Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama is considered a key example of hard science
fiction. However, as a realistic vision of the future, it is notably lacking.
Set in the year 2130, read forty years after its publication, its future feels
archaic. Clarke's future is one dominated by white Anglo-Saxon men,
neo-Judeo-Christian undertones, and an uncanny sense that the future resembles
the past more than the present.
Game Pitch: Bewerewolf
You are the werewolf. You make trouble. Unseen, unknown,
undetected - until it's too late.
In the city the skies grow black with the fumes from the
iron furnaces, while the machinery of man scrubs away the last remnants of the
wild. Man has grown overconfident, arrogant in his prowess, sloppy in his
execution. Now the time is opportune, the nights grow longer, the winter
approaches, what man has built, you can destroy. But time moves swiftly, and
even now it may already be too late.
Thoughts On: The Avengers
In the closing moments of The Avengers, Samuel L. Jackson, clothed in eye patch and black
trench coat as the ridiculously named Nick Fury, stands in front of a panel of
video screens with imposing faceless hand-wringing decision makers. One of them
asks, "Was that the point of all this? A statement?", Fury corrects
him, "A promise."
The council's question echoes the thoughts of the audience,
who having endured the visual effects equivalent of blunt force trauma, is left
wondering what the takeaway from this film is. The response "A
promise" feels hollow, hackneyed even. Within the framework of the plot it
implies that whenever the world is in peril, The Avengers will be there, to the
audience it is a pact that sequels will follow, but the purpose of this film,
or of its inevitable sequel is left unclear. Perhaps the question should have
never been asked, because all I can think of as the appropriate response is,
"We like money."
Game Pitch: The Proper Care of Humans
You play as a robot who manages a small ranch in a quiet
frontier setting while taking care of the human(s) who live on it. The ranch
must be made completely self-sufficient, including raising the animals used to
feed the humans, who are both helpless and whiny without your constant
attention. In the morning you may have to procure eggs from the hens, use them
to create chocolate chip cookies, and milk from cows and use it to make whip
cream, to serve a humans' desire for cookies in cream for breakfast. This must
be done before daylight when the human wakes. Then you must set the table, wake
the human, pull out his seat, arrange his meal, await his opinion.
Evolution Of A Painting: Woman In Water
The idea for this painting came to me pretty much fully formed: an image of a woman emerging from a pool of water, hair slicked back, bathed in splashes of vibrant, exaggerated and highly unrealistic lighting. I started with a quick sketch and divided it up into a grid.
I then divided up the canvas into an equivalent grid and used the sketch as a rough guideline. I was working fast here and not very much concerned with accurately capturing the sketch so this was more to keep it from falling horribly off the rails rather than a measured approach to accuracy of any kind.
In Search Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The abundance of worlds is perhaps only rivalled by their
variety. Habitable world configurations exist around single-, binary-, and
triple-star systems, around red and yellow dwarf stars, as planets and as
moons, in mass ranges from 0.8 to 5.5 Earth masses, with very long and very
short orbital periods, and with days lasting from a few hours to several
months.
The science of planet formation is not sufficiently well
developed to exclude solar systems that do not resemble our own. Indeed it
seems the laws of physics as we understand them allow for as much variety of
star systems as there are initial conditions. It makes sense then, to not presume
what kinds of worlds we can expect to find based on our sample size of one.
Alienssssss
Since its release in 1986 there have been no shortage of
video games based on the film Aliens,
although one could certainly make the case that there have been a shortage of
good video games. Most of those games were released closer to the franchise's
heyday, so that in recent years the selection has been a little barren. Still,
the idea of another video game based on the Aliens
property with Aliens: Colonial Marines
finally nearing release isn't entirely welcome. Even if games based on Aliens haven't been the most successful,
the film has managed to permeate video games nonetheless, to the point that
making an Aliens game seems like a
retread, as if someone set out to make Videogame:
The Video Game. Right off the bat we are assured of a quasi-realistic
military shooter draped in a sci-fi aesthetic so often recycled it's become
part of the tapestry of generic. Zealous over-use of caution strips? Check.
Obligatory turret sequences? Check. Vaguely insectoid enemies that die easy and
rush in waves? Triple Check. Climactic showdown in mech suit? Par for the
course. At this point it's hard to think of an element, be it weapons,
vehicles, even one-liners, that was featured in Aliens that hasn't since been wholesale lifted and re-used in a
video game, Aliens related or not.
References:
Aliens. (1986)
Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.
Gearbox Software (2013). Aliens:
Colonial Marines [Video game]. Sega.
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