The Pulp-O-Mizer is an Internet website/meme that’s been doing the rounds lately. It’s a lot of fun, and involves choosing a combination of image elements and text format options to create your own magazine cover in the style of 1950s pulp science fiction. Best results come from taking the time to play around and get a handle on its capabilities.
The most obvious idea is combine your personal favourites (favourite foreground image, background image, title, etc), making compromises when your first choices don’t work well together. Here’s one I did, reflecting my own tastes.
Another idea is to take something in the real world (a book, perhaps, or even your own blog), and create the cover it would have if it were a 1950s pulp science fiction magazine. I did this on Twitter with Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming, and Mike retweeted it!
The site does not have a public gallery, unfortunately, so you have to upload your generated image yourself. (But definitely worth it.) If you are willing, please post links to your creations in the comments.
Now here are the other links I wish to share:
Interesting:
- Leprosy converts nerve cells into stem cells.
- Tsetse fly repellant made from Essence of Waterbuck.
- Looking inside the brain of a fish in a swim simulator.
- Polynesians visited South America 1000 years ago and took home a souvineer.
- $60,000 eye implant to treat retinal damage blindness (on my list because my grandfather had macular degeneration).
- Ultra-fast archery. Pity about the video quality, but this is fascinating and I’d like to learn more.
- Story of a Russian family isolated in remote Siberia. (Particularly charmed by the bit about satellites.)
- Daniel Loxton’s history of the skeptical movement contains much meat to chew on.
- On the British Library’s digitisation of medieval manuscripts: an article and a blog.
Delightful:
- Electronic game to play with pigs, but I’d like to see more evidence that the pigs enjoy it. (Are the flashy firework displays really rewarding to them?)
- Two pieces of online art on the theme of unlimited zoom [1], [2].
- The Out of Eden Walk has started, and we’ll see how it goes. (I linked to this article in December.)
- Indoor kite-flying — essentially a form of dance.
Useful:
- Adding 24timezones.com to my list of bookmarked utility sites. Accurate-to-the-second time with a great interface.
