Friday Freebie Blog – Science Fiction Papercrafts

My Build of the Tie-Fighter

Lately I’ve been on a paper-craft kick. When I was younger, it had to be solid square sheet origami. Sometimes, however, you’ve got to cut paper into funny shapes and glue them together… take a look at the Millennium Falcon!

I finished working on the TIE-Fighter. If you plan to do the same, make sure you print the wing sheet 4 times. This will provide you with the pieces the inside and outside of each wing.

Go Build Your Own!
SF PaperCraftGallery

Popcorn Archive

One way that I enjoy passing the time is through a good movie. It’s particularly keen when a remake is made because it allows us to see a notable difference in cinema styles, director concepts, plot design and character development.

Take “The Fly” for instance. The original movie with Vincent Price had a dark sepia-like quality to it. By sepia-like quality I’m referring to the dark, rich dripping feel that the characters (most notably from Vincent) brought. It may not have been film-noir, but it felt similar. It also had distinctive rights and wrongs put in situations where grey decisions had to be made and the overall plot was focused on the question of where the soul lies. At what point, when a man is part beast, does the soul no longer exist? It also had some underpinning ideas on mercy killing, love, death and the macabre. Grey.

The more recent remake with Jeff Goldblum also had a dark quality to it, but it was more in the lighting and effects. Some camera angles also presented the overbearing nature of beastly instinct over the meek and gentle scientist. It was a much more classic and less sophisticated “Frankenstein” story. Science goes out of control and trying to act like God comes at a mortal price. In my opinion it was more gore than plot, though still fun in its own right.

Well – it turns out that our friends over at archive.org have been accumulating some very good full-length feature films over the years. Although neither version of “The Fly” is available in public domain, there are still some fantastic gems and some notable clods are available for our enjoyment. It only costs the resources to download and burn to DVD.

Note for techno-phobes: Some of these titles you’ll recognize on the WalMart discount $2 DVD shelf. That $2 gets you $0.20 in packaging and DVD and saves you the hassle of downloading and burning it yourself.

There are over 1300 to choose from. Obviously, there’s no way to go through all of them in any reasonable amount of time, so I suggest you browse through and search for topics, genres and actors you like and try those first.

Not Yet Flickr Favorites

Every once in a while I come up with what I think would be a totally cool idea. Maybe one out of twenty of those times do I actually spring for it.

Flickr is amazing. It’s API is moderately impressive, too. I thought: “What if I could go through all the tags of all my favorite photos up on flickr, ordered them by popularity, then did a search for photos that matched the top X tags in that list?”

I expected to discover some incredible art that would be right in line with what I already enjoyed. BTW – what is it that I enjoyed?

First, I discovered that flickr can only handle searches up to 20 tags. Any more than that and you get back zip – zilch – nada. Doesn’t matter if any photo in their database actually contains all 21 tags – you get nothing back.

Second, I discovered that some people out there have over 150 tags on the photos of which only 2 tags might apply. As a result, when searching by relevance you get these over-tagged photos in the list along with the worthy ones.

Blame the upload tools. They don’t ask the user to tag each photo, but rather to list out all the tags used for the batch of photos being uploaded. Non-savvy users might batch upload a photograph of a donkey and another of a stop sign. Given only one box for all photos to list their tags they would enter something that places stop-sign related tags on the donkey and vice-versa.

All the same – try the tool out, it actually does a shot-gun result of what I hoped for. Try sorting by “interestingness, descending” for the most polished works first, then try the others for works that are “sleepers” (fantastic photos that are uploaded while people are dozing off, and therefore rarely discovered).

Not Yet Flickr Favorites