Back in 1978, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg sat down to brainstorm out the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The whole process was taped, and those taped have now been transcribed into a PDF. At 90 pages long, it isn’t a short read, but its is an intriguing look into how to the movie script came about, and escpecially for those of us who are writers.
The whole PDF can be viewed here.
The first annoucement that is coming out of the changes previously announced is a new blog – Of Dust and Gold. This is a collaborative project between my fiance and I, based on a steampunk setting we are planning to write in.
The website is still in the very early stages of construction, but will be regularly update, wtih a serialised story starting to appear soon, we hope.
Of Dust and Gold centres around an old tramp freighter airship, Aria, and her eccletic crew, as they travel a region modelled on the Colonial Australia gold-rushes, with a steampunk flavour to it. Hence why I found the old gold rush photos so interesting, and relevant.
We hope to give it a really Australian feel, which is somewhat different to most current steampunk.
As someone with a bit of a historical bent, I found the following most fascinating.
In 1951, a collection of 3500 glass plate negatives from the nineteenth century were found. Digitally scanned, they can now be viewed and give glimpsed of what life was like back in 1872 and in the Gold Rush towns of Australia.
They can be viewed here, and a video about them viewed here.
The timing of finding this is rather intriguing, as there is a project I am working on that touches on aspects of this, and one of the characters just happens to be interested in photography, and would be using similar devices as took these photos.
With one week before Doctor Who starts up again, a short prequel to the first episode, The Bells of Saint John, has been released.
The engines used to spend Apollo 11 to the moon have been fond – more than four kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, used private funds to locate then raise the F-1 engines, and hoped they can be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He also maintains they remain the property of NASA
It is great to see such an amazing piece of history rediscovered, and also the philanthropic gesture made by Bezos.
It has been some time since I last properly updated the blog and it really is due. So over the coming weeks I plan to give it an overhaul, updating it and also fixing up links, setting up new pages and various other matters like that.
It is all part of the plan to get marketing back on track – it helps to have a more professional look to the blog. And not just to the blog, but various other odds and ends will be fixed up as well.
March 30 sees the return of The Doctor, with the second half of the current season of Doctor Who
To whet our appetites, a new trailer has been released.
A nostalgic look back for those of who who lived in the 70s and 80s.
From my earliest days, I have always been fascinated with exploration. While that does include physical exploration, it is not the whole of it. I am as much intrigued by the concept of it, the history of it, the future of it.
Lets put this in perspective. There has been talk about the prospects of a manned trip to or colony on Mars. For the later, it is pretty much a one way trip. Chances are you will be there for a minimum of many years. If asked I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes – though my fiancée may have words to me about that.
The prospect of being the first to step anywhere that no one has been before, to boldly go, to explore new worlds and lands, that appeals to me. Whether it be the sailing the seas during the Age of Exploration, or colonising an alien planet, I would have loved to have been there and done it. Sadly it seems I live in a period of time where there isn’t much left to explore – yet. We’ve explored most of Earth and haven’t quite managed to make it to the next step.
It does also influence my gaming choices – I prefer games where exploration and building are at the heart of it, going out into new lands, finding new things nad places. Games like Civisilation, Master of Orion, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect (mostly the first one though), Age of Empires, Total War and ones of a similar ilk.
And it does heavily influence my writing as well. That is largely why I write – so that I can explore strange new worlds, to go places that haven’t been visited before, except in my mind, and to share them with other people. That is what exploration is all about, going new places and sharing what you have discovered. And fantasy and sci-fi are two of the best genres to do that in.
And maybe, someday when I’m old and they have found a way to visit alien planets, I may even get to step foot on somewhere new and see sights no one has seen before me.
When I was in grade six, one of the themes for the year was space. It was a big year for it, as the Voyager probes were off doing fun stuff, with Voyager 2 doing a flyby of Uranus, there was the Challenger disaster, and then of course there was Halley’s Comet.
This was going to be the highlight of the year, with a trip very early one morning to go and see it out away from all the bright lights. I admit to being a bit of a space nerd at the time, with sapce ships and space travel and all that fun stuff a big influence on me. And after hearing all the talk of previous appearances of Halley’s Comet, when it covered half the sky and was visible even in the daytime, I was looking forward to it.
Except it turned out to be a bit of a dud. At best it was a barely visible smudge to the naked eye and only through a telescope could you see it properly. I was rather crushed, given that chances were I wouldn’t be ariund to see its return. Still, I held out hope that one day I would see a spectacular comet blaze across the skies.
It turns out that it may be this year, in what some are dubbing the Year of the Comet. Already we have had two small comets, Lemmon and Pan-STARRS, which were actually both visible together in the southern hemisphere for a short while.
But the big treat is a comet that should make an appearance later in the year, comet ISON. It is a sungrazer, which means that it will fly very close to the sun, but if it survives that, predeictions are that it could be the most spectacular comet to appear in anyoen’s memory, perhaps even to the level of the Great Comet of 1680. We shall once it makes it flyby around the sun, and puts in its expected appearance in in late October or early Novemeber, all the wya through to mid January, 2014. I am remaining cautiously optomistic.
The Great Comet of 1680
And there is talk of another major comet making an appearnace in 2014, comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Springs). It could be another really visual one to see, like ISON, but what makes this one so interesting is that there is a possibilty, small though it is, that it may collide with Mars.
Mist and Shadows 