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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Gryphon
Charter Member
19768 posts |
Mar-19-19, 11:32 PM (EDT) |
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"Blast From the Past dep't"
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So. Over the past few weeks, when we've both had the time simultaneously, my father and I have been building a couple of new bookcases for my living room. This is one part of the moving-without-moving project I alluded to a while back. Well, we finished them last weekend, and today he brought them up. After that, it was time to dig a few boxes full of my old books out of the stuff that's been stashed out on the (closed) porch for years and start loading them up.
(I've linked to the native-res version of the photo, on the off chance that someone out there is so bored they're curious about the stuff on the shelves. Sorry about the glare on the pictures, it was late afternoon and that wall faces to the west.) In the course of unpacking those boxes, I ran across my copy of the Undocumented Features Deluxe Edition. I should probably explain. The Deluxe Edition was a fancier hardcopy of the original, no-second-title core story. We made a handful of them, by hand, in late 1991 for ourselves and a few close associates. Basically, I dumped the original text into a slightly more elaborate word processor than the one we used to write the USENET version, dressed the text up a bit, and printed it on the laser printer in the CCC, then edge punched it and put it in a three-ring binder, along with a few illustrations judiciously chosen from the... oh... 20 or so that existed on the WPI anime-art FTP site at the time. Cover sheets were made by hand, by taping printed labels onto a couple more such artworks. Add a couple of little bonus items and a dedication page after the glossary, and Bob's your uncle. I thought this would be of interest here because one of the bonus items at the end, after a photocopy of the then-current WPI campus map, was a hand-drawn plan diagram of the Wedge as it existed at the time. I should note that this is only very abstractly to scale (it's really a bigger space than that relative to, say, the support columns), and it omits a few details (the tables in the Wedge Booths, for instance, are not shown for some reason). Still, it gives a reasonable sense of where the facility's main features were, relative to each other if nothing else. I thought it might be fun to share it. It's very different now, I understand. The Lower Wedge (which used to be a sort of low-rent function room) is gone altogether; it's been converted into the CCC's network operations office and something called the Access Grid, which I'm guessing is much less interesting than it sounds, while the Wedge proper has a lot less of that suburban bus station vibe. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Droken
Member since May-6-08
349 posts |
Mar-20-19, 00:54 AM (EDT) |
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1. "RE: Blast From the Past dep't"
In response to message #0
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Neat! On both counts, even! Cool to see the wedge as it was laid out. Personally, it can be difficult for me to internally visualize story locations and such from their descriptions, so I always enjoy seeing things like layouts and maps. Plus, more background stuff is always fun and enjoyable imo, so woo! Love the shelves too; very fitting for the room, look quite solid and well-made. -Droken "If at first you don't succeed, bull- riding is not for you." |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
19768 posts |
Mar-20-19, 01:02 AM (EDT) |
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2. "RE: Blast From the Past dep't"
In response to message #1
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>Love the shelves too; very fitting for the room, look quite solid and >well-made. Thank you! I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. They're quite basic, on purpose, but we built them for strength; they're made out of 8" pine boards (the backs are luan, a kind of lightweight plywood), and all the joints are pegged and glued so that there are no screw heads showing, and no brackets or shelf hangers intruding into the spaces where the books go. That was way more of a pain than making the shelves adjustable, but it makes for a much sturdier finished product. I'm also pleased by how well the stain (Minwax Golden Oak) turned out to match the existing paneling. The only downside right now is that they're so fresh they make the living room smell faintly of Polycrylic varnish, but it's not overpowering, and it should go away in a few days as the finish continues to cure. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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MuninsFire
Member since Mar-27-07
289 posts |
Mar-20-19, 03:03 AM (EDT) |
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6. "RE: Blast From the Past dep't"
In response to message #0
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One can never have enough bookshelves :-) Also....wow. I have been -totally- picturing the Wedge wrong for -years- For some reason I had it in my head that it had, like, a square profile but the -ceiling- slanted down from a high point to a low one, rather like how you use a doorstop. I apparently -totally misunderstood the geometry- and now I feel a little sheepish. -- In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
19768 posts |
Mar-20-19, 02:30 PM (EDT) |
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8. "RE: Blast From the Past dep't"
In response to message #7
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> >>(I've linked to the native-res version of the photo, on the off chance >>that someone out there is so bored they're curious about the stuff on >>the shelves. > >I don't know why, but I'm tickled that you have a 1st, 2nd and 3rd >place prize from the Maine Press Association. Alas that they were not all in the same year, or the certificates would match! :) Also, note that the first-place one is in the category of Sports Story. I didn't cover sports: don't really know enough about most of them to do so. That award is for the first feature article I was ever assigned, which was a retrospective on the local high school's boys' basketball team from sometime in the '60s. Stearns High was a basketball powerhouse in those days, and that year's team won the New England championship. I tracked down members of the team who still lived in town and whatnot to put together a story about their championship run, but the article contained virtually no actual depictions of.,. you know, basketball. So we were all a little surprised when it won as a sports story and not in the feature articles category... --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Peter Eng
Charter Member
1563 posts |
Mar-23-19, 02:37 PM (EDT) |
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10. "RE: Blast From the Past dep't"
In response to message #8
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>So we were all a little >surprised when it won as a sports story and not in the feature >articles category... >I'm imagining the people who decide on the awards saying, "This story really deserves a prize, but there's these three stories that also deserve recognition." "The sports story awards aren't too good this year. There's only two that I like." "Eh, it has 'basketball' in the article..." Peter Eng -- Insert humorous comment here. |
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version 3.3 © 2001
Eyrie Productions,
Unlimited
Benjamin
D. Hutchins
E P U (Colour)
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