...And I'll Form the Head!

Venom's head, like his body, is larger than a human's, with an exaggerated, over-sized mouth. To create this head, I plan to incorporate a baseball cap (as the upper half of the mouth and a custom made jaw made of a metal coat hanger that hangs from the cap, forms the outline of the jawline and serves as an infrastructure for the jaw.

This image (Created by Andre Holzmeister) is what inspired me to go with a baseball cap-based mask. Note the baseball cap brim-shaped upper mouth. If you fill out the area above the brim a bit, and cover the entire thing with black, shiny fabric, you have half of Venom's head. (Well, you'd want to add the eyes, too.)

I don't know how well you can tell in this sketch, but I quickly sketched out a form-up of that idea, and I think it could turn out quite nicely.



The tongue is an interesting challenge. My first thought was to use (part of) a rubber snake. Find a rubber snake tail that had a good curve to it, paint it appropriately and you're done. Surprisingly, sourcing a decent rubber snake (considering size, curve and reasonable cost) proved to be a bit difficult. I am considering other possibilities, such as making one out of fabric and painting it with black vinyl paint, but I've not yet got a single solution that I am dead-set on. We'll have to see how things turn out, I suppose.

Almost Halloween...

So, it's almost that time again. Time to put together a costume for Halloween. Last year, I put together a fairly decent Daft Punk costume, in what I decided to term "80%" fashion. That is, I try to rough in the idea and get it to a good looking, recognizable appearance, without worrying about 100% accuracy. For example, my Daft Punk costume consisted of a leather jacket, pleather pants, leather gloves with metallic duct tape appliqués to approximate the robotic-looking gloves and a tinted motorcycle helmet painted silver, rather than mocking up a helmet that is exactly the same shape as the original thing. I also attached an LED scrolling message belt buckle from ThinkGeek to the inside, so I even had scrolling messages. The overall look worked really well, and took a lot less effort than if I had built up the helmet from scratch.

This year, I've decided to take a similar approach to a costume I've wanted to try for a while: Venom. I kicked around the idea of making this costume before Spider-Man 3, so I'm not trying to replicate the Venom from the movie. I'm more interested in the somewhat amorphous, hulking "Eddie Brock" Venom from the good - ole days of Marvel. However, I'm willing to draw inspiration from, well, pretty much anywhere, so I'm looking at the old comics, Spider-Man 3, anything I can see from the upcoming Venom movie, as well as other universes and even fan pics online.

As I see it, there are a few targets to hit with the 80% Venom goal, here:

1) A mouth full of teeth. Venom has a disfigured, over-sized maw full of mismatched horror-teeth - think shark, crocodile, canines... very primal.

2) Hulking size, musculature. I will need to build upward and outward from my own physique, making a "muscle suit" of sorts. I will need to especially build up chest, shoulders, back, arms and calves.

3) Tongue. Venom has a long, nasty, prehensile tongue. We're talking 2-3 feet of nastiness here. Bonus points if I can get it animated. Toying with different ideas on that one.

4) Black, shiny coloration. I am planning to build up the costume with whatever I can find laying around, then skin it with something cheap (probably muslin fabric), and then, finally, coat the outside with shiny black vinyl paint. I am toying around with the idea of doing some sort of hex-like or muscle striation pattern on top of the paint, but that will be one of those "if I finish this thing and find myself bored with lots of extra time on my hands" things. Basically, not likely to be done.

5) Claws. Venom has large, pointy claws. I plan to modify some gloves for this purpose, but I'll have to remove them to get any work done.

6) Feet. Actually, one thing that will be difficult to accomplish is some decent Venom feet. There's not a lot of detail, just large, muscular feet, but since footware is typically more detailed than that, it's going to be interesting trying to get the right look. I've considered cloth over boots, but if it covers the bottom, you lose all of your grip and you will tear up the cloth pretty quickly.


Also, it's probably worth noting that the above list is a list of major items in order of importance. If I can't solve the feet problem, most people would probably forgive simple black boots without a second thought. If I can't get to the claws, black gloves would suffice. The teeth, the tongue... those are pivotal. The shiny black will help to sell the look. Mind you, not everything is listed above; this isn't a checklist of everything to do. I would have to use some shiny white vinyl paint for the spider emblem and eyes, as well as some red for the tongue and mouth, but that's sort of assumed to be part of the other parts.

This is the costume I plan to wear to work for the costume contest on October 29th, as well as while helping to run the ACM programming competition at LSU on the 30th. Who knows, if it goes well, perhaps I'll find some party or competition to go to for the 31st.

Blatherings about Life the Universe and Everything.

No, I'm not talking about the book, Life, the Universe and Everything.

The following is a quickly-jotted-down stream of consciousness-esque series of thoughts I had, cleaned up and presented here for your bemusement. I actually jotted this down some time ago, and just recently found this while cleaning up some drafts in my blog... Enjoy!

...Okay, so we know that light is a wave and a particle. Or, if you prefer, a wave-particle... appropriately traveling through what we consider space-time. Named thusly, because we are more familiar with "space" 3-dimensions, and we simply lob in a fourth, which we call time. However, if you ask someone what the three dimensions are, they would respond something to the effect of length, width and height... which are all simply scalar distance measurements. And, depending on your choice of origin and orientation, those three could be anything, so long as they are "normal" to each other. Length could be width or height, and the others rotate appropriately to suit. Simply turning an object in your hands and considering what its "height" is will reveal the very definition to be very weak and backwards-thinking. How can we hope to uncover the science behind the creation of a universe when we measure reality and all of existence with relation to the gravitational center of our planet of birth ...or any single planet for that matter? If height is "up" and up is "away from down" and down is the direction that things fall when dropped on Earth, then our definitions are waaay too "preschool" to approach the task.

So, given that we are looking at some arbitrary distance (we'll call length, in this case), if we take an object and dissect it perfectly (impossible, but that's another story), then we end up with twice the number of objects, each with half the length - voila! ...preservation of matter (or, more technically, matter-duration, in space-time). These two objects can occupy the same space, much like cars in parking lots do... by taking turns. They can't occupy the same space at the same time. They, likewise, can occupy the same time. This is, in fact, totally normal and expected, in our point of view. You would be quite shocked to find that if you cut an object in half one half disappeared and would only reappear at the disappearance of the other half. However, we have already illustrated above that one axis is no different from another axis and, in fact, objects can be rotated such that their lengths can swing around to become their widths, with other axes following suit. This poses some interesting questions...

First, quarks. We can observe a quark existing in two places at the same time and then apparently disappearing from existence. Can we move quarks? If so, is it possible to move two "of the same quark" into the SAME 3D space? I wonder if this would be possible at all. Much like the familiar objective behavior of normally observed objects occupying the same space, but at different times, given an axial rotation, it may be impossible for the same quark to occupy different times at the same space. Moving on...

Quarks have been observed to rotate in opposite directions to each other. We see similar behavior when we wave at ourselves in a mirror. Or when an image is flipped in a camera. This observed phenomena is resultant of optics - lens effects. Could there be something in nature that acts as a "matter-duration" lens, not of light, but of quarks, causing a "reflection" effect on the quark, so that the spins are actually identical (As would be necessary if it is the same quark), but the space-time orientation of the quark is adjusted by this lens effect?

If items could occupy the same space-time location-moments, then the only mathematical description that could isolate these object-instances would be mass. Mathematically speaking, however, this would present an "n-paradox", where we could agree that there is a given number of instances coexisting, and the amount of mass ascribed to each instance would have to be identical, lacking any way of specifying one from the other. It follows that any number of possibilities would be equally true, so long as the number (n) of assumed instances times the assumed mass of a given instance equals the total mass occupying that specific location-moment. This should hold true right on up to a single object in space-time being recognized as an infinite number of instances with infinitely small mass. If you could focus on a single instance, moving one would be infinitely easy. Should we assume that the others, being instances which are bound in space-time would move with them?

...A question best left to the Jedi, that is...

Astromech Gallery - Astromech.net

About, say twenty or thirty years ago, computers were in an infantile 'hobbyist' stage; "Getting a computer" meant buying a motherboard (if that) and adding little electronic things to it. Some things were available in parts at different locations, but something had to be made from scratch. As time and technology raced each other, computers have become extremely commonplace, from being embedded in our everyday lives to being sold as fairly discrete units that can be bought in a single box at a store and after a little bit of color-coded setup, can do anything you could hope to do with a computer.

Except walk around. In my opinion, we are NOW with robotics where we were THEN with computers. The economy of course will play a part in the rate of technological advancement, especially in regards to those products which can be considered a luxury, but nevertheless, the robots of our favorite science fictions are waiting for us just around the corner. Will it be another ten years? Twenty? Thirty? That depends on you... ...and me. I personally have decided to embark on the creation of a new robotic friend. Perhaps he will put in some good words for me if they eventually take over!

Don't know any good robots? Perhaps you should start familiarizing yourself with a few