Amazed, Amused Or Offended
Originally I was going to have this Intro be about railway logistics in the First Unpleasantness, T. E. Lawrence, the Arab Revolt and the Hejaz Railway, which I was going to cunningly turn back in an analogy with occupied Crimea. It would have taken a fair bit of note-taking, which I had started. For instance, did you know that El Aurens claimed to have blown up seventy-two bridges in his internecine career? Art!
In case you mistook it for 'Lawrence Of Lesser Sneddlepool' No, it's not a bridge. Make do.
The real train's rusting carcass is still out there in the desert, over a century later, wh
ANYWAY, having come across a picture from several days ago, I have changed my mind, because I can and, once again, whose blog is it?
Right, Art!
First published in 1985 and this is the paperback edition I bought. In it Sterling imagines a future with a fractured Solar System that encompasses all sorts of differing political entities, based on planets, moons and asteroids. One of the more amusing and prescient grace notes he invents is that of 'improving' digital software graphics, which will preen and prune your appearance into the best possible public image. Art!
Domestic AI systems will continue to deliver this service even after you are deceased, meaning there is life after death, even if only virtual. Not bad, Brucie, inventing app filters 25 years ahead of their real-life appearance.
Then there's "Surrogates", which I was mildly horrified to see was made back in 2009. You may not realise, but this was an adaptation of a comic book, which I think I have the trade paperback of. Not that great, to be honest, in terms of artwork, even if the core idea is interesting: people live vicariously through surrogate android versions of themselves. Art!
As I seem to recall being said elsewhere, "Even better than the real thing", since these androids are all far, far more attractive, athletic and ageless versions of the owner-operator. Not only that, if your surrogate gets damaged in any way, you the owner-operator don't get to feel any pain! Which is not necessarily a good thing as you'd not learn to avoid driving a motor-mower across your surrogate feet, or that bleach is not good for bad breath. Art!
That's the real human 'Maggie' character there, and her surrogate. You have to admit, makeup did a spanking job of making Rosamund Pike look plain and frumpy.
Uh-oh. Art is getting those googly eyes again that imply a crush coming on. Quick, nurse, the scenes! Art?
Er - quite.
This, lest ye be unaware, is one of the stock photos of myself that I use occasionally to make a point. THE ONE TO PORT! just so we're clear. The one to starboard is a result of an entity called 'Grok', which I challenged to create a picture of myself. You can see it's taken a few liberties; my nose has been tactfully reduced in size, the old tash trimmed considerably neater, and the jowls have been tightened up. Hilarious! Not sure why I pointed all that out as you can clearly witness it yourself if you have eyes, as we can presume you do since you're reading this. Definitely from a comic artist circa 1957. I can see this chap - Colonel Conrad, Space Service (Rtd.) - turning up in a 'Dan Dare' strip and providing peppery dialogue (much like the real thing).
Just for shizzles and giggles, I asked the AI Art Generator to create an image using a prompt of my own name, full version with both middle names (I know, I know, I'm greedy) and - Art!
He looks like a tortured Celtic scribe of poems about anomie and angst and who nicked the last slice of clootie dumpling, nicht wahr*?
I think that's quite enough of Colonel Conrad, Space Service (Rtd.)
I've Been There!
Many years ago the family went to South Canada to visit New York, San Francisco and Portland, and whilst in San Fran we took a boat tour that went under a couple of whacking big bridges, and sailed around Alcatraz Island. Which is topical because of Mopey Dick. Art!
One has to say, very probably not. Donold mentioned it because it's the only prison in South Canada he's ever heard of. Going from the BBC article, the prison closed down in 1963, so the most recently-constructed buildings are over 60 years old. Nor is it sitting in the middle of the Mojave in a nice dry environment; it's in the middle of San Fran Bay and the elements have been at work on it since the Thirties. Art!
Fixer-upper
You may be surprised that it has a staff from the National Parks Service present. Necessary because it hauls in 1.4 million visitors per year, and all that tourist income would vanish instantly if it went back to being a penitentiary again. One former Park Ranger, John Martini, who used to serve there detailed that it was horribly expensive to incarcerate people there, thanks to the need to bring supplies in by boat. Before you ask, bringing them in by helicopter would be ruinously costly. The NPS has spent millions on merely rendering the site safe for visitors; to house prisoners would require new water, light, heat and sanitation utilities as there are none at present. Conrad, and others, reckon it would be cheaper to tear the lot down and start from scratch, in which case why not merely do that somewhere else? Art!
A Small Inkursksion
You are probably aware - did we mention it on the blog? - that Ukraine very cheekily invaded the Ruffian oblast of Kursk last August, and was only recently forced to withdraw. I shan't go into the calculus of profit and loss about this, as bean-counting military pros and cons can send normal folks to sleep, just to post that the Ukrainians have, even more cheekily, made another (much smaller) incursion back across the border. Art!
I knew about this much earlier but wanted to wait until it was confirmed. One of the persistent bugbears of this conflict is people who wildly inflate claims or just make things up out of whole cloth. Art!
This is a clip of (very sweary!) Ruffian drone operators with a single spotting UAV, watching with shock as a Ukrainian engineering vehicle crosses a minefield and destroys 'dragons teeth'.
One can imagine them drawing short straws in the Kremlin to see who gets to give Putinpot the glad tidings.
How It's Going
Your Modest Artisan continues to watch Season Two of 'Lost' and make up Order Of Battle sheets on A4 with my counters from 'Modern Battles'. Art!
All I've got left to do is blu-tak those green counters onto the A4 sheet, then transfer the Soviet counters onto two separate sheets for 'Bundeswehr' and 'Yugoslavia'. Shouldn't take long, they're already blu-tak'd themselves and in order of formation in the different types of units. You might think of this as 'staff work'.
Only problem is, this arrangement of a paste table makes getting those loose and boxed comics a lot harder to get back into the Comic Cavern. 'Harder' as in 'impossible', so there will continue to be comics lying around messily in my Sekrit Layr. Live with it.
NO! And Go Away
Nobody's talking about your pimped product, you bumbletuck. Art!
We're getting into 'Surrogates' territory here, which is where we came in.
Good night!
* Or maybe it was soda-bread.
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