CyborgParrots Blog

Some Nerd who likes Avatar, Miraculous Ladybug, RWBY, Samurai Jack, and Vidya Gaems.

[hoot-alex]

[shiny-eyed-corvid]

colorful things I found on the ground in NYC September-October 2024

favorites from this round: tiny house enamel pin, sea monster toy, glass bead with flowers

[renumuro]

No matter how dangerous the machines were, they had one weak spot—their lack of stealth. They couldn't infiltrate human camps and strike from behind. The robots were quickly identified, no matter how humanoid Skynet tried to make them. But then the T-800 terminators appeared...

[kolibriisme]

[spelldealer]

me in five years when i still don’t have my life together:

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

It's been 5 years.

[meanya]

[worldhistoryfacts]

Goya's the Third of May 1808 can be called the beginning of modern anti-war art.

There’s so much going on in this painting: the anonymous soldiers whose expressions we can’t see, the bloody deaths of the already-executed men, the pleading expression on the face of the man in the white shirt, the man with his head in his hands, unable to bear the awfulness of it all. It adds up to one of the most iconic anti-war statements in art history. As Jackson Arn writes,

The Spanish government officials who hired Goya must have thought they were commissioning a memorialization and, by the same token, a celebration of Spain and Spain alone. What they got instead celebrated nothing and condemned war, no matter who waged it or why. As the Napoleonic Wars faded into history, the painting’s universality became clearer. To 21st-century eyes, the figures in The Third of May don’t seem particularly French or Spanish. It is simple enough to imagine this shadowy, pared-down scene playing out in Germany in 1942, in Chile in 1973, or in Iraq in 2006. Small wonder, then, that artists from around the world continue to turn to Goya when realizing their own anti-war visions.

An Ocean of Pain and Death

Anti-war art from Napoleon to Guernica

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Digital illustrations by Boris Groh

This artist on Instagram

[inkeyjay]

🩸🗡️

This is Iron Fang. Once and obedient guardian, his oath to protect a nobleman, only to receive constant lashes if he didn't comply to his corrupt bidding. Parts of their body replaced, little by little, to make them more lethal. More obedient. More a beast than a human.And like a beast, they tore the hand that fed them off, and now roams the realm seeking to protect those who have yet to grow their fangs.

Yippee! I can finally show you the paladin i did for Book of Devotion by @sleepywyrm_ed. Some leftovers are available right now so if you didn't grab your copy through the kickstarter now's your chance! 🩸

[retroscifiart]

Art by Jean Giraud aka Moebius for Moebius 1: Upon a Star (1987)

[sandmandaddy69]

Moebius

[retroscifiart]

Art by Jean Giraud aka Moebius for Moebius 7: The Goddess (1990)

[moymoimi]

[godzilla-reads]

🦖 An Alphabet of Dinosaurs by Peter Dodson and Wayne D. Barlowe (pub. 1995)

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Whenever I read a dinosaur book, especially one of educational value for kids I feel like I need to put the publication date because the paleontology field is constantly changing with new information. That said, I really enjoyed this children’s book and how fun it was- there were several dinosaurs I had not heard of! Plus there’s a handy pronunciation guide in the back for those tricky names like Quaesitosaurus.

And of course, my favorite member of the dinosaur alphabet was S for Stegosaurus!

[forehead-alien]

Did you know that there is a book based on the 2005 National Geographic documentary Extraterrestrial? Neither did I until last week but now I got a copy of it. It's not a deep worldbuilding exploration akin to Wayne Barlowe's Expedition or Dougal Dixon's Greenworld series, but has fact files on all featured organisms at the end of the book. Other sections include an introduction to astrobiology, the search for alien life, aliens in pop culture and other neat stuff. Definitely worth checking out if you are interested in speculative evolution and a great companion to the tv program.

[retroscifiart]

Art by Wayne D Barlowe ‘Alien Flora’ from In The Stream of the Stars: The Soviet-American Space Art Book (1990)

[frogshunnedshadows]

Humblebrag: I own a copy of this book.

[that-dinopunk-guy]

The Christmas season (really, the whole stretch from November to the beginning of April) is always rough on my depression, but at least today I got another pile of used sci-fi paperbacks in the mail to add to my growing hoard.

These I got because I enjoyed A Plague of Demons so I wanted to check out more of Laumer's work...but mainly because of the Wayne Barlowe covers. (I've also ordered a Barlowe cover copy of Plague, but it hasn't arrived yet.)

I've been meaning to check out the Lensman series for like ever. I went for this set because it had the coolest covers, and won it in a grueling auction. (I think there was only one other bidder. I ended up paying like fifteen bucks.)

Mesklin is a really cool worldbuilding concept, so I got some Hal Clement. This set actually had two different editions of Ocean on Top, so I will be donating the one with the lamer cover to my grandmother's used book store. (I've ended up with a lot of duplicate copies of books to donate, actually...)

I'd never heard of Elizabeth Moon and got these totally on a whim, and now I've gotta get Sporting Chance and Once a Hero to have the complete Familias Regnant series.

I feel like I should probably lay off these purchases for a while after this; they always seem to arrive in huge batches and I'm sure my mail lady is getting sick of having to deal with all those boxes. (I didn't even post the thirty-two other books that came the other day.)

[that-dinopunk-guy]

Back when I was a kid I read Dinosaur World, because A, dinosaurs, and B, cover and illustrations by Wayne Barlowe. It was weird as hell and left me with a lot of questions, but I never got hold of the sequel. Then years later I came across Dinosaur Samurai in my high school's library, which got my attention because A, dinosaurs, B, cover and illustrations by Brian Franczak, and C, samurai. I never read it though, because I didn't know at the time how far into the series it was and I knew I probably wouldn't have any idea what was going on.

Anyway, now I finally have the whole series.

In other eBay paperback news:

I haven't read all of these (though I have read all the Dark Horse comics they were adapted from, aside from Hunter's Planet which was an original story), and the ones I have read I don't recall being very good, and I think the whole "Yautja" lore the AvP books introduced is fucking stupid, but I have a weird nostalgia for '90s franchise tie-in novels, so I got these too.

I need to track down the ones adapted from the Predator comics about Dutch's cop brother, I remember those being a lot more fun.