Day: 14 January 2006

Grease Monkey: indie space-station comic collection

Tim Eldred’s indie comic book Grease Monkey — a great, funny space adventure comic — has been collected by Tor and has just hit the shelves. Grease Monkey is the story of a post-alien-invasion space-station where crack pilots drill ceaselessly to train for the second match — like Ender’s Game, but wicked funny. The Barbarian squadron is the all-woman piloted champ of the fleet, in no small part thanks to their mechanic Mac, who is an uplifted gibbon (part of a tribe of sentient apes that mixes with human society). The story is told from the PoV of Robin, Mac’s young assistant, who is taken under Mac’s hairy arm and treated to a crash-course in beating the system. It’s got space-battles, human-gorilla political clashes, and military humor: part Catch 22, part Planet of the Apes, and charming as hell. This is one of the rare fine comics that is a truly satisfying read for adults, but which contains nothing too racy for the average precocious twelve-year-old (said twelve-year-old will surely love this as much as her parents, by the way).

Kitchen Sink press published the first couple issues of this, but regrettably cancelled it. Eldred finished the series anyway, it being the sort of thing that you have to finish writing once you get started, and with the Tor edition, we get to read the whole story.

Link

Podcast of Cory’s “Human Readable” begins

I’ve begun a podcast of my story Human Readable, originally published in 2005’s Future Washington anthology. It’s the tale of a world that’s been upended by hyper-efficient planning algorithms based on ant-colony optimizations, so that Los Angeles has the best traffic in the world. However, when these networks crash, they really crash — cars, surfboards, and many other common conveyances end up catastrophically failing, with concomitant loss of life. It’s long story, so it’ll come in 7 or 8 installments — I’ll post a couple per week until they run out. Hope you enjoy them!

Link to installment one,

Link to Podcast feed

Machinima Dracula short film

Alessandro made this seven-minute Dracula video using machinima, a technique wherein one records video-game characters acting out the action, and then records dialog and effects audio separately, thus using a game’s 3D engine for more expensive animation packages.

The film is good and creepy, and I really liked the production values in the audio components. It was made with The Movies, a game specifically designed to produce machnima films.

Link

(Thanks, Alessandro!)

Plush Tetris blocks

A clever crafter on Etsy has made a set of plush Tetris blocks. They’re not soft enough to use as pillows, but they look like great training tools if you’re planning to raise your child as a black-belt Tetris master who will support you in your dotage with competitive cash-prizes from the Tetris competitions.

Link

Ten free things to do in Tokyo

10 Free Things to Do in Tokyo from Pingmag does just what it says on the tin: lays out ten free, fun things for a visitor to Tokyo to do in town, with an emphasis on geek pleasures like playing free video games and collecting digital photos of distinctive manhole-cover designs. For a classic of the Tokyo-on-no-dollars-a-day genre, see Justin Hall’s “Justin Tokyo”.

Depending on the season (peak time around hay-fever- and constant- cold- nose-running- months) you can spot people giving away free tissues with a little commercial message – almost everywhere. One of the most frequently distributed ones is the Takefuji-pack (yellow flowers – blue sky), which I even knew before I ever set foot in Japan.

Spotting the nice ones can be quite a challenge, besides some are only for women or men or young or old or Japanese only….. try your best and see what you can gather!

Link