Voxel-style tribute to one of my all-time favorite films: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Made in the early 2010s.

More voxel art in the

Check this thread for game-themed voxel art:

https://graphics.social/@metin/110858474959620439

The ka-tet, having clicked the heels of their "ruby slippers" have gained entrance to the emerald glass castle.

And here I stop reading for the day. I am now 95% of the way through Wizard and Glass.

“Oh Christ,” Eddie said. “I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”
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Probably the MOST unique line Stephen King has ever written.

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WTF???

Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants flickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye had been traced in yellow.

It’s the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought.
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I would've made a beeline down I-70 West had I seen that!

They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz.
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An interesting twist on this story. We've been paralleling Lord of the Rings so strongly, but now we're pivoting (or maybe just incorporating) The Wizard of Oz into this narrative (red shoes, emerald palace...)

“No,” Jake said. “It’s another riddle.” He looked at the weird, blood-red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. “Another goddamned riddle.”
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Who put these shoes there? Why are they all red? What do they mean?

Susannah’s were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the feminine, sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren’t really shoes at all—they had been made to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.
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I spoke too soon.

They reached the shoes at midmorning.
...
Susannah’s impression that there were six pairs was understandable but wrong—there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter—four dark red booties made of supple leather—was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member of their ka-tet.
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When we last left the ka-tet, they encountered shoes laid out on the highway. Now the shocking revelation the shoes were meant for them.

But... Susannah has no legs!

“Something up there,” Jake said, pointing at a long stretch of road from which the cars had been cleared. “Do you see?”
...
They were shoes. Six pairs of shoes placed neatly in a line across the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70.
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I stop here at the end of this chapter. I inch my way closer to the end, now 93% of the way through Wizard and Glass.

(edit: just noticed ChatGPT produced a single shoe instead of a pair - wonder what THAT means!)

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Ah yes - in this realm, a virus had wiped out the area as well. But it's not the EXACT same world as The Stand, though, is it? Slight differences, a parallel version.

“Did you ever see the witch again?” Jake asked.

For a long time it seemed Roland would not answer this, either, but in the end he did.

“Yes. She wasn’t done with me. Like my dreams of Susan, she followed me. All the way from Mejis, she followed me.”
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The parallels to Lord of the Rings is stunning. The glass ball is the ring. Roland is Frodo who was succumbing to its power. Rhea is Gollum who chases after it.

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Roland talks about what he saw in the Wizard's Glass when he did look into it again and I can see the allure of wanting to be inside it. I, for one, want Roland to stay there and share all he "learns".

“That’s where I went. That’s where I travelled while my friends travelled east with me. I got better there, little by little. I held onto the ball, and I travelled inside my head, and I got better. But the glass never glowed for me until the very end . . . when the battlements of the castle and the towers of the city were actually in sight. If it had awakened earlier . . .”
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And now I want immediately to go back to Roland's world and continue his story in Gilead!

“Yeah. It makes my adventures searching for the elusive dime bag in Tompkins Square look pretty tame. In a way, though, I’m almost relieved.”

“Relieved? Why?”

“Because I thought he was going to tell us that he killed her himself. For his damned Tower.”

Susannah looked squarely into his eyes. “But he thinks that’s what he did. Don’t you understand that?”
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Susannah and Eddie reflecting on Roland's story and she's correct.

For the first time in

(hours? days?)

the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees.
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The return to the "present" is quite jarring after having spent so much time in Roland's past.