Category Archives: Crossposted

Announcements, Crossposted

Designing the Bristlecone Ship Coin

As part of the Random Access Memorabilia (Book 13) Kickstarter we’ll be doing a ship coin for Bristlecone, which featured prominently in books 12, 13, and 14.  I’ll be drawing this ship again for the coin, and doing so for the first time in a couple of years at least.

In order to get it right, I made a model sheet from some of my favorite drawings of the ship.

The image in the upper left was rendered by Jeff Zugale¹, who did all the ship design work for Planet Mercenary. Everything else was my line art.

I’ll probably be drawing the ship using a camera angle similar to the upper center, but with more detail, like the images in the lower left (in front of the tufted wing shark¹) and lower right corners.

In the Planet Mercenary RPG, Bristlecone is defined as a Celeschul Orbital Foundries Wyvern-class vessel. The hull and A.I. were built and integrated in the 26th century, but improvements in annie-plant tech led to numerous upgrades. The full history of the ship won’t fit on the coin, but we’ll hit the highlights.

The tufted wing shark² won’t appear on the coin anywhere.

¹ Jeff “Starshipwright” Zugale is doing an art book Kickstarter WITH SPACESHIP TOYS right now, and you should go look at it.
² McConger named the tufted wing shark “Kong,” but xenobiologists ignored the precedent he attempted to set and went with something more descriptive.³
³ At least to humans, who know what the word “shark” means. 

Crossposted, Reviews

Blade Runner 2049

I watched the theatrical version of 1982’s Blade Runner on Friday morning to prep for a 12:30pm showing of Blade Runner 2049. I did this on a whim, but I’m very glad I did, because it made the parallels between the two films stand out, and not in a bad way.

It also meant I spent 5 hours in the Blade Runner universe, and that place weighs pretty heavily on the soul. Even the shiny parts of that future are unsettling, like blood on chrome, and the non-shiny parts are deeply bleak, like broken bones in sand.

But the parallels? Wow. Sure, there were plenty of obvious callbacks, like eyeball imagery, constant rain, and telling the computer to enhance images, but there were also thematic links in the camera angles, color palettes, and the pacing. Even the soundtrack, which was not the work of Vangelis, sounded to me like music which, under decades of environmental pressure, was driven to evolve from Vangelis¹. It’s different, but Vangelis is still there, like mitochondrial DNA.

I was amazed by the film, and I liked it, but Blade Runner 2049 still doesn’t clear my personal Threshold of Awesome. Mostly because I prefer to have a bit more fun at the movies. Setting that aside, however, it is an awesome film².

¹ My library contains several albums of Vangelis music, including at least one version of the original Blade Runner soundtrack. I suspect that Zimmer and Wallfisch spent many hours with a similar library before laying down anything in the studio.
²In the interest of letting moviegoers know what they’re in for: Blade Runner 2049 has more nudity and violence than the original film, and at two hours and 47 minutes it runs kind of long.

Announcements, Crossposted

Final Week for Book 13 Pre-Orders

The Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter closes on Friday, October 13th. As of this writing there are about 200 sketch editions left, and we’ve cleared all but one of our stretch goals.

We’re doing the final layout work now, and the book is looking SO NICE. You can expect an updated cover reveal on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

We’re also designing the Bristlecone ship coin, per the stretch goal which we cleared early this week. We’ll reveal that design soon, but it’s not quite ready.

Do you want Schlock Mercenary t-shirts? Consider buying a book!

This may sound a bit counter-intuitive, but in order to make the right shirts, in order to make really nice ones, we need to spend some money up front. We need to do R&D. If the Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter reaches its next stretch goal, we will spend a portion of this project’s proceeds (probably between $1,000 and $5,000) developing and prototyping t-shirts. We will then Kickstart a proper t-shirt project in February of 2018.

This is the final week of the Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter. We know there are a lot of demands on your discretionary income right now, and we’re very grateful for those portions of it you choose to spend with us.

 

Announcements, Crossposted

Sketch Editions: It’s Not Too Late!

We’ve added 400 more sketch editions to the Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter! Click that link, then scroll down a bit to “Sketch RAM Batch 2” to find the right pledge level.

What changed? Well, Kickstarting this book allows us to expand our fulfillment window a bit. In plain terms, it gives me more time for sketching, and that means more sketches. We probably should have figured this out earlier, but we’ve done so many book releases the old way that it didn’t even really occur to us.

Random Access Memorabilia is going to be a beautiful book. You should get one, and let me draw in it.