Derek Halliday 🇨🇦

Color full figure illustration of RS on toned paper with some minimal bg. Signature red hair really pops.

Red Sonja by Eric Canete.
#comics #art

Post your favorite copaganda.

Tbis iz sort of lazy, tho, honestly.

Post you favorite copaganda.

They're not cops...they're C.O.P.S.

We cannot and should not let generative AI take away these tiny, insignificant, but probably fun as hell jobs from artists

Apparently written and drawn by people who had never seen the show, this issue is fairly astonishing to behold from a fan perspective. At the end of the story, the Enterprise crew deems an entire planet's ecology too dangerous to live and lays it completely to waste.

Cover of Gold Key Star Trek #1 featuring photos of Mr Spock, Captain Kirk, Mr Sulu and the USS Enterprise

60 years of Star Trek, 60 days of Star Trek comic book covers.

Day 1: Star Trek #1, Gold Key

I just found out about ZPG (Zero Population Growth) yesterday, and I'd very much like to see it.

Fare dodgers targeted as train ticket refund rules are tightened In a bid to clamp down on ticket fraud that costs the railways millions each year, the government has quietly changed the rules on claiming refunds for unused train tickets.

DON'T BUY TRAIN TICKETS IN ADVANCE!
On 1 April, the government is quietly changing the rules.
Off-Peak & Anytime tickets become non-refundable after 23:59 the day BEFORE you travel.
If you wake up & find your event cancelled, NO REFUNDS, even on £100+ tickets.
www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/far...

Falling down a Fred Rogers rabbit hole at the moment, and dang if this isn't some "fundamental human dignity and self respect" delivered in a calm soothing tone and child appropriate language.

"I hope you're able to grow to respect whoever you are inside." 🥹😭❤️‍🩹

Man was a saint and a genius.

This is pretty neat to me, because to us the idea of a computer virus is a well established fact, but in the 70s they treat this as an outlandish idea.

It's pretty neat to see a new concept for the time being explored like this...and a novel set-up for the upcoming horror of the premise.

But also...while they do have a computer model for a reasonable failure rate on the robots due to various kinds of malfunctions, they've been having a cascading rise in failure rates that are exceeding projections.

This is when the lead technician suggests a parallel to a virus.

A...COMPUTER virus

The robots are very sophisticated and highly technical...and in most cases, a lot of them were designed by computers themselves.

So while the technicians can repair superficial damage, they sometimes struggle to understand what's actually WRONG with them and how to fix it.

...diagnose and repair the robots.

In contrast to the WESTWORLD TV show, where this is a pretty easy feat for them, and their only struggle is to understand the uncontrolled evolution of the robot's AI, in this one they actually just DON'T KNOW HOW THEY WORK AT ALL.

...recover all the bodies of the robots that were either damaged in the proceedings of the day's 'events', or have malfunctioned.

This is all very well done and, again, adds to the verisimilitude of the world, but also introduces some interesting ideas as they show the staff attempting to...

Ok, now we're getting into the weeds here...

Crichton balances tone pretty well by following up some scenes demonstrating the fun of the park...the freedom to do whatever you want without consequences...with the actual WORKINGS of the park, in a very creepy scene where the park's staff...

I like how Crichton keeps cutting back to the operations center of the park to demonstrate that this is a MASSIVE technical endeavor, which gives the premise both scale and verisimilitude.

They introduce another world building mechanic after the first gunfight with Yul Brynner's Gunslinger, explaining how the guns have a sensor that will keep them from firing at anything with a body temperature that reads as organic. It's a little goofy, but I think it works as well as anything.

But it's also a neat subversion, because we recognize him as a Western hero, and here he's playing a sci-fi MONSTER.

This is pretty solid stuff, so far! Crichton's a steady hand, and whatever he might lack in technical skill as a director, he's making up for as a storyteller.

...but he's not phoning it in.

And from a casting standpoint, it's sort of genius...particularly how they lean into making him look like his character from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. He is the quintessential Western gunslinger...ICONIC...which is what you'd create if you were making a theme park.

Some good character stuff and humor as Brolin and Benjamin explore the park a bit, and we begin to ease into the premise a bit more.

Yul Brynner finally appears, and...FUCK.

His presence is UNBELIEVABLE. @___@

And the way he moves is so precise.

He took this gig out of desperation...

...in the orientation video was that the Delos parks recreation the pleasures and the STRUGGLE of their themes.

So he hasn't been introduced to the actual novelty of the park yet...he's basically disappointed because he's paying big buck to cosplay and sleep in a lumpy bed in a dirty dive. :P

This is a pretty neat beat...when they first arrive in Westworld proper, Richard Benjamin isn't impressed...because it's a perfect recreation of the Old West...and it's sort of shitty and uncomfortable...it's not really that SEXY for $1000 a day (in 1973 money).

But part of Delos sales pitch...

It's also, like...not entirely accurate, because they have the visual signifier in the film of the robots having reflective eyes, which is a REALLY neat, simple, visual.

"Was she a...?"

"Probably."

"That's amazing..."

"Supposedly you cant tell. Except by looking at the hand. They haven't perfected the hand yet."

This is an interesting beat, and also weirdly prescient, because it's how we current identify AI art...

It's inability to understand hands. :P

Rollerball 4K Blu-ray (4K Ultra HD) Rollerball 4K Blu-ray Release Date November 22, 2022. Blu-ray reviews, news, specs, ratings, screenshots. Cheap Blu-ray movies and deals.

From SHOUT! Factory!

It's not really up to the WESTWORLD movie to answer the question of, "If they can build hyper-realistic robots...why use them for a theme park? Why not other things?"

That's not the point, here...the point here is to make a fun movie where the question is, "What if DISNEYLAND tried to KILL you?"

Crichton doesn't get lost in the weeds interrogating the logic of his world building, like the WESTWORLD TV show does...but really, it's apples and oranges.

The HBO show had to greatly expand on the premise and the world to fill out SEASONS, but also modern audiences ask different questions.

I've never heard of ZPG before (ZERO POPULATION GROWTH)...

Apparently Kino Lorber has a blu-ray of it, so I might look for that!

I've got to watch the ROLLERBALL 4k.

I've seen LOGAN'S RUN a couple of times on TMN and SCI-FI Channel when I was in my teens and liked it (though Box was really goofy).

I personally sort of dug SATURN 9, which was visually pretty sumptuous.

I dig stuff like that...Crichton had the 'Sci-fi Future Horror Theme Park' idea, but he he wrote to the resources he had.

Another thing I like about old movies is the ancillary design stuff...like the DELOS logo, which is pretty neat looking!