"the fountainhead" comic strip by frank godwin (1945-1946)

around 2003, i'd recalled reading in "letters of ayn rand" that king features serialized howard roark's architectural adventures as a kind of comic for syndicated papers between 1945-46... something which -- as an artist and the world's laziest objectivist -- positively blew my mind. sadly it would take another couple of decades for them to be available online, and even then in smudgy microfiche quality. anyway, i've edited down and posted most of them here for my own convenience.

unfortunately there are four missing installments, which may have appeared in the (color?) sunday supplement, and thus wasn't archived by the boneheaded powers that be back then because, y'know, they were only comics:

#12 - january 6 1946 - stoddard temple verdict
#18 - january 13 1946 - roark visits the wynand household?
#24 - january 20 1946 - toohey tears off his mask?
#30 - january 26 1946 - roark wins and builds wynand tower (grr)

also, apparently the ayn rand institute released a book of godwin's work called "the illustrated fountainhead" back in 1998, but i haven't been able to find it on abebooks nor amazon.

gee bee air rally farmer's daughters (1988)

one of my most memorable/unexpected amiga experiences was playing activision's "gee bee air rally" (a fun plane race game set in the 1920's), and stumbling into this rather sexy and well-drawn post-parachuting sequence. usually you landed in a tree, a scorched desert or a mud filled pigpen (at least you hope that's mud). but here... well, you might not be wanting to get back to the race for a while!

anyway, to my frustration decades later, there were zero screenshots of the amiga version of the scene to be found online, save a small jpeg whose lossy compression naturally destroyed the true pixel-level art (always use gif or png for these things, guys). so i installed an amiga emulator, downloaded the game disk image, hunted around for kickstart roms, fiddled with configurations, played the game for two hours until i got to the sequence in question (which naturally wouldn't appear until you had the emulator set for 100% compatibility), and finally capped it for posterity:

you're welcome. (on a related note, i also finally completed the commodore 64 "farmer's daughter" x-rated text adventure: god, those old grue-filled parser games were soooo maddening. and even don't get me started on the babel fish dispenser in infocom's version of hitchhiker's guide...)

mindshadow game screenshots (1984)

from the commodore 64 version. this game totally blew my mind back in the day. it was also the first time i'd been able to figure out the fundamental difference between raster and vector computer graphics, as the objects for each scene were 'painted' on-screen like bob ross on amphetemines. interplay was truly living fifteen years in the future; adobe flash is nothing more than an advanced version of the techniques they pioneered here.

solution to the water maze in marble madness (1986-2008)

only took me 20+ years to figure this one out; the secret level required two players. solving it was difficult enough with an commie64 emulator, which could instantly bring me back to where i was with a saved-state file... god knows how much time it would've taken with the old school hardware! 

back to the future 2 concept art (1989)

i've always been obsessed with the neo-reaganian world of 2015 as portrayed by bttf2. we probably would've had fusion, weather control, rejuvenation and hover technology if there had been a technological singularity. with less than four years to go, however, only the 'asian influence' theme seems to have manifested itself; china's economic rise and japan's cultural works have definitely shaped the united states in the past decade. 

adventure construction set advertisement (1986)

electronic arts was awesomesauce in the 1980's. i must've spent at least eight months of my adolescence making ultima style adventures with this thing on my commodore 64. the largest one was something called "otherworld" which was submitted to this particular contest. a few years back i actually salvaged all my old c64 drawings and programs using an x1541 cable and starcommander to convert the old 5-inch floppies to emulator-readable images. unfortunately, that adventure never survived the data-transition.

max headroom tv series end theme (1987)

great synth from my youth. i pieced this together from the max headroom dvd collection; there were several episodes that had snippets of the audio. the composer may have been midge ure of ultravox, not sure.

and yes, i do know how to capitalize, as you can plainly tell from my other blog. i just figured the whole undercase motif would lend this new journal thingy a nice minimalist air, as i expect to be posting images and video, but not overly much text.