Sports World is probably my favourite haikyo in Japan. In an upcoming top ten list of ruins in East Japan I’m putting together, it will more than likely be number 1. It’s just so awesome. It’s massive, 20 years abandoned but relatively intact, and set in a really beautiful forested mountain area. There are creepy screaming monkeys/birds at night, models on fashion shoots by day, and all manner of ways to entertain oneself clambering, clowning, and investigating the rest of the time.
by Michael John Grist
The Sphinx asked me its questions.
I ignored the Sphinx. It had the head of a lion, and the body of a man and woman combined.
“Where are you from?” it asked. “Why are you here?”
The Sphinx touched me with its hips. It edged closer to me.
“Stroke my hair,” it said. “Then you may pass.”
“I don’t want to pass,” I said.
“All want to pass. Just touch my cheeks. Stroke my back.”
“I don’t want to. I’m fine here.”
“It’s the desert.”
“It’s where I’m meant to be.”
“Kiss my eyelids. Stroke the soft skin of my fore-arms.”
“No.”
At the height of his power in the 1970’s former president/dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand E. Marcos commissioned the construction of a 99-foot concrete bust in own image, situated on a cliff overlooking the South China Sea around 130 km North of Manila. In 2002 it was torn apart in an explosion, the eyes, forehead and cheeks blown to bits- suspects included left-wing activists, members of a local tribe – or possibly looters hunting for one of Marcos’ legendary treasure troves.
The bust was completed in the early 1980s when Mr Marcos was still in power, but fell into disrepair after he was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986. He died in exile three years later.
by Robert Mammone
The tick tick tick of the car’s cooling engine dragged Arthur back to his surroundings with a rush. The sky was cornflower blue, the only movement a honking arrow of geese skirting the horizon. He squinted against the bright summer light, his face cooled by a gentle breeze that disturbed the smoke hazing the air. A fly crawled across his face, tasted the sweat beading on his skin, before he swatted it away.
He looked down at his hand resting on the hood of his car. He felt the heat bite deep into his hand, the pain distant, happening to someone else. He idly fingered a small dent marring the otherwise glossy, satin finish. Such a small thing, his mind wondered, such a small thing with large… He looked up sharply and the reality of his situation fell on him like a ravening beast, seizing his throat in a choking grasp that left him dizzy and breathless.
A little up the road, lying on its roof was a late model Mini, as helpless and useless as an upturned beetle. Scrapes and gouges in the paint work and battered panels robbed it of its graceful lines. Wisps of smoke spiralled into the air from its shattered engine and petrol leaked in a spreading, acrid pool. One of the front wheels rotated hypnotically.
Cities can be destroyed at the click of a mouse button.
The ruins of New York are nothing new, we’ve seen them in countless movies as the stunning backdrop to end of the world tales. But how hard are these images to make? For film they typically do it with computers, and frame-by-frame paint what they want. Here I take a lesson in that kind of frame-by-frame painting- with just one cell.
It took something like 4 hours to make this one. I spent a lot of time on small details, the windows, the grass, learning how to add textures with perspective, cloning people out, and so forth, plus in just figuring out the new tools.
And you can spot some basic errors. My cutting out of the sky (to replace with moody clouds), especially around the Chrysler Tower, is imperfect. The ruined road only goes up to the start of the cars.
The biggest impact tool is layering textures. That’s what ages all the buildings, and the road. Replacing the sky is probably next. Those steps don’t take all that long. The longer steps are all the fine details that you may glance over at first, that your eye will more explicitly notice if you look at the image for any time. Things that would only stand out if they were not destructed- like killing all the traffic lights, shredding all the flags, adding intricate cracks to the windows in the top left.
Alright. I’ll see if I can prep an original image for next week.
If anyone else fancies following the tutorial and posting their image/image link here, I’d love to see what they come up with.
See more SF / Fantasy Ruins here:
[album id=8 template=compact]See all my real world ‘haikyo/ruin’ explores in Japan here:
[album id=4 template=compact]See a curation of curious world ruins here.
Read my stories inspired by ruin here.
If you like what you’ve read here- why not subscribe to the email newsletter for free updates.
Seigoshi mine hides its secrets well. Fronted by a live builder’s yard, shielded by a fence with a live antenna inside, overgrown, ramshackle, and falling down- if you can plough through all of that you get to the good stuff- lonely mine carts, ancient bottles of whiskey, LOST-like hatches complete with beeping machinery, and store rooms filled with boxes of TNT.
Tokyo has been ravaged. It was meteors or earthquakes, tsunami or nuclear holocaust, though the cause hardly matters- no one’s left alive to remember it anyway. The apocalypse came and killed everyone, leaving only bits of our cities behind.
Recently I’ve become more interested in this kind of of digital manipulation, also called digital painting. I use some basic tools in Photoshop and like what I see. At some point I’ll try my hand at destructing environments, but for now let’s all enjoy what Tokyo Genso (Tokyo Fantasy) has managed to conjure up for us.
See more Fantasy Ruins in the gallery.
See all my real world ‘haikyo/ruin’ explores in Japan here:
[album id=4 template=compact]See a curation of curious world ruins here.
Read my stories inspired by ruin here.
If you like what you’ve read here- why not subscribe to the email newsletter for free updates.
by Michael John Grist
NB- This one is very graphic, and dark, and full of swearing.
He’s standing outside the building, waiting. He has been here for days. He doesn’t move much, he just stands, and waits, and he doesn’t care about the rain, or the sun on his face, tanning his right cheek to red, leaving the left sheltered and pale. People bustle by him like buffalo, following the herd. No-one asks him what he’s doing there.
He’s wearing the same clothes he was 2 days ago. He hasn’t moved. He only stands and stares up at the building sweeping majestic above him, 64 stories high and more than he can bear. He feels that at any minute the whole thing will fall down and burst him like a grape. That at any minute the things he thinks he remembers, fogged and bleary-eyed, will rush up through his body and choke him from inside.
Sometimes he spreads his arms because he thinks it will happen soon. He is only waiting for it. Pedestrians jostle with him and newsvendors hawk and spit in his path.
The police haven’t noticed him yet. It’s really a matter of time. Then it will be over, and he will have been judged. That’s all he’s waiting for.
Image from here.
by Michael Colangelo
Connor Mason is disappointed with the way that the makeup kit has turned out. He stares into his mother’s boudoir mirror and compares his face to that of the monster’s face on the discarded box. He looks nothing like the picture advertised. In fact, he still looks like himself, just with ugly blotches of green and brown patterned on his skin.
The kit was a rip-off. He has ordered things from the back pages of comic books before and they have all been failures. If they even show up at all, that is. They are usually nothing like the advertisements claim.
The x-ray vision glasses, and the trick handcuffs, and the fart candy have all let him down – time and time again.
Despite his malign feelings towards the products, he already has his eye on a new one. The “Saw-a-Lady-in-Half” box is expensive at sixty dollars. Maybe that’s the trick, though. Maybe he’s getting shit because he’s paying for shit. That must be the reason behind his consistent failings.
