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We
guys tend to hunch over things and grunt at each other.
It's wired in; once upon a time it might have been
"Check out sophisticated flaking technique on
stone axe of Gronk!"
Lately
it's been guys bending over engine compartments and
nodding to each other, pretending that an automobile
engine is still something you can understand by looking
at it.
It's
a bonding thing.
Someday, in the Future That Never Was, it'll be exactly
the same.
That's why we see Rusty the Robot failing to find
the right instructions in his Ray-O-Zap Broadcast
Tower Manual, while Henry looks sagely over his shoulder,
and everyone is wondering why it doesn't work, and
nobody really minds.
I
blame the manual. It claims the proud owner will be
"Broadcasting in Twenty Seven Minutes!"
which sounds a bit dodgy to me, and I bet they said
that just to make the Proud Owner figure it's somehow
his fault. As always, there is no customer service
number, and this is all happening late on a Friday.
This
picture's title is taken from a great old tune performed
by Henry Hall & the BBC Dance Orchestra in 1934,
which was one of the best years we've had for dreaming
about the future. In fact our nearest spaceman in
this picture is named after Henry Hall. Which just
goes to show, uh, something. I'll figure that out
in a minute.
As
always with these, I rendered the original image in
3D Studio Max and then retouched and modified it in
Adobe Photoshop. This was an unusually difficult image
to render for reasons you don't really care about,
involving lots of memory, unstable displacement maps,
and four computers. Just pretend you're listening,
at this point; I won't notice. But it all worked out
in the end.
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