Digitprop

This is my stab at a paper model of the Reddit logo. The rounded shapes of the logo do not lend themselves well to papercrafting, and so a paper model will either be very complicated to assemble or inaccurate. I took the easy road and made a rough approximation, which only looks good from the front. Well, at least it’s relatively easy to assemble.

If you want something more refined, look here.

Here is a glimpse at the not so elegant backbone structure:

And here are the parts:

And here is the template (see also instructions here):

• For Corel Draw: reddit_paper_model.cdr
• As PDF: reddit_paper_model.pdf
• For Craft Robo: GSD + PDF
• As SVG (e.g. for Inkscape): reddit_paper_model.svg

Assembly should be easy: First, glue the large strip into a cylinder – this will be the “body”. The body, head, and feet are connected by sliding them into assembly slots cut into the opposing part. The head has two strips which interconnect via the same slots. They form an ‘X’ which can then be inserted into the slots in the body cylinder.

Most of you will by now have seen the video of Nuclear Boy and his tummy problems. The media artist Kazuhiko Hachyia and the community have created a simultaneously hilarious and touching PA-style film which explains in a child-friendly way what’s going on at Fukushima. Imagine the confusion and fear experienced by children in the region. This film is a great way to explain in a non-threatening way what’s happening at Fukushima.

The animation may seem odd to grown-ups, but it takes its subject matter very seriously. And Hachyia does a great job in accurately conveying technical information in a seemingly playful way. In fact, I found the animation to be much more competent than some of the public media output.

Now, to reinforce the message and to encourage all of us to donate to earthquake relief efforts, I have created paper models of Nuclear Boy, Three Mile Island Boy and Chernobyl Boy. All three of them look rather unhappy, which isn’t surprising considering their condition.

Three Miles Island Boy has since recovered from his tummy problems, but he is still quite traumatized  by the memories:

And so are we. But much worse off is Chernobyl Boy, who ‘literally pooped in the classroom’, as Hachiya put it bluntly but accurately.

Well, and Nuclear Boy – Fukushima – is still fighting the disease.

So far, he did a good job of preventing the worst and ‘keeping it in’. Let’s all hope that he pulls through! And in the meantime, think of the many thousand victims of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan: Please donate generously. Even though Japan is a rich country, the sheer dimensions of this catastrophe require our combined efforts. Here is a list with pointers to charity organizations:

japanearthquakedonations.org

You can easily print out and build all three models yourself. Just download the PDFs below, and you are good to go. And if you are the lucky owner of a Craft Robo, I have prepared an extra PDF and GSD file as well.

Nuclear boy: PDF, PDF+GSD, CDR

Chernobyl boy: PDF, PDF+GSD, CDR

Three mile island boy: PDF, PDF+GSD, CDR

I should add some details on the creation of the original animation Hashyia told me: The whole thing started as a collection of posts in which he tried to explain the disaster to his wife and child. The posts were picked up and retweeted, and at some point they were turned into a manga, and from there into an animation.

So a true community effort, and in my mind a very brilliant one. I’d be happy if the above paper models were considered a modest contribution…

(English copy at bottom)

So, heute mal aus gegebenem Anlass ein deutscher Beitrag. Ungeachtet der etwas unseriösen, sensationsheischenden und handwerklich stümperhaften Berichterstattung über die ‘Reaktorkatastrophe’ in Japan kann man guten Gewissens behaupten, dass wir die Technologie der Kernspaltung nicht wirklich im Griff haben.

Angefangen von den kruden Unter-Tage-Müllkippen, die wir ‘Endlager’ nennen, über pseudoredundante Kühlsysteme, die dann doch im Ernstfall komplett ausfallen bis hin zu unausgegorenen Notfallplänen handelt es sich hier um Restrisiken, die man besser nicht in Kauf nehmen sollte.

Nun, wie dem auch sei, hierzu hat wohl jeder eine eigene Meinung. Gut nur, wenn man zu dieser auch steht. So wie unsere wohlgeliebte Kanzlerin. Die hat zum Beispiel gesagt:

Wenn ich sehe, wie viele Kernkraftwerke weltweit gebaut werden, dann wäre es wirklich jammerschade, sollten wir aus diesem Bereich aussteigen. (15.6.2008, Quelle: Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Charakterfest und wohldurchdacht wie wir sie kennen, hat sie dass dann vor Kurzem bekräftigt:

Wenn wir von der Kernenergie als Brückentechnologie sprechen, dann bedeutet das nichts anderes, als dass wir aus der Nutzung der Kernenergie aussteigen möchten. (14.3.2011, Quelle: Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Ups, oder doch nicht? Sollte da ein gewisser Meinungsumschwung stattgefunden haben? Das wollen wir doch gleich feiern, und zwar mit einer kleinen Gedenkfigur zum Selberbasteln:

Es handelt sich um ein Wendemahnmal mit doppelgesichtiger Kanzlerin: Auf jeder der beiden Seiten ist eines der obigen Zitate zu lesen. So hat der Betrachter immer die volle Übersicht über die Meinungsvielfalt im Kopfe der Frau Dr. Merkel.

Hier sind die Vorlagen, damit jeder die Kanzlerin selbst basteln kann (Anleitung hier):

• For Corel Draw: merkel.cdr
• Als PDF zum Selbstausschneiden: merkel.pdf
• Als PDF für RoboCraft: merkel_robo.pdf
• GSD für RoboCraft (mit PDF verwenden): merkel_robo.gsd
• Als SVG: merkel.zip

For our English-speaking readers: Don’t worry if you didn’t get much out of the above – it’s a German affair, dealing with our beloved chancelor Merkel’s deceitful atomic energy policy. She effectively reversed her previous view on nuclear energy (which she advocated strongly) right after the Fukushima incident. While it’s not particularly surprising that politicians do everything to cater to the public opinion, it’s still despicable. Hence the two-faced Merkel figure.

Sometimes the world of Lego® minifigures – as colorful as it may be – can be a bit mundane. Here is something to give it more style: High art.

Hanging these up is significantly easier than with the real thing: Just align the holes in the flaps with the stubs of the wall bricks, and that’s it.

So easy, yet makes  a whale of a difference. Really brightens the room up. And if you feel adventurous, you can organize a whole art exhibition.

And here is the template (see also instructions here):

• For Corel Draw:art.cdr
• As PDF: art.pdf
• As GDS (use with PDF): art.gsd
• As SVG (e.g. for Inkscape): art.zip (note that this is a ZIP file which contains the actual SVG file and embedded PNG bitmaps in a subdirectory)

LEGO^® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site

What would the world be without sheep? A sad, desolate place, that’s what. And to contribute to the sheepness of our nice little universe, here is a paper sheep:

And lo and behold, you can make your very own, just by downloading, printing, cutting and gluing the template below. Admittedly this sheep is not as cuddly as the ones made of wool, but it’s still a nice enough fellow:

And here is the template (see also instructions here). It comes in two parts, as it didn’t fit on a single page:

• For Corel Draw: sheep_1.cdr, sheep_2.cdr
• As PDF: sheep_1.pdf, sheep_2.pdf
• As GDS (use with PDF): sheep_1.gsd, sheep_2.gsd
• As SVG (e.g. for Inkscape): sheep_1.svg, sheep_2.svg

Here is company for the dog and the cow: A hippo.

This is admittedly somewhat complicated to assemble. The head is curved, and getting the curvature right takes a little bit of patience. The rest of the model is very simple, but the head can give you, well, some headache. Here it is in a semi-folded state:

The best approach is to ease the curved parts into their final shape by carefully wrapping them around a round pencil, then to glue everything together.

Here is the back:

This is what the uncut template looks like:

And here is the template (see also instructions here):

• For Corel Draw: hippo.cdr
• As PDF: hippo.pdf
• As GDS (use with PDF): hippo.gsd
• As SVG (e.g. for Inkscape): hippo.svg

If you know this title, congratulations: You seem to be a true scifi geek. If not, don’t feel bad – it’s a rather obscure book by conventional literature standards. You may know the movie that’s based on Roadside picnic, though: Stalker. Still no luck? Ok, this will be a tough sale, but don’t let your mind miss an opportunity to be blown away.

What would happen if aliens visited earth? Now, we all know the stereotypes and Hollywood templates, but what would really happen? Well, it depends on how these aliens view us, what they want from us, why they came. Now imagine they didn’t want anything from us. Imagine that apparently they didn’t even take notice of our existence. That we are so far below their level that they just don’t care.

That is – in a nutshell – the premise of roadside picnic. As one scientist in the book puts it,

Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

The alien visitation left behind six zones filled to the brim with artifacts and reality-defying phenomena. The aliens are nowhere to be seen, and it seems they have left as quickly as they came, after little more than a day. However, what remains is a mess of alien technology that is so far beyond human comprehension that its effects border on the supernatural.

The alien artifacts are by no means harmless, and they effectively render the zones uninhabitable and extremely difficult to navigate. The zones may even contain technology which might lead to global destruction or the extinction of the race. Therefore, access is tightly regulated and only careful scientific expeditions are allowed. At their edge, frontier societies appear comprised of scientists, venturers and the so-called stalkers. Stalkers are people who go into the forbidden zones on their own, against the law. They face great danger, both from law-enforcement and from the zones themselves. However, considering the nature of the artifacts that can be found in the zone, the reward is potentially boundless.

Now, as ‘hard scifi’ as the above sounds, Roadside Picnic is not about technology or aliens or laser weapons. It’s about us humans. The remains of the ‘picnic’ are so out of the ordinary that our only way to cope with them is to do business as usual. In the face of technology lightyears ahead of our own, it’s the same old games of greed, bickering, deception and betrayal. The alien artifacts are taken as found, as weapons, as energy sources, as toys, but any attempt to crack their secrets and learn the why and whereabout of the aliens are thwarted by intrigue and powerplay.

Wikipedia has a nice listing of the artifacts and phenomena encountered in the zone, and even knowing that these lists are figments of the authors’ imagination, they are thrilling enough to keep your mind busy. It’s very interesting how the inhabitants of the frontier city Harmont, for whom they are entirely real, react to them. Basically shrugging their shoulders, they accept them as new facts and integrate them into their daily business, trying to find ways to take advantage of them. No one seems to care about the deeper cosmological implications, or about the fate of humanity in general.

Roadside Picnic is a very pessmistic novel, which basically concludes that Homo sapiens will always stick with his behavioural programs designed for small hordes of cave-dwelling gather-hunterers. Even in the face of something so clearly superior and simultaneously threatening and promising as the visitors, people are still people. This could actually be quite funny, but the novel is very serious about it: In the end, we know nothing, and the fact that we know nothing is owned to our inability to transcend ourselves.

You can actually find the full text of Roadside Picnic online here, in Russian and English side by side.

Roadside Picnic has been written by two brothers, Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky, who are actually quite famous in Russia and among scifi fans in the West. They are remarkable characters, and it’s worthwhile to look into other works by the Strugatsky brothers, as is a trip to their Wikipedia entry.

As I mentioned above, Roadside picnic has been turned into a beautiful and brilliant movie, Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s usually said to be ‘loosely based’ on the novel, which technically it is, but I think it’s an extremely faithful translation of the book’s atmosphere, human dilemma and fatalistic approach of the protagonist into film. So go watch it. Here is the IMDb entry (and don’t let the ridiculous movie poster put you off). Here is the DVD.

Playing with the fusion of Lego^® and paper, I came across a nice way of improving the ubiquitous minifigures. A simple paper layout allows to quickly add new heads, featuring whatever design you come up with. Here is the result:

The underlying design is quite simple and doesn’t require any glue. If you cut it out manually, it’s quite a hassle to get clean shapes, considering the miniature scale of things, but it’s a piece of cake for the Craft Robo:

What you do is, starting with the center, fold down all four flaps, then fold them once more to create a cube. The cube has two holes, one on the top and one on the bottom. Put the head of a minifigure inside the cube, make its stud poke out at the top hole, and put the whole thing onto the ‘neck’ of a minifigure – voila finished head transplant.

Using this basic template, I created five farm animals:

Well, four farm animals and a panda, to be precise. Although the panda tries to blend in, conformist animal that he is…

Cat and panda having a nice after-work chat on their way home to the wife and kids:

And here is the template (see also instructions here):

• For Corel Draw: fivefriends.cdr
• As PDF: fivefriends.pdf
• As GDS (use with PDF): fivefriends.gsd
• As SVG (e.g. for Inkscape): fivefriends.svg

LEGO^® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site

Another movie by Guy Maddin, and equally nonconformist, fascinating, and beautiful as Careful. ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ is a very unique film, and as Careful, it comes with its very own, very unconventional visual language.

It’s the 30ies, shortly before the end of probhition, and everybody is drowning in the global depression. Lady Port-Huntly, the owner of a Canadian beer company from Winnipeg, knows how to seize the opportunity: As soon as the prohibition is gone, millions of American drinkers will return to beer. And what instills the thirst for alcoholics better than melancholy?

The conclusion is obvious: Muskeg beer starts a contest for ‘the saddest music in the world’. Hundreds of musicians from all over the world follow the call, and intend to ‘lay claim to the jewel-studded crown of frozen tears and 25 thousand dollars in prize money. That’s right, 25 thousand depression era dollars.’

However, we are particularly interested in the fate of two brothers, who – due to rather bizarre circumstances – represent the USA and Serbia respectively. While the contest is going on, and we see a variety of musical performances from folklore groups all over the world, it dawns on us that it’s all about – for the lack of a better word – love pentagon, involving the two brothers, their father, Lady Port-Huntly herself and Narcissa.

No use in explaining who Narcissa is – go see the movie. It’s complicated, but Maddin manages to show the simplicity behind the complex, the constants of human desires and trials. And when we are finally ready to suspend our disbelief, to see the sorrow of the protagonists behind the retro style filming, the hilarious stereotypes, he ramps up the parody factor to turn everything into a brilliant, albeit somewhat sarcastic, comedy.

The Saddest Music has been called a ‘musical’, but I think that’s not fair. To me, it is foremost a comedy, transcending a range of categories and styles to tell a simple story about egotism, personal battles, and love. It sure has music in it (duh!), but that music is merely setting the stage. In fact, Maddin ensures that the music is delivered in the least enjoyable – and hilariously comic – way: Two bands from different countries go head-to-head into the musical battle, playing their corny folklore tracks alternatingly and – as the battle nears its climax – simultaneously. Which nicely illustrates the pointlessness of competing for the saddest music in the world.

The winner of each round takes – must in fact take – a slide into a pool of beer. Depression era entertainment at its best. Well, we can be lucky that we can watch the spectacle from the safe distance of the new millenium, or so it seems… if you look closely enough, you will easily recognize the cruel and mindless misanthropic ‘entertainment’ that’s dished out by contemporary media.

The Saddest Music is also a jibe at Maddin’s home town Winnipeg, which, the introductory announcement for the contest states, is the ‘world capital of sorrow’. However, as with many artists in a love-hate relationship with their home town (or country, for that matter), it’s rather obvious that Maddin has a deep affection for Winnipeg and its melancholic and struggling 1930ies denizens.

Great praise deserves the cast: Lady Port-Huntly is played by Isabella Rossellini, and she does a great job conveying both the glamour and the tragedy of her character. The Lady, being an obscenely rich beer baroness admist the poverty of depression-Canada, has a bitter secret of her own. Due to a rather bizarre car accident involving above-mentioned father and son, she has lost both her legs. Now her dearest dream is to be able to walk again, a wish that seems to be fulfilled when she gets two artificial legs – made of glass and filled with Muskeg beer, no less.

If you feel uncomfortable at the thought of a legless woman delightedly praising the clean, sparkly beauty of her new, beer-filled glass legs, you are not the only one.

Ross McMillan plays one of the brothers, Roderick Kent, who has migrated to Serbia where he became ‘Gravillo the Great’. Gravillo  is the prototype of the melancholic, a figure with multiple levels of tragedy woven into his life, so tragic in fact that it’s outrageously funny.

No one has seen Gravillo’s face, as he wears a veil ‘as black as night’ all the time, so as to express the ‘national sadness of Serbia’ over being the cause of the World War I. A clear parody of ‘the man in black’, Johnny Cash, Gravillo is mourning the 9 million dead of the war, but also his dead son, whose heart he always carries with him in a jar.

It’s these little details, executed perfectly by cast and photography, that make this movie so interesting. And make no mistake: The greatest thing about this movie is how entertaining and funny it is.

I tent to be somewhat nervous when a 2003 movie starts black and white, and stays that way almost entirely, with a few colored scenes thrown in. In this case, the effect is not the least bit annoying, and in fact the deliberately low quality of the visuals (mimicking the distorting and field-narrowing effects of early cinematographic techniques) adds to the already powerful atmosphere.

If you want to see an ‘artsy’ independent movie, but want to be thoroughly entertained at the same time, you cannot go wrong with the Saddest Music.

The Saddest Music in the World at the IMDb

Watch The Saddest Music at Amazon

Here is a little something I did for Valentine’s day for my significant other: A paper vase and flower.

The ‘vase’ is made from two pieces of paper, slid into each other, and the flower is a couple of cut-out petal shapes.

Here are the parts:

If you want to make this, here is the template:

As a Corel Draw file

As a GSD file for Craft Robo

As an SVG file