There is a city on the moon. 11 days are missing. The Earth is hollow. The tower of Babel never fell. These are just a few of the many premises of The Secret World, a stunning new MMORPG game that promises to plunge players deep into a Lovecraftian realm of mythology risen, a secret world the X-files only ever hinted at. MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, a game played online in a shared fantasy world like World of Warcraft. The Secret World, as yet unreleased, looks utterly awesome, with a taste of any and all mythological flavors- …
The Ruins of Nuclear Winter
Nuclear winter slathered down across the world like a rain of torrential lead paint, bowing our cities beneath it. Ceilings and structures collapsed under the deluge, walls crumbled, and humanity was washed away by a tide of toxic white sludge. Gerry Judah sculpts the apocalypse. He builds out minutely detailed architectural models of buildings, then destructs them with a flood of white paint- leaving the canvas pitted, scored, and crusted with ruins. The sculptures are then hung on their sides in galleries, where viewers can peer deep through the blasted roofs and into the hollow bones of his work. A …
The Ruins of Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card’s brilliant novel Ender’s Game is not widely known for its ruins. You’re rather more likely to read it and be blown away by the sheer force of Ender’s personality, by the twisted morality of the story’s central conceit, or by the genius with which Card orchestrates his entire Battle School world. But there are ruins. One of them in particular stands out, and throughout the novel we see its creation, its dessication, and at last its final resting state; transliterated across time and space for the novel’s finale. If you know Ender you’ll probably already know what …
The Ruins of Warcraft
The online fantasy game World of Warcraft is awash with ruins. Half of the in-game quests involve pilfering buried treasure from cities razed by the Scourge, temples leveled by the Lich King, and craters where force field-encapsulated cities once lay. A large part of the joy of the game (IMHO) comes from exploring these areas and their eerily haunting graphics. The ruins of Bashal’Aran
Ruins of the Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty is an icon, a beacon-fire at America`s shore calling out to all and sundry- `come on in, there`s plenty of room!` To destroy her is to denounce the very idea of America, to throw that generosity of spirit back in her face and cry out `who needs you?` Aliens have done this a few times. Meteors twice. Global warming and global sanding have been involved also. In disaster movies the destruction of Lady Liberty has become something of a cliche, but that doesn`t stop it from being awesome. Read on for the gallery.
The ruins of LOST
The TV show LOST is all about ruins.? The island itself is a living museum, a place where the relics of millennia-old statues rest side by side with downed aircraft and underground research stations, all of them abandoned fossils of our cultural evolution. A huge part of the show`s appeal has been the Indiana Jones-esque exploration of these ruins. It`s one of the reasons I`m such a big LOST fan. Click through to relive the adventure.
Painting the Ruins of NYC
Cities can be destroyed at the click of a mouse button. The ruins of New York are nothing new, we’ve seen them in countless movies as the stunning backdrop to end of the world tales. But how hard are these images to make? For film they typically do it with computers, and frame-by-frame paint what they want. Here I take a lesson in that kind of frame-by-frame painting- with just one cell. This is my first effort at destructing a city through Photoshop. I followed an indepth tutorial online here, and if you go to check that out you’ll notice …
Ruins of Tokyo’s Apocalypse
Tokyo has been ravaged. It was meteors or earthquakes, tsunami or nuclear holocaust, though the cause hardly matters- no one’s left alive to remember it anyway. The apocalypse came and killed everyone, leaving only bits of our cities behind. Tokyo Genso is the site of a Japanese game artist who is passionate about the apocalypse. His site features huge amounts of his often excellent art, occasionally describing his destructing technique, and show-casing his work in magazines like ‘Liberal Time’ and at otaku conventions. He takes photos around Tokyo, and via Photoshop kills all the people and ages the city through …