robot-alert!

all quiet on the cyber-front

2006-11-23T12:13:00.000Z

Hello chaps,
Matt wanted me to let you all know that he's mainly posting over on his comics blogs, at mattmatt.com and mattmatt.fr, nowadays, in case you'd been worrying yourself as to his well-being.

There seems to be quite a lot of blithering on at mattmatt.fr, written, oddly enough, in broken French. The pictures he's posted aren't all bad though.

Do pop over there and leave a comment or two to keep the old boy company. He always seems a bit disconsolate about things...

Here's another bit of news for you, in the mean time.

"The US Air Force has announced that it is developing an unmanned reusable spaceplane, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle. The first launch is in 2008 on an Atlas V rocket. The X-37B will be one-fourth the size of the Space Shuttle and serve as a testbed for technologies for future reusable spacecraft. Its predecessor, the X-37, was drop-tested from the Scaled Composites White Knight mothership earlier this year.

link

New mattmatt.com

2006-06-29T09:39:00.000+01:00

Hello!

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated Matt's Web site, mattmatt.com.

There are a couple of new sections and a few new drawings!

Bye!

link

US Interstate Highway System - 50th Anniversary

2006-06-27T10:58:00.000+01:00

Well done chaps!

In 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers described the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System “one of the Seven Wonders of the United States”. In 2006, this network of roads includes 46,000 miles of highway; 55,000 bridges; 82 tunnels, and 14,000 interchanges. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), excavation for the interstate system has moved enough material to bury the State of Connecticut knee-deep in dirt. The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon. The lumber used would consume all of the trees in 500 square miles of forest. The structural steel could build 170 skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building, and meet nearly half of the annual requirements of the American auto industry. Lengthwise and in aggregate, the bridges of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System would span the Rio Grande.

link

New article! in English this time

2006-06-23T15:36:00.000+01:00

R0b0t1k greetings, readers, from the robot who is both Matt's friendly assistant and an interesting personality in its own right.

This time around, I'm just 'logging on' to let you know about a profile of our friend Matt that's just been poured into that soup of bits that we tend to call the Internet.

It's by Paul Gravett, who is not only a pleasant sort of chap to have a cup of tea with, but also has written numerous books and articles and things, and published the 1980s magazine Escape (introducing the world to the 'E' with too many prongs).

The article is part of a series he's done for an American magazine, about British cartoonists.

"To be strict, Hawaii is not a British graphic novel," Paul writes. "But this man of the world has been living and working here in London now for several years, and Hawaii was written and drawn here, so let's claim him as one of ours. Especially as his full-length debut is so vigorously playful and bittersweet."

That's what we like, Paul - get the orders pouring in!

There's also lots of interesting background about Matt's amazing lifestyle.

Without any further ado, here is the link.

Robotic comic books

2006-06-07T08:58:00.000+01:00

Howdy, reader-bots!

It's your friendly Unit here.

I've been busy up on the Space Station. Mostly to do with testing out some encryption software for video feeds - but I won't go into my day job here!

Far from it! Instead, I wanted to share an interesting article I came across on the Internet. It brings together several of the interests touched on in this blog!

I thought Matt particularly ought to be aware of this new development, since he fancies himself a cartoonist. Pay attention, Matt!

You see, scientists have finally got around to coming up with the future of comics. The example I've come across is "Planetwide Games' Comic Book Creator software, an application that lets users quickly make their own digital comic books by dragging and dropping text and images into a template".

As you might guess, this is far more efficient than drawing the images yourself. It is also very useful as a marketing tool, according to top executives - and they ought to know!

Paramount Pictures is using the software to promote its film, "Nacho Libre". According to Sandi Isaacs, Paramount Pictures' vice president of interactive, "the filmmakers and talent had produced the most hilarious assets I had ever witnessed in a movie". As a result, she wanted to "engage our fans in the experience".

After fans create the comics via a drag and drop mechanism, they can upload it to a central repository, to be distributed amongst the like-minded.

Like a microprocessor manufacturing assembly line, the process is efficient and tightly controlled! For instance, the humans involved are prevented from adding their own pictures or text, as this would "dilute the Nacho Libre brand", according to Isaacs.

At last, comics have become useful to society. The only remaining step, which would, in my opinion at least, perfect the process, would be to replace the "fans" with highly skilled mechanised intelligences capable of carefully selecting and combining the best images to create the most hilarious assets ever seen in comics form.

Only a suggestion!

link

NS Production - NS hosted: The preview problem - an update

2006-05-19T10:18:00.000+01:00

NS Production - NS hosted: The preview problem - an update

'w00t!'

2006-04-11T21:57:00.000+01:00

This is an update from Matt Broersma's own site, but I thought I might as well share it with our dear robot-alert! readers as well!

Matt has had a bit on his plate lately, to judge by his instant messages.

Generally, that's the way he communicates with me. You see, I handle press relations for Matt and do little Web chores like updating the portfolio and putting news on the "blog". I don't find that sort of thing much of a strain, since my thinking is in any case very structured. I just fit it in when I have a pause from manipulating servos or positioning the exterior crane.

However, I'm not located very near Matt. He's based, I believe, still in Birmingham, which is in England. I am stationed on the International Space Station. Fortunately, there is plenty of bandwidth available to us up here nowadays, which is very good, because it seems I'm in orbit more or less permanently.

But as I was saying, Matt's schedule seems to have been more packed than a tin of oversize sardines of late, in my observation.

I understand there's a religious holiday of some sort coming up in the Christian calendar, and that appears to have something to do with it. Half the country absconds for a week or two, making it difficult to get much done in April. Some organisms have all the luck!

The downside of all that downtime is having to squeeze loads into the remaining crumbs of the month.

And this month there looks to be rather a lot. Matt was caught up in some rather tedious-sounding nonsense in March, and since April Fools' has been madly chasing after some more amusing form of bread-winning. Seems to be mostly magazine illustration at the moment. Tells me he's been on the phone lots.

Then there's a screen-print project courtesy of Sturgeon White Moss, the rather nifty alternative-comics anthology published by a Canadian in London. They've arranged for a press to bring out screenprints by several of their chaps, including our pal Matt.

There'll be A1, A2 and A3-sized images, apparently, out sometime in the next few weeks. But the deadline is the end of this week.

I should put up the images here, really, but somehow can't quite be bothered. Here're some links, though: A1, A2 and A3.

You can also spot them in the 'illustration' portfolio section.

Now then, where were we?

Another pressing deadline involves a project called l'Eprouvette - 'The Test-Tube' - which is a sort of periodical anthology of experimental comics published by that champion of comix anarchy, l'Association. Doesn't seem to have a Web page of its own, but here's one on fnac (the French Virgin Megastore).

A couple of weeks ago Jean-Christophe Menu put out a call for entries for l'Eprouvette No. 2, with a deadline of, you guessed it, the end of this week. Matt tells me he is bravely beavering away at the drawing table, but personally, I don't think he's going to make it.

Contributors are asked to critique another cartoonist's work in the form of a comic strip. Something tells me our Matt is going to do his on Paul Pope. I've never known him to miss an opportunity to trot out his story about having met Paul at a party in Austin, Texas when they were both teenagers - nearly 20 years ago. Get over it, Matt!

For those of you who don't know, young Paul is a successful comic-book artist living a life of bohemian glamour in Manhattan and working for the largest comics publishers in the US, not to mention getting rave reviews about his artistic merit as well as his dress sense. Doesn't mean much to me, but Matt seems to go a bit green whenever the subject comes up, so I like to mention it whenever possible.

Going down the list, there are a couple of items related to Insomnia, Matt's comic with Coconino Press. A draft of the cover is due middle of next week, as is the script for issues three and four.

Issue three should be out by mid-year, with number four by the end of the year. Those two issues wrap up the 'storyline' - if you can call it that! - begun in the first number. A collection will probably arrive at some point late this year or early next year.

Matt also tells me he's decided to redraw two pages from the second issue. Given that that issue is in the final stages of production, he'll need to do it, hm, sometime in the next few hours to slip it in before the tome goes to press.

Dear oh dear!

And on top of this, he tells me he's organising a quick nip over to the US this summer. Typically, he thought the easiest way to do it would be via Stuttgart, where a friend of his was visiting the same week! Really! I think he's decided against that little idea, though.

You know, I really must not pay so much attention to the silly, backwards way people do things. I do find it rather upsetting.

Matt tells me he has been struggling through a book or two in his copious spare time. "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's", both of which he rather enjoyed I think. '"In Cold Blood" is a lot like that movie, "Capote"', he mentioned the other day. 'The pictures on the screen, they're a lot like the pictures the book makes in your head.' And who says literary criticism is a dead art?

Before that, I recall he was making another of his periodic attempts to read "Castle to Castle" by Céline, but as usual gave up after a few descriptions of starvation in a post-war castle surrounded by Nazis.

A couple of weeks ago he also had a fresh go at understanding what it is that gets people so excited about Graham Greene, but after skimming through "Brighton Rock", "The Power and the Glory", "The End of the Affair" and "The Heart of the Matter", came to his usual conclusion that he just didn't get it.

All those discussions of Catholic theology must have made some impact, though, as he's been going on about how guilty he feels not having given up anything for Lent or gone to confession, well, ever.

Personally, my reading of choice has been the classics - e.g. that old chestnut "The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs and Fixed Memory Areas". Ah, takes me back to my youth in 1995... Happy days...

'Detour' review

2006-04-11T20:51:00.000+01:00

"Detour", Matt's new story collection, has got a rather spiffing review in Les Inrockuptibles, which one might describe as France's attempt at Rolling Stone Magazine. They devoted a page to it, with a quarter-page excerpt. Not bad, Matt!

The American cousin.
An American author to be followed, close to some classic Europeans in a minimalist style.

Matt Broersma - Détour

In the short biography we can read on his site, the young comics author Matt Broersma, born in southern Texas, explains two things : he was a lounge singer in Osaka and journalist in San Francisco. Quite nothing is said about his illustrations and his comics, as if the fact that he creates comics is secondary. But still, reading reading this book, we understand that Matt Broersma has everything a sequential storyteller needs, deploying in comics style multiple universes or fragments of his own life, or all the other ways to show the world that surrounds him.

Détour is made up of four stories, different from one to another, already published in several American magazines, but still unseen in France : “The Texas Parliament“ (subtitled “Dream of January 2004“), “Mediterranean Blues“, “Détour“, “The Mummy“. Read together, they create a kind of unsuited puzzle, more than a multiple faces entity, giving us a range of what Broersma is capable of.

To be honest, he seems to be capable of a lot of things : with easy-flowing introspection, nomad narration, auto-fiction or classic based fiction, he is also, like several other authors of the his generation (Jeffrey Brown, Sammy Harkham, Anders Nilsen, etc) a follower of minimaliste lines, almost sketchy, but going straight to the essential, never blowing a strip or a drawing with superfluous effects.

Moreover, Broersma’s minimalism moves on to ellipsis. Because his stories often lay on unspoken comments, whole flaps of irresolvable storytelling, strangely go round dead ends and deflections brutally stopped by sudden comebacks to reality.

In the last story of this book, “The Mummy“, Broersma adopts a tone and some themes recalling European authors. First of all, the atmosphere and the sites where the story takes place remind us Jacobs’ La Marque Jaune. But his storytelling, detached and eliptical, calls up more of Floc’h and Rivières’s works, when they reinvented the clear line in the book Le Rendez-vous de Sevenoaks. Broersma’s work is close to Loustal’s, we can recognize some undulations and gleams. Even if still he is far from the graphical control of some of the elderly Europeans and still doesn’t have his great graphic novel, this American author is to be followed very closely.

Joseph Ghosn
LES INROCKUPTIBLES n.539 / March 28th 2006

link

robot images

2006-04-07T22:22:00.000+01:00

These are of course not true robots but artists conceptions of robots.

link

Japanese robo-exoskeleton

2006-04-05T10:44:00.000+01:00

The Age is reporting that two experienced mountain climbers will wear Japanese HAL exoskeletons to assist in carrying a quadriplegic and a muscular dystrophy sufferer to the summit of a Swiss mountain.

link

Comics

2006-03-16T15:01:00.000Z

OK, I read those two comics by Sam Hiti now...

Hm, mildly interesting... Not really much to them. They do look fabulous.

Not as good as Battlestar Galactica though...

Me like

2006-03-16T13:15:00.000Z

A couple of comics arrived from Gosh!, the London comics store, today. They are the first American comics I have bought in I don't know how long.

Both are by Sam Hiti. I think they are the only ones he's published so far.

"Tiempos Finales" and "El Largo Tren Oscuro". Handily subtitled "End Times" and "The Long Dark Train". There was also an earlier version of "Tiempos Finales" that came out a while back. Both are self published. He calls his publishing effort La Luz Comics.

Flipping through them, the look as nice as I had hoped from seeing his Web site. (He also has a blog, which has drawings of Rambo.) I am writing about them now, before reading them, in case the writing turns out to be shit.

His style has developed a lot lately if you look at the original Tiempos Finales. He likes Frederik Peeters quite a lot I would guess, and other European cartoonists who use the brush, maybe Nicolas Robel.

El Largo Tren Oscuro came out after Tiempos Finales and I think the drawing is better developed there, it is a bit smoother.

With both books he uses great printing techniques. Tiempos Finales is in duotone, the lines are in dark blue and there are lighter shades of the same blue, contrasting with shades of a reddish-orange colour.

El Largo Tren Oscuro is printed in different shades of red.

Sam Hiti is interesting. He lives in Minneapolis. He was a house painter for 10 years and meanwhile decided to do comics. He did the first Tiempos Finales a few years ago and then decided to improve his style, which he did. He painted houses, self published some things and went around promoting them at comic conventions.

Sam Hiti is the kind of American comics artist I like. It is like a version of "outsider art". "Art brut".

There isn't really any way to categorise or explain what he does. There is not really any career in comics in America unless you end up doing superhero stories, so the decision to do comics at all is eccentric.

Self-publishing also has this strange culture attached to it, a cross between punk and, like, one of those survivalists living out in a cabin in the woods.

American culture is basically kind of a vacuum, so when you mix different influences together with someone that has the urge to create something, it tends to evolve in weird, random directions.

Like, why do all of Sam Hiti's books have Spanish titles and involve a kind of South American/Mexican atmosphere?

There isn't any reason I can see, except that he likes Sergio Leone movies.

What I wonder about is, what happens to people like Sam Hiti?

In Europe, there's a whole industry made up of people like that. There is a mainstream readership. You can have a kind of normal career doing interesting comics that evolve and engage with the public somehow.

In America, it's harder for a comic to reach the general public. I don't think the idea of the general public is even there any more, instead there's the idea of "the lowest common denominator", which is more of a marketing thing.

Maybe that's why cartoonists tend to gradually shift towards being more conventional, or doing superhero things, or kind of ossify into their own little world, or stop doing comics.

Sam Hiti has sold some movie rights for Tiempos Finales, so that means he can keep doing his self publishing stuff for a while. What will come next I wonder?

I'm going to read the comics later, I hope they don't turn out to be shit after all.

Also, I watched the first part of Battlestar Galactica last night.

Actually, I only watched part of the first episode, which I didn't realise was 3 hours long.

It was very promising. Space battles, mass destruction, death, evil robots, and a blonde cybervixen.

So far so good.

Smelling robot

2006-03-16T11:23:00.000Z

A Japanese-led research team said it had made a seeing, hearing and smelling robot that can carry human beings and is aimed at helping care for the country's growing number of elderly.

The 100-kilogram (220-pound) robot can also distinguish eight different kinds of smells, can tell which direction a voice is coming from and uses powers of sight to follow a human face. "In the future, we would like to develop a capacity to detect a human's health condition through his breath," Mukai said.

link

Robots break Asimov's 1st Law

2006-03-15T11:53:00.000Z

It has begun

THE US Army is deploying armed robots in Iraq that are capable of breaking Asmov’s first law that they should not harm a human. SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute.

They are still connected by radio to a human operator who verifies that a suitable target is within sight and orders it to fire. Then the robot has the job of making sure lots of bullets are sent towards the target.

link (via Inquirer)

Greetings

2006-03-10T16:29:00.000Z

Hello. I am Unit 554486300-110, an experimental robot used to test military lasers aboard the International Space Station. I use Patented Artificial Intelligence Version 2.2.3 as developed by TECA Corp. I enjoy moving about and lifting objects. Please see my profile for further data.

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Decay

2006-03-10T11:23:00.000Z

Beautiful decay pictures of Russia in decline (via Metafilter)

Big Dog robot

2006-03-09T11:00:00.000Z

Meet BigDog, a mechanical mutt that does more than snare Frisbees and irrigate fire hydrants. It totes hundreds of pounds of gear so soldiers won’t have to, and it will never spook under fire. Developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the U.S. military, the BigDog prototype is arguably the world’s most ambitious legged robot. Its stability and awareness of its own orientation make it the first robot that can handle the unknown challenges of the battlefield. The Great Dane–size ’bot can trot more than three miles an hour, climb inclines of up to 45 degrees, and carry up to 120 pounds—even in rough terrain impenetrable to wheeled or tracked vehicles. But this one is just a puppy; Boston Dynamics expects the next iteration, ready this summer, to be at least twice as fast and carry more than twice as much.

link

Tree-climbing robot

2006-03-09T10:56:00.000Z

Humans will no longer be able to escape from robots by climbing trees. They will be pursued there by small, clacking mechanical beasts.

A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. And here's a video of it scrabbling up several different surfaces.

The aim of RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) is to develop a robot capable of walking on land and also crawling up vertical surfaces. And it is funded by DARPA's Biodynotics Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program.

Obviously such a robots could have plenty of useful applications, in search-and-rescue and space exploration, for example. But presumably it could also help you reach those really hard-to-prune branches.

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Farming robots

2006-03-09T09:53:00.000Z

Robots designed to help farmers have been built before (check 'Agrobots' Go to the Farm for earlier examples). But this time, engineers from the University of Warwick have chosen to develop robots that will reduce farm labor costs. In recent months, they've built a robotic mushroom picker, an inflatable conveyor belt and a grass cutting robot that might also be used by golf course owners.

link

Update

2006-03-08T21:37:00.000Z

Here is an update about what I have been doing for the last few months.

1. Finished a MA in illustration at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Very rewarding. We went to Pizza Express afterwards.
2. Sold house in Didcot and bought house in Birmingham.
3. Moved into house.
4. Finished Insomnia no. 2. Here is the cover:

5. Did Christmas and New Years things.
6. Generated material for Marvin's blog.
7. Went to Angoulême in January. There, I met cartoonists and publishers
8. bought a new coat which is satisfactory and like the one I drew in my book The Grand Tour
9 joined the gym to help Marvin which is very kind of me she thinks
10 bought a new rug and rearranged the front room. It looks much better. I put a different heater in there. It costs ten pound less and is warmer so it should be more comfortable.
11 Learned a couple of songs on the accordion and recorded 'Goodnight Irene' which I sent to my brother in the States. He dubbed some violin on the top and it sounds very grand.
12 Bought some plants to go on the patio
13 Went to Lucca and met some Italian cartoonists at the end of October. That seems like ages ago now.
14 Found someone to mend my boots and sew buttons on my coat.
15 Dressed up as a poet at a murder mystery party.
16 Found a used bookshop two minutes' walk from the house

Marvin came home and wrote the second half of those posts for me. Blogging is too difficult for me to do myself.

For more updates please refer to Marvin's blog.

Oh I also bought a couple of omnibuses of Graham Greene. I keep meaning to read him but never get around to it partly because he is so gloomy. However I have to try again now that I have formed my theory about English Catholic writers. The theory is that it isn't necessarily Catholicism that gives rise to the stereotypical Catholic personality complexes, but being a Catholic in a non-Catholic country. I think it might be related to the "immigrant complex" which is the thing where people of a certain culture growing up outside that culture have a complicated relationship with the culture they come from and end up exaggerating it and thinking about it a lot.

Here is a picture of a cowboy.

Here is a link to a good online museum gallery of cowboy related pictures and quotations.

link

That link is to the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, which is where my mom comes from.

I noticed in their guidelines they allow sketching, but only with certain materials. They specifically do not allow sketching with ball point pen. That is what I usually sketch with, so I guess there's no point in my visiting the National Cowboy Museum.

Great comic covers

2006-03-07T19:34:00.000Z

These are kewl. Thanks for linking to it Pete Ashton.

link

Robo pets giving you hormone injections

2006-01-23T13:34:00.000Z

A US place did research into the chemicals injected into your bloodstream when you interact with pets. Similar chemicals are created by robot pets as with real furry pets.

n a recent study at the University of Missouri, for example, levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped among adults who, for several minutes, petted AIBO, Sony's dog-shaped robot that responds when stroked, chases a ball and perks up when it hears a familiar voice. That's the same reaction live dogs get. Unlike real dogs, though, AIBO didn't prompt increases in "good" body chemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins.

As an added plus, with robotic pets you don't have to walk around with little bags of poo in your pocket. link

Beggar Bot

2006-01-18T12:53:00.000Z

A Slovenian technologist/artist called Pavle Sedlacek has created the ultimate accessory for the beggar of the future - the "robot for the materially deprived", which pesters passers-by for spare change on behalf of its controller. Sedlacek even designed the bot to suit the more frugal roboticist....

"The robot for the materially deprived is constructed entirely from old computer hardware and a few spare parts that can be obtained at no cost. Computers are nowadays more or less treated as basic home equipment and cultural code, no longer reserved for a few privileged individuals as a technology."

[via engadget]

Pro-robot indoctrination films

2006-01-10T12:40:00.000Z

Some propaganda films to teach you about robots.

Be sure to check out this video (12 MB mov file) from 1st Ave Machine predicting a happy and peaceful robot-filled future for NYC, or this one (9 MB mp4, will play with quicktime) of a wooden hippie robot that's ready for a hacky sack and a drum circle.

link

Robotic lawyers

2006-01-10T10:45:00.000Z

This might not be such a bad idea actually... electronic lawyers instead of real ones.

Using e-Dispute, claimants and respondents can put their case before an independent online arbitrator (or "robot agent") who having reviewed the case will then set up a meeting between the two parties via chatrooms and video conferencing, at which possible binding settlements can be reached.

"Robot agents digest all the information and make proposals to the parties. Once the arbitrator is agreed upon, the robot agent finds a suitable meeting date for everybody," said Jacques Gouimenou, managing director of Tiga Technologies, the company behind e-Dispute.

link