Spock's Pickled Brain

1. A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs) Former Confederate cavalryman John Carter goes out in search of gold in Arizona, but instead finds something far stranger. While fleeing from an attack from the Apache, Carter stumbles into an ancient cave and is transported to the planet Mars. Adopted by war-like green Martians, Carter eventually gains great rank due to his warrior skills and unnatural strength. But as tribal politics escalate and he befriends a red Martian princess, Carter's feats of survival find new purpose on the face of this strange landscape. There might be some quibbling on this point but to me this is one of the oldest examples of space opera, a series that has warriors, empires, intrigues, and exotic backdrop of an alien world. Edgar Rice Burroughs is more well-known for his creation of the Tarzan series, but his stories from Barsoom are a scifi staple. Burroughs was purposefully emulating the pulp adventure serials of his time, but ended up making the styl...

Strike fear into the hearts of all with a mysterious visage and protect yourself from the elements with a few pieces of armor. As a genre raypunk often uses costume elements that hearken back to ancient civilizations and reincorporate them as functional or decorative pieces. While old-school metal armor is no longer practical, in films like Flash Gordon and Star Wars they reappear, justified as being made from superior materials or inherited from alien cultures. I repainted some dollar store Halloween plastic armor to give it new life in a raypunk adventure. Inspirations Materials -Plastic Halloween armor mask and bracers -Gold spray paint -Clear coat sealer -Leather bracers ( see tutorial ) Tools -Sandpaper 1. Gather the materials The base mask and bracers are a child-size Halloween armor I found at Dollar Tree last Halloween,  a lucky find as they already evoke a sci-fi warrior look. But the paint job was weird, so I used gold metallic spray paint and c...

Space opera and "raypunk" have a lot of overlap, with the most prominent examples being Star Wars and Flash Gordon . But if you're really looking for the penultimate space-based retro-futuristic intrigue-filled masterpiece it is difficult to beat Frank Herbert's Dune . Star Wars and Flash Gordon are campy and largely simplistic, relying heavily on action and spectacle and then making up the web of the universe as they go along. In reverse, the universe of the Dune series is intricate and hard-hitting from the start, thoughtful and deep in the nerdy weeds of science fiction. In fact it boggles my mind that such a cerebral book managed to make it out of the pages and onto the screen. But it has, not once but now heading into three times. 1. The Book Dune was originally published back in 1965, an immediate critical success which earned the first ever Nebula Award for best science fiction novel. As with the best of science fiction, it uses the medium to thoughtfu...

It's a dangerous universe out there, every spacer and astronavigator ought to have a sidearm they can count on. While there is a metric ton of fantastic rayguns people have made, I wanted to see if I could make my own out of common home improvement store materials. A hose nozzle, plumbing and irrigation parts, and a few small details for glitz. And there's a very simple way to make the light-up "pommel", to show the weapon is charged and ready to do some damage. I call this model the Mako, a sleek raygun for a space-faring gunslinger. Materials -Orbit thumb-control hose nozzle -SharkBite Push-to-connect reducer tee 3/4" x 3/4" x 1/2" -2 1/2inch swing pipe coupling -1 regular size marble -1 shooter marble -Small penlight -7/8 inch black rubber leg tip Tools -Hobby knife -Epoxy glue -Metallic gold spray paint -Black spray paint -Gold acrylic paint (optional) -Black acrylic paint (optional) 1. Gather the materials From the hard...

Just so you know, The Loonatic and I have some serious differences in how we think about raypunk, despite the fact that we agree on many of the movies and books that we consider raypunk. This post is a discussion of how I think about raypunk, including a little information about many of the movies that I think epitomize the aesthetic. The Loonatic has a more in depth discussion of the individual merit of some of these movies. Okay, so my aesthetic sense of raypunk comes from two inter-related but still somewhat unique themes. The first theme comes from, of course, the seminal 1950's science fiction greats, like Forbidden Planet and Cat-Women of the Moon . Like the superhero comics of the day, these movies rely on bright colors and clean, geometric shapes to convey sleek futuristic scenes. In general, morality was fairly simple in these movies. However, the plots often chose to tell stories of exploration, wonder, and sometimes tragedy, rather than simple good versus evil confron...