The Ministry of Plenty

More buildings. This one is considerably larger than the others, but took less time. I’m slowly getting the hang of this.

Finished another building today, you can see a spinning version if you have a webGL compatible browser (Chrome, Firefox with a recent graphics card driver), otherwise you’ll have to make do with a static view.

dresdencodak:

jessfink:

Portrait artist: Micah Johnson

While outside the scope of comics, since this was posted by my fellow cartoonist (and also well within the confines of my own comic’s subjects), I thought I’d give it a reblog.

There is a reason that science and religion frequently butt heads, and it deals with the nature of understanding.  From a sociological and historical standpoint, the primary function of a religion is to provide cultural cohesion, so some wonder why it would ever “need” to conflict with science.  The issue only arises because religion achieves that cohesion through empirical claims (by this I mean claims about the nature of the world).  Whether those claims are “a god created the world” or “the Earth is the center of the universe,” it doesn’t really matter, it’s all in a realm that it empirically testable. Science, while constructed to deal with a different end of the human experience, does overlap in this empirical realm, and so there arises a conflict.

While individuals can exhibit personal and cultural bias, science, as an institution, produces knowledge that is independent of any particular culture, and so potentially places itself at odds with anything that relies on empirical claims.  If your worldview and personal values are tied to, say, the Sun being made mostly of iron, you’re not going to take kindly to evidence to the contrary.

This is why religion is at its core incompatible with the continued expanse of human knowledge (science).  Understanding new things about the world, in the lens of religious thinking, is not required and is almost always limited in some way.  Even the most progressive or benign religions ultimately place some limitation on “what we can know.” They have to, because every religion still has physical or metaphysical claims about existence.  If they didn’t, they’d just be philosophies.

This is what Professor Dawkins is addressing, that what actually unifies all religion is that they all share some point where the furthering of understanding must end.  And, for him (and many of us), this is inacceptable.

Been doing some experiments with modelling and texturing.

korybing:

I’ve gotten a lot (note: more than four) questions asking how much I’m going to be selling P-Body hoodies for and I guess I need to clarify that I’m not selling them for anything because I’m only making one! It’s more of a “hoodie costume” than anything.

Even if I could figure out a way to mass-produce them in a way that doesn’t look like they were made with fabric paint while we watched Howl’s Moving Castle and gossiped about the internet, we wouldn’t sell them! We don’t own the rights to P-Body and ATLAS and selling merch based off of them is not only immoral, but illegal!

I know a lot of people make money off fanart at conventions, and a lot of companies don’t care that you’re selling Pikachu shrinky-dinks, but it’s still immoral! People aren’t buying your merchandise because they like YOU, they’re buying it because OH, A THING I RECOGNIZE. It’s easy money, but it’s dirty money.

A lot of big companies don’t care, and a lot of people can make a living that way, but I will not be one of those people. The same laws that protect me from people creating and selling bootleg Skin Deep merchandise are the same laws that protect big nameless corporations from the same thing. Just because they might not care or might not catch you doesn’t mean that it’s not stil immoral to do! It’s a matter of principles, I suppose.

(Source: korybing)

Trying out a new colouring technique.

I get bored sometimes. Other times my hands draw things. This time, Aesil showed us his internal organs. Sans heart, or arms, or legs, or stuff I’m not entirely sure where it is.

Harold is my rather belayed attempt at a character for sfemonster’s ( @sfemonster ) Emilio Orion project.

Harold is a fifty three year old fusion reactor engineer from a small asteroid settlement somewhere inside Acchi space. Harold is also mostly replacement parts, something I’ll get on to in a minute. He is the main reactor technician onboard the Emilio Orion, and hence is in charge of supplying the ship and its three antimatter catalysed fusion engines with the insane quantity of power they require. He lives in a small set of quarters nestled between the three reactor cores down in the engineering decks, oddly enough in zero-gee. He calls the three reactors his daughters and gets angry when anyone but the other technicians even enter the outer containment shell.

His personal appearance is due to his habit of being the last person out of a damaged ship. About ten years prior to working on the Emilio Orion he worked on a ship called The Good Statesman. The ship was caught in an ion storm and suffered severe damage, all the worse due to a general reactor containment failure. Harold was in the engine room at the time and suffered severe wounds to almost all of his body, lost his right arm and left leg, his index and little finger of his left hand and his right eye. However, his actions probably saved most of the crew. Afterwards, he chose to forgo extensive (and expensive) skin grafts and settled with the bare minimum to let him heal. This explains the good engineers odd skin tone.

He wears the standard ship-suit, a modified pair of trousers, a personal gravity modulator (pilfered from a hoverboard) for when he ventures from the engineering deck and his mask (which is made from a material that only lets light through one way). He has a multifunction arm (which has several functional attachments, ranging from hands to blowtorches) but no prosthetic leg. This is down to a preference for zero gee, and the fact that you’re better off calling the captain on her smoking on ship than trying to force Harold to spend money.

Harold is unsurprisingly single and displays no real regard for anything organic. He likes playing go and sitting in a space suit watching the stars go by. Since the ‘accident’ he has taken to rebuilding the destroyed second reactor by hand whilst he waits for the replacement to be delivered. It is currently sitting in one of the cargo pods, which Harold paid for in cash. God know where the money came from.