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All I've ever seen of Harryhausen is Clash of the Titans, and to be honest I didn't think it stood the test of time very well.
Ironscarf wrote:Coincidentally I was just talking to my dad about how I'm glad that people aren't really expected to look after their loony relatives like in the old days, because we'd have to have my uncles locked up in the attic.
What am I talking about, beast in the attic; they've got Product Placement!
This is weird-
Apparently the head of the boring US clothes company Abacrombie and Fitch said this:
“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”
It's like bizaro land… That stuff is so mind-bendingly dull, generic, boring, behind the times, and bland, and so are the sorts of people that buy it.
And doing a Google image search for "Abacrombie and Fitch" makes it look as if they're trying to market themselves exclusively towards still-in-the-closset gay men with bad taste.
ozoneocean wrote:And it doesn't have the polo pony. Not even a blasted alligator. What good is it? If I want bland "classic" clothing I want a logo dammit!
And doing a Google image search for "Abacrombie and Fitch" makes it look as if they're trying to market themselves exclusively towards still-in-the-closset gay men with bad taste.
Loony relatives in attics are great for Hammer movies but make terrible houseguests. We did actually have a Frenchman over once for an exchange visit and he was exactly as described - right down to the match striking on expensive surfaces!
Ironscarf wrote:Pity Hammer never did a version of Jane Eyre. The original looney relative in the attic. They also avoided Lovecraft who also had looney relatives hidden away like the dread spawn of the Old Ones.
Loony relatives in attics are great for Hammer movies but make terrible houseguests.
We did actually have a Frenchman over once for an exchange visit and he was exactly as described -Figures it was a Frenchman. I knew Texans like that in the Army. Fortunately there was no expensive furniture around to be ruined. You know they sell faux antiques with the dings and scratch marks already on them? I'd like to be the guy in the factory who gets to bang up the furniture with the hammer before it's sent off to get painted.
Bravo1142 wrote:
You know they sell faux antiques with the dings and scratch marks already on them?
So whats new here? been lurking a bit but not enough.
Lite bites should update again by monday.
Personal stuff. life is still in adjustment phase, really struggle to do art at present. I keep opening software to do BASO stuff and i get a blank. :( I cant write at all and even following my own notes i get nothing. Luckily i can follow others so back to Lite bites and i have done a couple of pages for heroes alliance. Stress messes stuff up. depression I can use, stress is wrong for creativity.
@ozone:
François?
—
First serious rant in a long time…
My sisters and I inherited significant (for us, anyway) amounts of money from our granddad when he died. It's been over a year now, I think, and we haven't seen any money yet. I don't even know exactly how much I'll be getting.
My mom is supposed to be dealing with it, and at this point I've just asked way too many times to ask again. My older sister told me our mom snapped at her last time she tried.
I don't even know what to do about this.
Genejoke is right - you need to speak to the solicitor. I take it the Grandad in question is your mum's father and she is probably the executor of the will? The executor is responsible for carrying out the wishes of the deceased; maybe she just can't or doesn't want to deal with it, but as a beneficiary of the will you have rights.
This is where it gets tricky. If the executor is not carrying out their duties, you would have to apply to the court to request that somebody else (usually the next of kin) administer the estate and the court would then write to your mother informing her of this request.
As you can see, this is not going well! People usaully get ripped off by their nearest and dearest in my experience - money seems to be thicker than blood. The best you can do is bite the bullet and talk to your mum about this - and keep talking to her about it regardless of the response. She'll probably deal with it eventually if you persevere, or at least you'll find out where the cash went!
If the assets were not cash or readily convertiable to cash a year's delay is common in the USA. Liquidation of things that aren't money is sometimes necessary and that is often painful for the executor to do. Let alone writing out checks often requires one to be in the last stage of grief: acceptance. If one isn't there yet and especially in denial, the writing of checks just isn't going to happen in many instances. Then there is the settling of debts and that can go on and on and on and make inheritances vanish. And then the executor is often too ambarassed to say that it all went to the creditors and there's no money remaining.
And never forget Mr Taxman.
My wife is a legal secretary who did estates for several years and has also executed her grandmother's and mother's estates. Her mother died more than ten years ago and the estate still isn't completely settled as there are still creditors demanding settlement.
Similarly I just got a large cash settlement of a disability suit and it's all already spent on bills. I probably won't personally see a dime (or for all this talk of soliciters as opposed to lawyers should I say shilling?)
Apparently the design requires some other metal part or it won't work, which is some sort of measure to make them legal- so they can be detected etc.
But the catch to the whole big story is that almost none of the people that downloaded the plans can do anything with them because the sorts of "printer" you need for them aren't the cheap $2000 sort, they're a more heavy duty kind that goes for $8000+ second hand.
Add to that the guns are only reliable for a single shot.
So at the moment it's still a lot cheaper and easier just to buy a real gun that will be far superior.
The story is not as bad as it sounds basically. Not nearly. The thing is though that it points to bad potential problems down the track:
-If the materials get better so the crappy "printed" (such an idiotic word usage in this context) guns can reliably and accurately fire more than one shot.
-If the 3D fabricators become cheap and high quality enough to be freely available.
But the Fabrication machines are the key themselves. People say you ca't regulate plans freely available on the net, well you can still easily regulate the fabrication devices as well as the material for the "printing", so there are still avenues for control and that Texas Law student can gp and suck on his own tiny genitals.
From the looks of it, only the barrel part needs to be replaced, after every shot, and the gun was designed so that's easily replaceable. Thus, you don't need to make the entire gun again, from scratch. This certainly slows down the re-fire rate of the gun, but there's still potential for mugging/store robberies, after all, you only need one bullet to kill someone.
The report only noted that the firing pin was required for purchase and everything else could be made with the printer. If they omitted any extra parts, then that's fine by me.
As for the price of the printer, yes, of course that's gonna be the biggest limiting factor but they're becoming increasingly more common. This might create incentive for ne'er-do-wells to start breaking into facilities that contain printers capable of making this gun. After all, there's a potential business in selling these guns to people in the street. Apparently the street value for a proper handgun is around $150-200 dollars. Imagine someone flooding the street with cheap $50 disposable guns.
Edit:
So apparently, the firing "pin" is a simple nail, that you can buy at a convenience store. It's, in fact, the only metal part of the gun, aside from the bullets, of course. You don't even need to bother acquiring a proper firing pin from a gun store. The gun is otherwise made out of 15 plastic pieces that can all be printed out of a 3D printer.
Here's a picture of the gun with all of its non plastic parts.
Also… Deucebag responsible for making it:
P.S:
He's calling his design "The liberator", after a single use gun that was airdropped by the allies, in mass, over France, during the Nazi occupation. Because you know this gun is gonna be used for noble causes.
Here you go PP:
"Additionally, Defense Distributed’s plans call for a 170g piece of steel
in the body of the gun — a little piece of steel that, essentially, is
the only thing keeping these legal. The Undetectable Firearms Act
explicitly bans any gun that can’t be detected with a metal detector.
Without this piece of steel, there’s virtually no way of knowing who
might be packing plastic-encased heat. Equally important: it’s also
impossible to get off a shot without it."
Link:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/05/100000-people-have-already-downloaded-3d-printed-gun-plans-so-what/
There certainly seems to be some conflicting information floating around about this gun. I picket this up from a different source, when I was originally looking around for information about this metal part that you're talking about:
"Unlike the original, steel Liberator, though, Wilson’s weapon is almost entirely plastic: Fifteen of its 16 pieces have been created inside an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a machine that lays down threads of melted polymer that add up to precisely-shaped solid objects just as easily as a traditional printer lays ink on a page. The only non-printed piece is a common hardware store nail used as its firing pin."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/05/meet-the-liberator-test-firing-the-worlds-first-fully-3d-printed-gun/
Ok.
After further looking around, I'm still not quite sure that I can trust this particular statement that:
"plans call for a 170g piece of steel…impossible to get off a shot without it."
I think the article writer may be confusing the necessity of the steel piece with the firing pin, but the latter is certainly needed to strike and ignite the bullet casing.
It's true that the models that are made by Cody Wilson (creator of the gun) and his company, contain a steel piece, so that the gun is detectable but it's there for legal reasons. Without it, the gun would violate the Undetectable Firearms Act. BBC, Forbes and my local news sites are either omitting the existence of that piece, which is why I'm hearing about it first now, or pointing out that it's only there because Wilson is operating within the bounds of American gun laws. They even point out that those that download the gun don't have to include the piece.
170g of steel wouldn't be a tiny thing, either, so my suspicion is that it's located inside of the grip of the gun. Here's an image, showing the inside:
And taken apart (note that the bullet and the pin are shown in the picture):
Further more, Forbes is the one pointing out that the gun can use an ordinary nail for a firing pin.
More pictures and reading material:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10016769.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185
With the plethora of cheap and easily obtainable illegal handguns that infest the USA this entire "printable" gun thing is a chimera. This is very expensive and not worth much as far as improvised munitions go. A single shot pistol with only one metal part? I know how to make a single shot pistol without the metal part.
Composite "plastic" hand guns have been around for decades and ones without that piece of steel are reaily available further making this a nearly academic exercise. The law student made his point with his printer. This is a publicity ploy and a red flag to wave in front of the anti-gun crowd.
I know places where $8000 will buy me a frigging arsenal where sneaking it anywhere won't be a concern because I'll be able to shoot my way anywhere I wanted to go.
I think Bravo has hit pretty close to the bone here.
The idea of the creator of this thing was to make a statement against anti-gun laws, in an extremely childish and ill-thought out manner. The idea is to get mass press coverage and create a scare so that his platform (that guns are impossible to control so should instead be made universally available) can be forced through and given credence- FAR more credence than he or his idiotic notions deserve.
His plastic guns seem a much bigger deal than they are, but won't be a threat until some time down the track. He knows this but his aim is to make it seem like it's a thing NOW so that people will take notice of his bigger pro-gun agenda.
"You can't stop it so you may as well not even try"
The reality is that ALL the power of a gun is inside of the bullet. A gun is just a casing for directing an explosion accurately and reliably. They are very simple machines, very easy to make with almost zero skill. Where it gets hard is making them accurate for more than one shot.
Regarding the plastic gun: I do agree with you that it is first and foremost a publicity but I do feel that it is a discussion that we should be concerned with. I do feel though that it is a bit premature by 10 years at least, due to the fact that this is a technology that's available everywhere…yet.
My friend gave me a fine brown leather strap for "late"birthday present. For my guitar of course, you naughty naughty ozone -.-*
Guitar strap - what a fine present idea!
My favourite ever present was the fuzz box I got when I was about 14. It still sounds fantastic but now it's a rare vintage item so I never take it out.
Fortunately it only has six components inside so I can knock one up in an afternoon and cause more sonic destruction than anything a 3D printer can produce.
—
Cybermen are back on tonight - apparently Neil Gaiman has written it. Fingers crossed…
ozoneocean wrote:I-uh… I can't be mand at you…
Gullas should get a pair of fuzzy handcuffs and a ballgag for his guitar too ^_^
I'll make it up to you Gullas:
Page 2 of Bottomless Waitress is like a real thing now: http://www.drunkduck.com/Bottomless_Waitress/
Totally bra.
It's radical, tubular, and indeed, bitchen'
As the Americans say: "Oss-um"
Lite bites has finally updated. i even have the next page uploaded for a few days time.
So, my life… Marriage break up and stuff was hard but in an effort to get back on the horse I signed up to a dating website. All goes well enough, meet someone and went out on my first date in over eleven years. Went well enough but the mixed signals that followed… more than I care to be doing with at this point in time. So i think i'll avoid that stuff for now.
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