A while back, I wrote a post about aesthetics vs. practicality in designing science fiction spaceships, which also extends to any sort of speculative design.

Recently, a discussion exploded on the same board over an initially small misunderstanding that went rampant really fast. You can read about it here, if you care to (it spans three pages). The ( Read more... )

Social media presents a bit of a problem for me, indirectly.

When I come across something thought-provoking, I want to share it with people. I suspect this is true of most of us. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on make this easy. The collective inertia behind these sites makes new connections easy to establish, which only further ( Read more... )

This post is part of a meta-series. Click here for a list of all posts in this series.

Finally an update! Although a somewhat unglamorous one. Been doing a ton of experimentation, cleanup, and method optimization to try to make this process less painful in the future by enduring the pain now. Stuff I’ve learned while doing Defender has also given ( Read more... )

The feedback from my Beta Readers has been flowing in and it paints a rather bleak picture, confirming many of the quiet misgivings I already had but nevertheless hoped were merely the voice of self-doubt that plagues anyone involved in an artistic pursuit. No, not this time. That was the voice of my unforgiving inner critic telling me that while ( Read more... )

Apparently, I never actually posted any of the project to my blog. I shall remedy that presently!

WARNING: This is an image-heavy post! Images behind the cut.

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Mirrored from Ryan McClure.

This post is part of a meta-series. Click here for a list of all posts in this series.

Right now, it’s all grunt work. I’m steadily making my way through each of the cross-section cut-outs. They’re tedious and time-consuming, but I had the good fortune to secure a large supply of cardboard boxes completely free thanks to a well-timed arrival at ( Read more... )

This post is part of a meta-series. Click here for a list of all posts in this series.

For 14 years 1, ever since first seeing examples of others that have done so on the Internet, I’ve schemed, planned, yearned, learned, studied, and plotted to make myself a “real” set of Stormtrooper armor, from scratch. It’s been a long road full of reading, ( Read more... )

I’m going back and filling in some brackets 1 on the first draft of the New Book. Once I’m done, the first draft goes out to my First Reader for initial feedback. For all intents and purposes, though, the actual work of writing the draft is complete.

I mark 8/2 as the completion date, after which I took a break for a week to recharge the batteries ( Read more... )

What does it do?

That’s a weird phrase. I mean, in the cavalcade of oddities that comprise the English language, it’s probably pretty low on the list, but it’s still weird. You’ve got two identical (auxiliary) verbs, with different conjugations, with a single subject and an interrogative pronoun. Do-support is the grammatical term for this. While I ( Read more... )

With the tremendous response erupting from last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, I wanted to put down some long-form thoughts that I could point people toward in a format where I had some control over spoiler visibility. If you haven’t seen the episode or read the third book of the series, stop reading now.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

Read the rest of this ( Read more... )