my.bicycle

Season 1, Episode 4 — Throne for a Loss YAY! Thank you for posting mails in response to this thread. It is nice to be encouraged! During a botched exchange of goods, Rygel is kidnapped by a gang of steroid abusers Tavloids Tavleks. They plan to ransom Rygel back to his "six billion subjects."  Because Rygel stole a gem from Moya, which is actually an integral piece which influences her flight capabilities, the crew can't just leave him to deal with the consequences of his choices.  The Tavloids (Aeryn, D'Argo, and Zhaan shout "TAVLEK" in unison) have bulky armor, and mottled skin with messed up scars. Most importantly, in a literal interpretation of "plot armor," they have a bracer which injects them with addictive, super-strength drugs, and creates a force screen... and bolts of energy. It's a super-soldier serum and weapon all in one! It also requires serious come-down time for its literal "users."  One such user, a young Tavlek, is...

Season 1, Episode 3 — Back and Back and Back to the Future I remember disliking this episode so much that I nearly skipped it for this re-watch, but I wondered what I might see this time that I had previously missed. I got ⅔ of the way through it, looked for an episode guide, and am unsurprised to see many people give this a "DON'T WATCH" rating. Here's one :  Back and Back and Back to the Future: Skip it. Definitely skip. There are alternate realities and timelines, but they don’t count and we don’t learn anything essential about anyone except the Australian guest stars’ willingness to emulate ’80’s aerobics gurus. The only notable thing is Aeryn in a sports bra. Long story short, it's a time-loop episode, where Moya finds an imploding anomaly, and an escape capsule flees the wreck.  Moya picks up the survivors: Alien John Romero and his spandex-and-leather clad sex assistant. I mean assistant. The sex is separate, but implied, with every male member of the cas...

Season 1, Episode 2 (on Apple's box set) —  Exodus from Genesis   Is this about Peter Gabriel's departure from his prog-rock band, only to be replaced by Phil Collins, then the band turns power-pop?  Maybe.  It more reasonably appears to be the trope-y "Aliens tribute" episode that every SF show eventually does. Except... it's not? Not entirely? We learn that Aeryn, like all Sebaceans, is unable to regulate her body temperature against heat.  The crew is being pursued by Crais' (rogue?) Peacekeeper faction, and flies into a nearby nebula-cum-anomaly to hide from them. Unfortunately, they pick up a passenger entity: an alien lifeform. It releases chitin-covered critters (they move like DRDs) that stay hidden and occasionally stab the crew from cover. Not a great guest for Moya's hospitality. It also start ramping up the heat onboard, blocking ventilation shafts, and Aeryn starts to overheat.  The alien lifeform starts cranking out doppelgangers of the crew,...

These meaty sculptures are fabric art, from Tamara Kostianovsky. The artist also has an instagram . ( Make Zine )

Starting with fresh eyes, it's surprising to see how dated the CG already appears. Crap, "already" but it's actually been 25 years.  Holy mackerel.  The space battle has telltale graphics limitations that are clearly predating the proliferation of Physics (or Physically) Based Rendering (PBR). At this point, every recent videogame has more realistic graphics in real time than Farscape's pre-rendered sequences. Still, these are beautiful for their time.  Probably the more interesting element is, of course, the collaboration with  Jim Henson's Creature Shop , and the use of puppets of main characters in a post- Return of the Jedi  landscape.  Season 1, Episode 1 —  Premiere John Crichton takes off from Earth, his dad is  the cop from Adam-12 , and his bestie is  the Hotel Manager from White Orchid s1 ; that's a really interesting drama, by the way! Very human in its portrayal of each character. Crichton takes off to perform ...

The sixth entry of his series on drawings of classic D&D monsters is up. He's one of my favorite fantasy artists. His work tends toward the charming and cozy, rather than others' focus on machismo or melodrama.

‘Weihenmayer climbs using a device called the BrainPort, held in his mouth; it converts one sense (sight) to another (touch). A decade ago, Weihenmayer began using the BrainPort, a device that enables him to “see” the rock face using his tongue. The BrainPort consists of two parts: the band on his brow supports a tiny video camera; connected to this by a cable is a postage-stamp-size white plastic lollipop, which he holds in his mouth. The camera feed is reduced in resolution to a grid of four hundred gray-scale pixels, transmitted to his tongue via a corresponding grid of four hundred tiny electrodes on the lollipop. Dark pixels provide a strong shock; lighter pixels merely tingle. The resulting vision is a sensation that Weihenmayer describes as “pictures being painted with tiny bubbles.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is that these are still just the earliest days of investment and research into what sensory-substitution devices might someday be able to achieve....

“The big problem, I think, is that institutions tend to be wrong about what they are actually for. That is, they have defined their existence by various functions they perform within a given ecosystem. In the context here, these institutions grew up in an ecosystem where information was scarce, and information distribution limited. The ecosystem has changed (info distribution and access is abundant), and institutions are having a hard time adapting. So: music labels think they sell CDs to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles, and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers; universities think they provide a place for people to learn and do research; governments think they try to improve society by implementing policies wanted by the people … etc. But I think they are all wrong. All those kinds of definitions get you tied up in the functional stuff you do, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s importan...

The movie Blade Runner is very dear to my heart. It is a treatise on the nature of existence expanding on, and perhaps exceeding the reach of the Phillip K. Dick work which inspired it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Perhaps I have missed out on some greater subtlety of PKD's work, but the point of DADoES pursues the definition of fake, while Blade Runner instead focuses on what is real. Where the replicants in the novel are sociopathic monsters who emulate emotions solely to gain traction against humans who may hunt them, the humans there rely on machines to dictate their own emotions for them. They dial for "energetic determination" or "six-hour self-accusatory depression." As much as the replicants are machines incapable of real emotion, humans are similarly reliant on a machine to simulate emotion for them. In contrast, the movie's central them is spelled out for us in Deckard's apartment, when Rachel is playing the piano. She professe...

I hope you eventually got your coffee "Shaun" A post shared by Insta-Chaz (@instachaaz) on Feb 2, 2017 at 9:24pm PST

“(...) in which a train on the subway system of Buenos Aires suddenly disappears and a mathematician is called in to examine the mystery.” – BLDGBLOG: Moebius Underworld

Baldwin fight! A photo posted by Travon Free (@travon) on Oct 27, 2016 at 11:18am PDT

Am I seeing a trend? It looks as though we are seeing a few nourishing efforts cropping up around the public domain. The British Library just put a whole mess of  (one million)  images up online for public consumption, and the New York Public Library just shared twenty-thousand maps .

In the low-angled sunlight of a hot afternoon, the front door of the cramped eatery creaked open. The guy who walked in, he looked like a cat hairball that had been pushed around until it was roughly the shape of a man. From the reaction of the woman at the front register, he smelled about the same. After a moment, at a table nearby the Tin Man felt someone's eyes on him. It was just a little vibration in his tin-can chest that made him sit up straighter -- and stop nudging the oil can around on the cafe's well-worn table nervously. It had been a warm summer by anyone's account, but here, after things had traditionally let up for finer climates, out of all rationality came a spike in the temperature. But defying all rationality was not particularly surprising, as this was Oz, and Oz was rarely about making allowances for reason. The heat had sent the poor locals into the shade, and the rich locals out of the city and into their vacation cottages. The city was half desert...