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Real life Steampunk

We've all heard of the myriad dark, dirty, and foggy anime and sci-fi fictions sprinkled across their normally high-tech glistening counterparts. They go by steampunk, and they are amazingly fulfilling, portraying a world of heavy iron and chugging brass steam pistons, tons of metal slugging across the landscape and into the sky. Fanciful? Yes, but what isn't?

With that said, here's a treat for your senses:





Crabfu Steamworks creates small-scale remote control steam powered vehicles, and they are all fantastically fun. My favorite is probably the steam walker that I've got pictured up above, click on the link, it goes to a movie that you have to see. It walks so perfectly, exactly the opposite of how you would excpect.

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Don't believe everything you see

Don't believe everything you see, but it is a good idea to make yourself aware of the myraid possibilities present in globalization of monetary control.

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Games!

For to burn away your life.


3D Logic is a lot of fun if you like spatial puzzles, I got to level 14, and am stumped there.


Zwok is reminiscent of Worms, or Gunbound. Make your own character and upgrade him. Nice little way to kill time if you have access to Shockwave. Plus the character creater is awesome.

I had to remove the images as they were hosted offsite and the folks who had hosted them rescinded their public use.

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Yoda /= Science

It's a Yoda Backpack.

In other news, it pays to realize exactly how much empty space is in an atom, to scale. This site puts the size of an electron at 1 pixel, and extrapolates from there, meaning that the entire website is approximately 5 million pixels wide, or 11 miles at 72ppi, the normal monitor setting.

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Toys are for Happiness!

On a sad note, Lego is closing its doors on its US manufacturing plant, and moving production to Mexico. It's also undergoing massive layoffs due to losses which they say are a direct result of children being more interested in electronics than the old fashioned engineering blocks.

It seems as if this is the first nail in Lego's coffin, which is very sad, to me.

On a happier note, I ran across something quite interesting on BoingBoing today:



Yes, that is a Star Wars Transformer. They've got a whole line of them.

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Saturn : Sky / Pontiac : Solstice

You might remember a couple of months ago when there was a picture of a very intriguing dodge concept car on this blog, if not, you can refresh your memory.

The reason that I bring it up is because last year GM introduced the Pontiac Solstice and the Saturn Sky. They have a very clean sporty feel to the design, which I very much like, and they are not built for power or speed, which I also like. The one thing that lacks in this new chassis is fuel efficiency. The cars have a respectable power rating, at almost 180 BHP, but their fuel efficiency is still below the 30 mark, at 20/28.


[Saturn Sky]


[Pontiac Solstice]

The thing that I liked so much about the Dodge Sling Shot concept was that it was a sporty car built around a very fuel efficient chassis. This GM frame has an acceptable MPG rating, but it is not a selling point, which in my opinion hinders this design greatly.

With high fuel costs unlikely to abate in the near future, a large contingent of people are looking to get their hands on cars that will save them money, hence the popularity of the Toyota Prius. However, the Prius is a sedan, and a marginally ugly one at that. This frame could fill a very profitable area in the sports car arena, namely, the fuel efficiency slot, where there is essentially no competition.

If GM comes out with a hybrid or otherwise efficient model, I will probably own one of these cars. Most likely the Saturn, because the front end is much more attractive to me.

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Updates to the Site

I'm in the process of scaling back the site somewhat, mainly the three portfolio pages, as the "blog" coding does not support them as well as I had hoped. The ability to quickly alter these pages and have them automatically publish to my site is offset by the inability to have clean code and a flexible interface on these pages.

The majority of the work will be done on the stills page, simply because of the raw number of images on that area of the site.

Also, I'm hpoing to update the format of the video and web areas, as they were finished in a rush, and do not reflect a well-thought out structure.

Stay tuned!

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