Robot Claw – Page 125 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Monster Contest: Halftime

April 1, 2023

Once again Bernard and I are doing a postcard art contest. This year the subject is ‘monsters’ and we collectively decided on 10 subjects before starting. Each week we’re taking turns picking the next subject.

The rules are a little different this year. Firstly we’re using identical media, specifically only the markers in the above pic. I bought two sets of each and sent him one, and (aside from pencil for the initial sketch) this means our art is black and red only.

Secondly I printed the postcards in advance with the subjects on the front. This means, unlike previous years, we only get one go at drawing our art and can’t just grab another postcard and start again if we don’t like it or make a mistake!

The judges are the same as last year (JF, JK, SMS, SS and AW) and as far as voting is concerned the only change was I formalized that they could split their votes (which most of them had been doing last year anyway). We’re now half way through and here are the results so far:

Bigfoot

Lessons were learned on card one. I hadn’t done any testing of the markers, and was very surprised to note how much they bled into the cardboard of the postcard. I had visions of fine detail in our pictures that faded fast when this became apparent. Even so I think we hit the ground running, with Bernard’s creation on the left and mine on the right.

The voting was incredibly close, with Bernard’s 2.51 points just beating my 2.49. Most judges commented how difficult it was to choose, and how surprised they were by the quality 🙂

Some judge comments:
“It’s a strong start. The depiction of trees in the first artwork is very well done as is Bigfoot striding through the forest. Although I would have preferred for him to refrain from smiling at the artist.”
“The second artwork is stunning. The shape of the head is very pleasing and the use of negative space creates effective dimensionality. He’s a scary beast even though his square chompers are only built for chewing grass.”
“I like the way we see him in his environment in left image. And I like how scary he is in other image.”

Ghost

Mine is on the left, and Bernard’s on the right. This was another tough one for the judges, although I had a ‘judging question’ about the lack of red in the right picture (it is there, just difficult to see without zooming in). Some judges questioned whether mine was even a ghost!

Voting was very split and seemed to rest on whether judges liked a darker or a more whimsical ghost. Ultimately I won with 2.65 points to Bernard’s 2.35.

Here are some judge comments:
“Right is clearly Casper!”
“There’s not much I don’t like about left. I particularly like the flame, and the teeth. Right…… it doesn’t capture me unfortunately.”
“Love the bony hand and lantern flame!”
“…I do actually like the left pic better. But right is a much better ghost.”

Zombie

Bernard is left, and I am right. This one led to another judges question about whether multiple subjects was acceptable. We hadn’t discussed that in advance, and after this one we decided to keep it at one only going forward. By this third week some judges had observed that one of us was using the same style weekly, and the other was mixing it up. Although they didn’t know who was who, I suspect this began to be factored in to their judging (one suggested that variety was advantageous).

Bernard’s apocalyptic vignette scored him an easy win with 3.26 points to my 1.74. None of the judges noticed that mine was supposed to be Michael Jackson…

Here’s what the judges had to say:
“The vertical lines speak of skeletons, the horizontal lines the prison of the life of a zombie endlessly driven to feed. Baby zombies barely exist and the mushroom cloud of death is a creature of its own advancing on us. The bloodied satiation of the zombie family gives the viewer a moment of peace to view the encroaching doom before the hunger takes hold again.”
“Right is a punk zombie head on a red gingham picnic table cloth.”

Sea Monster

I drew left, and Bernard drew right. I had a vision of a medieval style ‘monster on old map’ which didn’t quite work out, but I love that we both basically drew the same idea. Both artworks have a lot of fine detail; I wonder how much the judges noticed?

Voting on this one was very split, with three judges giving us equal points! Ultimately though the other two preferred mine and I won 3.1 points to 1.9.

Here’s the judges comments:
“Both squidtastic!”
“Impossible to choose.”
“I love left. But right will get a few points because I dig the night sky contrast.”
“Left is very well crafted. The use of white space, the detail of the ship, the twining tentacles, the striking contrast of the bold red of the monster, the minimal detail of the background that gives the artwork perspective. I like everything about this artwork??”
“Right which depicts a sea monster attacking at night conveys a terrifying sight with the cavernous mouth and enormous teeth about to envelope and destroy the ship. The detail of the ship gets a little lost in picture with the tentacles of the monster and the waves of the sea. The spotty creature looks a little diseased.”

Dragon

Mine is left; Bernard’s is right. This was a somewhat controversial piece since two judges have very strong opinions of what dragons look like and one of the above pieces not agree with their expectations!

Voting was a blowout, and I won 4.05 points to Bernard’s 0.95. I was pleased by this since I put more effort into my dragon than any previous piece, but had been nervous since I had wanted to draw hind legs but couldn’t work out how to add them! I also liked that judges noticed I’d gone (more successfully this time) for a medieval art style.

Here’s what the judges said:
“While I’d like the artist to have shown the back legs as well, I prefer it to the “hairy” dragon on the right.”
“Left: great detail of body, especially scales and excellent flames. Right: Torching guy!”
“Left is really charming. Reminds me of medieval illustrations. I tip my hat to right for the dynamic flaming I feel in its depiction!”
“I love the shape of the flame and the traditional look of the dragon on left. A good solid effort”
“Right is a bit of an abomination I’m sorry to say. Being an ardent fan of the dragon I emphatically reject the enormous hairy slug that is for some reason breathing fire. The only saving grace of this artwork is the charred remains of the valiant knight who is a charming and comical figure.”

Halfway through I’m ahead 3 to 2, which means with five subjects remaining this is still anyone’s game.

I asked Bernard for his comments at this point and he said: “Once again the judges appear to be unable to recognize true art when they see it. My remaining five pieces will be of the same stellar quality as my initial five pieces have been.“

As for myself, I’ll probably still continue trying a different style with every piece and hoping the judges appreciate the detail and work that has gone into my mini-masterpieces 🙂

Come back in five weeks to find out what the remaining five subjects were, and who wins this years postcard art contest!

My Collections: PS3 and PS4

March 30, 2023

The Playstation 3 (PS3) was released in November 2006 and it would be 10 months before I finally bought one early in September of 2007. The system was very expensive ($500), had a slow start, and even almost a year into release there was a lack of games that caught my eye. Indeed, for the first couple of weeks I owned it, I didn’t even buy any games for it and instead used it to watch blu-rays and play PS2 games!

Looking back on the PS3 I remember it as the console that ushered in – for me – the era of downloading games. Sony introduced the PlayStation shop with the PS3 and there was a lot of interesting and inexpensive games available, and during the life of the console I probably bought a couple of dozen games online. Of course I also bought disc games – 98 in total – and my PS3 library ended up being one of my top 10 biggest game collections.

That’s the bulk of them above, and notable titles included the first of the Souls series, the immersive RPG Dragons Dogma and Diablo 3 which featured couch co-op that KLS used to play together endlessly. In fact we played the PS3 often enough that not one, but two of them died, with the laser failing on one and the disc tray on the other! We played them both to death 🙂

The PS3 era of games is unremarkable from a collector’s perspective. They’re not old enough to be retro, and not new enough to be appealing to modern gamers. Furthermore, many of the landmark titles have been rereleased or ‘remastered’ for newer consoles. There is very little value in PS3 games today, and it’s probably the least collected console. The vast majority of my games – which are of course all in pristine condition – are only ‘worth’ only a few dollars. I have a couple of ‘rare’ games (shown above) but even then they’d sell for less what I paid for them. Maybe one day PS3 games will gain value, but I don’t think that day is anytime soon.

The life of the PS3 extended all the way into 2017, but long before it was retired it had already been surpassed by its followup, the PlayStation 4 (PS4). This was released in late 2013, but I didn’t get mine until Christmas 2014 (in response to the death of our second PS3).

In some ways the PS4 is still a current-era console, in that it has yet to be officially retired and you can still buy them new in stores. For many years ours was our primary console, and both KLS and myself played it extensively. And then, about 2 years ago, it died as well, and we didn’t replace it (although not for lack of trying).

I loved the PS4. It has a great controller, a good OS and it was successful enough that the market supported lots of fantastic games (such as Monster Hunter World, Nioh and several Vanillaware games). It had easy and fast online play, and if you didn’t absolutely need them upon launch the games were reasonably priced after a few months as well.

In the 7+ years we owned one I bought 123 PS4 games. I think – since many of them were $30 or less – this was also the console with the lowest average game price of any I have ever owned. That’s not to say I didn’t over time pick up a few games that are a little more collectible (such as the limited edition of Odin Sphere) shown above, but most of my PS4 library is as unremarkable (as collectibles) as my PS3 games.

This post is because – as with the Wii and Wii U collections – I’m also selling my PS3 and PS4 games. Look closely at the above pics and you may note that there are four games that I bought for both the PS3 and PS4 and one of them – Dragon’s Crown – I also own for the Vita! I love that game to death, and it’s one of a few that will be hard to say goodbye to (especially since it’s a collectors metal case edition with an unopened pack of trading cards) but I hold out hope we may get yet another remaster for Switch sometime soon. The bulk of these games I won’t miss though: they were fun to play in their time, but I’ll never play them again and they’re just now taking up space in the house.

Between 1995 and 2021 we had (8 models of) four different PlayStation consoles in our house (not including PSP or Vita) but have yet to buy a PlayStation 5. Right now it doesn’t have many games I’m interested in, it’s very expensive, and the Switch is more than enough for our needs. With the sell off of my PS3/PS4 collections has the sun set on PlayStation in this house? Time will tell…

Dinosaur Models!

March 25, 2023

I recently bought and assembled three dinosaur model kits. Collectively they cost me under $40, which is less than a (single) typical model kit that I usually buy.

The first was this Triceratops which seems to be part of a new line they’re calling Plannosaurus. It’s a beginners kit that allows you to build a skeleton or normal version of the beast.

The instructions are in colour and contain lots of information about the dinosaurs presented in a cute style. The kit is easy to make (you assemble the skeleton first, then if you want you put the skin on) and I finished in about half an hour.

I’m assuming this is aimed at kids, so I think that while it’s well-engineered (you barely need nippers or sand paper), I found I had to use glue to get certain pieces of the skin to stay on. Also the stickers were fiddly to attach, and I think kids would get frustrated with them quickly. But it looked great once I finished.

I also got this Tyrannosaurus kit, from the same line as the Triceratops. It’s extremely similar, only as you can see it has more parts since the assembly (and parts) is slightly different depending on whether you build the normal or ‘feathered’ version.

Here’s proof that model kits can be educational! There’s lots of this sort of thing in the instructions 🙂

I chose the ‘non-feathered’ mode since I didn’t want to put the stickers on. I think he looks even better than the Triceratops, and considering the low price I’m very impressed with the quality.

Lastly, I also made this curio: yet another Triceratops skeleton kit (also from Bandai) but made from a new non-plastic material called Limex. This is an environmentally friendly alternative made from calcium, and they’ve only used it for an extremely small amount of recent kits. This kit was extremely inexpensive at only $7!

It’s a trivial skeleton to assemble – it took me maybe 5 minutes – and the material is extremely white and seems very slightly translucent which is why it appears to glow in the photos. I think it’s well suited to a skeleton kit like this one, but I’m not sure Bandai will be switching their Gundams to Limex any time soon.

While these are all fairly simple kits, I think they were great value and for their intended audience of kids I think they’d be a big success. All three of these will go to work and be displayed on a cabinet in my office next to the other dinosaur skeleton kit I made a year or so back (and a shark kit I bought in Japan). Maybe if I get the other two Dino-related kits I’ll make and bring them to work too 🙂