My money's on the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
(link),Jan 20
RT @WardQNormal: The trouble with conspiracy theories is that a lack of evidence is not taken as proof it's not real, but instead as proof the conspiracy is indeed everywhere. This is like thinking that the reason you never see elephants hiding up in treetops is because they're good at it.,Jan 12
Publius Clodius was a populist demagogue in the late Roman Republic. He knew how to whip a mob up into a frenzy, but he wasn't clever enough to use them effectively. He failed.,Jan 7
One of these seems to say "Come on down!" (link),Jan 7
Just a reminder that I still have a bunch of old original art for sale. These all come to us from the 1980's, with drawings from The Runestaff, the Leslie Fish/Rudyard Kipling Cold Iron songbook, The Folk Harp Journal, and more.
(link)(link),Jan 14
An idea whose time has gone! Just what I was looking for.
The USB typewriter is a non-destructive mod for a mechanical typewriter that converts it into a keyboard that can be used with any Mac or PC – it’s shown here being used with an iPad, which is the only productive use I’ve heard of for one of those.
The conversion does require some sanding of the typewriter’s crossbar which makes contact with the keys’ arms.
You can purchase complete USB typewriters (current offerings are $400 or $450), a prefab kit ($150), or a bag of parts ($75) to solder together yourself. For $200 you can ship your own antique typewriter to the maker and have it converted.
I would love to pair an old portable typewriter with a mini-ITX or Via computer and a little LCD screen for the world’s weirdest and most wonderful laptop. Throw in a retro telephone handset for a cell phone, and look! A mobile vintage office!
Gasp! at the striking cover art by Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Norman Saunders, Lawrence Sterne Stevens, and Raphael DeSoto!
Be Amazed! to discover that most of the A. Merritt stories I read in the early seventies seem to have first seen print here, in these Astounding Pages!
Well. Or not. I mean, that’s probably more amazing to me than to you. And doesn’t that space ship on the left have a duck’s head? Yep. I thought so.
Great stuff here. Everything from Finlay’s rifleman on the back of a giant mutant bee to the unashamed mad science of this beaker-bearing biologist with his tiny man in a tube.
Just spotted this at Deviant Art: Antony Ward’s 3D model of a "Rocket Girl" character, via Silo, ZBrush and Maya. Really nice sculptural work there, and an interesting approach to her hair. I don’t think the character herself needs much explanation, since it goes something like this:
Girl x (Rocket Pack+Fins) + (2 x boots / raygun) = awesome
I don’t own an XBox, but I guess if I did I’d totally fail to resist the complete wackiness of Snoopy Flying Ace. According to the Ars Technica review this game explores the deep and disturbing hallucinations of everyone’s favorite beagle as he dogfights with foes like a gigantic zeppelin (protected by force fields), and swoops in crazy Immelmans past the Eiffel tower, a beagle-shaped Sphinx, and… wait for it… a frozen dinosaur.
Power-ups include a doghouse-shaped plane and a tail gunner – Woodstock the bird. I can’t believe I think so, but the game sounds like loads of fun. It’s available through the XBox Live Arcade.
This is a preview rendering of the scene I’m now working on for a series of non-interactive stories we’ll be seeing at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Click to embiggify it.
The Clockwork Book is unusually steampunk, for me. It’s a mechanical being that was built quite some time ago, as we measure time in Retropolis, and was designed to use simple, mechanical technology because part of its purpose is to last for a very long time. Here’s a little snippet about the Book:
There are always plenty of stories about the things we never talk about. That’s not a contradiction: it’s probably Quantum Mechanics.
So everyone knows about the Clockwork Book in spite of the fact that no one talks about it.
The people who visit the Book are perplexed, or obsessed, or desperate, and sometimes they’re all three. They Need To Know. And if you Need To Know, it’s maddening that somewhere below your feet lies the Clockwork Book in the midst of its Bookmaking machinery, calmly annotating the very thing you’re after. It preys on your mind. Until one day you slip down the quiet street where a hatch opens onto a shaft that leads far below the city to a tunnel, at the end of which lies the Book.
The Book, as I’ve said, accumulates stories. It does this by trading the stories it knows for new stories. This sounds harmless. In fact, it sounds beneficial. Until you think about it.
Because stories are not neutral. Stories always say something about the person who tells them. They often say more than the teller realizes, and it’s easy to become so wrapped up in the telling that we tell too much.
Everything that the Book learns becomes part of the Book. And the Book grows by trading the stories it knows – to anyone who asks.
Also… a very long time ago the English language decided that the word "spell" could mean two things: the way to form a word, or the way to distort the universe. This decision was not made casually. If you take the point of view that the English language recommends, you begin to see the Book as a very large, ever-growing nexus of words that may someday rip the fabric of reality into tiny quivering shreds.
Of course, the English language is excitable, and it tends toward exaggeration. But still…
Over the decades since the first part of the Clockwork Book collected its first story, people have gradually learned to avoid the Book despite the fact that, in general, we really want to know things. And there must be a reason.
There’s a way to find out for certain, of course: you just have to be willing to ask.
The Book exists to contain stories; it acquires stories by learning new stories; and it shares these stories with anyone who’s willing to trade. So in some ways you might point at the Book and say "Hey! A metaphor!" thinking of things like the Internet itself, or Facebook, or what have you. And although you’d have a point… I’m pretty sure you’d be wrong. The Book is what the Book is.
And for my purposes, at least, the Clockwork Book is the central character I was looking for to stand or, well, squat, anyway, at the center of the linear stories I plan to add to the Thrilling Tales web site. If you’re one of my Kickstarter supporters you’ll know a bit more about how I invented the Book a long time ago, and how I found it again as I rummaged around in my Idea Closet much more recently. And if you’re not one of my Kickstarter backers, well, I’m not telling. So there.
Because I’m just like that. No, that’s not it. I am just like that, of course, but since those good folks have chosen to help me out with the next stage of the Thrilling Tales, I want them to get something nobody else has got. And at the moment, that’s the tale of the Clockwork Book and Me.
This is described as a prototype robotic dog – but let’s get this out of the way right at the start. The shape and texture of its robotic body makes it look like a huge beetle, which seems a bit creepy.
That impression fades, though, as you watch it move. Its four legs are constructed like a dog’s legs and its movement is captivating. As the robot explores rough and unfamiliar terrain it applies its experience of similar situations and tries to find its way, sometimes slipping and recovering. Those moments are the ones that really make it seem alive and you find yourself cheering it on.
In fact the way it pauses and thinks about what to do next give the impression of awareness. It’s very interesting to watch and quite a technical achievement – just imagine yourself trying to train a machine to behave this way. Its interactions with a changing environment are especially, well, awesome.
But like most who’ve viewed the demonstration I find myself thinking less about how smart these researchers are, and more about the way we react to the machine in motion and why we perceive it as an autonomous creature. I like the idea of something like this, with Roomba-like instructions to explore and patrol, making way for me on the stairs and showing up next to my bed in the morning.
[tags]robotics, robot, motion, quadruped, dog, bug, usc, bring me my coffee[/tags]
I just had some fun playing through a text adventure game called Choice of the Dragon (try it!).
It was created with a system called Choicescript. Choicescript games are free to play on the web, but are also available as iPhone and Android apps. There’s (so far) one more game called Choice of Broadsides.
In a lot of ways these resemble what I’ve done with Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – in fact the basic differences are owed to the two facts that I’m simultaneously developing for the web and for print, and I’m illustrating my story nodes. As it stands the Choicescript games don’t support illustrations but it wouldn’t take much custom Javascript (and/or php) in the page template to fix that. Choicescript allows you to set variables depending on the player’s actions and one of those variables could easily be the URL of an illustration. A little document.write, and you’re there.
If you’re interested in playing with Choicescript – some user-created games get hosted on the choiceofgames site – you can start out with the blog.
[tags]text adventure, game engine, choice of games, choice of the dragon, choice of broadsides, roll your own[/tags]
I’ve been working on this mechanism – well, it’s a 3D model, so it’s not a real mechanism – for the past few days. In ways that are known only to my Kickstarter backers, this is a part of the next stage at my Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site.
It’s unusually steampunkish for me but that makes sense because this object is just the eye of a mechanical character who’s much older than anything else in Retropolis. A character who was built in the earliest days of the Mad Science we know and love. I added an eyebrow as a backplate for the band drive – and after much agony I figured out how to set the objects up in 3DS Max so that the whole thing animates when you turn its drive wheel.
The iris mechanism here is based on a real, working design that was featured at Boing Boing a few days back. The original forum thread (with many revisions!) is here. My version is based on one of the earliest of them – I wanted to start with something simple before I got all baroque about it. Which I felt was likely.
Anyway what this means is that I’m working maniacally on some new stuff for the Thrilling Tales site. And now… to that I shall return.
Tomas Pettersson’s DonationWare Sculptris has come a long way since we first heard about it several months ago. The 3D sculpting application produces results a lot like what you get from the basic features of HelluvaLottaMoneyWare programs like ZBrush and Mudbox, but it’s a hobby project that’s supported by voluntary donations. The video above is a user video by Syntax Error. (Part two is here.)
You can start out with a simple sphere, as we see in this example, or you can import an existing .obj file. I’m still blundering around with it but I’m always curious about ways in which to combine these organic modeling tools with rigid, streamlined shapes for ever more interesting rockets and whatnot. I especially like how well its "Reduce" brush brings down the resolution of an area I’ve been mucking about with.
I did convince the program to hide under its blanket at one point… but overall it seems pretty neat. Try it out!
Now that Go Hero’s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon action figures are out in the wild, they’re about to be joined by the lantern-jawed British spaceman Dan Dare and the, well, lantern-nosed pulp crimefighter, The Shadow.
Each of these 1:6 scale figures is now available for pre-order (the photos are from prototypes).
Not content just to fight crime and patrol the spaceways, Go Hero is also working on the incredible BAT BOY from the late lamented Weekly World News.
I’m also curious about the Atomodel, a 1:6 scale blank action figure. It’s got over 30 points of articulation and offers you a blank maquette on which to work – so if you’re dreaming up a new steampunk Star Wars, or, well, whatever, this could be just the thing for you. There’s even a version with an integrated MP3 player for those all-important pew-pew effects.
[tags]go hero, collector, action figure, toys, dan dare, the shadow, pulp, comics, atomodel, blank action figure, maquette, armature, nerd it yourself[/tags]
My money's on the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
(link),Jan 20
RT @WardQNormal: The trouble with conspiracy theories is that a lack of evidence is not taken as proof it's not real, but instead as proof the conspiracy is indeed everywhere. This is like thinking that the reason you never see elephants hiding up in treetops is because they're good at it.,Jan 12
Publius Clodius was a populist demagogue in the late Roman Republic. He knew how to whip a mob up into a frenzy, but he wasn't clever enough to use them effectively. He failed.,Jan 7
One of these seems to say "Come on down!" (link),Jan 7
Just a reminder that I still have a bunch of old original art for sale. These all come to us from the 1980's, with drawings from The Runestaff, the Leslie Fish/Rudyard Kipling Cold Iron songbook, The Folk Harp Journal, and more.
(link)(link),Jan 14
and 
I just had some fun playing through a text adventure game called 
Now that Go Hero’s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon action figures are out in the wild, they’re about to be joined by the lantern-jawed British spaceman 
