It would appear that someone had had the audacity of considering an African American actor for the role of the Human Torch in an upcoming Fantastic Four movie. Naturally some people have lost their collective shit. I posit that while this looks like blatant racism, some of the rage is from a different, and while equally irrational, less offensive source. I mean some of it definitely is racism. But... »
Headshots from the Heart is a fundraising event benefiting the remarkable charity, Child’s Play. It is happening next weekend and you can of course donate or participate in their geektastic auctions.I’m going to swoon a little now over how happy the existence of these charities makes me. Child’s Play itself is two parts brilliant and three parts heartwarming, baked at incredibly ... »
The long winter is over and we’re celebrating spring in the traditional way: with Irish dancing and higher order mathematics. This time we’re doing it with some friends. For those interested in what we were solving Polly had this: Ryan had this: And both of us had to solve this: »
Many cosplayers struggle with finding the right material to build their beautiful creations. In this series, I’m going to talk about different aspects of materials science from an engineering perspective, as it relates to Cosplay. First topic: Steel. Steel is much more complicated material than our limited linguistic treatment would imply. Colloquially, there are two kinds of steel: normal s... »
I love monsters. I love magic. I love the idea that we’re living in a world in which such things might exist. Since all evidence seems to point in a much more mundane direction, I build my own. This is a bit about my art projects a story of one of my paths into skepticism. A good long time ago, I posted about a dragon skeleton that I’d made. I’ve been listening to a lot of Monste... »
It’s been a while since we did one of these. Thank you Madfishmonger for your help »
A few weeks ago I made a post about my genderbent Slave Leia costume. I had some requests to explain my process. I didn’t document my progress on that project, but I just finished a project on which I did. The following is my process on a Tywin Lannister pauldron from the Game of Thrones TV series. The first step in armor smithing is to create a pattern. This can be time consuming and often ... »
There is a pervasive, systematic campaign to take the achievements of hard working and psychologically twisted engineers away and credit them to the demented scientific research community. Too often are death rays and killer robots attributed to a lunatic scientist when they truly belong to a deranged engineer. No more will the crackpot inventors of the world toil under this oppressive misrepresen... »
