Hello….

Here is an interesting fictional story I saw over at Io9 about Zeppelin travel.

In a few weeks is a small gaming convention called Strategicon in Los Angeles. I’m thinking of taking my board game there to test, if I can get it ready in time!

UPDATE: Fixed the link, sorry about that!

Hello!
First of all, these two pages took me way too long. I almost hate looking at them. Almost.

Got a new watch this week. The Tauchmeister T0196 XXL Military Worldtimer Watch.  I ordered it from Long Island Watch, they have a lot of other cool vintage style watches.  I wish I could have bought more!

I also got a scale replica of the USS Macon Airship, but I have to glue all the engines back on since they came off in shipping.  Bummer.

Meanwhile I have been very busy this last week.  I posted what I’ve been up to over at my business blog www.kopetkai.com/blog.  I haven’t been updating it much since I moved but I will from now on. . .

This Sunday!  I am hopefully going to see “Flying Down to Rio” at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

From the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles:

“In the 1930s, in the age of Art Deco streamline design, people were traveling farther and faster than any humans had ever traveled before. Fast cars, streamlined trains, luxury steamships, swift airliners, giant seaplanes and majestic Zeppelins opened up new horizons to those with the money to spend.

Walter Nelson will present a program of film, poster art, photographs and music that will bring to life the experience and romance of travel in the years just before the Second World War. This will be followed by the classic musical Flying Down to Rio, with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Dolores Del Rio and a host of other stars and marvelous music.

This is a Co-Presentation with the American Cinematheque.

Lecture: 4 PM

Screening of Flying Down to Rio at 5 PM

Tickets are $7 for members of ADSLA and American Cinematheque. Regular American Cinematheque prices apply for the general public ($11) and students/seniors ($9) and are available via Fandango, or can be purchased on the day of the event at the door. Please bring your ADSLA membership card with you to the box office.

Parking: $2 per hour metered parking available near the theatre. $2 for four hours validated parking available at Hollywood and Highland. There are also pay parking lots on Las Palmas and Cherokee that cost approximately $10. Why not take the metro? The Egyptian is a very short walk east from the Hollywood and Highland METRO station.”

Apparently in 1931 there was a staged aerial combat above new york.  I would love to see that in action, although something tells me they wouldn’t let them do that these days.  Click the image for more pictures at popular mechanics, thanks to io9.com for the link.

This week after that crazy volcano blew up, of course everyone knows the planes in Europe  were grounded.  But some planes got through!  They had to bring out the old guns, here’s a picture of some old biplanes flying over modern grounded jets.

I also tested my board game this last week.  It’s still in a very rough early stage, but the testing definitely went well!  Maybe I will post some pictures of the next play through.

In a couple weeks is the Turner Classic Movie film festival in Los Angeles.  They have a very exciting lineup including some very big guests.  I will probably be going to at least one of the film showings.   The last day they are showing Metropolis,  I will definitely try to get into see that.  Here’s and article all about this latest version including a piece of film they found in South America that had be missing since the 1920’s.

This week I watched the film The Magician (1926)  It centers around a magician who needs the blood of a virgin to create life.  It was a pretty dark movie for the time.  One of my favorite parts was the giant demon statue one of the characters was carving during the film.  The book came out years before the movie, and the character of the magician was based on Aleister Crowley.  I thought that was interesting since my Aleister Gurdeff character is based on him and another esoteric man from the period.  When the book came out Aleister wrote a letter that was published in Vanity Fair Magazine.  He accused the author of plagiarism, but also succeeded in enhancing his own mysterious reputation. Here’s a quote from his letter, “I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar…”

“Bewildering,” I love that, what a ham.

Some news going around this week was the recent availability of the entire Popular Science library on google.  I found this cover and thought it particularly interesting.  Also this week I downloaded Toy Soldiers on Xbox Live.  It’s a fun little tactical war game that takes place using WWI based toy soldiers.  Very fun game, It definitely took up way too much of my time last weekend.

This week’s 30’s movie of the week was 1935’s The Whole Town’s Talking, starring Edward G. Robinson.  It’s a great little comedy gangster  film, especially for the interesting acting job Robinson does in playing his own double.  I especially appreciated all the 1930’s slang and great outdoor city traffic scenes filled with cars from the period.

Oh, and I also happened to be flipping through channels this week and caught and episode of Lock N’ Load with R. Lee Ermey.  And to my surprise he was testing both machine guns in this weeks episode, the Thompson gun and the MG 08.  He can definitely handle a machine gun well for a 64 year old. (As in better than I could handle one.)

The team is splitting up for now. The first page of the second chapter finds some members at the Carbon and Carbide building in Chicago, an art deco landmark. And some members on the Zephyr, a historic piece of art deco machinery.
In 1934 the Pioneer Zephyr set a speed record between Chicago and Denver in a famous run called the “Dawn-to-Dusk” dash.

Oh and by the way, I just picked up Bioshock 2 special edition today, very nice packaging, nice art deco style posters, hope it’s as good as the first one!

Well, I am moving next week, and I just went to New Orleans last weekend, so between those two events I am sort of taking this week off.  I say sort of because I have gone back and redone the first page of the first chapter and changed a few things that were bugging me on pages here and there.  Next Episode Chapter Two starts, I have decided to include a little peek at one of my long term projects, a board game based on The 19XX.  These are just a couple of the character cards from the game, artwork is not final of course, but that is Fay Wells, and a character you won’t see until Chapter Two, Glänzen Schädel, or Shining Skull in English.  So that’s the end of Chapter One, more of a prologue I guess, but either way, I hope you found it mildly amusing!

Not much to say this week, I’m going to New Orleans in two days, so my mind is kind of on that.

Ok, wait I thought of something…

The line about the runway being too short… I went to the Minter Field Air Museum in Shafter last summer.  It was something like 110 degrees outside and a B-17 was supposed to be there.  But when we got there we learned that the runway was too short for the plane to land on because of the heat.  If it landed it wouldn’t have been able to take off again.  So instead of landing the Flying Fortress did a fly by over the airfield.  It seemed like we were trapped in the heat and the smog and no one could save us, the ship they sent couldn’t even land, it could only fly past and look at our helpless faces, camera lenses, and pathetic waves.  I hope it found someplace better to land. Some place safe.

Minter Field B-17