Four Favorite Robots: Ruby Tenneco

1. Ultron: he is permanently angry at his annoying dad, Ant Man.


2. Mechagodzilla: he is like Godzilla, but more mecha.


3. Robocon: he wants to be helpful but dishonors his family. Mr. Pony told me about him. I think he is Moby's great-great-grandfather.


4. Data: he is sensitive and shy.

Four Favorite Robots: Mr. Pony

@HumanHand, an Internet friend, asked me to name my five most interesting robots. Of course, this was in the context of me blathering on about dancing like a robot, but this fact is unimportant to the discussion. Vowing to take this question seriously, I have taken it seriously; and given our communal love of robots, this seemed the proper forum in which to take it seriously. I have reduced the number to four, to make the challenge more challenging to conceptualize, and less challenging to execute (drawing is hard).

X-51 (Machine Man; Aaron Stack)
In the beginning, X-51 spent his entire day agonizing over his humanity, never realizing that all this whining made him more even more human than the weird, flat characters with which he shared his comic book. As goofy as this endless soul-searching was, it begs certain questions. How could X-51 miss his own humanity all those years? Could it be that the mind is an imperfect tool for understanding its own workings? And if machines can ask if they have humanity, then don't they? (And if that's the case, why don't AI scientists just make a machine that speaks the question "Do I have a soul" and call it a day?)

Mouse Droid
Found aboard the Death Star. I cannot figure out, for the life of me, what these damn things do. They don't carry information— The Death Star has an internal comm system and intranet capable of displaying images and other complex readouts. You see Stormtroopers following them in one scene, but wouldn't an object designed to be followed be a little more, I don't know; visible? The only thing I can think of is that maybe they're like little Roombas, cleaning and polishing the shiny Death Star floors. I wonder what they're saying, with all those squeaks and squirts.


Shockwave
Near as I can tell, Shockwave just sat on Cybertron, talking to Megatron on the telephone. Once in a while he would open a space bridge, or something. He was support staff. He could also turn into a giant ray-gun pistol. The fact that he was apparently all alone in his office, and maybe his whole office building, and possibly his entire planet (it was really never clear to me if there was anyone else on Cybertron); with no one to hold the ray-gun he turned into; makes him an especially melancholy figure. At the end of the day, who did he have to go for drinks with? No one, that's who. I bet the time difference was murder, too. I bet when Megatron called, he was super-happy.


Moby
Yeah. Kinda partial to this guy.

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Please, Community--submit your own Four Most Interesting Robots! As you can see from the tweet, these robots can inexplicably not include Bender from Futurama or the Robot from Lost in Space. For more information on any of these robots, fricking Google them.

The Hell is Dwarf Fortress?

Here's what happened to one guy.

How Incentives Motivate (and How They Don't); Drawn (via @Viil)

From Dan Pink's talk on his book "Drive", at the RSA. I think this was a TED talk, too. I find this breathtaking for a couple of reasons, which will become apparent when you take the time to watch it. Not sure these principals can be applied everywhere, but it's great to keep in mind that there are places where this model works. Also, the real-time drawing is kinda perfect. (I wish I'd thought to add a temporal dimension to my failed Pho Recipe Drawing.)

More of these awesome real-time drawings/talks here.

Via @Viil.

Iron Man and the Finch, Locked in an Eternal Struggle

Manticores are apparently Awesome.

I'm not exactly sure how this occurred other than it just being publicly available, but one of my pictures seems to be awesome. I don't know what this will mean for future generations. But I got a note in my flickr inbox telling me I had been nominated for an "awesome-off" i don't think there's a prize or anything, other than the satisfaction of knowing that you can be awesome.

For the reader's information, this drawing was a conceptual sketch for a photographic tableau piece I made back in late 2001. It never really saw the light of day, and the show it was featured in was a met with mixed reviews and almost zero attendance. It was considered "too dark" for the times we were occupying. Who knows. maybe the Manticore will have a renaissance after all.
Here is an excerpt from a much huger photograph. (We are talking like 14 feet long.)

Manticores will always hold a special place in my heart. But so will so many other monsters.

Uncanny X-Men 164

Uncanny X-Men 163

Secret City

I may have learned to draw by tracing comics, but Commander Mark made me the master-drawer I am today.



The guy was actually pretty great. He dealt out a lot of fairly advanced drawing concepts, but he did it a little at a time, so you never got lost. He'd show the occasional art history slide (accompanied here by the music right after the opening cutscene from a Super-Nintendo shooter), along with the occasional weird-ass plot point (4:55).

More here.