The Retreat

As we all know, not all techniques are created equal. Sometimes, you've got crazy things that work amazingly well and you've got highly complicated things which don't really reached the level of success you would like. I've tinkered around with some of the images that I have in my library to see what can be done in the intersection between these notional spaces. All of the images are from my Lytro, light-field library , meaning that the native source is roughly 1030 x 1030 with the addition of a 330 x 330 grayscale depth map. Given that data, I can create an image from the seven 1030 x 1030 slightly offset image slices that Lytro can export, align and stack them in Photoshop, then feed them into another tool for presentation altogether: in this case, Depthy . Let's start with something simple, the key ring that came up with my Homeworld Collectors Edition preorder: Homeworld on a chain. Pointedly, not in use. This is animated with #Depthy from the afor...

Story Seed – DarkRun This story seed is intended to be used with Kingdom as a means of quickly assembling a game session setup for 3 - 5 players. The future has arrived in a long black limousine with windows so deeply shaded that you can see the reflection of the nothingness over the city. Cybernetics are old hat; you can go out to grab a cheap Chinese dinner and get the colour of your eyes changed as easily as a crappy tattoo. Behind the dirt and the hustle, the old dance between corporations, governments, and the individual still turns, as brittle and stately as a retired debutante. The chrome and plastic and clean concrete hide something altogether different that only a few see but everyone feels. Some go just a little bit mad and rip open tiny holes between worlds to let their madness out. Some ignore the lure of implanted steel for grafts from creatures no one has ever seen walking the Earth. A few make deals with alien gods and demons, trading a little bit of blood, a hand...

Story Seed This story seed is intended to be used with Kingdom as a means of quickly assembling a game session setup for 3 - 5 players. The Two Flowers Coiled Nigh For tens of thousands of years, the kingdom of úða berjum was ruled by a succession of bold leaders, some Kings, some Queens, some Princess and Princesses of the most noble, all worshiping the gods of order and light, the ákveðinn . Now, the end of the gods comes slowly, creeping in the night, and the source of that threat remains unrevealed. Uoa Berjum is assaulted within and without, and none in the halls of power know who can be trusted. Now stands arrayed outwards to the weapons of the Enemy: the Knights, Paladin, and Staves, swordsmen, warriors, and soldiers roused only partially from their internecine struggles. And inward slither the restless, empty eyes of the foe which demands only pain, not form, or shape, nor even power, only that others serve and die so they may suffer ever longer this vale of tears. ...

One of my favorite kinds of places to rove around and take pictures is a graveyard. For one, no one's ever bothered me a graveyard; if you're looking for peace and quiet, a nice place to curl up and read a good book, pop down to your local graveyard and enjoy the atmosphere of people who will neither judge you nor interrupt you. Occasionally the living people get in the way with their wailing, and crying, and gnashing of teeth, but by and large they come and go, here and there, and leave you with a much more appreciative audience for anything that you might be interested in doing. In my case, that usually photography. Or hitting unsuccessfully on corpses. But we'll get to that On the 2nd, my henchman and I decided to go wandering around one of the larger graveyards in the area. Not the largest, by any measure, but large enough that there were some forgotten corners and strange things to see, which is the whole point. There are the usual sort of things like famil...

The 1st Generation Lytro light-field camera. Less Violence Than Expected! OK, you got me. After reading far, far too much linkbait phrasing, it's almost impossible to let go of the stuff if you have the opportunity to go with it. That's the true, hidden danger of dealing with such toxic material.  One weird trick that'll keep you from reading headlines for the rest of your life! Ahem. That's not what we're here for. The Rebel T3, token human-technology device. Instead, we're here to talk about cameras and alien technology.  If not alien technology, certainly technology that's alien to the experience of most of the photograph-taking public. The kind of alien technology that lets you take a shot, then feed it into your computer and be able to adjust the planes of focus with a mouse-stroke, adjust the aperture from f/1 to f/16 with a slider, even define areas of complete sharpness against areas of perfect out-of-focus. It's real...

5150: Space Marines They Invade Ships So You Don’t Have To 5150: Space Marines “Falcon’s Fist, this is 4-1 Actual. We’re loaded into the assault and ready to release clamps.” “Go for release, 4-1 Actual. Clean ‘em out.” “That’s the plan, Fist. Hitting pirate destroyers is my favourite thing to do on a lazy Saturday. 4-1 Actual out.” They Invade Ships So You Don’t Have To There is a definite difference between the kind of soldier you need for taking and holding planet-side (or even asteroid-side) facilities and areas, and the kind of soldier who’d willingly strap themselves into a wedge-shaped chunk of metal, get hurled onto a slightly larger one, then get to the careful business of killing other men who probably knew they were coming in tight quarters within a box that might suddenly lose all its air at any moment. There’s a certain level of challenge there that not everyone is ready to take up. Those that do get called “marines.” Sometimes worse. ...