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what game is this...been looking for a cheapish way to do mechwarrior with friends
Mobile Frame Zero. http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/The pdf of the rulebook is available pay-what-you-want at that site. The rulebook has all the rules, and building instructions for for six "typical" frames (but of course, being built from lego, you can build frames in whatever shape you want).
WW1: The Thing EditionMore zombies than The Thing, I'd say. Have you seen it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8PUIeSQ6WM
This kitschy cult-comedy/sci-fi/horror/musical plays like an Ed Wood film mixed with a punk rock musical. In the fictional small town of Burquitlam, B.C., local butcher Bob (Dawson) hires a mysterious hulking assistant, Abdulla the Turk (jazz musician Clarence ‘Big’ Miller), who loves butchering a bit too much. Meanwhile, a teenage genius (Andrew Gillies) from a family of Moldovan immigrants conducts strange experiments with a stolen car – and that’s just the vague outline of a plot that ranges from mildly bizarre to completely absurd. Oh, and yes, it’s a musical.
Author and critic Owen Hatherley presents and comments on a television broadcast of Open University course A305, for contemporary eyes and ears. The episode, “English Flats of the Thirties,” juxtaposes two housing schemes, one in London and one in Leeds, one public and one private, one modelled on the monumental mass housing of Red Vienna and one on the ideas of Le Corbusier. Looking at how these buildings were perceived in the 1970s, Hatherley reflects both on the changing reputation of modernist mass housing and attitudes toward working class housing and the architectural avant-garde. Why did one of the buildings become “iconic” and get preserved, while the other was demolished?
Hatherley is the author of books including Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2009), and Uncommon (2011), about the pop group Pulp. He has contributed to publications including Building Design, The Guardian, Icon, Jacobin, London Review of Books, New Humanist, New Statesman, Socialist Review, and Socialist Worker.
hahaha yeah, i found out shipping containers are shit as structure components at some point during the brutalist campaign. Oh well, i guess they are more viable in a zombie apocalypse because steel is stronger than zombie claws.They can make sense if you're cut off from other sources of steel and have a surplus of containers.
Most shipping container projects you read about never actually get built, and those that do are for rich clients with more money than sense, but the myth that shipping containers are a viable "solution" to anything is... annoying.What you get with a container is cheap structure, if you can use the box-basically as-is. As soon as you remove anything (including the ends) you need to hire welders and buy steel. Architecture is more than structure though and structure on its own is not particularly expensive- especially when you are building a space as small as a shipping container, so the savings here are minimal. Relatively untrained people can build a room that size of simple wood framing in a day without needing to rent a crane or learning how to weld for about the same cost (or less) than buying a used container.
- Housing is usually not a technology problem. All parts of the world have vernacular housing, and it usually works quite well for the local climate. There are certainly places with material shortages, or situations where factory built housing might be appropriate- especially when an area is recovering from a disaster. In this case prefab buildings would make sense- but doing them in containers does not.
- If you are going through the trouble of building in factory, why not build to a dimension that is appropriate for human habitation? With only 7’ clear (2.1 m) inside a built-out container, you are left with the building code minimum room width as your typical condition. It’s hardly an ideal width, and it is not difficult to ship wider modular units: modular home builders do it all the time.
- Insulation. All surfaces of the container need to be insulated, and this means either building a new set of walls on the inside or outside of the container. If walls are furred out on the interior, this is convenient for plumbing and electrical lines but it narrows the usable space of an already small box. It also allows for a huge amount of thermal bridging unless the floor is built up with insulation on the inside (which brings up a host of other problems). If the exterior is insulated it no longer looks like a container, and then you have to pay to clad the entire thing over the insulation. In either scenario you’re duplicating all of the walls that you started with. Improper insulation will result in heavy condensation on the inside of the metal exterior walls.
- Structure. You’ve seen the proposals with cantilevers everywhere. Containers stacked like Lego building blocks, or with one layer perpendicular to the next. Architects love stuff like this, just like they throw around usually misleading/meaningless phrases like “kit of parts.” Guess what- the second you don’t stack the containers on their corners, the structure that is built into the containers needs to be duplicated with heavy steel reinforcing. The rails at the top and the roof of the container are not structural at all (the roof of a container is light gauge steel, and will dent easily if you step on it). If you cut openings in the container walls, the entire structure starts to deflect and needs to be reinforced because the corrugated sides act like the flange of beam and once big pieces are removed, the beam stops working. All of this steel reinforcing is very expensive, and it’s the only way you can build a “double-wide.”
- Stacking. One recent competition boasted that because containers can be stacked 9-high, concrete floors could be provided every 9th floor with stacks of containers in between. That load still needs to travel down through the building, and still then requires columns. Those floors every ninth floor need to hold the entire weight of 9-stories of building above, which makes it dubious that you’d really be saving much on structure. The foundation also needs to be built similarly to a “regular” site-built building, and this is one of the most expensive pieces. Stacking also requires a large crane and an area for staging the prefabricated container modules, which can be hard to arrange on a dense urban infill site.
- Utilities and Mechanical Systems. In a large building, you’ll still need a lot of space to run utilities. Because of the problems with insulation mentioned above, you will need to install a very robust HVAC system to heat and cool the building (that Mumbai tower shown above would literally be a deathtrap without cooling). You will have a hard time taking advantage of passive strategies like thermal mass if you maintain the container aesthetic. You’ll also end up with low ceilings, as even high cube containers are only 9-’6” (2.9 m) in overall exterior height, so any ductwork or utilities start cutting in to headroom.
- Recycling. Part of the container narrative is that it’s “green” because we have a surplus of containers that can be reused. This is somewhat true, but in reality many existing container projects use brand new containers from China (which are still very cheap to buy). Used containers need to be thoroughly cleaned because there is a risk they may have been used to transport something toxic in the past.
Hot Knives looks kind of eh,Yeah, it's basically a bunch of drunk/stoner sketches with an afterthought of a plot*. The viewing experience was probably improved by the alcohol being served at the candy bar.
but Sword and the Claw looks legit amazing.It is, I highly recommend it. This was the first time in months I've gotten out to that theatre's "Secret Cinema"** and this was one of the best ones yet!
Phil Caracas (Harry Knuckles, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter) stars in a modern day slacker odyssey.
Stan (Phil Caracas) is a bumbling slacker who, despite approaching middle age, continues to be a popular party animal with no apparent responsibilities. His next-door neighbour (Gabriela Svoboda) loses her dog and the hapless Stan suddenly has purpose in his life. Find the missing pooch! His mission becomes an existential journey into the self and the dangerous world around him. His investigations uncover a labyrinth of conspiracies and skullduggery that blow his mind and will most certainly blow yours. Be prepared for the wild ride that is Hot Knives!
They took his money. They took his family. And now, they've taken his hands. But they can never take his revenge! Exploding from the same hallucinogenic netherworld as TURKISH STAR WARS, THE SWORD AND THE CLAW stars Turkish genre legend Cuneyt Arkin in his most iconic role. It's CONAN THE BARBARIAN meets The Three Stooges meets DOLEMITE with more lo-fi bloodshed, pop-art visuals, and bizarro dubbing than the boundaries of reality can handle.AKA: Lionman. As usual for special screenings, a member of the theatre staff got onstage to introduce the movie beforehand. He informed us that in addition to being made from the only surviving 35mm print, the digital tranfer we were about to watch apparently had an additonal 25 minutes of film which had been cut from the original theatrical release. He didn't know which 25 minutes had been restored, but having now seen it, I'm willing to bet it was 25 minutes of fight scenes! The majority of the screen time of this movie seems to be insane, highly acrobatic fight scenes!
