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The graphic artist Brian Wood recently made his sketch collection, Public Domain, freely available from his webpage. Sadly, the title of the book is somewhat misleading.

I admire Brian Wood as an artist. The first time I acquainted myself with his work was with the comic Channel Zero. I remember Channel Zero as a relentless social critique draped in marvellous monochromatic illustrations. I instantly fell in love with his style. Having read Channel Zero, I moved on to DMZ, yet another comic written and (partly) illustrated by Wood. But the world is big, and for a neophyte such as I, there was simply too many comics out there to keep my interest in Wood’s DMZ. I wandered off the path.

Now Wood has shared his sketch collection Public Domain (in pdf) from his website and I find myself awing, gaping and gawking at Wood’s illustrations. Personally, I admire Wood’s monochromatic works the most. Actually, monochromatic is an unbecoming term for it, since he dabbles mostly in black and white. This makes for a special stencil-ish style in which the motifs stand out the clearer. Yet despite the lack of tones, Wood skilfully uses perspective and shadow to create depth. His style is often Noir and fits well with the Brooklyn environment which clearly undercurrents his visual inspiration.

At first I was delighted to hear from Warren Ellis that Wood had published some of his illustrations for free, and further excited that this work was called “Public Domain” because I inferred that it meant “in the public domain” (free as in free speech, free as in free beer). This is not the case, you are free to download it and look at it, but not to share it, alter it or use it in any other fashion than for your own private entertainment.

Yet, I found looking through Public Domain inspiring and while the collection is not in the public domain (yet), it is still free, such an initiative should always be commended.

1 Comment | In: Comics | tags: public domain. | #

After a languid winter of about two years now starts an invigorating summer. I have been away for too long and must consequently atone my sloth.

I have now come to the realization that since the birth of my son and my position as high school teacher, the nights are no longer as fertile as they used to. The blog needs to change if it is to survive. Writing about creative commons germs is satisfying but it is also troublesome. Finding good material demands much time, time that I do not have and quite frankly time that I would be unwilling to invest if I had.

by legends2k on Flickr

This means that, for my own gratification, the blog will change its nature. I imagine it will start to resemble a personal blog more and thus move away from the niche it once so stubbornly inhabited.

It saddens me that I am no longer able to continue providing my audience with high quality free and open material, yet I am happy that I have finally reached this conclusion.

In the ashes of yesterday, the sparks of tomorrow burn.

No Comments | In: Me, the blog | tags: change. | #

Misery Depot is a science fiction comic written by Hermes Pique and illustrated by Juan Romera, they’ve both done a good job. However, with its 25 pages, Misery Depot, unfortunately, doesn’t explore the setting much which results in a run-of-the-mill Scifi story.

*Spoiler alert!*

Central to the story is a mother and her daughter, Agatha. From what I’ve gathered, the two have had a relatively strained relationship, mainly because of the mother’s mental illness. Agatha decided to commit her mother to a “sanatorium” and, seemingly, just live out her life in ignorant bliss of what exactly the sanatorium did. The sanatorium, which I believe the title of the comic refers to, is a place to store the mad, old people whose minds have degenerated into pure paranoia or childish regress. This being a dark and sinister dystopian future, the patients are, of course, stored in vats at a huge cutting-edge facility. By accident, apparently, the naked mother is released from her vat and seeks out her emotionally cold daughter, only to be rejected and sent back.

It would have been nice if Pique and Romera had invested more time in expanding both setting and plot. There’s no doubt these two guys are good at what they do and they do it without any detours what so ever; the story is trim and simple and the illustrations do a good job of explaining what the text and plot does not. But I want more, I want to know more about the sanatorium, I want to know Agatha’s feelings and why she, apparently, never bothered to visit her mother or even check out the sanatorium, and I want to know what happened (and is going to happen) to the old man etc.

PRLog wrote later this year that a new comic is in the works from Papyrus Comics, the publishers of Misery Depot, but I was unable to find any information about a new comic from Papyrus (seemingly, Misery Depot is the only comic they’ve published; their twitter profile links to the Misery Depot web page). If these guys decide to make a new comic, I hope it’ll explore the setting and expand the story.

All this being said, it is, as always, fucking awesome when somebody decides to publish their works under a Creative Commons license, especially when they’ve got the craft down like Pique and Romera do. And even though it might not sound like it, I’m actually recommending that you read this comic. What saddens me is merely that there’s too little of it, not the quality.

Misery Depot was published in late 2008 and has, somewhat recently, been ported to the Android telephone. The comic, it is estimated, has currently been read by more than 10.000 people and it’s been translated to Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and French.

Via: PRLog

No Comments | In: Comics | tags: Comics, science fiction. | #

I’m looking forward to Posthuman Studios’ upcoming role playing game Eclipse Phase, a science fiction game with lots of transhuman and cyberpunk elements.

Eclipse Phase’s universe is a conglomerate of sci-fi memes such as transhumanism, singularity, AI, virus, post-apocalyptism and domestic 3D nano printing. While this could be somewhat confusing, I guess it would be possible for a game master to downplay some of the aspects. My experiences are that the more tech you supply your players with and the more these players know the possibilities of it, the harder it gets to challenge them.

The setting is somewhat like this: (Trans)humanity has been plagued by international conflicts and cyberwars. A group of military AI’s known as the TITANS have reached sentience and started to enhance their own intelligence and turned against humanity, thus turning the conflicts into “man versus machine”. This wiped out most of humanity and turned the Earth into a “toxic and strange hellhole”.

Just as quickly as they came, the TITANS disappeared, taking millions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems—often one-way and/or fatal. Though only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—the foolish, brave, curious, and desperate are already risking certain death to enter and explore what lies beyond.

The transhuman world resembles a three-circled Dante’s Inferno: the center is the suppressive police state where high technology is banned, the periphery consists of societies structured after all the different ideas imagination can conjure up and the fringe is lawlessness and chaos.

To top it all off, a mutating bio-, info- and nano-virus, known as the Exsurgent virus, runs rampantly through humanity, turning its victims into unspeakable reality-altering monsters(!)
The system, as far as I can see, is a basic d100 percentile one, my favorite since its simple and therefore helps keep the players’ minds in the game.

Even though the game eventually will get published as an actual physical book, it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, meaning you can share and remix (expand, develop etc.) the game as long as you: give attribution, don’t use it commercially and share it under the same license.

Now, as said previously, even though I’m looking forward to the publication of Eclipse Phase, I can’t really wrap my head around all the different trajectories explained on the web-page. It’s like they’ve just looked at the contemporary futuristic jabber and thrown it all into the mix; I’m worried that might be too much to get a coherent universe. If I were to create a campaign in Eclipse Phase, I’d probably shave some of the elements off. Then again, all the above information is very concisely written and maybe the source book will help illuminate how this all is supposed to make sense on a deeper level.

But the people at Posthuman Studios deserve respect for this project. I will give the game a fair chance once it’s published.

No Comments | In: Cyberpunk, science fiction | tags: Cyberpunk, postapocalyptic, science fiction. | #

Over at Ficly.com they’re hosting a cyberpunk short story competition, deadline is August 23rd 2009.

Console cowboys. Holograms. Street samurai. Armored battlesuits. All-powerful corporate conglomerates. High-tech drugs. Flesh shops. Jacking into cyberspace to escape the frail confines of ‘the meat.’

The deal at Ficly is that submitted fiction must be limited to 1024 characters, which is the equivalent of 7.3 maxed out tweets. I was unable to find any sufficient term for fiction of that span, but the people of Ficly have dubbed them “Ficlets”.

*struggling to get mind out of gutter*

As to what the elements of a cyberpunk story are, I could go on for Megabytes. But the competition guidelines (somewhat implicitly) state that “the old cyberpunk motto of ‘high tech and low life,’” should suffice.

So wipe off your greasy hands and put away the snacks, because now is the time to write.

2 Comments | In: Cyberpunk | tags: competition, Cyberpunk, short story, writing. | #

I know it’s been too long since I last posted anything here. The reason for my lag is partially that it’s summer – that’s right… dare draw the curtains and have a look-see (if you’re on the northern hemisphere). It’s also because I’ve had really important stuff to do whenever I was as much as near a computer.

Now on to the entertainment.

I’d like to this time recommend Fly You Fools (FYF), a misanthropic yet funny webcomic. FYF mostly centers around stuff from India, it says, but the great joke is on us all. We all too well recognize all the idiosyncrasies that permeate every “modern” society. From the paradoxes of consumption to the daft demands of authorities, from the pointlessness of mainstream entertainment to the hypocrisy of the whole human species. In FYF’s own words “People are mindless cattle”.

The graphical expression coupled with this particular brand of humor gives FYF a Pythonesque quality. I really enjoyed reading the comics and so should you.

5 Comments | In: Comics | tags: comedy, webcomic. | #

My brain is still trying to re-acclimatize after tumbling through Laroquod’s webcomic Hypothesis. Hypothesis is the brain child of Paul Laroquod, a “time walker, lost in the here and now” (according to himself) from Toronto who dabbles in photography and, of course, comics.

…follow the story of my experiments in your world, conducted with graphic and cinematic techniques you’ll recognise at first, and then increasingly with tools

UNLIKE ANY YOU’VE SEEN BEFORE

Hypothesis is divided into three episodes. In the first episode, the time traveler awakes on earth in a time distinct from his own. During this episode, the traveler tries to make sense of why he’d make a note to himself which says “Shoot Everything”. In the second episode, the time traveler explores the uses of the “desktop TV” and tries to get something to eat, preferably something with gravy.  The third episode deals mostly with the time traveler’s attempt to understand a scrambled news feed and to triangulate a  non-dimensional “New Resonance”.

I still quite haven’t figured Hypothesis out yet. It seems the traveler has had a similar experience; in the third episode, he asks Doug aka. the Oracle:

No answering of plot-related questions, like – why am I here? Why do I have skills I’ve never learned?

WHAT WAS UP WITH THE LITTLE DUDE?

Et cetera?

I don’t lament the fact that I don’t completely understand Hypothesis because I think it’s one of its most seducing qualities. I see the story as a homage to near future science fiction, it’s almost Burroughsian in its style. And those of you who follow this blog know I dig surreal stories where the reader is kept in hesitation. If I was able to “understand” the story, I think it would have been too simple for my taste.

Perhaps one of the most astounding aspects of Hypothesis is the graphic side which is an eclectic mix of edited (for lack of a better non-proprietary word) photography, screen dumps and illustration. Laroquod has also made some experimentation with regard to the layout of text-boxes, supplying them with their own distinct graphical expressions, a feature, he’s revealed, partially inspired by Frank Miller.

Hypothesis is in the Public Domain, making it possible for anyone to use it as they see fit: remixing, sharing, copying, capitalizing, tattooing. However, attribution is still the least you could do if you want to do any of the above things with/to “Hypothesis”.

3 Comments | In: Comics, science fiction | tags: public domain, science fiction, webcomic. | #

Hey y’all.

I’m writing to inform you that I plan to make Nemobay straightly about Creative Commons (and related) material.

What this means is that the material I pick in the future, will be licensed under a Creative Commons License (or at least related to Creative Commons in some obscure way). Unfortunately that might also mean that the posts will be less frequent. I want to make sure that the material is of some quality.

Although I hope the focus will still be science fiction and horror, I can in no way guarantee it ( don’t want to). I reserve the right to post about any material I deem worthy (such as music, images and thoughts). I must also warn that I also reserve the right to quote copyrighted material for the explorations of topics connected with Nemobay’s themes, which means I might do posts whose nature will be more polemic and philosophizing that the rest. In short, anything might happen, but no matter what, the readers of Nemobay will still have access to relevant material.

I’m doing this because I feel there’s plenty of blogs reviewing and recomending (both online and offline) commercial material. Fact is I really dig stuff that’s been produced voluntarily and enthusiasticly. I’m amazed at the Creative Commons community and the fan culture it seems to spawn. That’s the field I really want to explore for now.

Image by: Justus Hayes / Shoes on Wires / shoesonwires.com

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | tags: creative commons. | #

Holy Dingo! According to CreativeCommons.org, Ridley Scott, the director behind numerous awesome movies like Alien and Bladerunner, is going to do a webseries called “Purefold” under the free copyleft license.

The licence basically means that anyone can download, share and remix the material of the series without having to fear prosecution. It will be very interesting to see both what the series will be like and also what users of the Internet will do to it.

Although not completely related to Bladerunner, the series will still be “based on the same themes” - as BitsBlog @ New York Times quotes David Bausola (one of the production company Ag8’s creators) saying.

Via: Creative Commons .org

No Comments | In: science fiction | tags: science fiction, web series. | #

Just found this (Creative Commons) goddie on Jamendo. Since I have a poor knowledge of Spanish (it’s Spanish - right?), I haven’t got the slightest idea what they’re rapping about, but I like it.

With a mix of doomish music samples and 8bit, these guys rap relentlessly away with a beat that’ll split open your ribcage.

I stumbled onto Necronomicon on Jamendo and naturally I immediately fell for the name. Judge by yourself.

No Comments | In: music | tags: horror, music, rap. | #