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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. | #

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. | #

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. | #

I’ve known about this film since it was shown (and won a competition) at Breakpoint in 2008 because I know some of the guys in JUNK. And now the time has finally come to mention E.T.A, an animated short film.

Like everything Nemobay blogs about, E.T.A. can be downloaded and/or watched for free. However, if you intend to use it for anything else than watching, be it screenings, remixing etc., be sure to contact them and hear what they have to say before doing so.

Overall, it took JUNK four years to complete E.T.A. and I have no idea whether that’s normal so I wont comment on it.

‘Nuff said, so I’ll leave the final words to JUNK:

“Marvin has the most boring job - ever. But all is not as it seems…”

No Comments | In: science fiction | tags: animated, science fiction, short. | #

An android wakes up in a scrap yard and realizes she(?) is tied to a wooden “H”. Her chest is marked by a round symbol of two crossed hammers. As she tries to flee the yard (with the “H” on her back; very Christ-like), a big hand places another symbol on her chest and picks up the “H”. The movie is only about two minutes long, but it is very beautiful. The framerate has either been lowered, or it simply is stop-motion. It is made in a grainy sort of black and white, accompanied by quiet music.

“Redite” is directed by Patrick Boivin, a “French Canadian autodidact movie maker” as he calls himself. The subtitle of the movie is “Freedom is hard to handle…”, a relatively ambiguous title because freedom is taken away from the android shortly after she has realized that she is free.

I must say I really like this cute little film, setting and costume is really great. I cannot stress enough how much I’d wish film makers would do this kind of stuff more often. Or at least I would wish I was better at finding it when they do.

Go see it one and all =)

No Comments | In: horror | tags: horror, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, short movie. | #

Posthuman Blues recently brought the short movie World Builder by Bruce Branit to my attention. The description reads:

A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.

World builder is a very beautiful and emotionally loaded movie. As audience, we follow this “strange man” preparing a holographic world for somebody. When he’s done, a woman appears. As she is enjoying this platonic world, the strange man secretly follows her, reacting strongly to her expressions. My words cannot describe exactly how well this is acted out in the movie, so you’ll have to go and see it.

Okay, so I know this still looks like we’re talking about a shampoo commercial here, but trust me; we’re not.

The graphic side is just as beautiful as both script and acting. And you can’t help feeling drawn to a future where world building this easy is a actually possible.

The movie is somewhat reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, although this in no way is a critique. It is only the “feel” of the movie and not the basics of it which indicate that Bruce might have been inspired by Aronofsky’s movie.

Posthuman Blues originally got the hint from Bruce Sterling’s blog on Wired.

Image: from crasch’s Flickr stream

No Comments | In: Comics, science fiction | tags: hologram, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, short movie. | #

io9 just directed my attention to this blog post on Tom Ellard’s blog by “former astronaut” Vincent T Grant. In this post, Vincent goes through four kinds of science fiction and how to write in these particular genres. He does so in a humorous and “no BS” way.

The sub-genres are: Traditional Science Fiction, New Wave, Alternative Realities and Dystopian Worlds.

It’s a quick but worth your time read, mostly because of its humorous qualities (that is: don’t expect to be enlightened and finally become the Philip K. Dick v2.0 you always wanted to be).

Although Charlie Jane Anders‘ (from io9) favorite part is on New Wave, I think my tastes are more to his advice on Dystopian Worlds:

“So there was a line up at the local DMV the other day and when I finally got to the end they say that at 90 years old I shouldn’t be driving anyway. And no they don’t care if I had flown three shuttle missions I was too old. Well what if the whole world was like the DMV and if you were too old you couldn’t get a license?”

While his post is really good, I’m not sure he exists. I tried Googling Vincent T Grant and found nothing on him, maybe he doesn’t exist? Maybe he’s a robot? According to a comment from Belabras to io9’s article, “There is not now, nor has there ever been, a Vincent T Grant that was an astronaut”.

2 Comments | In: science fiction, writing | tags: sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, writing. | #

Just realized I had this old bookmark waiting for me to come around. We’ll I did, because seeing it, I remembered that it’d looked neat.

The comic takes place in New York City a good hundred years from now. Manhattan has been hit by a tsunami, the consequences; riots, rampant crime and trafficking from the surrounding area, a martial law has been declared and a giant wall erected to normalize Manhattan once again.

This is a society in which hash is legal, in fact you can’t buy a pack without it containing a bit of hash (for your pleasure, of course). Anything open source is illegal, especially open source drugs such as “M6″ (which is actually licensed under GPL).

The language is tough but poetic and there’s a realistic feel to it, I can’t help feeling.

“It made their fashion mods look like cheap costumes. You had to be hard-core to let them open up your skull and stick the gear into your brain.”

The graphic side of the comic is monochrome but of course spiced up with vivid colors where appropriate.

There are six issues up and even though I’ve only read the first one, I definitely look forward to reading the next five. You can read them online either on your computer or your PSP.

Because the series is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, you can also download the files in zip’s if you’d like.

With all this and more, it most definitely is one of those precious pearls one too rarely finds on the Internet.

2 Comments | In: Comics, Cyberpunk, science fiction | tags: Comics, Cyberpunk, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi. | #

All day I’d been looking forward to a seminar with Jakob Stegelmann (one of the great genre and game ‘enthusiasts’ of Denmark) and Malene Flagga (quantum physicist and science journalist). They were going to venture into the future, both of science fiction and reality (as the title for the seminar so concisely expressed it).

I’d brought my notebook and a pen (because it was that kind of notebook) with me in hopes of getting inspiration both for my thesis and this blog. But, alas, throngs of nerds, geeks and other kinds of sci-fi hooligans had decided to spend their monday night in The Black Diamond which meant not only chaotic shambling verging on a state of civil war, but also that yours truely was not appointed a seat in the great halls of The Black Diamond.

So here I am now with a familiar bitter taste in my mouth, a mouth that wants to speew profanities at Students Only! for being an elitist extension of the military-industrial complex by only allowing people who are students to their seminars and for accepting sponsored beer.  And not least for ensuring that corporate censorship will saturate the once pristine waters of academia. I want to tell them that I never ever ever ever will try to attend one of their events ever again… ever. And then we’ll see who drops the last tear!

But truth is that I’m a student, I like free beer and without sponsorship, it would probably be impossible for them to do what they do (as far as I know anyway). I just feel miserable because I didn’t get in, they tried all they could to get as many in as possible and even though it was chaos, they kept cool.

So because I did not get to see this seminar and because I feel like I owe you, here is something much better, the Amazing Dancing Baby Skeletons of Bologna!

3 Comments | In: Me, science fiction | tags: Me, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi. | #