So TetZoom 2021, which occurred about a week ago and ran all day and into the night, was an absolute blast! This was the second ever TetZoo Convention I've ever been able to attend and I really really hope they keep the online/livestream portion of the show. Handy Sketchbook on my knee, I took a lot of notes on the presentations and here they are, though considerably cleaned up:
One of the highlights of the show was getting to attend the Paleoart Workshop, which I wisely snapped up tickets for as soon as I could. And so I drew this beautiful Kronosaurus along with our teacher Mark Witton. What an awesome experience!
Before I get into the review proper, I want to express my gratitude and joy for TetZooMCon 2020. The annual TetZoo Convention went virtual this year, and so it was the first time I got to attend. It was wonderful! I really hope they keep Zoom/remote attendance an option in the future; if so, I'll know to grab a ticket to the Paleoart workshop early and stick around for the after party.
Speculative Biology! You love it, I love it, but it so rarely shows up in anything mainstream. Usually we get a weird one-off Discovery Channel oddity or a handful of cherished books. So it's wonderful that Netflix has a whole high-profile four-episode SpecBio series. I can heartily recommend "Alien Worlds" so here's the trailer:
Now, I thought "Alien Worlds" was very nice. I feel like I like it more than most because I didn't have as much of a problem with the segments where the biological concepts portrayed by the aliens were demonstrated by real-world creatures, and I liked the interviews with the scientists. After all, these concepts are always new to somebody. And given that, at time of writing, "Alien Worlds" is in Netflix's top ten, that means a lot of people are learning how awesome extremophiles are.
The creature designs are overall decent. I feel like we got a nice mix of the familiar and the really alien. I think the Pentapods and Skygrazers were my favorite, with the Mothbuns as an honorable mention; their base design wasn't that imaginative (they look like... a moth-bunny), but I love that they're a relatively "normal" looking creature with a Bizarre Alien Life-Cycle. God, I love the "normal-ish creature turns out to have a really weird behavior or life-cycle or something trope.
Mostly, I hope we get more Speculative Biology series like this. The popularity of the series means there's definitely an audience for it. I also want to look for the "Alien Planet" series that this has been compared to often, based on Wayne Barlowe's classic Expedition, because I have not seen that since it's initial broadcast. We'll see if Santa brings me the new edition of Expedition to compare/contrast.
I also want Sophie Okonedo to narrate everything. In the meantime...
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Art of the Day! For a treat, here are some very very early creature designs of my own from (I think) way back in 1991. Most of them are more fantastical than speculative, strictly speaking, but I like them; especially the dogbird and stegocow!
What a fantastic book Naish and Barrett's Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved is! It is a fine introduction to these fantastic animals that I love so much. If I could afford it, I'd buy copies for every family I know. Most of the information in the book will be new and mind-blowing for them.
Most of the information wasn't new to me, so the selling point for me was those incredible illustrations. The book is packed with art. I can't express how happy I am to see the work of artists I first encountered online in a big beautiful glossy book.
Best of all, we have here a book about dinosaurs where birds are included like it ain't no thing and therefore, this is a book about dinosaurs that does not end at the K/T extinction. Goodness, this is the dinosaur book I've wished for since childhood.
Oof, that cover though... >_<
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Art of the Day!
A tiny frog with a big, big voice to round out Janphibianuary.
