Playing D&D With Porn Stars: One of the Coolest things Anyone's Ever Sent Me

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

One of the Coolest things Anyone's Ever Sent Me

Check out this cutaway diagram of an apartment block in Kowloon...
(click twice to enlarge twice)

Closeup:

22 comments:

biopunk said...: Cool!

Reality really can be stranger than fiction...; January 4, 2011 at 9:36 PM
biopunk said...: Here's a link for some background:

http://coilhouse.net/2008/08/kowloon-walled-city-the-modern-pirate-utopia/; January 4, 2011 at 9:40 PM
John Matthew Stater said...: Look up Kowloon on youtube and you'll see a rather inspirational German documentary on the city.; January 4, 2011 at 9:41 PM
Adam Dickstein said...: That is an epic illustration. Amazing.; January 4, 2011 at 9:44 PM
christian said...: I like the guy pissing from the roof.; January 4, 2011 at 10:14 PM
Dyson Logos said...: That's not just Wow. That's the mother of wow.

I was just looking up the walled city this morning and was stunned to discover it doesn't exist anymore.; January 4, 2011 at 10:34 PM
huth said...: Whose it credited to? Any info?; January 4, 2011 at 11:32 PM
biopunk said...: With my google-fu, I think it is from the InterCommunication magazine #23, 1997 Winter Issue:

Kowloon Walled City a sa a Pot-au-feu of Reveries:
Kowloon's Gate / Hong Kong: City of Multiple Layers / Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City

The article is credited to Itaru MATSUEDA, but don't know if he was the artist.

http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic023/contents_e.html

I'm thinking there may be a typo in the title and it should read: ...As A Pot-au-feu, not: a sa a Pot-au-feu...; January 5, 2011 at 12:30 AM
C'nor (Outermost_Toe) said...: Huh. Now all you have to do is figure out a way to use it.; January 5, 2011 at 12:35 AM
Spawn of Endra said...: Definitely an information-rich image. It's intriguing that there is more attention paid to the stuff, the accoutrements of the apartments, than their dwellers. There are apts occupied by formless individuals, surrounded by clearly defined material goods all along the back wall of each apartment. Their stuff is defined, they are plastic. That's an interesting technique for selling a life style. Presumably this is from a brochure for prospective tenants or some other marketing drive (wut-whoa, marketing ... these are all depictions of sexless [not genderless] beings except for Peeing-Man)?

If nothing else it might be a lucrative freelance illustrating opportunity for you?; January 5, 2011 at 1:29 AM
Zak Sabbath said...: @spawn

I don't need freelance illustration opportunities, really, I've already got 3 jobs and 2 of them pay well.; January 5, 2011 at 1:50 AM
Anonymous said...: The map is awesome. I used to draw stuff like that as a kid, fill them with stick figures treasures and monsters and navigate them as dungeon of sorts. Soon my classmates started doing the same, and we were all exploring each other's dungeons. Happy times.

From a more designery oriented perspective, dungeons are arcologies. And vice versa: the interaction with the space is equivalent from a navigational point of view. Sure, from arcologies you might see the sky now and then, but the same applies to dungeons built in canyons or cliffs, which leads to a number of interesting things to do with the huge wall of... air (harder to navigate than stone at times). I'm surprised it's not an idea used often.

Kowloon had an interesting social structure as well, which I don't really expect to be replicated in a dungeon, as the dungeon inhabitants are not underploretariat working in sweatshops in the neighbouring medieval burgh, but can be a great inspiration for authors interested in having a more coneptually robust social structure in their dungeon.; January 5, 2011 at 2:56 AM
Malcadon said...: I first found out about this super shantytown when reading about William Gibson's Wired magazine article called Disneyland with the Death Penalty. At the end of the article, he mused about the contrast between the squeaky-clean and strict city-state of Singapore, and this witched hive of scum and villainy. This was from the article:

"Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seemed to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole."

Thanks for showing this cutaway. I also like to recommend running a Google image search on the walled city, as it is full of great images, as you could a larger cutaway, and photos of the inside. I grew-up in a rundown slum, so this - more-or-less - takes me back.; January 5, 2011 at 3:07 AM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; January 5, 2011 at 9:14 AM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; January 5, 2011 at 9:22 AM
Chance said...: I first found out about it watching Blood Sport , and started looking into it as a cyberpunk setting. The map was the first one I had seen of it however , and it blows my mind a little to see such a mass of humanity laid out like that.; January 5, 2011 at 10:15 AM
Unknown said...: Wow, that's one of the most spectacular cross-sections I've ever seen. I snagged me a larger version from the Webs to peruse later at my leisure.; January 5, 2011 at 11:32 AM
The Cramp said...: I have been trying to figure out where this place was for a while, but I was looking on the wrong continent. There are scenes in the film Baraka that were shot in Kowloon, but I was told they were shout in South America somewhere. While Columbia, Brazil and Argentina have some crazy dense slums, Kowloon is the bloody platonic ideal.; January 5, 2011 at 11:37 AM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; January 5, 2011 at 12:35 PM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; January 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM
Anonymous said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; January 5, 2011 at 1:35 PM
crowking said...: The great hong kong director Tsui Hark, made a cool action film ten years ago called Time and Tide that contained major battle scene in Kolwoon. there's some footage of it in the trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxk2PPOdw8o; January 6, 2011 at 8:11 AM

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