Crafts: Millennium Falcon Cockpit

"Millennium Falcon Cockpit Playhouse" by Kyle Gilbert

Via: Make

Do you ever find yourself jealous of someone else's childhood?  Cuz that's what I'm experiencing right now.  This stupendous Millennium Falcon Cockpit Playhouse is the work of Instructables contributor and super awesome dad Kyle Gilbert, who built it for his two Star Wars-loving kids.

"My kids love Star Wars, and pretty much every day they end up walking around the house with blasters and lightsabers as they fight off the bad guys. Since I was ready for a new project and because the new Star Wars movie is getting closer every day, I decided it would be fun to build the kids a Millennium Falcon Playhouse."

Gilbert built this geektastic playhouse over the course of ten days. It’s made of PVC board, MDF, glue, bondo, paint, and a variety of cleverly repurposed odds and ends for the dashboard.

Visit the Millennium Falcon Cockpit Playhouse Instructables page to learn exactly how this little bucket of bolts was made.

Props: 3D Printed Spider-Man Mask

3D Printed Spider-Man Mask by Costume designer Yuri Schuurkes

Face Shell available for purchase from Shapeways. US$184.93

Last week, 3DPrint ran a great story about a rather novel application of 3D printing for cosplay. As you can see, he was clearly trying to recreate Toby McGuire's 2002 costume, and he did a very credible job.

Costume designer Yuri Schuurkes has spent years perfecting his Spider-Man costume from scratch, but as any cosplayer who has ever pulled a piece of spandex over their face can tell you, capturing a credible facial silhouette is difficult to say the least.  (Spandex tends to do some really ridiculous-looking things when pulled tight over the human body.)  Schuurkes finally sought out the advice of a professional 3D designer to print the perfect Spidey mask.

Humor: Wizard of Oz

"Wizard of Oz" by John Martinez of ToonHole

Batman invades Oz and mercilessly takes down the Scarecrow. 

Gaming Round-Up: August 10, 2015

"Master Chief" by Jude Smith

After 30 Years of Being a Dude, There's No Reason Link Shouldn’t Be a Lady argues Vice's Nick Gillham.  I disagree completely.  After thirty years, Zelda just deserves her own damned game.  Yes, the franchise could do with a female lead, but Zelda's earned that role about twenty times over.  I think a game that begins with Link NOT returning from a quest would be a power reboot for the series.

Errant Signal’s Chris Franklin dissects The Magic Circle, describing it as being less “a game about games” and more “a game about game developers,” and in particular how its thematic through-line of challenging designer constraints is undercut by the game’s post-story ‘build mode.’

If you can’t decipher fighting game tournament EVO in real-time, Patrick Miller offers a bit of an introduction in which he breaks down the top 8 lessons from the tournament. It’s heavy in detail both in terms of the game’s mechanics and the scene.

In the best bit of data porn posted this week, Rob Lockhart looks at game names from a dataset including nearly 150,000 games. What are the most common title words, subtitles, in general, per year or per platform? The most generic PC game title would be War World Online: Wars Star Dark Game – Space Battle Simulator.

Comic Round-Up: August 10, 2015

Storm by Tommy Lee Edwards

Interview: Eisner Winner Jorge Corona on GONERS

Interview: Tamil filmmaker J.S. Nandhini talks about the difficulties she encountered in making what may be the first digital graphic novel in Tamil, The Girl with a Red Nose Ring, and why she chose to make a comic rather than a movie.

News: BookScan’s Top 20 graphic novels sold in bookstores in July has a decidedly different makeup than usual, with the 1988 one-shot Batman: The Killing Joke topping the list.

News: ComicsAlliance calls for a boycott of—or at least a break from—Marvel Comics.

7 graphic novels to get lost in this fall

13 Horror Comics and Graphic Novels You Need to be Reading in 2015

Fantastic Four Movie: Marvel Universe Easter Eggs and Comic References Guide

A female protagonist from a kangaroo-like species where women are forbidden to read and write… tell us more, Threadworlds!

Matt Krantz explains the basics of buying comics as an investment — what to look for, how grading works, even how much of a commission the auction houses take.

Rob Salkowitz takes a birds-eye view of the recent conversations about diversity 

Roger Cohen writes about the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, which is now flush with cash thanks to popular support after the murders of 12 people during a staff meeting in January.

Spider-Man Fight Scene in CIVIL WAR Is Described as "Profoundly Dorky"

Ultimate X-Men to Young Wolverine: 5 ways Fox could make a good Marvel TV series

What the failure to cover Attack on Titan says about the comics industry.

Why Fantastic Four is bad for comics fans

Link Round-Up: August 10, 2015

"Darth Maul" by Chile-based Carlos Valenzuela

Alex Ross picks the Top 10 Alex Ross paintings by Alex Ross!

How beauty and wardrobe humanize the robots in Ex Machina and AMC’s Humans.

It is so hot, we would take any pop culture character as popsicles… but Adventure Time is a great place to start.

Just one awesome example of Star Trek‘s dedication to diversity.

This Star Trek parody is painful, but, maybe in the good way? How can we ever truly know the difference between “good” and “evil”?

"What is significant about fan fiction is that it often spins the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell, because fanficcers often come from a different demographic. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that they are being reinterpreted by the wrong sorts of fans - women, people of colour, queer kids, horny teenagers, people who are not professional writers, people who actually care about continuity (sorry). The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly."

- Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase by Laurie Penny

Announcement: Summer Hiatus Over!

"Most Complicated Board Game Ever" by Rhett & Link

Oh, look. Someone's already invented my game.

Dear Valued Readers,

I'm back to the grind!  Thanks for not going anywhere.  Over the course of the next week, I'll be ramping back up to my normal posting schedule.

As you might remember, I took a month off from posting to work on a board game design that I hoped to launch on KickStarter later this year.

Designing a board turned out to be a lot harder than I expected, but not for the reasons I expected.

I thought the most difficult part of designing an actual product would be the business logistics: how it would cost to print a game, how I would raise funds for the initial printing, where I would distribute the game from in order to minimize postage costs, etc.  It turns out, the real challenge was my own runaway exceptions.