Neobums Epilogue: Where are they now

Earlier this year I posted about the making of the "Neobums," the little alien vagrants that had been loitering around town during Neotropolis 2225.  On the last night of the event, the Sentinels of Kepler 609-c initiated a major crackdown and arrested all of them:


It was a sad story.

But when the event was over and folks were headed back to their home planet, it turns out many of these little bums found new homes.

Leon, the proprietor of Spacer's Landing, adopted the little drunk that refused to leave his bar:

His name is now "Dribbles" and he's still a drunk, but he's trying to cut back:

He's also trying to improve himself by learning some new talents:

Getting along with his housemates:

And helping with daily chores where he can:

Ghillie, of Ghillie's Arcade fame, adopted the little loiterer who gained a fondness for video games in his arcade:

Short staffed as usual, Ghillie decided to put him to work:


His name is now George and he's starting to master the arts of video game and vending machine repairs:

The Cahdo brothers wandered off together to find more misadventures in LaLa Land:

One of them was spotted in the midst of a brief love affair with an Earth local named Rufus:


The other briefly took up residence in a washing machine:


At this point, they still remain at large.

 
While searching for the two of them, someone managed to find this guy chilling in their fridge:


Many people will remember Dmitri, the frequently unconscious drunk spotted on the main drag:


Still a problem alcoholic, he's temporarily taken up residence with a roommate somewhere in Earth's northern hemisphere:


If you spent anytime shopping at Starside Armory, you may have seen this little criminal loitering there:


It turns out he managed to stow away when they were preparing for lift-off from Kepler 609c:


When they discovered him, they named him "Gimbal" and put him to work.  Now he purportedly helps out a bit behind the scenes, but mostly his contribution amounts to just hanging around:

Then there's this little guy:


His name turns out to be "Pug" and he ended up transported to the penal colony at Oz for a one-year sentence.  He was photographed wearing his prison-issued uniform during a coastal clean-up work release:


That should give him plenty of time to rethink his life.

Some folks will remember Steve who was regularly panhandling outside the Gentleman Loser:


Upon apprehension by the Sentinels, Steve's fake mustache was removed revealing his true identity. It turns out "Steve" was in fact Jerry all along. Wanted for numerous unspecified crimes throughout the sector, Jerry disappeared in Sentinel custody.

Jorbu the Bartender continues to work at the Gentleman Loser, even though he drinks more liquor than he serves:

Blamo somehow manages to keep his employment contract with Xenogon Pest Removal Services despite numerous sexual harassment complaints:


He can be found at their home office most weekdays and occasionally on Sundays when he thinks there's nobody around.

Finally, there's Coach's adopted son Scratch who joined the NPCs:

When I asked Coach how Scratch was getting along on Earth during the off season, he had this to say: 

"Since getting home from Neo, the most we've done is to ensure the infestation of space fleas have gone dormant by locking him in the RV and giving him a Wired magazine to review. 

He's still on page 3, must be terribly interesting. 

He did manage to make it on an adventure to a small mountain town where some down on their luck apocalypse types regarded him and his kind with joy. Many selfies were taken, pockets were searched, drugs confiscated. 

He's enrolled in multiple correspondence courses that he has been taking online, and had a recent breakup with his long distance AI girlfriend when she said... " You've reached the daily limit for Chat GPT at this current subscription level"

Otherwise it's nothing but page 4 of Wired magazine in Scratch's near future..."

Some months later, Coach sent me this photo:

Clearly Scratch's reading comprehension had somewhat improved.

So that's where they are now.  Expect to see them and more of their kind at Neotropolis in 2226.

If you'd like to see more photos of these guys from the even and a few more scattered behind-the-scenes pictures of them being made, I have a album posted here: LINK

*If you've never been to Neotropolis, know that the Sentinels are the oppressive mercenary law enforcement operators who maintain law and order in this dystopian cyperpunk colony.

Meredith's Magic Wheelchair, Skeletor's Throne

A couple of years ago I made a Skeletor cosplay that I'm pretty proud of.  The character is a lot of fun to play around with and gets really great reactions from the crowd wherever I take him.  I never knew how completely I would enjoy running around as a campy 80s cartoon villain, but I love it.

So when we were talking with the folks from Magic Wheelchair earlier this year about what we could build for them to unveil at San Diego Comic Con, I was over the moon excited when they mentioned Meredith, a young lady from Austin, Texas who wanted her chair dressed as Skeletor's Bone Throne.

This was already a project I'd been noodling over so I could have it for photos of my own Skeletor costume.  So as luck would have it, I'd already worked out all of the details of exactly how I would build it.  Modifying my plan to fit a wheelchair would actually be pretty straightforward.

Here's the end result:

To see how we built it, read on...

Building Trazyn the Infinite for Games Workshop

Back in July I was at San Diego Comic Con unveiling a pair of Magic Wheelchair cosplays we'd built when I got a text from my contact at Games Workshop. 

"What would it take for you to build a wearable version of Trazyn the Infinite?" he asked.

For thems of you who don't know, this is Trazyn the Infinite:


"I'll need three months and here's a price," says I.

"Okay," he replied, "thanks anyway."

That was at the beginning of the convention and I tried not to think about it too much.  But I tend to be pretty inexpensive for the kind of work I do, so I had a hard time shaking this one off.  During a fuel stop on the way home, I couldn't help but text the question:

"Just out of curiosity," I texted, "how much were you expecting to spend?"

"The problem wasn't the price," he replied, "it was the timeline.  We need it in Nottingham in September."

"Alright," says I, "I'm going to hate myself for this later, but if we begin right away we can pull this off."

By the time the project was fully approved we had just about six weeks before Trazyn had to be walking around the show floor halfway around the world.

Awesome.

This build was done using every kind of tech I have in my shop as well as some old-school analog techniques. Normally I'd like to break up a project like this into sensible parts so you can see how each piece came together in a nice, palatable little package.  But that's not at all how these things actually happen.  In this case (like so many of my builds) all of the parts were largely done simultaneously.

So this writeup will seem like it jumps all over the place. Pieces were being 3D printed, CNC carved, hand-sculpted, painted, vacformed, rigged, weathered, and rebuilt all at the same time in the great whirling slide puzzle that is my workshop.  So here's the whole fabrication tornado in largely chronological order.  Try to keep up...

G.I. Joe Hydro Viper Helmet: a Sidetrack Project

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through posts in one of my toy collectors' groups and was reminded of this guy:

This was the "Hydro-Viper" one of the last G.I. Joe action figures I bought as a kid before I'd finally lost interest in that particular toy line.  Here's what the package and the action figure looked like:


At this point, the G.I. Joe line had started veering hard toward goofy science fiction concepts and bright colors.  That was just some of what helped me outgrow those particular toys.*  This character was definitely a goofy science fiction concept in bright colors, but for some reason this guy struck a chord with me.  I was fascinated with all things military and scuba diving as a kid and this covered both.

The action figure wasn't particularly well sculpted and the colors seemed wrong, but I absolutely loved the artwork on the package.  Even their lore was cool:


It's also fascinating to me that he came with a manta ray.  While a lot of the named, one-off characters had their animal sidekicks (i.e. Snake Eyes had a wolf named "Timber" and Shipwreck had a parrot named "Polly") this was not a unique, individual character.  Instead, he was one of presumably many rank and file troops that were given a series of surgical alterations for deep diving and then issued a specially trained manta ray to assist in their duties as part of an evil terrorist organization determined to rule the world.

Neat.

But I digress.

Stricken by an overwhelming wave of nostalgia, I decided I needed to bring this very distinctive dive helmet to life.  So I dug up all of the reference images I could and put Jeff to work on the digital sculpt.  In no time at all, he delivered this thing of beauty:


With the huge ears and dorsal fin, it was going to be easy for this helmet to get comically large.  So I told Jeff to keep the rest of the helmet as close fitting as possible.  He nailed it:


So I split it into separate parts to speed up the FDM** printing process and overnight my fleet of printers grew the whole set.  Here's the initial helmet roughed together:


I didn't do the prettiest job on the seams, but a bit of sanding and Bondo made quick work of them:


And even at this stage, the helmet looked pretty spiffy:


After a couple of rounds of sanding and filling, the whole thing was given a two coats of red primer:


And I couldn't resist the urge to take dusty mirror selfies:


For the almost burgundy red color, I applied a basecoat of Dupl-Color Bordeaux Red Metallic:


This was a nice, deep red which did a great job of adding depth to the details:


And with a clearcoat, the metallic effect was downright gorgeous:


I masked off the dorsal fin and the forehead arrow and painted them with Rustoleum satin "Canyon Black" and gloss "Marigold" respectively:


The masking tape lifted a bit of the clearcoat, so apparently I didn't tack cloth the helmet enough before I sprayed the clear.  I'd have to go back and re-apply that later.

In the meantime, I used the scroll saw to cut some 1/8" smoke tinted acrylic sheet to make lenses to fit in the eye holes:


These pieces were heated in a toaster oven until they were soft and floppy*** then pressed into the eye hole from inside with a soft rag.  Then the soft acrylic was held in place, bulging out of the eye hole until it cooled and became rigid again.  This makes a perfectly bubbled, custom fit lens for the eye hole:


The lenses were glued in place with cyanoacrylate adhesive, then I made up a pair of LED throwies to make the eyes more interesting:


An LED throwie is literally just an LED taped onto a button cell battery.  It's about the simplest bit of electronics you can make and it did just what I needed to give me an idea of how the final effect would look:


Here you can just about make out the masking tape holding the LED throwie inside the eye from the test lighting:


Clearly I'd need a more elegant solution.

But the effect was just sinister enough and visibility was largely unimpaired:


Success!

The LED throwies have enough juice to stay lit for several days, but I didn't want to have to re-make them every time I wanted to light up the helmet.  Instead, I wired up a pair of LEDs to a AA battery pack:


Then I shrink-wrapped the leads with a piece of aluminum armature wire, leaving just a tiny bit of the LED's tip showing on the end:


This gave me a nice, stiff, posable stalk with the glowy bit on the end:

The battery pack was mounted up in the dorsal fin with a patch of velcro and the leads and armature wire were gaff taped into place.  The wire was bent to hold the LEDs in exactly the right spot in the center of the eye lens:


The result was an appropriately menacing final touch to the character's glare:


Unfriendly face is unfriendly:

And with a new application of clearcoat, it's done:

Here's a nifty little turnaround:

I did go ahead and add a couple lengths of wiring loom to approximate the weirdly narrow air lines feeding into the snoot:

I need an ever-so-slightly bigger size though.  They don't look quite right.

In the meantime, I just need to talk myself out of making the rest of the costume and doing an underwater cosplay photoshoot.  

It sounds like fun though, so I'll probably end up doing it anyway.  In fact, I should start training a manta ray now.

Stay tuned...

*Girls.  The other main thing was girls.

**FDM Stands for "Filament Deposition Modeling," the more common type of 3D printing for at-home users.  It tends to take a lot of time for larger parts, so I cut them into smaller parts so they can all be printed simultaneously to speed things up.

***Made you look.