Radioactive Fantasy

inktober day 7

inktober day 14

inktober day 20+21

new friends join in, and the scale of our crusaders’ exploits continues to grow far too vast to be properly captured

inktober day 28

target acquired

inktober day 31

as one bizarre adventure ends, another begins

THIS ALIEN SHORE (1998) by Michael Whelan, cover for the book by C.S. Friedman.

A great cover for many reasons. First, there’s the movement created by Michael’s composition. Vibrant splashes of color draw us into the background, but the eye never lingers long there as the lines created by the alien crowd redirect back to the central figure.

In the foreground, we get a realistic portrait of Jamisia that conveys a lot about her character. All eyes seem to be on her in that moment. Her body language is closed, protective, yet her gaze is direct. Her costuming is shiny but her face is unembellished.

Contradictions abound. Even the object in her hand is meant to cast eyes away, which only serves to heighten the viewer’s curiosity about her.

In Thunderbird Strike, a new side-scrolling game that launches at the ImagineNATIVEfestival this week in Toronto, players can control a thunderbird—a symbol in several Indigenous cultures—that destroys as much of the oil industry’s machinery and pipelines as it possibly can. And it’s so satisfying.

The game was created by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish games developer, and assistant professor of media and information at Michigan State University. She told me in an interview that she wanted to create a game where Indigenous players could reclaim some agency around oil pipelines, even if through a video game.

(and let’s be honest, the venn diagram circle of “oil lobbyists” is just a small circle in the larger circle of “racists”) and could really use support and advocacy:

https://www.thunderbirdstrike.com/

WOW this is gonna be a real photo-finish of a Kickstarter, eh? I think that we’ve got a real shot at this again!

Anyway, what I’m here to say is, if it is at all possible, if you’ve already backed the campaign (which is already pretty awesome!), consider upping your pledge by just a couple bucks while you’re at it? We may be able to manage this just by bringing in people from all the signal boosting we’ve been doing, but if it looks like it’s gonna be a real close one in the last couple days, if even half of us already in pitched in an extra five dollars, it’d boost the progress bar by about a thousand! A pretty good bargain, if you ask me, if it makes the difference between having books and not having books! Or, possibly, make another account/use a relative’s and buy another book? I’m genuinely considering this myself if Mod doesn’t add an “extra book” tier. Makes for a good backup and/or gift!

Heya! Whoops;;;~ i didnt know if you guys wanted to see the stills of the gif (since i focused on figuring out the glitch stuff;;;;) But yeah, cool beans!!:

Ah~the mystery gang…

in their final forms:

I think the reason the Age of Fire books didn’t become Percy Jackson level super-huge (they have their fans, of course) is that they went for the wrong audience. They should have been young adult books aimed at boys instead at aimed at the crowd who liked Mists of Avalon. Age of Fire is about being a dragon. Can you imagine how well this would play among the kind of boys who made Raptor Red (a pov dinosaur novel told from the point of view of a velociraptor living in earth’s past) one of the best selling young adult books of the 1990s, and one of the few to be a huge hit among boys as opposed to girls? 

Remember all the boy’s adventure stories of the turn of the century like Wild Animals I Have Known that dealt with wildlife from their point of view, which sold like gangbusters at the turn of the century to school boys? President and naturalist Theodore Roosevelt even wrote some stories in this genre, though he was harshly critical of “Wild Animals I Have Known” on scientific grounds, sarcastically calling it “Wild Animals Only I Have Known.”(Burn.)  Age of Fire should have been in Scholastic Book Sales that go to elementary schools instead of reviewed in the back of Analog. 

First of all, they would not be horses, They would be some sort of eldrich demonic fae beast monstrosity and I would like exactly none of that, thank you very much.

But on topic, some of the way an equine species would need to be modified to become carnivorous include:

Wider mouths. Horse mouths don’t open very far and are geared towards chewing high fiber diets. All their dentition needs to change.

So does their lips and jaw muscles. The carnivore horse needs to be able to open wide and have a strong bite force. The strongest jaw muscles of horses are for chewing grass side to side, they need more chomping power.

Forward facing eyes if this species hunts rather than scavenging. Horses have great peripheral vision but poor binocular vision.

A sensible digestive system, for goodness sake.

Whether you keep them quadrupedal or make them bipedal is up to you, both motions of locomotion are efficient enough.

They may have longer tail bones for increased dexterity when turning at speed.

Whether you keep the hooves or switch to claws is up to your design, but the claws are definitely more concerning.

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”. 

“Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas

“Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice

Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results

Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%

Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.

Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results

Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable

Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe

Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.