Happiness is a Warm Meme

Someone has managed to make an amazing replica of the Hellboy Gun out of paper… presumably copied from a replica, a great many of which can be found on google… every successful sci-fantasy movie seems to create a cottage industry of DIY weapon-making. There are enough Lord of the Rings swords on Ebay to arm the whole of Middle Earth several times over.

The person that made it (showing a keen grasp of the nature of memetics) didn’t just show the product, but also provided all the plans… which are on a Japanese site, if you click the jpg links.

And someone’s taken them up on the challenge… and actually used those plans to make a real(er) one out of an aluminium block.

They’ve not only included pictures of the finished product, but the entire life cycle in picture form… I went on about this tendency earlier. A created “thing” can have its attention-value massively enhanced if its 4th(?) dimension is published as well… and people are doing it. A lot.

This thing is quite an impressive piece of work I think.

Further on…. Indy Mogul has an instructional video of how to make them here:

And loathe though I am to say that instructional videos are the new Rock and Roll, the spirit of “The Velvet Underground didn’t make a lot of money, but everyone who heard their records started a band” isn’t a million miles away. Worse is better. If it’s easy to copy, people will copy… making variations of their own, but out of this rag-tag bazaar of replication, real jewels can be found.

But I digress. Back to Hellboy Guns.

Here are the originals. My brother (who is an unbelievably clever bloke) made 8 of them for the movie. I was a bit unsure as to the copyright situation with regards publishing pictures of something, the IP of which is technically owned by someone else… but he seemed to think it was ok, and besides… the cat would appear to be well and truly out of the bag on this one.

So how much of this is legal? I haven’t a clue… but although it’s going to be a while before home raprep boxes get up to speed, I have a feeling that the massive heamoraging of “intellectual property” that we’ve seen in the last decade isn’t going to be limited to a purely digital realm forever.