Over at the new Shock:Human Contact forum, Malcolm Craig asks,
Are the Academy always overt when they arrive at a planet?
The answer is, “It’s hard not to be, but there are ways, when the circumstances are right.” Join the conversation and help form the Academic Contact Best Practices document!
March 10, 2010 – 10:26 am
According to this article, this crater some 40 km across may have been caused by the impact of a 2km asteroid several tens of millions of years ago. The prevailing thought is that it was mid-Creatceous — that is, sort of in the middle of the Age of Dinosaurs. The scientists that discovered it are [...]
February 16, 2010 – 5:46 pm
For 800 years the Academy has been slowly bringing the humans of Earth back from the brink of extinction to enlightenment. For the last 300, it has looked in wonder at the faint signals from the stars, knowing that humans had fled their home deep in its terrible past and may now be struggling without [...]
February 16, 2010 – 12:54 pm
It looks like I’m not the only one vying for Neill Blomkamp’s attention. This is a blog filled with adoration of all the right stuff, by a artist who makes nice things. I’m gonna have to step up my game.
February 14, 2010 – 10:41 pm
In Bruce Sterling’s 1999 book Distraction, interpersonal relationships are largely mediated by “Relationship servers” that keep track of reputations beyond your immediate circle. People will sign up to help someone according to their trustworthiness, and they’re given tongue-in-cheek ranks to indicate how trusted they are. It winds up being a powerful sociopolitical tool in the [...]
February 5, 2010 – 9:21 pm
Human Contact is a version of the Shock: system, focused for a far-future, spacefaring setting. Its science is as hard as I can make it while still having fairy dust things like “interstellar travel” work, while at its core, the setting is about culture clash and the moral challenges of being an explorer and being [...]
January 20, 2010 – 9:31 pm
Painting is nearly done! You can see a spot I missed completely on the right knee, and there are a couple of spots that still need work, but the body’s just about done. Next come the banners, which will brighten the monochrome substantially. More pics under the cut!
January 16, 2010 – 4:44 pm
I’ve been working on this guy quite a bit. Materials have been about $25. No special tools, but I made some sculpting tools out of music wire and dowels. More pics below the cut!
January 11, 2010 – 1:53 pm
In 1992, you may recall the bold experiment of Biosphere2 — to make an enclosed ecosystem like that we would require on interplanetary trips — that failed almost instantly among normal, predictable (but ignored) human sexual politics and demagoguery. There were engineering problems (who knew concrete absorbed the CO2 that the plants needed to breathe [...]
January 3, 2010 – 2:43 am
I haven’t made any sculpture in years, and I’ve never used Sculpey to do anything but make little beads. So we’ll see how this goes. I’ve gotten a lot of help from the extraordinarily kind and knowledgeable artists over at the Concept Art fora.
Lots of pictures of this Warrior of the Southern Heart of Ashlesa [...]
