Odds and Ends from my brain and interests. Given that it is meant to be much like my old cartoon strip at the Lowell Connector, I suppose it is eponymous (I also like that it does make an oxymoron of sorts)

If there is to be anything here of any regularity it should be about sci-fi, computers, technology, and scale modeling with origami thrown in on the side (at least not infrequently). Oh, I would also expect some cartooning too

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Sunday Comic: Starry, Starry Night

©1996, 2010

Kind of fitting for the holiday season although the original commemorated my experience with the Great Comet of 1996, or Comet C/1996 B2 Hyakutake which I got to see that spring in the dark skies of southern New Hampshire. There's a color version below (originally meant for halftone printing so it was done in a very black and white format).



Monday, December 13, 2010

ModMon: Flying them around the room while making engine noises!

     I got my current schedule back from Arisia for next years con (about a month from now), and it appears that modeling as a topic is not in the works. I did get the paper modeling workshop scheduled and that's good. As a result, I've started to edit some kind of a handout for the workshop, mostly to provide links for tips, reference information, and of course, downloads. Still, I couldn't help but worry if anyone will show. I can only hope that the panel discussion didn't work out because there was insufficient panelist interest, i.e. talking heads, to do it. I hope there will be attendee interest anyway given what appears to be a high level of gadget and fashion interest among participants. Still, is it that dress up is ok, but little ships are not?
     As I was writing the handout's introduction I noted something universal. All of us as children at one time or another entered into other worlds through miniatures. It may have been a doll house (or action figure headquarters), or it may have been horses or a truck, or even a vaguely spaceship shaped razor case. These were probably the earliest stories we created on our own. Sure there were books, but at first these are read to you, and often full of pictures. In our miniature worlds, they were our stories and our landscapes. It's true that this wasn't our only imaginative game play. We had our costumed games and our role playing to be sure. Therefore,  grabbing our miniature representations of the world, say a metal die-cast P-47, flying it around the room while making engine noises and strafing the mad scientist's missile base was just part of our childhood repertoire. Inevitably, at some point, like reading quietly to yourself, you realize you shouldn't do it out loud anymore. Play has to be reasoned somehow as sport, or theater, or team building exercises. Imagination becomes more part of reading quietly to ourselves  and we put away childish things.
      Nothing terribly wrong with that I suppose. There were for me at least many worlds to go to in stories. There were strange planets, weird landscapes, bizarre situations and funny moments. There is also theater of the mind in radio and new scenes to be seen on television and movies.  Invariably though, you cannot "go" to these worlds anymore than you could actually sit inside the capsule you saw at the museum (or in a book of a museum). The miniature can then return as a way to somehow be there. I can't touch the real thing, because maybe it is long gone, too far away, too rare or because it was never real to begin with. Maybe it is a way to make real something you have always seen in your mind, but never realized like you saw it.
     Some can write the world they can see inside into some version of reality. Others will paint and sculpt it out or try to live it out in costume. There are also some like me that want the solidity of the miniature, so as to see the curves and corners, the colors and lines. With a model you can try to visualize the inhabitant's point of view, or picture the scale of the real thing (be it the real Saturn V stack or some television starship). You can even somehow re-enact some historical moment, or a story scene like the HMS Thunderchild facing down the Martian tripods. Needless to say it is also nice to be able to grab the thing, and when no one is looking, fly it around the room while making engine noises.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Sunday Comic: Biohazard Bunny

Arisia 2011 created an open invitation for volunteer T-shirt design this year. While I was nicely complimented on my entry, it didn't make it. I have to admit it needed a more helpful caption than mine had. On the other hand I'll always wonder if things would have been different if I had captioned it ...

Biohazard Bunny to the rescue!


©2010
 Well, actually to the rescue of its fellow genetically enhanced lab rabbits regardless of collateral damage. After all, Biohazard Bunny has a heavily armed saucer and does travel.
Perhaps I'm venting some of my issues with our own house bunny (a veritable poop machine and arch enemy of USB cables, garbage bags, and geraniums).

Monday, December 06, 2010

Modeling Monday: Web pages that aren't quite dead yet

     This is something of a self serving post. Over time there have been many web sites that I've visited that had some cool reference photos or drawings that have come in handy for modeling hardware that have subsequently disappeared. This should be no surprise given the ephemeral nature of the web that was pretty self evident since I first discovered it. Fan sites were often being generated by students using their school web space and invariably all these sites would end shortly after graduation and the sys admin started clearing space on the disks. Research was also powered by those frequenting bulletin boards and alt.binaries.models.scale (and sometimes without the ".scale"). These of course were cleared on a regular basis.
     So, you saved a lot of stuff. Of course at the time before memory was cheap, you would bookmark stuff and dump it on floppies (boy, that's really dating me). Then systems crash, software changes, and stuff is eventually lost. Still, some places seemed to continue on and on, even if they weren't being updated. Then one day you take a peek and 404 comes up.  Over the years, many legacy free web space providers have merged, gone out of business, or simply phased out that part of the business and overnight the sites are gone. Thus the beauty of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) which since about 1996 has been collecting pages off the web on a regular basis. So, if you have the URL of the page you want,  you can plug it into their "Wayback" machine and see if they actually got stuff. Alas, just because it existed doesn't mean they have it. Initially the collection focused on text content, images and other file formats later so sometimes you hit the site to see "close up of hatch" and see nothing. The other problem  may be the "robots.txt" file which directs web collection software to not cache the site. I recall this as being the problem of one excellent Space 1999 site whose author was upset about large scale downloading from his site. Another problem is that you have to know the URL because there is no keyword search on the archives data (not directly, although it is possible to Google it with a site restriction to the archive domain, but I suspect this is rather patchy and dependent on external links to that data).
     So the self serving part of the post is this: How do I keep track of references to archived URLs that show up on the web and discussions groups in addition to just saving it to myself? Well, why not post it. For instance:
  • Hangar 18 models used to have good reference shots of Space 1999 and The Black Hole until they stopped. (originally http://www.coldnorth.com/hangar-18-models/resources/)
  • Dannysoar's fantasy site and his home page for neat articles about some fantastical flying machines (and also weird free flyers). (originally centered around http://home.att.net/~dannysoar although you have to hunt around off the links a bit as he added accounts as he ran out of space)
  • The Modeler's Reference Vault which seems to have disappeared just this year (2010, formerly www.cloudster.com)
  • The Idic Page which had tons of Star Trek photos and stories (members.aol.com/idicpage/main.html).
  • The Lost Plan-It which was an early web page with reference shots to some of the rarer stuff like Dark Star, Valley Forge, and the Robinson Crusoe on Mars ship (www.execpc.com/~ppavlovi/lostplanit001.htm). The site is somewhat difficult to navigate and varied over time due to space restrictions
  • Precision Paper Models which was one of the first places I found cool card models (www76.pair.com/tjohnson/ppsm.html). Not everything was archived. Some versions of the Atlas booster are missing, but can be made up from other Atlas versions that are archived.
  • E. te Groen's models for the Philippus Lansbergen Observatory website are here. E. te Groen is still active and they may re-appear here or elsewhere.  (orig. www.lansbergen.net/eng/index.htm)
The other thing to try is just using the internet archive to go backwards in time with any of your old (or existing) links pages, such as www.spacestation42.com for card models or www.starshipmodeler.com, or even Yahoo.

The funny thing is this started fortuitously as a result of the ongoing search for those "easy" paper kits. There was a great beginner site called "Modular Space Toys" which consisted of a series of "module" models that could be combined with others to create a large variety of different models. Well, the site disappeared (it may come back), but for now the bulk of the module's are still available at http://web.archive.org/web/%2A/http://www.geocities.com/codex34/paper/paper1.html. These are great for downloading and re-painting as many of them are "gif" files and easy to edit on almost any picture editing software.

It isn't perfect. The archive is made up donated equipment run by volunteers. It often has retrieval problems and probably suffers from a non-trivial amount of memory loss, but hey, it's not dead yet!

p.s. If anyone knows if any cool archived site, or previous urls for the site (sometimes sites with a domain like "coolsf.com" may have had a previous existance as "www.geocities.com/user4/coolsf.htm") feel free to add the info below

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Sunday Comic: Moby DEC

©1995,2010


  Originally from December of '95. The result of a frazzled sketch on a whiteboard drawn sometime in the wee hours of working on final projects and a long series of failures to compile. The following morning complimented by my office mates, I took a picture and then redrew it for the school paper. I realized it was a very common sentiment.

Oh, I know it's not the literal quote, but I nonetheless made a point of crediting Ahab and not Khan.