Does anyone know what this image was used for? Maybe the cover to one of James White’s Sector General books?
I’m working on a post for my art blog newsletter about red crosses on spaceships, and I can’t find any sources for this image on my normal search engines, TinEye and Google Lens.
suspect that’s a piece of AI art trained on Berkey’s paintings, unfortunately. a lot of the structures don’t make any logical sense on a spaceship and it would explain the lack of source.
The most that I can gather from a casual Google Image search is that this was used with another image as a cover for a 1977 folder. It can be found at the bottom of this website. Apparently those paintings have never been posted on any John Berkley website until the poster of the blog did so in 2009: It looks like even the image you’re using in your post is from this person, given they both share the same soft reflective light in the top-left corner. Likely this was an overhead light or something when taking the photo.
Also. Lol, no. This isn’t AI. Usually if I suspect something is AI, I at least… look at the date? That it was posted? If you don’t have the option enabled, I’d recommend finding it in the settings and changing it. I often forget that it’s something that needs to be enabled in settings.
Thanks to everyone, lots of great thoughts in the reblogs, comments, and tags! The reblog above is right, I do remember seeing that one Berkey fansite and I’m sure my 2018 post came from there. Looks like the image was used for a 1977 folder - possibly nowhere else.
Berkey did do four covers for the Sector General series. Three of them were done in the late 90s. These are from 1996, ‘97, and ‘98, respectively – probably not related to a pre-1977 painting.
However! The fourth cover was this one from 1974. Perhaps the never-used space station was a rejected version of this cover, and was then repurposed for the folder a few years later.
Dear Miss Manners: After several decades of typing on keyboards, I have lost my ability to write nicely by hand. My solution is to send electronic notes — for expressing appreciation, recognizing significant events, etc.
There are several lovely e-card forms available. Using them results in more timely responses, as well as significant savings over printed cards and postage.
I feel it would be nice if Miss Manners would acknowledge that electronic thank-yous are as valid as handwritten in today’s communication environment. Any thank-you is better than no thank-you at all.
Sorry, but you will have to snatch the fountain pen out of Miss Manners’ cold, lifeless hand before she agrees that electronic messages are as meaningful as handwritten ones.
She will concede, however, that any response is better than no response (has it really come to this?) as long as the sentiment itself is not computer-generated. “Thank you for the (insert present) that you gave me. It was very special and/or significant” is not fooling anyone.
As for your argument about saving money? Miss Manners highly doubts that the dozen or so letters you write annually is anywhere near the equivalent cost of the computer that you no doubt replace every few years.
This week's Resolution Recipe: Citrus Chicken with Roasted Veg. "This is a love letter to the ingredients of the chef's Mexican-American upbringing." ( Read more... )
Happy book birthday to Rachel Ash Rosen's Blight, second in the Sleep of Reason trilogy.
I am excited to see this book in the world! The author is Known to Me as a fine stylist and a word-puncher on behalf of this often desperate global conspiracy we call trying to keep our human hearts alive.
(I consulted on the future aquatic subduction of my home city for this series and have no regrets.)
What is this book about? I will quote:
anti-fascism, revolution, queer longing, and like, giant fucking bone tentacles.
Would you like to read about a different end to the world? One in which, the characters, like you, have survived and find ways to make meaning and keep fighting after unimaginable loss?
Maybe you will like it, in that case.
(I was tempted to remove the "maybe" there, but my training tells me not to alter the sense of a quotation. Anyway. You will like it.)
Theme Prompt: #262 - Soulmates Title: A Change In A New World Fandom: Original (based on 'Trucks' by Stephen King) Rating/Warnings: PG | Mechanophilia Bonus: Yes Word Count: 699 Summary: Can man and machine be friends ?
My mom's garden has a vigorous knock out rosebush just beside it, and various bees adore it. Although I'm severely allergic to bites and stings, I will still follow honey and bumble bees; they're too busy to care about me.
Fun fact about me: I cannot smell typical roses. Knockouts are the only roses I can smell.
“My” fountain has been switched on! And yours too – a few years ago a bunch of readers donated to its restoration, and I also bought one of the name bricks in the base. So if you’re ever in downtown Chicago, you can come south to Printer’s Row Park and see “Sam, Deebs, and Dot” carved on the fountain. I’m pretty sure the engravers thought Deebs and Dot were my wife and child.
I wanted it to say “For the love of God, Montresor!” but they told me it was policy to only do names. (This is absolutely true. It was a whole conversation we had to have.)
[ID: a ten second film of the art deco fountain in Printer’s Row Park, burbling away merrily, surrounded by plants. The base of the fountain is lined in large bricks with names engraved on them. The only sound is ambient noise and gentle water flowing.]
Eating: This weekend is scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.) Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.
I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far. Watching:Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that, scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.
Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as scruloose and wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.
We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4. wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.
But last week, scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.
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