In an attempt to read more broadly I've been doing the reading challenges posted by Good Reads. And by and large it's been going OK. Not every book that I read I like, some books have ended up with one star reviews and some very sharp criticism.
However the most recent challenge irked me. First the description sounds like they thought they were terribly clever but comes across as super fucking cringe; like if you're sat at the pitch table... maybe just don't say anything if the other option is to offer this...
Then there's the books themselves. The books may not have anything wrong with them. I'm not making judgment on their substance. But the thing that got me into reading was judging books by their covers (hear me out, it will make some sort of sense):
I see a book's cover and if I like the look of it I'll read it. I won't read the blurb, I won't even read the introduction, I'll just read the book. This is how I came to read Michael Slade's Head Hunter, Robert Westall's Futuretrack 5, and William Gibson's Neuromancer.
They all had covers that were enticing enough to make me curious about what was inside them. This method has led me to read quite widely, because as the proverb points out, book covers can be quite deceptive.
But these...
They're just shit.
Like, there's a time and a place for pastels... which is after I'm dead and far far from my fucking corpse.
These covers give me fucking nothing. They're bland and indifferent. If they were a spice they'd be flour. There's no art to these covers, no passion. Just fucking words mostly in the same fucking type face with Matisse paper cutout inspired shapes that are screaming Basic Bitch at the top of their fucking lungs.
"Foresight" class S20-332 Advanced Steam Tank Engine no.11513₆ of the South Lymer Railway (the SLYM) on the planet Gymnome, circa 2335 AD. One of hundreds of Foresight-class locomotives built by General Fluidics, this one was built to a 3.04₆ љ narrow gauge. (three and one ninth glip, or roughly 1096mm). It is seen here with its Gymnomi Slime crew, the conductor to the left and the engineer to the right.
More information, drawing process, and alternate liveries under the cut:
More Details on the "Foresight" Class
Advanced Steam Locomotives were the result of a global oil crisis that began on Gymnome in the late 2320s that made Diesel engines first uneconomical, then almost unusable. After a period of bringing museum steam locomotives out of mothballs and modifying existing designs, the Foresight class is among the first "third generation" steam locomotives, designed with modern engineering principles from the ground up.
Advanced Steam engines, including this class, are designed with ease of maintenance and operation as well as high efficiency. The controls are electromechanical with an electronic control stand in the cab, similar to what you'd find in a Diesel, and it can be hooked up to other locomotives as a multiple unit. Some are even equipped for remote control running.
The engine is a compound Mallet, which uses the steam twice in pairs of low pressure and high pressure cylinders to make better use of its expansion. The firebox is a gas producer combustion system which breaks the fuel (either coal or biofuel, stored on a hopper atop the saddle tank) down into gasses, which are then burned at high efficiency. This produces more ash, but much less soot.
The locomotive runs at a high boiler pressure of 25 bar, and uses a superheater, since hotter, higher pressure steam expands more efficiently. However, this produces arguably too much pressure for the locomotive to use given the size of the cylinders. If it could use all of its tractive effort, it would be able to exert a whopping 243 kN of force. In practice, it would wheelslip long before thin. Although the onboard computer would identify and attempt to prevent a wheelslip, it would reduce in a lower throttle setting, which reduces the effective pressure.
Instead, the Foresight's cylinders are deliberately oversized so that it can be run with a higher cutoff, that is, closer to neutral gear. When running near neutral gear, steam is put in the cylinders only briefly during each stroke, which does less work per stroke but more work per unit of steam, therefore making the engine run more efficiently. To facilitate this, the expansion link on the valve gear has been cut short, limiting the cutoff to 30% in either direction, although starting cutoff is nominally 26%, which means it is over twice as efficient as an engine with the same tractive effort but working at full cutoff.
The useful tractive effort is about 60 kN.
Process:
This locomotive's story starts in July 2024, when I drew this image:
💬 5 🔁 24 ❤️ 79 · A mellanoid Advanced Steam tank engine, for use in shunting, industrial shortlines, and branch lines. This particular cla
of a Gymnomi Advanced Steam locomotive based loosely on the Argentinian LVM800 (Modern Steam Locomotive 800) concept by one of the biggest (and most successful) late proponent of steam, L.D. Porta.
My original version of the Gymnomi Advanced Tank Engine took the hopper-shaped covered coal bunker on top, and the basic design of the platforms on front and back, but adapted it to an overkill 0-6-6-0 Mallet design in true Gymnomi articulated loco design fashion. In retrospect I probably should have made it an 0-4-4-0, oh well.
In December 2024 I learned how to use Blender with the help of my friend @msasterisk, and produced this model:
By January that model was used in our new game, Train Puzzle dot exe (title then pending).
MsAsterisk later made this pixel art animation depicting the locomotive scrolling through lovely pixel art scenery based on that found in the original drawing.
And at some point I drew the inside of the cab.
This (quite self indulgent) art was done by placing the engine's game model next to my model of Thomas and tracing the result. It let me refine the look of the engine somewhat and include detail that wouldn't have fit into the game model. It's at this point that the loco gained Southern Valve Gear.
This alternate version was made showing the engine crew characters from the game. I now realize that the characters are grossly under-scale here. (The game's name was briefly Railway Misconductor; it is now Train Misconductor).
During the development process for the most recent milestone version, the resolution was slightly raised, which let me add a little more detail to the basic car frame model, including a 3D modelled truck rather than a box with a photo of wheels on it. But then, the box-with-wheel-drawings original 3D model was looking pretty archaic, so a few days ago the loco was redesigned. This let me fix some proportion issues I was annoyed by, and add a little more detail.
And I liked it so much I raised the game's resolution even more.
That brings us to the drawing at hand:
I started with this render of the new game model of the engine, and traced it, adjusting a few proportions to fit a realistic style and adding lots of detail.
I made heavy use of FireAlpaca's perspective tools. The wheels were done by first drawing two wheels on a circle, and then copying and squishing them to fit the elliptical shape they present to the viewer. The brake pump was given lots more detail, and the dynamo was added (previously I had assumed the dynamo might be hidden away because it's so noisy, but there's not really a good place for it.)
Then came brake rigging, sanding gear, and a blastpipe on the front engine, and the connecting rods, crosshead, and main rod on the engines. Cab detail taken from the old cab view drawing was added as well.
Here's the more or less final line art:
Note the holes in the side of the firebox. These are to let in air above the coal grates, as part of the Gas Producer Combustion System design. (although not the one from the LVM800).
There's also number boards on the headlamps. They were suggested on the previous drawings, but now they have an actual number (11513).
The LVM800 ancestry is a little more visible in this version, with the modified coal hopper roof doors and the sloped cab walls.
Then came the scenery, which was made in layers to replicate aspects of both MsAsterisk's pixel art scene and the original drawing it refers to, as well as a few of the other tree assets currently in game.
It was here where I went to sleep (at 5 AM last night). I got 4 hours of sleep and got back up to finish the drawing, so as you can imagine I'm a little tired as I type this. :P
By 11:30 today the solid colors were done.
And at 1:20 the rendering for the first variant, the clean yellow livery, was done:
Clean and factory fresh! Time to make her TIRED! The SLYM-11513 has only been in use for a few years by this point, but it does dirty work and the maintenance department is too overworked by all the new steam engines (which are harder to maintain than Diesels, even with Advanced Steam) to reliably clean the darned thing.
So the weathering was added, and the loco was finally complete!
But it was still missing one thing:
Can't have a Gymnomi train without a Gymnomi Slime crew!
Finally, some livery variants were prepared, which can be seen here:
There's some more livery variants I want to draw but they would be more complicated to pull off, so they can wait.
Here's some transparent versions
And finally a lineless version. The drawing wasn't designed to be seen this way but it's kind of interesting how close it is to looking good.
What's next for this engine? Well in addition to being part of a very fun shunting puzzle video game, I want to model essentially this drawing in blender, as a future project. Essentially going from traced blender render to high quality drawing back to blender render, but this time with a ton more detail. This would mostly be just a for-fun project, but it's possible I could mod it into other existing train games.
I'm Juan Santapau (he/him), and I make THE SECRET KNOTS, which is a series of short stories in comic form. I live in Chile. Hola.
If you've been on Tumblr for some time maybe you've seen some of these comics: the one about a city of secret names; the one with a misunderstood cryptid; the one about enshittification.
The full web archive is here: The Secret Knots.
If you'd like to support me with a few dollars every month (which helps me enormously to pay bills and keep making art), you can subscribe to my Patreon, where I post updates about every comic in progress and different extras. You can also follow for free and get notifications for new things.
Here’s the Newsletter, where I send reminders about new stories, and miscellaneous art.
I’m on Bsky and Reddit.
Here’s the PDF store, with some E-comics. Finally, here’s an invitation to the Secret Knots Discord, a community server that always brings nice recommendations, and regular sightings of the weird in the world. Feel free to drop by and say hello.
Sidekicks: Super Fun Summer Special #1 (July, 2003)
writer: Joseph Torres (aka J. Torres) | penciller(s): Mike Wieringo & Mike Norton | inker(s): Jason Bone & Mike Norton | letterer: Bryan Lee O'Malley | editor: James Lucas Jones | publishing company: Oni Press
The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).
Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here
A Wikisource entry can be found here.
Mirrors can be found here, here, here, here and here.
Is Bronwen Price AI? Legitimate question. Just finished Gibson's Patten Recognition read by Shelly Frasier and was very comfortable. For whatever reason the rest of that series is not available, and the blue ant editions that cone up when searched for are the Bronwen Price editions. Starting Spook Country and its already fucking horrible; the cadence and pronunciation is off and feels artificial. Apologies to her if she isa real person, but she's no Shelly Frasier, I can say that with confidence.
Fuck me sideways! If she's a professional voice actor she's fucking awful; what fucking direction was she given? I'm going to need to find my paperback copy of this book because I don't think I'm going to be able to make it through this audio book with that fucking voice.
Is Bronwen Price AI? Legitimate question. Just finished Gibson's Patten Recognition read by Shelly Frasier and was very comfortable. For whatever reason the rest of that series is not available, and the blue ant editions that cone up when searched for are the Bronwen Price editions. Starting Spook Country and its already fucking horrible; the cadence and pronunciation is off and feels artificial. Apologies to her if she isa real person, but she's no Shelly Frasier, I can say that with confidence.
