Retropolis Transit Authority Logo Tees

Filed under Works in Progress

Hot off the morning’s airship delivery, a series of t-shirts, long sleeved tees, and baseball jerseys featuring a promotional logo for the Retropolis Transit Authority.

Here the propeller-steered airship of the Future That Never Was rides over the Transit logo, which is oddly reminiscent of the “London Underground” logo – mainly because I was being oddly reminiscent about that, at the time.

And below that, the timeless commuter’s motto of “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now”. I actually saw that on billboards when I was in my teens and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was getting at until years later, stuck in the Los Angeles traffic on my way home, it all sort of clicked and finally made sense to me in that special “Thank you, Captain Obvious!” sort of way.

Anyway, go. Look. Browse. Enjoy.

Thrilling Tales: The Tune Up of Terror

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Change the oil, test the tubes, adjust the positronic circuits… but DON’T, please, use those jumper cables or strap me down to the… wait! Help!

Aw, heck. Not AGAIN.

This dramatic re-enactment of a senseless, preventable crime is meant to remind you how very important it is – even in emergencies – to make certain that any Sanity-Challenged Technophile you consult is fully vetted by the Retropolis Board of Technological Sociopaths. Check their certificates! Get a recommendation!

As with the rest of this series, TUNE UP OF TERROR is available on shirts, posters, greeting cards , coffee mugs, and on blank books.

Because this message is SO IMPORTANT to the Robotic Friendship Devices in your life, and mine.

Yes! In Fact, This IS Rocket Science

Filed under Works in Progress

Whether you’re a propeller head or not; whether you’re a valued research scientist, an engineer, or a mad genius; or even if you’re none of the above – what you do may be, in fact, rocket science. No matter what they say.

Life’s just full of things that aren’t rocket science. Ask anyone. So how to gracefully explain to all and sundry that what you do IS, in fact, rocket science? We’re here to help.

As usual, available as a poster, greeting card, coffee mug, and on T-shirts.

Thrilling Tales: The Monument of Mystery

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Explorers on the Earthlike planet Wurlitzer 1015 are dumbfounded when they discover an ancient, mysterious monument brooding over its hills. What can it mean? Where can it have come from?

This retro science fiction pulp style illustration is an object lesson that shows us how little we really know of the worlds – or of the jukeboxes – that crowd the universe. The archaeological dig is still in progress; but there’s no doubt that these platter spinning aliens were here long before we were. And where are they now? Only the cryptic message “8 TRAK RULZ” may point the way.

Okay, sorry, I made that part up.

Yep, it’s another fake sci fi pulp magazine cover, and like the others, I’ve splattered it across T-Shirts, a poster, an archival print, blank books, greeting cards and, well, anything else that wasn’t moving too fast for me. And I’ve gotta say, I’m still sort of spry. Ish.

It Looks Like I have a Lot of Legos to Answer For

Filed under Hodgepodge

Chris Giddens writes to share with me his astonishing Lego retro rocket, complete with pilot-adventurer, which he tells me was inspired by my Retropolis pictures. I can’t help but wonder whether it takes him longer to build one than it takes me to model it :). Whillikers!

There are three photos of the little roadster rocket in his Flickr stream (here, here, and here) and those pictures share tags with some other pretty neat stuff I might otherwise have missed.

New Blank Books & Retro Modern Clocks at Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Desgn

Filed under Works in Progress

I guess I really wanted my imaginary magazine “Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual” to be in print, one way or another, so since I couldn’t do that exact thing I got wrapped up in designing a series of blank books with that and other retro science fiction art from my Retropolis series.

What came out of that convoluted sentence is this collection of blank books with both lined (or ruled) pages, and with unlined pages.

While I was at it, I put together a new series of clocks. I’ve offered a few small clocks for sale before but these new ones are another matter entirely – 14″ in diameter, with glass lenses and awesomely retrofuturistic aluminum rims. Neat!

Thrilling Tales: Bonnie Scarlet & the Sky Pirates

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Wronged by men & betrayed by fate, Bonnie Scarlet sails the airship REVENGE across the known worlds in an unending quest for plunder, justice, and just plain peevishness. Why? Because, that’s why. What do you mean by that?

Ladies: it’s a dream come true.

Gentlemen: Okay. It’s like this. That time last week when you found yourself standing behind a tree with guacamole all over your head, muttering “What just HAPPENED?” is pretty much all systems nominal for Bonnie Scarlet.

You’ll have learned by now that there’s not actually anything you can do to avoid the rampaging hordes of either sky pirates or your girlfriend. So like the various law enforcement agencies of Retropolis you’ve come to rely on ducking – and it’s important to avoid ducking straight down – or running, when necessary, and at all other times you’ve just got to be prepared to stand and deliver.

But hey, it could be worse – and that’s an actual quote from the Space Patrol – because whatever else you can say about her* she does what she does with uncommon style. ‘Cause really, it’s not just anybody who has their own airship, right?

*When she’s on the other side of the Moon, I mean.

Available – without guacamole – on shirts, posters, greeting cards, and non-shatterproof coffee mugs.

MIT Researchers Put Photosynthesis in Your Basement for Solar Power Storage

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Found on the Web

Back in May of 1935, Charles F. Kettering of General Motors told Modern Mechanix & Inventions magazine that if we could only unlock the secrets of photosynthesis and harness them, we’d have found the way to create almost limitless, inexpensive energy.

Researchers at MIT seem to have cracked that nut in a way they hope will turn each of our homes into its own power station – and filling station – with a process that can cheaply and effectively store electricity from solar (or other) sources using common carbon-free materials at room temperature.

Storing and transmitting energy is a lot more difficult than you’d suppose. There are inevitable losses as energy passes through power lines. That’s why the extensive wind farms being built these days provide regional, not national, power. In fact, about a gazillion years ago when I worked at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on California’s central coast, that plant was linked to an underground hydroelectric plant. In off hours the nuclear plant’s energy was used to pump the subterrainean reservoir uphill so that in peak times the water could rush downhill and power turbines that supplemented the nuclear plant’s output. Very clever, really, but there were still substantial losses in energy because of friction.

And storing solar power for later use at night is one of the problems that continue to face the solar power industry.

This new process developed at MIT – due in part to the funding of a ten million dollar grant from the Chesonis Foundation – is a very simple technique that uses electrical current to separate oxygen and hydrogen in gaseous form, later to be recombined to produce power or charge fuel cells. The result could be the near complete decentralization of power. Each home would become its own solar power plant and filling station for the fuel cells we’ll need to power our electric cars. It’s the sort of energy system you’d expect to need in outer space – but you’d be using it at home.

In practice, I’d expect that homes would remain on the grid but that demand from the central power stations would drop tremendously as these homes began to generate their own power. In fact the excess power could even be sold back to the utilities. This process is intended to make solar power more effective but it only requires an electrical current to work – so it could be used with any electric sources, including wind farms, which also have a greater or lesser output depending on the conditions outside.

And couldn’t this same process be used in a centralized way to produce the still-expensive hydrogen fuel cells that remain a barrier to fully electric cars?

Buy 100 Fembots, Become Busby-Berkeley: Priceless

Filed under Found on the Web

Robots Rule treats us to this video review – there’s a longer, text review on the site – of WowWee’s new Femisapien robot. She walks, she dances, she has a built-in “Backup Singer” mode, and she can even attack other fembots with a sword. Yes, it’s true: my lifelong goal of commanding a force of Busby-Berkeley space pirates in ostrich plumes may be at hand.

Seriously, though, she does have a fairly simple interface for learning new behaviors and looks like a fun, if nearly useless, little project. I think you could say the same for almost any commercial robotics project these days – though MIT’s stair climbing robot was pretty impressive – and, in a pinch, she’ll even dance with you.

Get one now, before they organize.

[tags]wowwee, fembot, femisapien, robot, robotics, robosapien[/tags]

Latest Uproar at Cafepress – Changes to the Volume Sales Bonus

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Print On Demand

Every now and then, Cafepress makes a fundamental change in its terms of service for shopkeepers, and almost without exception there’s a huge backlash by shopkeepers who believe that this new change is going to have a severe impact on their income. Often, they’re right. Even when they’re wrong it’s annoying that a party with which you do business can redefine the terms of your agreement with them at any time, while you can’t – ever – do the same thing. Or anything like it.

In fact (especially over the past two years) Cafepress has been nickel and diming away at its shopkeeper/designers in what’s probably been meant as an effort to maximize profits. Often, by the looks of it, this to make the company’s balance sheets continue to escalate quarter by quarter in a way that will be sweet music to to the ears of investors in the event of a probable IPO. Anyone who’s chased that particular dragon knows that once you start it becomes more and more difficult to pull off the same scale of growth in each quarter. It only gets harder if you do go public.

From the shopkeepers’ perspective, though, it looks as though the company is finding every way it can to monetize not the customers who buy all this merchandise, but the shopkeepers who create it. That impression was reinforced a few months ago when very large Cafepress stores (those with more than 500 sections) were abolished, though existing shops were grandfathered in. Shopkeepers who wanted to bloat their ventures with more merchandise than that were going to have to establish additional premium shops, for additional monthly fees.

This month’s brouhaha is all about the Cafepress volume bonus, a plan through which those shops with a high sales volume are rewarded by incremental bonuses: the more you sell, the larger your bonus. The volume sales bonus has often been named by CP shopkeepers as the reason they would stay with Cafepress rather than moving to a competitor.

Back in 2002, when I started my first Cafepress shop, it was understood that this bonus was a reward for the promotion a shopkeeper did to increase sales at his or her shop. And as little as I think of the company’s maneuvers over the past couple of years I think that the new program is better suited to that end. Not that I don’t think it’s seriously flawed – but the flaws I see are of another kind entirely.