Miniatures: The Finished Goristro

Unfortunately, all I have to use is my crappy cell camera. Nonetheless, below is a picture of the finished Goristro. I plan on using him (CR 17 monster) to scare the shit out of my cocky (lvl 5) gaming group. Also, enjoy my facial expression in the background.

Miniatures: The Goristro

So, this time around I'm going to kind of walk you through one of my miniature mods/repaints. This is the Goristro, a Demon on a huge (a.k.a. 3") base. Problems with the original miniature (bottom picture) which became apparent immediately are its odd, leaning posture; the horrible nose (which I can't find a decent picture of); and the dull spikes and horns. I managed to fix these problems with liberal applications of green stuff, adding some details in
while I was at it, e.g. the base, the skull on the chain (not very visible), tongue, and sharpened canines.
Next post will have the finished, painted pictures of the Goristro.

Read the first letter of every line... And, no, you didn't lose the game.

Clearly, some of you are actually reading my posts, so I'll elaborate more. Much
like other pen & paper RPGs, you can use miniatures with D&D. Personally,
I prefer using terrain and miniatures to help represent the environment, especially for
combat. As for the novel, some further discussion of mimesis is necessary. (Don't
kill me for the boring nature of my post, please, folks.)
So, mimesis is the theoretical perception of art as an imitation of a topic, as well as the
process of that actual imitation or representation. It's relevance to eroticism in
Longus is that the author seems to indicate that he believes sex to be the representation
of love in a physical medium. Also, um...
xylophone.

Some assorted notes.

Firstly: I shall answer the questions posed in the comments from the last post. Those are D&D miniatures, and I did in fact paint them myself. I don't sell them frequently, as I typically do them for relaxation or my campaign. I've done commissions in the past, as doing custom miniatures is really the only way to guarantee that somebody wants to buy the durned thing.

Secondly: Does anybody know how to disable to damned Captcha? I hate those things, and so do you, so help me out here. Edit: Fixed. Thanks, folks!

Finally: I'm reading Daphnis & Chloe, the Hellenistic novel by Longus. (I'm reading it in the original 2nd century Greek, as this is my field of study.) Whilst reading, it became evident that two of the themes which permeate the novel most fully are mimesis -most familiar to all of you via Dawkins' appropriation of the word in creating 'meme', just as 'genesis' is the root of 'gene'- and eroticism. The idea I'm now exploring is that sex (at least to the Greeks) is a mimetic representation of love (eros) in a physical medium. Thoughts? The inputs of those majoring in anthropology, sociology, ancient studies, psychology, or cognition would be especially valuable.

Miniatures, Part II

Since people seemed to like the last installment, I shall continue. Those last two miniatures were (from left to right) a Cerebrilith and a Tsucora Quori. A little background about DDM (as enthusiasts refer to Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures): They are plastic and come prepainted. For example, the last two miniatures, before I repainted them, looked as those on the right do. And now, for three more of my (re)paint-jobs, below, with the original miniature, above them.

Miniatures

I paint some Dungeons & Dragons miniatures. Here are two of mine which I did a long time ago. Anybody else paint or build models? It's sort of dying hobby, nowadays.

Captchas...

...My last two were stfuncle and shiparse. Erm...

Science Fiction

So, I've been making my way through science fiction movies I've never gotten around too. Pandorum, Equilibrium, Silent Running, and Sunshine. To make a long story short, the champion of these was, with ease, Sunshine. It was, in all respects, well-crafted. The cinematography was fantastic, with some innovative features which would seem more suited to an art film than a major motion picture (but which nonetheless mesh well with the movie in general). I'm curious if any of y'all have seen it, and what you think.

Textual Resonance

Texts resonate within their cultural sphere; a fairly obvious point in and of itself, but one with greater implications. Textual resonance is the source of allusion, and to a more removed degree, symbolism and metaphor. The interesting part comes when you study different types of resonance.
Let's take, for examples, two comedic shows: Robot Chicken and Arrested Development. Both shows (which I am including, in a rather loose sense, as texts) resonate within their cultural spheres, and to a degree, are defined by the various norms and expectations within the confines of which they are created (if only so that comedic convention may defy them). Both shows are also utterly hilarious. However, the resemblence stops there.
Robot Chicken is externally resonant. It is a sponge, which soaks up external references, and creates amusing parodic twists. Its humor -to use a metaphor I am very fond of- hyperlinks out to other texts. In other words, if you don't get the reference, you won't get the joke. How do you get the reference? Expose yourself to the media and texts which are not defined within the show, except as parody.
Arrested Development chooses the opposite tactic. It sets up a web of internal references, and so becomes its own microcosm of culture. In other words, a human being understanding only the vaguest conventions of Western civilization would eventually find A.D. amusing, as they accustomed themselves to the internally resonant references.

Italian War Propaganda

Oddly enough, it seems as if the perception of Americans as boorish and arrogant is not a product of the modern world; Italy used the idea for much of its propaganda during the second world war (along with a healthy dose of racism). e.g.:

The Obsolescence of Memory: Mnemonics in the Age of Google

We live in an age of quantification of ideas.
From the scribbles in Lascaux, to the zealous scribes of Alexandria and throughout the entirety of our halting march of progress, mankind has sought to immortalize itself through memorabilia. Some attempts are ultimately more successful than others; while the humble graffiti of early man lurked safely in a French grotto, the ambitious library of Egypt was a towering success – and then a towering inferno. Finally, however, we have ensconced the sum of our knowledge in an ultimate repository: one measured in bytes.
What, then, is the quantifiable sum of our magnum opus? We can dimly comprehend vast quantities of dollars and time and space, but mankind is unable to measure its ideas with a unit relevant to the referent. We know of the byte and the gigabyte, but we have no ratio of bytes to ideas. Nonetheless, our collective knowledge has been uploaded and quantified, and it weighs in at approximately 487 billion gigabytes.
That’s 487,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of ideas; the contributions of countless human brains, and a pool of ideas too deep to plumb. The result of this ineffable and overwhelming archive is our increasingly bipartite intellect, in which memory is externalized technologically, and synaptic connections are still made within the organic brain. If we were to evaluate humanity in the same way that we compare computers, we would say that computers (and the internet) store and enable access to read-only memory (ROM) far more efficiently than a human brain does. However, our squishy cerebrum is still largely superior in relation to random-access memory (RAM) and processing capabilities.
Our brain may lose bragging rights soon enough, though. Technology (in case you’ve missed this) is advancing very quickly. Very, very quickly. To say that the progress of human technology will outstrip that of its creators is like saying that the progress of a Ferrari will outstrip a tortoise with a head start. Evolution is a God slow to change His creations, while mankind is a tinkering deity, constantly improving its progeny until they will eventually surpass mankind’s ability to improve them any further. If this seems dubious, remind yourself how handmade electronics compare in quality to those made by machine.
To put it bluntly, if we were to chart humanity’s progress in the cognitive facets established above – namely, capacity to store and access data, and ability to draw meaningful conclusions thenceforth – throughout the past century, we would have two remarkably horizontal lines. Boys and girls, this won’t be changing in the near future. On the other hand, the same lines for technology could easily be mistaken for a Space Shuttle launch trajectory. Barring a sudden and widespread mutation, or a luddite revolution, mankind may soon no longer be the dominant species of Earth.
Ideally, a sort of symbiotic relationship will result; the subservient nature of mechanisms will remain, and mankind will not become so enamored of its tools that indolence and dependence will lead to the sort of techno-apocalypse that James Cameron seems to fear so sincerely. Alternatively, this may indeed occur, and evolution’s steel and plastic darlings will inherit the Earth.
We cannot beat technology, so (as the old maxim goes) we will most likely join them. As strange as it may seem, the cybernetic union of digital memory and biological computing may very well be the next step in human evolution, as natural as the selection of the apes who used tools over those who didn’t. The implications of this brave new symbiotic world, I do not know. However, until that world arrives, I shall internalize as much data as I possibly can; while the brain is compatible with the meme format, it does not yet accept bytes.