The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

11 Great Children's Book Titles or Terrible Band Names

If there actually is a child chapter book or band named after any of the following, I stand behind my opinions.

111 Minute Book Covers: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Speed composition of a book cover for C. S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia (if numbered correctly).

Assets are "Tambako the Jaguar's" CC licensed photograph of a lion from Flickr, and Henningklevjer's CC licensed cloth weave texture from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Charlemagne and Mona Lisa Solid.

Under 111 minutes? No, but with the template established, the rest of the series should go faster.

Click image for 300dpi.

Panorama: Off Route 17

Union, ME.

Stitched together in Hugin from eighteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.

111 Minute Book Covers: Paradise Lost

Speed composition of a book cover for John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Assets are a photo of Michelle Webster from a shoot we did in March, and Ivan Tortuga's public domain image of a moth from the Wikimedia Commons. Fonts are Zdenek Gromnica's InfraRed and Gerard E. Bernor's Bambi Bold.

Under 111 minutes? Close.

Click image for 300dpi.

Panorama: Beech Hill

Rockport, ME.

Stitched together in Hugin from fifteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.

Zombeatification

From a picture of my friend Michelle...

Original:

Edited:

Still not as awesome as this image, or this image, but fun.

Lessons learned:

• I'm trying to teach myself not to just go in and make a mess in Photoshop. You can always get an image done faster by painting and filtering the assets directly, but adjustment layers and smart objects REALLY save grief when you need to go back in and fix things. This composite is almost completely nondestructive.
• Applying a filter to a smart object creates an editable "smart filter." I don't know how I missed this feature. I wish to god I'd noticed it when I did the Ego Likeness flyer for Plague.
• Also useful in a project currently underway, simulating the look of still film has two parts to it: grain and schmutz.
  • Grain can be created by adding a 50% gray layer, setting its composite mode to Overlay, applying a small amount of noise, and scaling the layer up as desired.
  • Schmutz is small fibres, hair and dust on the negative. This is a little harder. Opaque bits on a clear negative, they appear white when printed. I'd love to find a high-res print of an unexposed frame of film. Then you could just apply it as a layer in Screen mode. I wonder if it's possible to make a convincing one in Animation:Master with instances and flocking.
• When you see what happens to people when zombies get them, why are the zombies we see always so intact?

Building the Shack, Part 12

Ended up spending most of the winter on the walls, working on warm days. Started by cutting and stapling sheet plastic over the frame where the walls would go.

Collected usable scrap lumber from around the property. Angle cut boards on the table saw to 30°. Made perpendicular cuts in the workshop with hand-held circular saw.

Started on the west wall. Didn't beat the snow. Got most of the west wall nailed into place standing on saw horses. Finished on the extension ladder.

East wall was the most complicated. Hung the entension ladder on the roof peak from the foot of the banking, being careful of the picture window.

Made a platform with the ladder, to get the board above the window nailed into place. Steadied the ladder by running ratcheting straps out from the side windows, and finished the roof peak late one night in February under freezing drizzle.

South wall easier. Stood on the block of styrofoam from the picture window installation to get the top board in place. Worked up from the bottom. Recut the final board a few times.

North wall finished last. Cut the final board trapezoidally by hand.

Finished this afternoon, in sunny 45° spring weather.

Caulking needed in places, but walls are in place.

Panorama: The Eddy, Wiscasset, ME

Stitched together in Hugin from 17 camera phone pictures. Miller Cylindrical projection.

Panorama: Breakwater in Winter

Rockland, ME. A much balmier 20°, but breezy.

Stitched together in Hugin from 13 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.

Panorama: Stepped Brook

Union, ME. Air temperature about 10° F.

Stitched together in Hugin from 24 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.

Spaceships

If you don't have artificial gravity, science fiction starts to look more like the age of schooners. To get from place to place in the solar system it'd be necessary to accelerate halfway, turn around and decelerate for the rest of the trip. Accelerating or decelerating at more than the equivalent rate of Earth gravity (9.8m/s) would be difficult for the crew to withstand for long. Jupiter is about 983 million km from Earth at its nearest point. If I'm doing the math right (and I'm probably not) accelerating halfway at 9.8m/s would take 158 hours -- about 6½ days. The full trip would take two weeks.

Laser weapons are a must. You'd only be able to see them when they shoot through gas or dust, but when it comes to shooting from one moving platform and hitting another on a logarithmic scale you won't get much time to aim. A projectile would deliver more energy with less expended, but a powerful lazer would be able to vaporize or nudge it out of the way. Opponents would basically joust on a split-second timeframe, trying to pass momentarily close enough for their computers to shoot. Ships would be no more than specks to one another, usually less. Forget about human combat.

Until someone tells me what exactly an "energy shield" would be, we'll have to assume that surviving a lazer attack means thick, dense plating all over the ship. If a lazer can vaporize a few cubic meters of hull in one shot, you'd better have a lot of hull to spare. It should be shiny too. Getting hit with a lazer might lead to some pretty refractions.

One last thought: Get used to the solar system. It takes light from the sun (which doesn't have to accelerate) eight minutes to reach Earth, four hours to reach Neptune, and four years to reach the nearest star -- itself a burnt-out red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.

Blowing some of the cobwebs out of scifi tropes, fiction begins to slip into unfamiliar grooves.

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