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A BBC reporter tweeted that "Queen Elizabrth [sic] has died" and all hell broke loose. However, when NBC News alerted Buckingham Palace to the tweets, a spokesman said that the queen was not only alive but carrying out public engagements.

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Jelle Knikkers makes incredible "Marble Machines and Rolling Ball Sculptures" including this one containing 11,000 marbles rolling down four paths. Called the "Marble Tsunami," it's located in the indoor playground Monkey Town in Gouda, The Netherlands. The Marble Master

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Absolutely beautiful.

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Hello fellow modelers,

Adding a simple base to a build not only enhances the presentation, but it also adds realism.  Like capturing a snapshot of a moment in time.  It also provides you something to hold during examination when you don't necessarily want to touch your model.  Knock off a radiator flap on that Hasegawa 109 much??  Been there done that.

Anyways, I get alot of questions and comments on my display bases so I figured I would finally do a tutorial on how I do them.  Each build gets one and its fairly easy.  On my last build, a P-51 B, I decided to document the process.  Here's how I do it:

We start with a simple pine plaque that can be bought at a craft store.  I get them at a place called Pat Catan's for like 2 bucks each.  I pre-stain all of mine in this nice oak brown by Minwax, but any stain or paint will do.  It's time for a border for the groundwork.  I like a 1/4 inch space between the ground and the beveled edge.  Lay down some cheap masking tape on a clean flat surface (I use this mirror) then use the edge of the plaque as a cutting template and work your way around (see picture...you'll get the idea)...

See......about a 1/4 inch...

Repeat and work your way around until you get here...

Now we have our barrier protecting the edges. Unless you like a messy bench, grab the box top to your now built model (or any flat box) and put the plaque in it.  This is now your work area and will catch any terrain that doesn't stick (more on that soon)... 

Now were getting to the fun part.  Get some white glue (I use good old Elmer's) and with an old wide paint brush, lay it down covering the entire surface thusly. 

Now for the secret...real dirt.  I keep all different kinds in these little cups (like Tom Sizemore in Saving Private  Ryan).  I even have sand for African or tropical venues.  Shake it on then turn the base on its side so the excess falls off.  Leave those pebbles on there, it adds to the effect. 

Heres why we need the box top.  Be sure to dump the excess back into the cup for later use.

This is optional, but I like tire ruts in the ground, to simulate the plane landing and then coming to rest after a sortie.  Afterall, I am trying to capture a moment in time.  Use an old paintbrush handle and carve the tire marks into the wet glue/dirt (be sure they match your plane's wheelbase). 

You can add more glue and dirt as needed, depending how pronounced you want the tracks. Here I added more glue and dirt which causes the tracks to swell a bit.  I like the effect. 

Time to break it up a little bit.  Were gonna replicate some grass which was common on European airfields.  In the desert or tropics, we may just have sand.  Its up to you.  Here we add more glue and dab it down thusly.. 

I use Woodland Scenics Railroad grass. I got mine at my local hobby store years ago and have several textures and shades.  I think the "Fine Turf" is good for 1/48 scale.  I use their "Burnt Grass" sometimes too, which has more brown in it.  Sprinkle it on, shake excess off, pour back into container....

It should come out like this.  Don't worry about glue showing through, when the glue dries you won't see it.  Now run that brush handle through the grass too... 

Now its time to make it more three dimesional.  I use a "Course Turf" and add it sporadically on the grass, to simulate  taller weeds or grass.  I just press it into the still wet glue.  Shake off excess....recycle.

Sometimes I like to fade out the grass by lightly airbrushing the grass with a little XF-59 Desert Yellow.  It sort of blends everything in.  Again, it depending on the look I'm going for. 

Time to remove the tape, which is best done when the glue is still wet.  A perfect edge....

Thats pretty much it.  I can usually crank one of these out in under a hour (I pre-stain my plaques remember).  Make sure you let the glue dry before you add the plane. 

Now stick those tires at the end of the tire tracks......done!

You have a piece of aviation history captured in a moment of time.  Now go to the backyard and collect some dirt!..

Joe

   

 

   

"John Forbes Nash Jr., the brilliant Princeton University mathematician whose life story was the subject of the film "A Beautiful Mind," was killed with his wife Alicia on Saturday in a crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. Previously. (more…)

Avanaut posted a photo:

Ha! All these years photographing Lego and I never knew I had one of these.

I went to our cellar trying to find some Lego tread bricks in an old box of Lego down there, that is a box of my Lego, not the kid's. I didn't find the treads but I found a red spaceman I never knew I had. How could I forget something like this? I have no idea.

I haven't looked back that much over the years, except for this photo and some old scale model things. My old toys have done their job, but I am still very happy I found this. Seeing the cracked helmet made me smile, it's like I found Benny's lost brother.

I just had to shoot it on a 2001-esque setup with no cleaning, dust and all, it's a document of life.

Oh, and there were several of those LEGO printed bricks.

We thought it was crazy when Obama's trade threatened Congress with prison if they disclosed anything about the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership. Read the rest

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You’d be forgiven for doing a double-take, a triple-take, or even insisting that this is a clever ‘shop job, but you’d be mistaken. This is a 1/12-scale version of a power suit model from the Starship Troopers anime series, done by Japanese modeler mumumuno53. To achieve this amazing effect, he […]

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The post This Isn’t a Drawing, This is a Physical Model appeared first on Make:.

Mike Davis from Ioactive found serious flaws in the high-security the Cyberlock locks used by hospitals, airports and critical infrastructure, but when he announced his findings, he got a legal threat that cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read the rest

As much as many of us enjoy building with Lego, we also have a secret desire to see a model getting smashed into smithereens, and that’s where WIRED comes in to deliver this slow motion video of the Lego Super Star Destroyer vs. the ground.

I might be unpopular in this post. If you are a huge minecraft / star citizen / flappy bird and gangnam style fan, look away now.

I think there is a phenomena that is becoming stronger and stronger and I think its bad news for all content creators. Well, for 99.99% of us. That phenomena is the globalization of media, and the concentration of it in a few hands.

Zap back a few hundred years, and you could be the #1 best Lute player in the village. Nobody else could touch you for lute playing. You rocked. 30 miles away there was a better lute player, but nobody ever left their village anyway, so who cared. You could play the lute, and people would pay you to hear it. Happy times.

Zap forward a bit and we have TV and radio. And thats different, because now you can hear that Lute / guitar player from the next village on the radio. And that means everyone in the country can hear him. So that guy gets to be a big national star, and the lesser local people don’t do so well. And thats tough for them, but probably not a total disaster. After all, competing with every guitar player in the UK is tough, but you aren’t competing globally. BBC radio doesn’t play in Islamabad, and  (and this is crucial) even if it did, nobody would like your weird English music over there anyway, due to cultural differences.

The latest transformers movie had a scene set in China, and dialog where people say to trust the government to save them. Both put in to keep Chinese audiences / government officials happy. This is what happens now. Nobody makes a movie based on selling it to people in their country. The stuff is global. It has been, obviously for decades, but its becoming more and more so every year. Now entertainment is predominantly digital, there are literally no borders now. Staggered release dates wont last much longer. Cultural differences are eroding.

So now for the first time we seeing the emergence not just of monopolies on a national level, but an international level. Not just in terms of software and services, but in terms of culture. I never thought I’d see a Korean rap star become a global phenomena. I witnessed middle aged men dressed up as the ugly sisters from Cinderella doing a gangnam style dance one Christmas in Longleat house, England. This is new.

When culture is global, and popularity is global, there is only one chart. THE chart. Everyone knows what everyone likes, and what already has coverage gets more coverage. Saturation coverage.

The itunes charts are pretty much *the place* for apps. Get to the top there, and you are laughing. The problem is, because there is less variety in charts / news outlets / media globally now, you are getting more of a centralized consensus on what is good. People who are only going to write about one pop song (the very mainstream non specialist media) would write about gangnam style. One mobile game? well flappy bird obviously (or angry birds…), one desktop game? well obviously minecraft.

And this leads to the crazy irony of the most successful, popular content getting more and more publicity. Thats always been true but its getting much, much worse because now that is global. Why do I care? why is this bad?

I think its bad because it leads to random perturbations becoming exaggerated. A slight boost in popularity of something bumps it from #100 in a chart to #9. it gets more attention so it goes to #1, and then so much attention it stays there, and then the mere fact that it stayed there becomes newsworthy making it even more popular, and the cycle continues, all potentially from a tiny, tiny bump, maybe a single media personality took a liking to it. A minor disruption in a flat surface is exaggerated to a mountain.

What I’m saying is that gangnam style, minecraft, flappy bird and star citizen are not *THAT* good. I’m not saying they aren’t good, or great even, or amazing even, but the level of popularity is totally disconnected from the quality at some point above the ‘ten million copies sold’ level. Stuff is getting bought *because it is getting bought*. And stuff is becoming popular *because it is already popular* and that sucks, because when you produce content, the success of it is too much attributed to luck. And thats bad, bad bad.

One of the bright points in all this is actually steam. Steams front page re-coding is awesome, and exactly what was needed. Beforehand, if a game got a front page feature, it became popular, and sold a lot, and the word of mouth generated a lot of sales which led to a front page feature and…. etc. Now, there is no such thing. If you love complex PC strategy games and politics, you might be staggered at the promotion my game ‘Democracy 3′ gets on steam. But thats just for you. Steam now has hundreds of micro-niches, and lots of developers have the chance to be popular in that niche.

We need the same for all media. Why do ‘pop charts’ even exist? or movie charts? Why on earth does the fact that ‘fast and furious’ made X dollars have any newsworthy value outside of the industry? Should I go and see it because its popular with everybody else? Fuck no. Charts suck. Charts encourage a homogenization of culture and promote the bland and inoffensive.

So why don’t apple do what steam do and fix this problem? Because *they do not need to care*. As a developer, its terrifying to know a game I make will almost certainly fail, but *might* become minecraft or flappy bird. Thats a very very risky industry. But for people with an online store, they (except steam) don’t care. Why should they? They don’t care if the #1 game is awesome or a fart joke. They collect their slice of *all* the money anyway. Running in app store is the ultimate hedging strategy in games. I wish I owned one :D.

Transformers Generation, six months in the making. Directed by Harris Loureiro who says, "Finally it is done!"

German Pirate MEP Julia Reda's copyright report calls for an end to geoblocking within the EU market, which is inarguably required to create a single digital market. If a European can buy something in one EU member state, she should be able to buy it in the other member-states, too. Read the rest

In a nifty series of articles, my friend Dan Griliopoulos has been modeling the United Kingdom's major political parties' stances in the simulation game Democracy 3. The latest piece tackles creepy far-righters UKIP, and the model isn't so favorable: Read the rest

The school bus driver in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec told 8 year old Sarah Auger she wasn't allowed to read on the way to and from school because she might poke herself in the eye with a corner of the book. Read the rest

The team over at the popular wargaming portal Beasts of War has been putting together a magnificent Battle of Hoth gaming table for this weekend’s Salute 2015 (the massive U.K. gaming convention). They ran a contest to create a set of game rules for the board and are bringing the […]

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The post Battle of Hoth Recreated on Gaming Table for Salute 2015 appeared first on Make:.

For his ongoing series Flying Cars, French designer Sylvain Viau digitally edits photographs of cars into sleek, wheel-less hover cars that appear to float just above the ground. Viau not only uses his own photography to create these sci-fi cars, but is fortunate to claim many of the actual cars among his own collection. He originally worked only with 80s Citroën vehicles because of their classic space-age design, but has continued to branch out over the last few months to include cars from Peugeot, Toyota, and Renault. You can see many more here. (via Designboom)

Update: Photographer Renaud Marion created a similar series of works in 2013.

Handy aperture, shutter speed and ISO graphic.

Neat little info graphic to teach beginners how aperture, shutter speed and ISO affect a photo.

♬ Nailed it ♬ (via Techdirt)

Mr. Đức thắng Nguyễn (Duc Thang Nguyen) is an engineer from Vietnam. Since his retirement in 2002, he has being working on an amazing animated 3D catalog of mechanical contraptions. Using Autodesk Inventor as a tool, he has documented over 1,700 mechanisms. All from gears, couplings, clutches, differentials to detailed […]

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The post Understand 1,700 Mechanical Linkages with these Helpful Animations appeared first on Make:.

Yup, it’s true, the much-awaited sequel to the 200,000+ selling Indie Strategy game Gratuitous Space Battles, is finally on sale. Hurrah! This has taken us twenty months to make, involved a complete redesign and re-engineering of the graphics engine, numerous changes, improvements and fixes, not least the fact that the game now lets you design the look of the ships from scratch AND has steam workshop support, achievements, trading cards and so on. Plus it has one-click easy to use multiple-monitor support, which I HIGHLY recommend. Behold: the cheesy trailer:

The game has been in beta a while, so its hopefully vaguely playable by now! Big thanks to all the beta testers, and of course everybody who worked on the game. You can grab it from a variety of sources, and I’m just going to flat out assume all of their buy links are active right now…so here we go:

Of course the world is a different place now to when GSB1 was released. Who knows how well this one will do? Will anybody like it? One of my biggest fears is people assuming it wont run on their PC. It will! Its actually not *that* demanding. And if you happen to have two monitors you OWE it to yourself to grab it :D. So please do it, help me feed my cats! And if you like the game, PLEASE review it on steam, or wherever you buy it, tweet about it, tell all your friends. And your enemies :D. If you are someone who makes youtube lets-play videos, I hereby give you permission to use the game in your videos, and to monetize those videos, this is fine with me. The more video footage of the game the better. (The battles look much better in motion than as screenshots).

If you want more information / screenshots / wallpaper head over to the official site. Press inquiries welcome to cliff@positech.co.uk.

Michael Kuroda has built yet another great piece that features wonderful gaming icons from our childhood. This mosaic of the classic ghosts from Pac-Man is simple, yet elegant. Michael has done a wonderful job of capturing their look and feel, while using the border to symbolize their home, the maze from which they can never escape.

"Because there are so many technological world-firsts in the demo, and because we’re bending the hardware in ways that people have never thought to do so, it’s only fair that we try to explain exactly how this was achieved."

Square Enix has released the first trailer for the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a sequel to the blockbuster cyberpunk action hit Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

The game itself will take place two years after its predecessor, but the game will have a more open-ended structure that leaves more decisions in the hands of the gamer. Additionally, there will be "new gameplay twists including new augmentations."

It is also important to note that the game was built on the new Dawn Engine game engine.

The game is set for release later this year (unknown date so far) for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

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thebroodingatheist:

And then you ask why people are angry