This is the personal Web site of Robert Wm. Gomez. I am an artist, musician and nerd living in Chicago, Illinois who has been maintaining this site (in one form or another) since 1996. Enjoy your visit!
I just finished watching the pretty good T.V. adaptation of the game and was inspired to start up a new game of the original. Fallout was the first thing I ever bought on eBay back in ’98. The box smelled like cigar smoke, but the game didn’t stink at all.
In retrospect, it’s not quite as good as I remembered. There are just a few to many fiddly “puzzles” where you are supposed to try using random objects on the environment to get past obstacles. There are no clues. You just have to know to “use radio on computer” or whatever.
I found the water chip. Yippie!
Otherwise, everything else is great. I love the turn-based combat, the skills, and character interactions. The game is relatively short, especially when compared with the 3-D open-world sequels. We need more digestible length games these days.
I played a modded version of the game using a patch called Fallout Fixt. Most of the enhancements were not noticeable to me, but there were a couple things that I later realized weren’t in the original game. Most importantly you can tell your followers to move out of the way if they are blocking a doorway. This doesn’t work on recruited help from the Brotherhood and can end up making the game unwinnable. This is because the mod allows the Brotherhood knights to join you inside the mutant military base, which wasn’t designed for companions to fit alongside you.
I ended up playing all the way through the game and got all the good endings except for killing the Khans off. I’m tempted to fire up Fallout 2 now, but I should probably hold off. Skald comes out in a month.
Wood engraving is a very unforgiving process. There’s no (easy) way to erase mistakes. We don’t have an undo function like you digital nerds with your iPads. Planning and preparatory drawings are the key to fixing mistakes before they are permanently cut into your block.
Good. You’ve done the work and have that perfectly composed drawing that’s going to put you in all the art history books. Mr. Picasso, the Louvre-er-rah is on live four. The problem now becomes: how do you get that drawing on to your end-grain engraving block?
The simplest method is to trace your design to the block placing some transfer paper between the drawing and the block. The biggest drawback to this is that it is repetitive and time-consuming. Welcome to the world of printmaking! I also find that the transferred lines will eventually rub off if you don’t spray them with fixatif. This problem doubles if you are using any sort of slippery plastic engraving material like resingrave or corian. Transfer paper is usually best if you want to get a general layout of your design without too much detail, allowing the detail to emerge through the engraving process.
If you want a very accurate transfer of your drawing I have found that the best method is to use heat to transfer a LASER printed scan of your drawing.
Let’s take a moment to ruminate on fact that LASER is an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” What this has to do with the such-named printers and this post in general is beyond my understanding. All I know is that I, like the grammar pro that I am, am going to all-caps LASER whenever I use it.
Many sources on the ‘net will advise you to use acetone to transfer toner-based images. This sorta works, but in my experience it has a 70% failure rate. The key to getting a good toner transfer is heat. The source of that heat is a Wall Lenk L16TT Transfer Tool. It’s like a soldering iron with a disc attached to the end.
Print out your drawing (or photocopy it) and attach it, face-down, to your block. You want to be able to peek at the surface as you work, but it should be secure enough that it doesn’t shift around as you work. Heat up your transfer tool and then meticulously apply heat to the back of the printout. I drew a grid on the back of mine so that I could keep track of the areas I had worked on. You can lift the paper and peek at the results as you move across the block. It will take time and a lot more heat than you think. I was always hesitant to use this method on resingrave because I feared melting the epoxy.
Once you’ve covered the entire surface with burnished heat, you can start peeling back the paper. It will adhere more than you want and this is where acetone comes in handy. Don’t just rip the paper off, dab some acetone on the trouble spots and slowly work the paper off. If you are too hasty, paper scraps will be glued to your block. You will find that large areas of black adhere the most. For that reason, you should probably edit out large black areas on your image scan before attempting to transfer.
If all has gone well, your drawing will now appear in reverse on your block. Note that the toner will have a slight, raised texture. You can wash off the excess before printing with an acetone dampened swab if you want. Don’t let too much liquid get on the wood. You don’t want to raise the grain.
So here’s a quick video I made documenting the process:
Remember, the best wood engravings aren’t just mechanical reproductions of drawings. Let your tools and cutting guide the final appearance of your print. Get hip kids! Formschneider (cutting around a completed line drawing) is for losers and 16th century renaissance masters only!
If you have any questions, leave a comment and I will try to answer the best I can.
They took a one joke skit and expanded it to movie length! It’s okay. I laughed a couple of times. But that modern drift towards meta-comedy kinda is starting to show. “I’m making a joke… hey look at the joke! Isn’t it weird?” ha ha ha.
This was a weird one with hardly any plot. There are probably deep messages about faith, but I enjoyed it mostly as a character study of some of not-so-smart southerners with just enough strange humor and seriousness mixed together. It felt very indie and home-made despite being directed by John Houston.
It’s been quite a while since I have engraved in proper end-grain wood blocks. Up until now I have been very happy using resingrave but, alas, that material is not being manufactured anymore. I’ve spent the past year or so trying to find a suitable alternative. Corian countertop material allows for very fine lines but is chalky and gross to cut into. Boxwood or lemonwood would be great, but they are not available here in the good old U.S.A. and can get very expensive to have them imported from England. I even started to consider making my own maple blocks but I fear table saws and really wouldn’t know what I was doing. Then, a few months ago, I found out that there has been a block maker right here in the Midwest for years. So, here we are, with a fresh stack of large end-grain maple blocks ready to go. I have a couple of ideas and will hopefully have something to show in a month or so. Stay tuned.
My first post The Exapnse the T.V. show novel and it’s a good one. What makes it good? The stakes are high and the characters are all working together to solve a problem. There are no deep philosophical sci-fi ideas. This is just pure story telling and it works very well.
Incarcerat continues much along the same lines as Terrortome. Things start to lose steam in the last part of the book, “The Randyman,” which is a parody-mix of Candyman and Freddy Krueger. Even so, some of the biggest laughs were in that section.
El Perro Del Mar is the alter ego of Swedish singer/songwriter Sarah Assbring. Her style has covered a wide range within the genre of “pop” music, but these last few releases have evolved into some interesting territory. The songs are dark and atmospheric, relying on a blend of electronics and orchestral instrumentation as the base for her soft, reverberating vocals. If you were a fan of Julee Cruise you will be right at home here. The songs will gently wash over you and then occasionally drift into the sort of abstract, electronic experimentation that Sarah and her collaborator Jacob Haage had explored in their release Riptide. It’s these unexpected twists combined with the somber lyrical themes, focusing on death and loss, which make this an incredible record to experience.
This was Sparks riding fast and furious on the hype train. The Edgar Wright documentary was out, Annette was premiering on Amazon, all the normies were suddenly lifetime Sparks fans. This has sort of colored my appreciation of this album. I mean, I liked them when they sucked! Nevertheless, this record is pretty great and it was on this tour that I finally got to see Sparks live (they played like four blocks from house, insane!). But seriously, I was totally into these guys before anyone else, and I’ll fight you if you say otherwise. Good record. Buy it, twice.
