Tag: automata

Here at the Roadside Resort, I generally stick to oddities within the United States. On occasion, though, if something strikes my fancy, I'll ignore the borders and give a creator their due attention.

This time, it's Blair Somerville of Papatowai, New Zealand. For more than a decade, he's filled his Lost Gypsy Gallery with hand-created automata both large and small that are, as filmmaker Joey Bania describes them, "ingenious, interactive, and often hilariously impractical."

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Richard Garriott, sometimes known as Lord British, is a successful video-game developer, avid astronomer and well-known space tourist, having paid a substantial amount of his own money in 2008 to visit the International Space Station solely to fulfill a personal dream.

He's also an enthusiastic collector of space artifacts, as well as a large number of oddities, which he houses at his estate in Austin, Texas, known as Britannia Manor.

In this short film, we get a brief glimpse of his fantastical collection, most notably of his assemblage of wonderful automata.