In this third installment of my customized Steampunk Nerf Guns, I decided to delve into a couple of new directions.
The first test was dihydrogen monoxide blasters (commonly known as squirt guns or water pistols).
While browsing around a local mega-mart, I noticed a rather futuristic looking squirt gun that had some nice design lines. Unfortunately, it was also made of orange and clear transparent plastic. So I bought it anyway and decided to cover up the unsightly choice of plastic colors with a new finish.
After a bit of time browsing through my copy of "The Book of Guns and Gunsmithing"by Anthony North and Ian V. Hogg, I decided that the appropriate finish would be inspired by the matchlock dueling pistols from the 18th century.
This, in turn, produced The Duke's Disintegration Ray. Finished in gunmetal, steel and copper finishes with copious amounts of silver gilding.
The second direction was toward the realm of post-apocalyptic "Dieselpunk". On one of my junk store outings, I found another Ruff Stuff Air Blasters Motorized Mech Tommy 20 Dart Blaster.
Since I didn't want to repeat what I had done with The Mad Scientist, I figured I would try something different. While browsing through a copy of For The Boys: The Racy Pin-ups of WWII by Max Allan Collins, I stumbled upon a plane called "The Lady From Hades".
After giving the gun a bit of scarring and battle damage courtesy of a Dremel tool and some sand paper, I finished it in gunmetal, steel, rust, and satin black. For the finishing touches, I added the name to one side of the ammo cannister and 13 bombs to the other side and roughed them up with a bit of sandpaper to give them an aged look. To add to the post-apocalyptic feel, I burned and sun bleached my Victorian newspaper ad to complete the presentation. Thus, The Lady From Hades was complete.
The Duke's Disintegration Ray did alright on eBay. Not great, but alright considering it started as a squirt gun.
The Lady From Hades is currently available for a few more days on eBay. Current bid $26.98.
**UPDATE**
Good News. The Lady from Hades sold on eBay, so I'm currently batting 1000 on custom steampunk weaponry.
Be sure to check out Part 4 and Part 5 of the Customized Steampunk Nerf Guns for more customized Nerf Guns and Dihydrogen Monoxide Blasters.
In a previous post, I mentioned customizing Nerf Guns to give them a "steampunk" appearance. Well, on another trip to the junk store, I picked up a Ruff Stuff Air Blasters Tek 10 for a couple of dollars. So I decided to give it a make-over (honestly anything would look better than the bumble bee-esque coloring that the gun originally came with).
Because of the shape of this gun, I chose a color scheme rather similar to the Nerf Maverick I had customized before.
The Tek 10 was repainted in brass, copper, and satin black with decorative gilded accents on the cocking mechanism and the handle to give it a more regal appearance.
So without any further ado, I'd like to present the latest from Professor Finneas Wiley's Curiosities & Contraptions.
The "Equalizer"
As with the other guns, I have posted it for sale on eBay. When the auction is over, I will update this post with a bit of information on how it went. Feel free to check it out at the link below.
**Update** The Equalizer sold on eBay for a quite a bit more than I expected. The price tripled in the last 2 minutes of the auction which was kind of cool. I didn't get as many watchers or visitors, but it still went well. Maybe I've got something going with this idea.
Be sure to check out Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of the Customized Steampunk Nerf Guns for more customized Nerf Guns and Dihydrogen Monoxide Blasters.
"Wherever there is want, there is your place to supply; wherever ignorance, there is your place to teach; wherever sickness, there is your place to heal; wherever oppression, there is your place to relieve; wherever injustice, there is your place to vindicate; finally, wherever in the battle of life there is need of hands or nerve or brain, there amidst the carnage and desolation in the middle of the sulfurous smoke and the hail of death and the tempest of passion and hate, is your place to stand or fall fighting with your face to the foe." — Professor Harvey Wiley (founder of the FDA)
Today, it seems that nearly every non-alcoholic beverage for sale in America's millions of convenience stores and grocers contains one the following three ingredients:
High fructose corn syrup(HFCS) – a man-made derivative of corn syrup that studies show is linked to obesity, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and may also be carcinogenic
Aspartame – a man-made substitute for sugar accused of being a neurotoxin linked with a number of diseases
Sucralose – another man-made sugar substitute surrounded by just as much controversy as Aspartame
America needs more drink options that don't contain any of these sweeteners. Unfortunately, with the exception of an even fewer number of the already minimal list of drinks without these sweeteners, none offer caffeine as an ingredient. This is bad news for those that can't get going in the morning without a dose of caffeine to wake them up. It's time for a change, and that's where the idea behind "Professor Wiley's Energy Tonic" comes in. It would be an energizing elixir with the same amount of natural caffeine as a cup of drip brewed coffee, 100 mg of panax ginseng, 150 mg of ginkgo biloba, and sweetened with honey (a natural sugar that, unlike the other sweeteners, is actually good for you). The name is inspired by Professor Harvey Washington Wiley, founder of the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration’s original intention was to confront business directly when it strayed beyond the bounds and to ensure that the foods and drugs sold in America were safe and wholesome for consumption. This is something that has become rather lax in the past 15-20 years regarding soft drinks and more recently energy drinks. I am still considering whether the beverage would be sold as a 20 oz. bottled drink or a single serving packet of powder that can be added to a bottle of water. The single serving packet has already been done (sort of) by Morning Spark, but unlike them, the energy tonic will be using powdered honey as a sweetener instead of the aspartame they use. Plus it will be all natural. Every 20 oz. bottle or single serving packet of Professor Wiley’s Energy Tonic would contain the following ingredients:
Purified water - Essential for maintaining proper hydration
Honey(18g) - Contains variable amounts of vitamins B1, B2, C, B6, B5 and B3, a good source of antioxidants, 40% less calories than sugar, when taken with water diffuses into the bloodstream within 7 minutes helping to reduce mental fatigue, helps in the formation of blood cells, aids blood circulation, and when diluted in water helps kill harmful bacteria
Ginkgo Biloba(150mg) - Known to enhance memory and mental alertness, reduce mental fatigue, increase metabolism efficiency, boost oxygen levels to the brain, reduce cholesterol, help prevent damage to the body from free radicals, and improve vision.
Panax Ginseng(100mg) - Known to help strengthen the immune system, help control diabetes, stimulate the mind, increase a general sense of well-being, improve physical performance capacity, and may increase male fertility and help prevent cancer.
Caffeine(100mg) - New research suggests that ingesting 5mg of caffeine per kilogram of weight (1kg = about 2.2lbs) 30-60 minutes before workouts results in longer endurance, faster times, less exertion, less fatigue, and more rapid recovery — up to a 30% increase in each category. Also known to help convert fat to energy 30% more efficiently when taken prior to exercise.
Ester Gum(as a stabilizer)
And would be available in the following flavors:
Ginger - Known to aid digestion, is one of the best herbs for nausea, helps regulate blood sugar, boosts the immune system, naturally increases the body's energy levels, good for maintaining joint health, and increases circulation.
Chicory - An “Old West” style coffee-like root reported to help cleanse the blood and improve the health of your liver.
Sarsaparilla(also spelled Sasparilla or Sarsparilla) - Has held a long history as a health tonic. Sarsaparilla saponins help clear psoriasis endotoxins from the bloodstream.
Mint - Known for its ability to sooth the digestive tract, reduce the severity and length of stomach aches, ease the discomfort associated with irritable bowel syndrome, slow the growth of harmful bacteria and fungi, play a role in the treatment of asthma and many allergy conditions, and even thought to have benefits as an anticancer food.
Orange - Orange rind may be instrumental in lowering cholesterol naturally. It is also rich in fiber and can help regulate your GI tract.
Disclaimer: Statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. None of the ingredients listed are intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
If you would be interested in this product, send me a message of support. If you're on Myspace, feel free to send a friend request to Professor Wiley's Energy Tonic. I’m still in the development stage right now, but hopefully, with a little help, we can get Professor Wiley's Energy Tonic available for manufacture and sale to the general public soon. Like the idea and want to see it made reality? Help fund the research and development by donating to The Idea Can.
Yesterday I was watching a couple of videos on YouTube and found out about a contest that MSN Autos is putting on in conjunction with Dodge to design your dream car (if your dream car was a 2009 Dodge Challenger). They are giving away two brand new 2009 Dodge Challenger R/Ts. One to the entry that the judges select, the other to the people's choice. There are a bunch of other prizes like Microsoft Zune MP3 players, some games for the XBox 360, along with some other junk.
Since I've been on a steampunk kick lately, I figured why not design a steampunk Dodge Challenger. So without any further ado, here's my entry.
The Belle Epoque
***UPDATE***
So I didn't win anything and MSN has since pulled the site down or at least all the cars that were designed (as is evidenced by the blue square above where the design used to sit). Because I don't want my design to totally go to waste, I went ahead and made a 1280x1024 desktop wallpaper out of my design. If you'd care to download it and use it on your computer, feel free. Simply click on the image below and right click to "save as".
In my ongoing fascination with the Neo-Victorian "steampunk" art movement, I have started to become aware of the shear volume of interest there is surrounding the idea. The internet is full of interested individuals, there are a number of newer movies being made that borrow from the same inspirational pool, and a few RPG, COSPLAY, and LARP games that have sprung up in the past few years. Yet, despite this, there is a surprisingly small quantity of "steampunk" styled desktop wallpapers (www.steampunkwallpaper.com seems to have the largest collection I've seen so far). Even fewer still are the number of steampunk cell phone wallpapers (I still haven't found a decent source), and steampunk screen savers are all but nonexistent. This got me thinking. Instead of crawling the internet looking for the previously mentioned graphic imagery, why not create my own?
So the next question became, "Where do I start?" I spent a few hours looking at pictures of watch escapements and clock movements. A few more were spent actually looking at things that were made of brass to get an idea of how the metal reflected light. After this, I began laying out a few designs in Adobe Illustrator CS3. I debated working up 3D gears in Blender, but (since my 3D modeling skills are still a bit lacking) knew that it would take me a supremely long time to model the gears and even longer to wait for the render. After working up some stills, I began to attempt to foolishly animate them in Illustrator as a series of JPEGs that I would then combine into an animated GIF in Adobe Fireworks(big mistake). I figured, "Heck, I've seen a few steampunk wallpapers, but I've never seen an animated steampunk wallpaper. Why not give it a try?"
It was good in theory, but very bad in practice. The file sizes were through the roof (an average of 2MB per still image) and I would need at least 100 frames for the design I was testing to get a continuous loop. It also took my computer (a Dual Core processor and 2GB of RAM) about 5 minutes to save each image after running the processes for all the drop shadows, gaussian blurs, and textures (which meant I'd be looking at 8 hours and 20 minutes of saving plus time to animate the images and compile them together). Needless to say, it would take a long time. None of these things are conducive to an animated GIF that can be shown on anything less than a supercomputer. Who wants to have their desktop wallpaper eat up all their processing power to run itself? I wasn't going to let it stop me though.
I remembered that since Adobe had bought out Macromedia and took over the Flash program, you could pull Adobe Illustrator images into Adobe Flash and manipulate them (since they are both vector based programs). Two hundred and forty frames later (so much for 100), I had a full loop. Adobe Flash is able to publish animations as animated GIFs, so I tried it out. Unfortunately, I hadn't accounted for the extremely limited number of colors that an animated gif is capable of, so all my time trying to get gradients and textures right was lost to a pixelated animation reminiscent of a time when computers could only handle 256 colors. I was going for a "vintage" look, but not that kind of vintage. The file also weighed in at an astounding 6.5MB and ran pretty choppy on my computer. So much for the animated gif idea for now.
So I had a few stills that I saved at various dimensions for computers and smaller versions for common cell phone resolutions and an animation. This is where I realized just how few steampunk screen savers exist. I found one... and you have to pay to use it. Why not turn my animation into a screen saver? With a little looking, I stumbled upon a website(www.flashsaver.org) that allows you to turn SWF files into screen savers for free(which is much better than all the software programs that cost anywhere from $20 to $40 dollars to use). After testing the site out, I now had my first steampunk screen saver complete with matching non-animated wallpaper. I went ahead and began working on a second that would also have a matching non-animated wallpaper. Unfortunately I messed up when I designed it and realized half way through animating, that it would take at least 400-600 frames to get a full loop. So I changed the gears around and worked up a version that only took a little over 100 frames to get a loop. Much better.
So here is the fruit of my labor. Feel free to download and use them on your computer. The files are being hosted at www.mediafire.com, so clicking the links will redirect you to the appropriate page.
Desktop wallpaper:800x600, 1024x768, 1280x800, 1400x1050 Cell Phone wallpaper*:96x65, 101x80, 128x128, 160x128, 174x132, 220x176, 320x240, 400x400 Screen Saver:exe installation file(will resize to your screen size) *To use these, you'll need to download them to your computer and transfer them to your phone via a data cable or MicroSD card or whatever method you use to transfer files from your computer to your phone. I don't know where to begin to set them up to download straight to your phone. Sorry. If you would like a screen resolution different than the ones I've provided feel free to let me know. All comments are welcome.
If you'd like to get an idea of what the screen savers look like, I uploaded a video copy of the Atom Clock Screen Saver to YouTube.com.
As well as a video copy of the Gearworks Screen Saver. The video compression on this one caused a large number of digital artifacts that aren't present in the screen saver itself.
In this third installment of my customized Steampunk Nerf Guns, I decided to delve into a couple of new directions.
