Renkon

A few months back I set out to see whether you can write about giant robots in long-form verse.

Still not sure I know the answer, but you can now grab the first book of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright on itch.io.

since about 2003 or so I've played lots and lots of Simcity 4. This year marks its 20th anniversary, and despite its age it still has a lot of players, mostly thanks to the modding community.

one of the things I've always liked about that game is the industry models. Same goes for factorio, really. industry just looks nice from up above!

but that's a tangent. these images are screenshots from Google Maps, unedited. some have location/business markers as well.

while browsing and exploring around in a bout of virtual tourism, i noticed that some of these areas exhibit quite a pleasing composition, so I started making screenshots and crops of them.

here's a bunch of them which I like the most. considering I work with a large-scale industrial printing machine, I might just lay down a sheet of art-grade paper and make a few prints, for myself :)

if you want to look for yourself: open google maps, go to Japan, look for oceanside cities, then look for orange blobs near the coast. those are steel furnaces, which often include a LOT of cool-looking machinery, complex pipes and pretty colors!

here's the location of the first one. most others were captured in the neighborhood of this. honeslty just move along the coast and look for industrial areas in the sea, you'll find plenty of cool stuff there. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.7879581,134.6387643,799m/data=!3m1!1e3

Edit: Seeing them collaged together as in this chost makes me realize they might totally work as a single print, tiled together similarly. It almost feels like there's no border. Neat!

I played this on Itch a long time ago, but the prologue version just now hit Steam. I had a couple close calls in this run, especially against the queen bee boss. The basic combat is very satisfying, and I can see some really neat strategic twists have been added to the game since I last played.

Classic playable in browser: https://alarts.itch.io/die-in-the-dungeon

Prologue on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2214080/Die_in_the_Dungeon_PROLOGUE/

If people are looking to join a ttrpg forum, I think this is a nice one!