Category: The Unknown

The Fabulous Owlbear

May 22, 2015

First, read this post Adam did on his blog.

I’ve found a similar example. Here is the owlbear (an owl-bear hybrid monster) as illustrated in the first ever AD&D Monster Manual from 1978:

I have a copy of this book. It’s the 6th printing, from 1980, and was owned by KLS long before I met her. The owlbear in this version of the monster manual looks like this:

Fabulous isn’t it! It’s the only monster in the book that has been coloured in, but we can only dream she had done more as a child 🙂

Speaking of the owlbear… what’s this picture?

Interesting isn’t it? A few years ago it was revealed that some of the unusual monsters in AD&D were based on plastic toys. You can read the full story here (with more wonderful pictures). Based on the toy, and the supposition (which seems reasonable) that the toys were bootleg Ultraman monster toys, it’s obvious the owlbear is nothing more than… a kappa!

The kappa is a japanese water spirit which has a very rich mythology. Here’s an illustration done by Hokusai (famous for his The Great Wave Off Kanagawa) in the early 1800’s:

You can see the resemblance to the toy.

So what of the Ultraman connection? Japanese sentai shows often base their monsters on mythology, and it’s almost certain there is an early Kappa-based foe in one of the first few Ultraman series. I did a search and could only find one before 1978, a kappa-influenced alien named Tepeto in an episode of Ultraseven from 1967:

Not very owlbear-like is he?

So my guess is the original kappa designs (such as Hokusai’s) influenced the chinese toy which influenced the owlbear in AD&D.

What of the owlbear today? Here’s the latest illustration:

A bit literal isn’t it?

The Impossible Dream

April 16, 2015

Adam and I were boulevarding around Sydney, or maybe elsewhere, when we came upon a strange vending machine. It was a very tall box – ten feet or so – with a small keyboard and no screen. There was a dial to the right of the keyboard that had a few settings, but none were labeled. A tiny sign had been taped on and said it would print posters of anything the purchaser wanted. It was in the lobby of some building, alongside other more mundane machines. No-one seemed interested in it; we were.

The cost was $0.75. We fed it a dollar coin. It didn’t give change.

Since there was no screen at all it was unusual to use. We put money in and typed ‘Doctor Who’. Nothing happened for a while, then it printed out a poster which came out a slot at the very bottom near the floor. The poster was massive – about the right size to hang on a door. And it was amazing. I seem to recall a montage of heroes and villans done in a woodcut style. Absolutely not what we expected. More money went in.

‘Tardis’ got us a disturbing picture of the Tardis with a screaming face carved into the front panel and a ring (like Saturn) around the light.

I typed ‘Jon Pertwee’ and got something resembling a 1960s bond poster with Pertwee in leather on his bike, babe in arms. It was amazing.

Adam printed out more Doctor Who stuff, including using the same term twice and getting two different posters that seemed to be in a series. He tried the dial, using the same term three times with the dial set differently each time. The posters were different, but we couldn’t work out what the dial did, if anything.

We then switched to fantasy monsters (dragons, beholders, demons) and collected armloads of giant, unique, incredible door posters. I vividly remember a poster depicting a dark tangled forest in astonishing detail with monsters very well hidden behind almost every tree. The poster was printed in such a way that the setting sun seemed to glow like an actual light source. We were baffled.

I inspected the posters very closely and found no copyrights or trade marks at all. The machine itself had nothing written on it. It was a complete mystery.

I forget how things ended. I don’t remember leaving; we just kept printing posters over and over. It was addictive. I wish it was real.

But it wasn’t of course. It was just the dream I had last night.

How Far Can You See In The Woods (part 2)

March 14, 2015

If you’ve been reading the comments of the previous blog post, you will have seen Bernard coded the simulation I described. You can play with it here. This simulation doesn’t answer the original ‘field problem’, but instead the more general problem of ‘can you see your friend if you’re both standing in a forest’?

{A quick note: if it appears to crash your browser, just force-quit because the code is in an infinite loop. This happens a lot with high wood density and low tree radius. On an ipad, force-quit by returning to the home screen then double tapping the home button and swiping the browser up to close it.}

I’ve done some analysis using this early version of the simulation, and here’s a table of results:

That’s a surface plot of the percent chance to see your friend indexed by wood density (0.1 = 10% trees) and tree radius. A few comments:

– The distance between you and your friend is randomized.
– The tree position is randomized.
– The tree radii are unphysical, and the code doesn’t seem to support non-integer (cm) values.- I used 2500 trials each, except when radius was low (percentage ~ 0) where I dropped to 250.

Interestingly you can see the percent chance increases with tree size, but decreases with wood density. You are more likely to be able to see your friend if the trees are large, and less likely if they are close together. Currently there is no upper-bound on tree size, and it seems the percent chance simply increases as they get bigger and bigger.

As for the distance question, I’m happy to report that Bernard also added metrics to help you calculate this. I’m going to pick 20% wood density and 7m tree radius (!!) as an example. Here’s a simple representational plot of one such forest complete with friends:

In the above – generated by the simulation – the friends are far apart and can’t see each other. The obvious question is what is the relationship between distance and ability to see each other, and here are the metric results from 1000 trials with these parameters:

We can’t read too much into these since position is randomly chosen, but on first glance it seems (in this case) the friends were more likely to see each other at about 50 meters. However if you look at the bottom plot, you’ll notice there were quite a few occasions around the 50m mark where they could not see each other. I’d estimate about 20 or so, which means only about a 60% chance (seen/total) of seeing each other at about 50m. Glancing at the two plots it is, as we’d expect, the case that the chance to see each other decreases with any distance beyond standing adjacent.

So the results are interesting, but these are early days yet. Were I to modify the current code, here’s what I would do:
– Input wood density input as an integer between 1 and 99
– Input tree radius in cm
– Output result plots as percent chances per distance – one plot, rather than two, of (times seen at that distance)/(total times separated by that distance)
– Add variable tree radii
– Add foliage transmission support- Make the map circular, and distribute the trees according to a Gaussian distribution (this is more physical) {This may be for V2.0}

If and when these adjustments are made, you may see part 3 of this post 🙂
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Robot Claw