Meme-Free Zone

Sorry I'm a bit late mentioning this, but the Bundle of Holding site
http://bundleofholding.com
now has the Victoriana Bundle, featuring the Cubicle 7 Entertainment RPG of Victorian high adventure, gothic fantasy magic, and steampunk engineering. This offer runs until Monday, May 18.

http://bundleofholding.com/presents/Victoriana

PLAYER'S COLLECTION (US$12.95 - retail value $48)
- Victoriana 3e corebook (retail $25)
- + The Spring-Heeled Menace (free)
- Marvels of Science and Steampunk ($18)
- Darwin's Catalogue - Beastmen of Britain ($5)
GAMEMASTER'S COLLECTION (threshold starts at $27.95 - retail $86)
- Liber Magica ($18)
- Streets of Shadow ($18)
- The Smoke ($15)
- The Havering Adventures ($15)
- Jewel of the Empire ($20)

More titles will be added as time goes by, but the price goes up. If you buy early, you still get all the prices that will be added later. See their site for full details of how this works.

If you like Forgotten Futures this may be of interest.

In a comment on my last post i_kender pointed out that the British Library has put a shedload of illustrations from books on line for free use, as a huge flickr set.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

For example, one of the first I found was a larger version of this:

an illustration from The Angel of the Revolution - I have larger versions on the FF CD-ROM, but there isn't room on my web site.

At the moment the quantity is vast and tagging is minimal, actually finding anything is difficult. But if enough people take an interest it ought to eventually be a very useful resource.

A visit to the Yerkes observatory in 1897 - The Greatest Telescope on Earth by Walter George Bell.

http://forgottenfutures.com/library/telescope/telescope.htm

It's an interesting look at one of the last big refractor telescopes, but formatting HTML for measurements in weird fractions of an inch is a total pain!

Let me know if anything looks odd.

Someone pointed me at this 1896 article by George Griffith, with illustrations by Fred T. Jane (of Jane's Fighting Ships fame), which I somehow managed to miss when I checked the first volume of Pearson's Magazine for scientific romances. The reason probably being that it isn't so much a scientific romance as a "prediction" of military technology. I've just scanned it and put it on line, please tell me if you spot any errors etc. in the text before I link to it properly.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/library/warwater/warwater.htm

Since Livejournal has given me a metric sh*tload more storage space for the permanent account I'm having another try at uploading pictures to the Gallery thing. Hopefully these will be better than my previous attempt to post the pictures - these are 150 DPI scans reduced to 75 DPI, and look a lot clearer than the reduced version Photobucket gave me. Still about 300k each, so watch out if it's a slow connection!

( Read more... )

I've tried a web search on Francis Masey, the artist of the second picture, the most likely candidate seems to be a South African architectural artist - not sure of his dates but it seems plausible, he was active at the beginning of the 20th century and I suspect may have been around earlier.

I'd appreciate it if people could let me know if the pictures are visible to anyone else.

Anyone recommend a good tool for gallery uploads and management?

Later
Oh, if anyone here isn't reading news you should know that all free users have been given space for 6 user pictures, not three, and that everyone else has now got more storage space. Which in my case, since I have a permanent account, is 10 gigs. Not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm sure I'll think of something.