ZOM-BOT LABS

2010-03-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

I saw my baby, crying hard as babe could cry. What could I do? My baby's love had gone, And left my baby blue. Nobody knew

Lavender and mint versions will be available at imagekind right now!

retro ROBOCOP movie poster now available

2010-03-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

i just finished and uploaded this retro, kinda german, ROBOCOP poster at imagekind.com.

While i'm sure the german release of ROBOCOP didn't undergo a name change, i like doing it...making them seem even more foreign and classic. ROBOTERPOLIZIST literally means 'robot policeman'...
it's in (my fast becoming trademark) red and blue overlap technique with light aging.
available framed or unframed.

Big Trouble in Little China poster update

2010-03-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a surprise to me that my Big Trouble in Little China poster has ended up being my best selling print at my imagekind poster shop , outselling 'modern science', which I used to get inquiries and requests to get printed weekly.

I love when people drop me a note with interesting stories about how they found my work, where they display it in their homes, or some other small world connection with them, me or it.

For example, Micheal here bought a print of Big Trouble and took it with him to a convention, getting Lo Pan himself to sign it. I'll let him tell it.

Mr. Pitts,
I recently purchased your gorgeous "Big Trouble in Little China" poster to take with me to Megacon2010 in Orlando, Florida, where I had it signed by Lo Pan himself, Mr. James Hong. Mr. Hong was very impressed with the design, and signed the poster with a metallic-silver marker. He asked for information about it, and I emailed him a link to the poster here on Imagekind. Thanks for helping this fanboy make an impression! I wish you success, and with your blessing, will continue to purchase your art for the purpose of having it signed at other conventions.

Your fan,
Michael :o)

I'm waiting to see if Michael has any pics of the occasion, and if so I'll post an update.

now for sale: SCI-FI jesus fish raygun vinyl decals at my etsy!

2010-03-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

3/10/10 UPDATE: sold outof first batch, preselling for second batch now at the etsy shop, should be in in a week or so!

3/9/10- i finally got in my shipment of black and satin silver decals that i designed to spoof the jesus fish emblem- in the shape of a ray gun touting SCI-FI!
they look great! they are 3x5 roughly, and made out of durable weatherproof vinyl supposedly good for 5 to 7 years on your car.

you can pick black or silver at the shop here.

black works best on red and lighter car paint.
silver works great on the rear window, and red or darker car paint.

they're going fast! i only placed a small order to test the waters, and i may have to order more soon. in the next batch, i may have a small number of white ones (best for back windows) and maybe metallic gold as well...for the pimps out there ;)

LOST: final season.

2010-02-25T15:37:00.000-08:00

I'd like to think they can pull it off, but every other episode this season is hit or miss so far...feels like they need ONE more season to really wrap things up. I don't want everything tied up with a bow, but there are so many things that need at least a general HINT of an explanation to satisfy the intelligent viewers. We can't keep writing the show and patching all the plot holes and missteps in our heads and in fan forums for the writers. There is being smart enough to read into things and get what you want from a work of art, and then there is being an apologist for half-assery.

I'm going to keep this blog spoiler free, but the banter of Hurley and Jack this last episode, the discovery they made and the witty and convenient explanation of it was damn near insulting by this point. I understand Hurley has kind of become the voice of the fans in the audience, almost breaking the fourth wall of the show at times, but come on. What they discovered and everything that happened was nothing but last minute 'making it up as we go'.

all the same, I've been in a LOST mash up mood lately, after the success of my LOLS cats pic...

BEHOLD

2010-01-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

something else i am working on with absolutely no goal except for 'i like it'
potential titles are 'demon with a glass hand', 'BEHOLD!', or the "meltdown/martyr/malfunction/monstrosity of mission 10"

the progress and versions of which can be seen on my flickr

New Threadless.com Submission

2010-01-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

Here is the first of three designs I am subbing to threadless.com for the 10,000 dollar 2K10 competition.
a slightly larger version can be seen on my flickr

as I post this- it may not actually be up for voting for a day or so yet, but please check back and vote when it is!

Score this design: "Leaving the Comfort Zone," to help it get printed on Threadless!

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I has a donate button.

2010-01-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

Added a new feature to my blog..again I'm about 20 years behind everyone, but I now have a paypal donation button set up under my picture on the right.
It will securely connect you to my paypal account. Times are tough for everyone, and an artist's life has never been easy to begin with. Not begging for anything, just saying- it's there now! Pass the info along to your rich uncles! ;) ...and sincere thanks to those who have donated in the past, everything is appreciated with ridiculous gratitude.

If the Velma Tee was a cartoon or movie, this would be some of the soundtrack...

2010-01-19T17:37:00.000-08:00

up for 90 days at mediafire, I've uploaded a selection of tracks that would go well in a cartoon or movie of "we've got some work to do now"....

I had started renaming the tracks for certain scenes or encounters, but gave up on that idea after a couple- so i'm not sure what order they will re-arrange themselves into.
It's a mix of instrumental horror-surf guitar, old country, old pop or otherwise cinematic themes that
ithink would be appropriate if Velma's Monsterpocalypse movie was directed by Tarantino or Rodriguez in their hayday.
Quaint, unnervingly calm and quirky tracks fall between frenetic battle tracks, most all the vocals are appropriate to scenes I pictured in my head, daydreaming about a what-if movie where Velma and Scoob slaughter everything from mummies to fishmen, werewolves and zombies....

One of my favorites is Nancy Sinatra's 'Sugartown'- where I picture a dying Daphne- laying in a field near the van, overdosing on painkillers like a lady, after suffering a mortal wound.

you can download the stuffit file here;
http://www.mediafire.com/file/yqkaqyiyyzn/velma soundtrack.sitx

We've got some work to do now REPRINTED- voted 'bestee of Nov 09'!

2010-01-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

We've got some work to do now- aka 'the Velma Tee' was reprinted this week at threadless.com because you guys asked for it! It was also voted 'bestee' of november, winning me more earnings and Adobe Creative Suite 4! ...up until now, I've been getting by with cs2. Maybe now I can do all that neon blur/glow crap like everyone else! Not! But all the same, at least now i won't have to beg clients to convert their templates down to cs2 for me...ha ha.
As well as being november's bestee, I am in the running with 11 others to be the absolute bestee of 2009! If I win that, I get $20,000 - an amount I have never seen owned or imagined in my life, sad as that seems...
When voting is open for that, I will need all the help I can get to make it happen, and would love you all to show your support when I have the links to vote.

thanks everyone!
and if you already own the tee- go show your support in the threadless blogs by talking about it (like, funny instances of people realizing what it's about, sightings of other people in it, etc) and submit a pic of you in it to get free credit towards other shirts at threadless!

Happy New Year! a look to the past...

2010-01-02T15:35:00.000-08:00

Let's take a look back at the future through the eyes of the past- some of my favorite images courtesy of blackandwtf.tumblr.com
..such hopeful or wacky looks at the future, and what it SHOULD be like if the 60's and 70's hadn't come along and ruined it all.
Where's our bubble helmets? Robot lovers? ...sigh.
let's get back on the right track to the future in 2010, or 200X as us Mega Man geeks are coining it....

AVATAR: a zom-bot labs review

2009-12-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

Just as I was the last person in the world to have a blog, I'm probably the last person to review James Cameron's avatar online. Going into this, let me stress that I went into Avatar with an open mind, no prejudices, other than being a little annoyed by the hype and claims around the tech and how the movie would be like nothing we'd ever seen. I was hoping the backlash would be proven wrong, and I did want to get swept up in a bit of fantasy. However, try as I might, I've never been one of those people who can just turn off my brain and enjoy the ride. As an artist and storyteller of sorts, I am always noticing the small details, and unfortunately the flaws of things. Not because I want to tear down another artist's work, but because I wonder what I would have done with the same material or capabilities. Even with my favorite movies, I love them warts and all. So before I get into the small details of the movie, I will break down the entire experience into percentages for you.

positive-70% of Avatar was a good time at the movies. It will no doubt be enough to satisfy much of the audience, but not nit-pickers like me.
negative-10% the story felt like it needed further explanation or development. No idea how much story was left on the digital cutting room floor, I can only grade what I saw in the theater, and I felt like things were missing. Sci-Fi is supposed to have you leave the theater asking questions, not coming up with excuses to have it make sense.
negative-10% the characters were stock Cameron stereotypes and had little to no development, or what they did have was so drastic it felt forced or convenient. It felt like the cast of ALIENS was performing in a school play on ecology, only a much needed Hudson-esque banter was missing.
negative-10% of the ideas or creations were quite implausible, ridiculous, or simply lazy or too convenient.

-and while 10% may not seem like much, they added up and felt much larger in bringing down my overall score of the movie, kind of like how the humidity can change the feel of a hot day versus the real temperature, or how a small sore in your mouth can feel gigantic, or a papercut can hurt worse than a slap in the face.

1) The 3D experience: Luckily the glasses are big enough to go over prescription glasses. Luckily it's dark and everyone is looking forward so no one sees how dumb I look. Thinking back, I feel like the 3D trailer for Alice in Wonderland was more impressive than the depth in AVATAR, and not just because Wonderland was kicking and flinging objects into the audience shamelessly. After some time, I started getting a bad headache, and I'm not sure if it was the 3D or the fact that we had been rear ended on the way to the theater by people leaving WAL-MART in a hurry on Christmas Eve and maybe I had pulled a neck muscle.
Overall, I honestly think that the 3D in Coraline was better done than AVATAR. Granted, I didn't see either in IMAX.

2) The Computer Graphics: I was surprised how much the faces of the Na'vi did not bother me and how much their bodies did. Something was still too stiff, or was missing. Things still felt way too clean, and colorful just for the sake of being more eyepopping. I will hand it to them though, I believe they may have come the closest to getting across the uncanny valley as far as the eyes and expressions of the Na'vi. Then again, Gollum gave us the same feeling years ago in Lord of the rings.

3) The story: depending on which blog you read, Cameron was 'inspired' by any number of classic sci-fi stories, myths, movies and even history. Yes, it was all served with a huge scoop of liberal white guilt. For someone who hangs out with and befriends the military in real life while researching a movie, James Cameron sure made them look bad in this flick. I wonder what they think of the result?
The premise is so timeless it is totally dry and stale. Which is unfortunate because it is a very important lesson on the invasion and displacement of native cultures because of the greed of a 'higher culture'...but so far, the retelling of such a story has not made the world change its ways and I feel AVATAR did nothing more to help it...and it totally could have if the symbolism and characters were not so heavy handed.

4) the world of Pandora. It was pretty. It was fairly deep. It lit up at night for some reason, except for when the plot needed Jake's Avatar to be using a torch in the darkness. Then it was almost completely dark. So I don't know if the animals still relied on night vision, but those are gripes for another section below. Overall, it was pretty much a rainforest with some large scale sea life growing in it. Oh, and some areas totally looked like a YES album cover.

The Flaws- Scientific and artistic:

- The Idea that the Na'vi had warriors at all doesn't fit in with their philosophy. Were they a peaceful race or not? Did they ever fight the other tribes (not shown until the end)?

- The Na'vi were the only bipeds on the planet. They were also seemingly the only things with two eyes and a mammalian nose. The other creatures had smaller secondary eyes and breathed through their chest nostrils directly into their lungs (assuming). They were also the only creatures shown with hair. Cameron and his defenders will say that 'well, this is another planet we are talking about here- anything is possible'....but that's an easy excuse. Biology doesn't work that way. For a creature so supposedly tied into thier planet, they stuck out like sore thumbs.

- Na'vi scrambled with the letters E.T. added spells 'Native'..... clever, or lazy?

- Pandora was a planetoid, right...a moon? And our protagonists and their little town were the only Na'vi on it? oh, no wait, at the end we see there is a tribe that lives on the beach and one in the plains. Okay, that's still not a whole planet. And this tree and the Unobtanium under it were the only place on the entire moon to get the stuff? maybe so, but the treatment of the tribe as representing the entire planet was pretty lazy. Avatar is not alone in that though, many sci-fi flicks use this narrow approach.

- The arrows bounce off the war vessels in the beginning but penetrate by the end. how convenient.

- Jake's AVATAR is never eaten or molested by anything in the wild jungle every time he gets 'logged out' and leaves it there in the middle of nowhere. Only once do we see a consequence when he awakens to the harvesters destroying the jungle around him. Why were they doing that btw? they were not there to log, but extract ore from directly under a tree. they said so themselves.

- How does the Avatar body go on leaving a breathing without the 'soul' or 'brain' or whatever in it? And how did the transfer process go from being a close one in the lab at the beginning, to becoming a remote, long-distance sort of thing. If it is electromagnetic waves, they should not have worked near that 'soul tree', because as we heard many times, it fucked up all kinds of communication, radar, etc.

- Who braided Jake's Avatar's hair in the cloning vat? and what happens if the hair- that conceals the biological usb cable- isn't braided over it? that was such a silly idea. it would have been much better for them to simply connect via some palm organ than plugging their ponytails into the antennae of the animals. So without the braid, they just have raw, dangling nerves exposed on the back of their head? why not show this at some point.

-We can cross-clone humans with a creature that we have already established as totally different than us...and the assumption is that they can clone or at least replace Jake's own crippled legs..but he can't afford it on his own. So this opens up the question- do the rich clone themselves younger bodies and transfer their brains into them like in the avatar program? why not? seems like it would be an easy and obvious thing to do with that technology. Seriously, we are talking about complete mind transfer and functionality and this is all humans are doing with it? sneaking into an 'indian tribe' to steal some gold?

- The Na'vi seemed to be aware that Jake Sully and Sigourney's characters where not true Na'vi, after all Sigourney ran a school at some point (cut out of the final flick maybe), referring to them as sky people and dream walkers or whatever...then seemed totally surprised when they found out they were not Na'vi, then seemingly knew what was going on and wasn't shocked or surprised-even recognized jake's body- at the end. I'm as confused as you are.

- who were the other Avatar playing basketball and why did they never play into the plan?

- when the Colonel is killed at the end, his mech suit falls over like a human. Yet the suit only mimics the arm and maybe the leg or hip movement of the rider. since his body is held in place by the suit, when he died, the suit should have simply went limp, upright, like he was. It could not fall over dramatically unless he had the room to inside, which he did not. It actually would have been more poignant if it had just powered down into a slouched standing position.

oh god, i had a lot more, but i'm actually tired of complaining about it.

overall, it was a unique experience. was it a world and game-changer, no. No more than terminators 1 and 2 were, Aliens, the Abyss or any other Cameron movie. I think he needs to stretch his mind a little more with characters and story next time. Next time may be different. AVATAR felt like a multi-million dollar test run for something else.

New guns in progress...

2009-12-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

the 'Watt-Box'

features a oil-filled pressure gauge and is being wired so that the dome lights up electric blue with the push of a thumb trigger.

Unnamed retro blaster- not quite atomic, not quite steampunk.

top view: bolt in barrel is temporary until i find/make something more interesting. i'm also going to add brass lightning bolts on both sides of the 'blast chamber'

Bots in progress

2009-12-06T10:59:00.000-08:00

I've been tinkering a bit since my last post, and as pleased as I am to say I have some bots that are almost done, it just feels like all I ever have are bots that are almost done!
They are always short of some needed detail or character feature, but especially are usually lacking arms, hands, legs or feet. torsos and heads never seem to be a problem, but finding cool junk parts in matched pairs makes limb-building a little slower and frustrating.

Here is some new progress shots. I believe, for the most part, the copper and silver greasebot is complete. I may mount a hose and grease nozzle out of his butt for him to hold.

and of course, when they are complete, I'll have them for sale on etsy and post the announcement here!

A new favorite blog: Black and WTF

2009-11-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

a neat archive of strange old black and white pictures. not all are NSFW like below, I just can't pass up a pic of women and robots.

lots more goodies at http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com

We got some work to do now - NOW FOR SALE!

2009-11-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

Finally, after weeks of wondering and waiting and lying and keeping my mouth shut and ignoring offers from other printers and telling other interested parties to wait and cross their fingers, I can finally say that it's now for sale!
and it's quite a nice big print! i can't wait to see how the tiny details held up.

the shape of things to come

2009-11-12T18:16:00.000-08:00

There was a time when my diet consisted of ramen noodles and zone bars and I could fit in an american men's medium tee shirt, but no more. Now I have to buy everything large which (no offense to the naturally largies out there) breaks my heart. Because most american larges are fucking HUGE. with sleeves I can put my thigh in, neckholes I can get through with a scooter helmet on, and otherwise hang like a poncho and make me look fatter than my 'merely out of shape' figure actually is.
There needs to be something in between for tall guys with broad shoulders and chests, long torsos. A little pudge but not so much that we have to cover it in a tent. So I propose at least three (if not 5) in-between sizes for men's universal tee sizes.
Tim Gunn: make it work.

Here's a depressing thought...

2009-11-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

I don't want my blog to derail into negative observations, but I have another one anyway. Then I promise I will stop being 'Mr. Complainy Pants' and get back to art and art culture blogging...

So anyway- have you ever been to a Goodwill outlet Store? It's not your typical thrift store, or even your standard Goodwill store. It's something even far more depressing than an eviction yardsale or being so poor that you sell your plasma to be able to afford a meal that will essentially only replace the plasma you just sold.

A Goodwill Outlet Store is essentially a big hangar or warehouse-like room, full of bins of junk that maybe they didn't want to process or didn't think was fit for sale in the regular store.... It has really high ceilings,(though the junk bins are never more than 3 feet off the ground so I don't know why the ceilings have to be 50ft tall, but...) with typical depressing gym lighting. There are no prices. Nope. You PAY BUY THE POUND- of whatever it is you find. Clothes by the pound seems like a good deal but maybe books and housewares by the pound could get steep. Anyway, this is what they look like:

My first thought was- holy shit! I bet if I had all day I could really find some treasures here!
My very next thought the very next second was -Holy shit! this is kind of sad.

Not sad because the people shopping there were really poor or providing for their families- most were not. Most were other eBayers or Junk Sellers or Packrats. I was looking for metal parts for my steampunk guns and robots, so I was already in a foul mood when I saw an older woman with a cart full of pretty much every piece of brass in the place. My competition meter was on high. I fear facing snooty old swap meet women should they survive the apocalypse and frequent Barter Town. They are ruthless!
...but competition aside, a weird sadness came over me that I couldn't pinpoint until I was on my way out the door.

I had walked past bins of unwashed clothes that still smelled like people. Random clothes. No women's or men's sections that I could discern. Bins and bins of shoes. Bins of old belongings that were uncategorized other than, essentially, 'book' or 'not book'.

I love junk stores. And antique stores give me more warm nostalgia than 'creepy-old-shit' vibes. I even dumpster dive on occasion, so I really didn't have a problem with the fact that this room was full of old crap....
It was what the environment and experience reminded me of.

It literally reminded me of the piles of property at the train stations after Nazis took the luggage from the Jews they were sending to the camps. Loosely sorted. clothes, shoes, books, silverware...Of course nothing will hopefully ever duplicate that horror, and holocaust comparisons are often extreme, but that was the feeling that came over me. Dead people's stuff. Getting rooted through by looters and scavengers.

And I'm sure it wasn't all completely spring cleaning donations, certainly some actually WAS the property of dead people. I know when my own mother died, it was emotionally easier to just get rid of a lot of her stuff right away. You can't trash it, so you donate it and hope it can still be used by someone. So to see these heaps of belongings being bought and sold by the pound was a little depressing and not how I would have intended for my donations to end up...and it could effect where I donate to from now on. Not because goodwill are Nazis or dead people's things are creepy, but because the whole operation treated it all like utter shit (and most of it was) but they had no problem selling the shit to you by the pound in this strange, clinical, unfriendly environment. Ironically, I suggest you visit one if you can. It will make you hug and cling to all other ways of thrifting!

Kids are filthy: My trip to a LEGO store

2009-11-10T15:07:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to feel better after a nearly three day long illness of some sort knocked me on my ass... as far as I know, it wasn't the swine flu. There were no stomach or intestinal issues, the only nausea being related to the bad equilibrium from sinus problems. Looking back, there is only one thing we both did this weekend that fits the time table of infection: we went to a LEGO store in a North Carolina mall.

well, what does that have to do with getting sick?- you might ask.

The answer is simple: Kids are filthy little screaming petri dishes of germ breeding sugars. Throw in some staph from bad hygiene and viola!

On that innocent night, where I finally got to go to a lego store for the first time in my life, I actually chuckled at the bottles of hand sanitizer on some of the counters inside...mocked the job of spraying down one of the activity rooms with disinfectant and bleach solution- as we saw one employee do.

But it becomes hard to laugh when your throat can barely swallow, and your body is shivering and sweating simultaneously.
For the rest of this rant however, let's just accept the fact that your average lego store is probably equal to a major hospital for the amount of germs spread on the products and then mutated from the over-use of sanitizers. For the rest of the blog I just want to express how disappointing the lego store is, for any of you considering a trip out of your way.

check this out- it looks awesome, right? rows and rows of every lego of every color...

not so fast! look closer. the top three rows are unavailable- that is, they are just repeats of parts below, and are not open to scoop from- in other words, fake and visually deceiving- making the wall appear grander than it is.
secondly, the parts made available are some of the lamest, most common parts to any set.. tires, thin flats, etc- and others that simply just don't deem being so available: little white blocks with an eye painted on them? Dogs? (yes, I bought two dogs, but I digress). No hard to find or multi-useful shapes.

At the 'build your own minifig' table, one finds literally three torsos, three types of legs and maybe 5 different heads and occupational hats or hair. Which I guess is fine if you are a child with no imagination and content with settling for a race car driver, mechanic or fireman.
Guess I will have to keep shopping the most fully stocked, germ free and best priced Lego store of them all: eBay.

I'm jealous I didn't think of it first!

2009-11-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

a new shirt at threadless does something very well that i had been struggling to conceptualize for a while now: making the 80's space invader mythology into something realistically plausible.
you see, the 'pixel invaders' aren't critters at all, but the shapes of alien fighter ships- as shown by their clever shadows here:

i've had several space invader and 80's arcade space shooter projects brewing slowly for months now, and every time someone beats me to the punch with extreme cleverness.

so yeah, i'm jealous- and the design is so simple and wearable i may have to buy it!

Thanks!

2009-10-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

alright, the counts and views and links and buzz on 'we've got some work to do now' is still climbing...it's crazy, and I appreciate all of it!
here's a run down of some of the most notable links
http://io9.com/5391510/what-if-zombies-ate-most-of-the-mystery-team
http://boingboing.net/2009/10/26/zombiescooby-doo-mas.html
http://warmingglow.uproxx.com/2009/10/scooby-doo-zombies-badass
and beyond the other blogs and tweets about it, I have the pleasure of Simon Pegg Re-tweeting one of the links on his twitter....which was enough recognition to get me to break my sacred vow to never get involved in twitter. I will try to not abuse it. Feel free to follow me and i will do the same.

there is even rumors threadless.com may be thinking about doing something about all the buzz. hmmmmm.

anyway, this has been really cool.... I've already made several strong contacts in the art and print world from the publicity, with an interest in the rest of my art in general,and am still getting some small gigs from it....so I sincerely thank everyone who has pushed this design as much as you have.

CHEAP HALLOWEEN COSTUME #257

2009-10-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

...dusting off this old chestnut I drew back when Billy Mays was still kicking and selling us Mighty Putty. I do miss the big lug, and the show Pitchmen which was actually decent, as far as that behind the scene reality crap goes.
Well, if you are in a pinch this Halloween why not be the guy that does the topically-in-bad-taste-but-a-little-late-to-the-joke costume of a dead celeb from the past year? Heath Ledger jokers excluded, of course.
Go grab a blue button up from the thrift store, some tan slacks, brush your teeth until they are as white and radiant as this screen, practice your 'thumbs up' as well as your outside voice. Keep announcing your name, and that you are 'here'. Bring a silly product from home. Anything will do as long as you give it a powerful name. A simple clotheshanger can easily become a 'WARDROBE WIZARD!'
Then cut yourself one of these out of cardboard and break out the blackest black paint that you can black..I mean, paint.

If ambient light in the room is actually drawn into the gravitational pull of the blackness, even better.

ever start a blog and not know it?

2009-10-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

yeah apparently i started one some time ago. did one post. have no memory of it whatsoever, which is fine, because it is extremely unmemorable.

behold: ART AND RANTS

I've been Boing Boing'd!

2009-10-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to an unusually high number of views and adds to my flicker account, more specifically the pic of the Velma design I did for threadless.com. I tracked back my traffic and saw it had all come from Boing Boing. Yay publicity! you can see it HERE.

The comments section below is funny because the first poster automatically poo-poos not only the drawing, but steampunk as well, having already viewed my profile I suppose. But the original poster dissects him a new one so it's taken care of ;)

I'm still amazed how much attention this design has gotten. Like Madness of Mission Six, my Pac-Man mash-up, I like them both but don't consider them much more than clever 'alternate origins' or what-ifs.
I do think it is cute how many people keep saying 'velma is hot!' not knowing she's modeled directly off of Chanco

STUPID GOODWILL..... STUPID EBAY.

2009-10-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Well, after last week's great luck with the box of vacuum tubes, I suppose I was due some opposite karma at Goodwill Industries.

It was going to be a wasted trip until I saw this lovely, tarnished old chrome kitchen mixer....my mind immediately pinged 'RAYGUNNNNNN!' so I grabbed it up.

It would have made a classy 50's style raygun with some work. It was space-age looking, had some nice vents and knobs on it, a handle on the top that looked kind of like a fin.. it was the kind you could either mount on a stand or take off and use by hand. It even had a grimy old port window on it that literally said OFF or ON behind the glass of it when you turned the knob. The Mounting stand was missing but I didn't need it. Off of the stand, the mounting part was begging for a handle and trigger. The front part with the mixer mounts would have come off easily and could probably be cannibalized for parts. It wasn't clean or pretty. It had age and wear, and that's what was so great about it, and why I thought it would be cheap.

(pic found online of similar mixer- different handle, shown opposite side of 'off/on' window)

So I carry it around for like 20 minutes while I look at stuff. I get to the register and say "This didn't have a price on it but it was back with the other appliances". The girl looks befuddled. She didn't even know what it was. She asked an older cashier who said- "Oh that wasn't supposed to go out- they are going to put it on ebay".

Mind you it didn't have the beaters, the mounting base was missing and the cord was kinked and frayed- the whole thing may not have even worked!
I should have pulled the 'customer is always right' routine, or how I shop there all the time and they would lose a customer...better still if I had only known I would have taken the price sticker off of something else (a decent price mind you, I'm not a crook) and stuck it on and the girl would never have questioned it.

so, I guess I will see if I can find the savannah goodwill's ebay account, or at least scour ebay for other broken, low priced mixers like that.

Holy Jeez it would have made a swell blaster.

UPDATE: screw that old mixer for now....old power drills are where it's at for a good base/parts for atomic and dieselpunk ray guns! And they are pretty cheap, and lots of retro styles. I just scored one like this for $10.

I'll take the mechanism and end cap off of it, and modify it to where it's unrecognizable. It's a pity we don't make things like this anymore. Everything is plastic and has branding all over it. this is a Black & Decker but you would never know. still works too. can we say the same of the drill you and I have now in 50+ years?

The beauty of dead technology

2009-10-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

On a totally unscheduled stop at a North Carolina Goodwill this weekend after helping my gal-pal "Chanco" move, We found this tattered and taped up treasure chest of old vacuum tubes.

Most SANE people would have walked on by, but I was drawn to the little terrariums of technology, the mysterious filaments and conductors sealed inside the bulby, bell-jar shaped beauty of them.

Each is like it's own little palm-sized City of Kandor...

At $25 for the entire 1ft x 1.5ft x 6' h box (which has easily over a hundred tubes of all conceivable size and shape), it was the highest ticket item I had bought at goodwill since I scored a beautiful hardwood coffee table for the same price....but I knew the potential in it.

I've bought a couple on ebay before for use in ray gun and robot projects, so I also knew that, working or not, they are a goldmine to retro hobbyists as well as steampunk/industrial/robot sculptors.

So, now I have picked out an assortment to keep for myself in future raygun and robot projects, and I am going to bundle the rest up into grab bags of about 10 or 15 and put them on ebay, where I already see similar grab bags go for what I paid for the box.

The find leaves me with a couple questions. Granted, I don't have the electronics knowledge to know if these vacuum tubes were for radio, television, or what-- but who donated this huge lot of tubes to goodwill? Some old ham radio hobbyist? Retired television repairman? Crazy old tinkerer (like myself?)...and furthermore, I am honestly surprised that goodwill didn't trash them and actually put them up for sale at all. In Savannah at least, they throw away a trash trailer of donations daily- anything they don't understand or think will sell....which- yes, I root through from time to time to find bits for projects.

Either way, I feel lucky to have timed it all to find this box of goodness, and that I can rescue some of them for any other retro-techno fans like myself.

if you are interested in purchasing an assortment for your projects, contact me at pittsillustration@gmail.com

What is a ZOM-BOT ?

2009-10-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

Well, first and foremost, 'zom-bot' was a way two combine my two favorite fictional creatures, the zombie and robot.
As you think more about it, they are both frightening and intriguing because they are not alive, but 'act' it. They are both 'golems' of a sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem

One is made by man -the robot- and represents the next stage or age in mankind. Better, stronger, smarter...and even though we can program them to never harm us, our own programming and their massive intelligence usually tend to spell certain doom for us. Once they can reproduce themselves and see that we are a threat or a parasite on the world, they will remove and replace us. Robots are our pride and dreams run amok. Man's best intentions becoming his destruction. Fear of technology, but also fear of becoming obsolete. They also represent the old century's dreams for the future. It almost seems silly now how they used to think we would all be living on the moon with a robot butler in every home, but there is something so charming and hopeful about the way robots were portrayed nearly 50 to 70 years ago. An alternate future most of us would desperately love to live in.

The other -the zombie- is US...but not us.
Controlled by something we do not understand. Puppets. Perhaps acting out primitive urges from the corners of the inner brain. Eat. Attack. Spread the infection. Yet there is also an aspect of the hive mind, a herd mentality, and that's what frightens us most. It's certainly one of the things Romero was thinking when he wrote Dawn of the Dead. The last thing we want to do is settle into the mediocrity of acting and thinking like everyone else. Afraid that if they touch us, if we get too close, we will become them...and they are shuffling, blank faced in the malls of America right now. They are both Vampires and the Body Snatchers. The fact that they are corpses isn't even as scary as they fact that if we are infected we will lose control of our thoughts and individuality. It's not just about a fear of death, but our fear of what comes after. Or a reminder that some lives are more pointless and worse than death.
That's why those bitten or cornered in zombie movies would rather suicide with that last bullet then become ONE OF THEM...just like how you jokingly plead to your friends 'if i EVER act/dress/grow old/conform like that, please shoot me!'

So ZOM-BOT became my 'label' as well as my handle.
When trying to come up with a web address that was 33% relative to my work, 33% nonsensical (google, anyone?) and 33% phonetically catchy, zombotdotcom seemed to fit. It had a nice 'A-B-B-A' rhyme scheme that helps it stick in your head
a ZOM
b BOT
b DOT
a COM
zom rhymes with com, and bot rhymes with dot. simple enough.

Initially, I wanted to own ZOMBOT.COM (no dash in zombot) but it was owned and being sat on, unused. So I sucked it up and added the dash, which i like so much better now anyway. It's much more retro.

When it came time to have some products to sell, I struggled for a bit to try to picture- what would a zom-bot really even look like? A zombie with cybernetic attachments or limbs? Nah. what's the opposite of that? a robot with an undead brain!
and so the Zom-Bot was born.

I'm still working on more retro 'zombiganda' and advertisement posters in this series, 3 of which can be found HERE in various degrees of faux aging- from clean to folded to folded and dirtied.

oh, and i guess years ago, Hot Wheels beat me to the name..lol

http://hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Zombot

3 new Steampunk Guns for sale on Etsy!

2009-10-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

hand made with love and a whole lotta junk, i just posted 3 new steampunk retro styled ray guns to my etsy shop. check 'em out! the last two sold within 24 hours!

Der Moskito

the Dowling Orgone Repeater

the angry bee

Previously sold guns-

The captain's Companion

the Cranky Fat man

Blog #1: the testing out of this new-fangled system: aka- last person in the world without a blog

2009-09-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

while i set up my blog for mass consumption, allow me to try to post links to some good music sites.

http://twilightzone-rideyourpony.blogspot.com/
surf, garage and other oddities

http://supershock666.blogspot.com/
TONS of stuff. surf, western, punk, soundtracks...

http://staringapocalypse.blogspot.com/
mood music

http://www.ocremix.org/
remixed or arranged video game music

http://www.8bitpeoples.com/
best chiptune label on the net