From the Desk of Darkvale...

Despite our frequent radio silence, rest assured that Darkvale Studios is very much alive and well.  Our social media director recently suffered an attack of professional ennui, as well as an attack by a rabid pack of lemurs (not necessarily in that order), and as a result the final few blog opportunities of 2017 sailed quietly by.  As we claw our way back into the harsh light of the worldwide web, I am happy to let you know that Darkvale Studios will be exploring some new media opportunities in the months ahead - we will continue to exist on our website and FaceBook, and will be exploring some bold new storytelling frontiers in the early months of 2018.  Our production shop and laboratory workbench will once again be posting their “works in progress” photos, beginning in the next few days, and the Darkvale Studios you all know and tolerate will once again be a regular contribution to your weekly dose of internet noise.  You’re welcome.

Building the dreams of Orlando's madmen and madwomen isn’t always easy, and Darkvale Studios wish to thank you all once again for joining us on this frequently ugly journey.  Happy New Year, nutjobs.  

Mechanical Monsters of Suburbia

No HOA regulations were harmed in the making of this video.

Because new content is not always ready when the giant blog bell rings, tonight we bring you once again our lovely highlight reel of some of our stranger projects of the last few years.  Our humble shop has hosted some unique endeavors and happily served some of Orlando's most creative weirdos.  If you're reading this and you've ever hired us, rest assured we're not talking about you.  Anyway, take a moment, turn up your volume, and enjoy a quick video frolic of what emerges from the steady stream of sparks, smoke, and swearing that goes on around here.  And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to figure out how to disconnect this giant blog bell.  I'm not entirely sure why I even bought the thing.

No Skittish Need Apply...

After a poorly executed publicity stunt resulted in our resident artist snapping and being carted off to the giggle farm, the ensuing staffing issues sent us into a two month media blackout from which we are only now emerging.  There was a short frenzy of employee shuffling, and at one point we had a very hopeful prospect for a new social media director, until he violated our Offensive Speech Zero Tolerance clause with the phrases “Cool Beans”, "Awesome Sauce”, and, God help us all, “Totes Magotes”, which of course resulted in our having him immediately put to sleep.  Godspeed, Cameron.  At any rate, we seem to have repaired the communications wiring that our resident Picasso gnawed through during his frenzied escape attempts, and our art department walls have been thoroughly scrubbed of all blood and solid waste based graffiti, so we’re happy to announce that - we’re hiring!  To be sure, employment within the chaotic halls of the Darkvale Studios facility is not for the faint of heart nor the feeble of health insurance, but adventure is guaranteed, and the lack of desire to read the fine print is the very sort of thing we look for in our new prospects.  If you don’t suffer from hangups about “safety”, or “respect”, or “payment”, you may find this to be a very rewarding career.  You know where to find us, usually where the OSHA inspectors or news vans seem to gather, so toss on your fancy interviewin’ pants and come on down - our schedule seems to be wide open.  Also, our nameplate engraver is a little glitchy these days, so if your first name is Cameron, that would be a HUGE plus.

Less Chatter, More Splatter...

Art, it is said, is born out of chaos and suffering.  The management of Darkvale Studios, concerned about the recent creative silence of our art department, took one look at our resident artist and realized the problem.  He is a contented man with a happy family and many distractions, while his hairline, waistline, and creative spark all seem to be heading toward the shadowy end of the map.  Happiness is nearly as hated around here as puns, so the time is clearly upon us to kick the cosmic beehive and remind our little bohemian what he’s paid for.

The last painting he did took him one month. It stands to reason, in the minds of the cruel people in charge, that his next task should be to knock out 12 paintings in 4 weeks.  Big art, small art, art that climbs on rocks, we don’t care - and since we’re trying to generate a little buzz with this admittedly low budget publicity stunt, we’re going to be posting live stream videos, daily updates, extra mini challenges along the way, and even getting interactive by letting you, Darkvale fans, chime in with suggestions and votes on the outcomes of some of the artwork.  We would call this an immersive creative experience, if we were the kinds of people who said that kind of thing, so be glad we aren’t.  He’s receiving notice as this blog posts, and he has the next couple of days to get his supplies together and call his loved ones. The whistle blows Saturday night at midnight, and by midnight, Saturday, August 26th, his last brushstroke needs to be drying on the canvas, or his next masterpiece will be performed with a sour cream gun in the kitchen of a Taco Bell.  So stock up on popcorn, brush up on your online heckling skills, and prepare to help us heap on the pressure as we make our little art monkey dance in his upcoming Brush with Destiny.  Ooooo, I think we have our title.  We paint with words.  We also paint with paint.  That’s the point of this whole thing, the painting with…ok, maybe not so great with words.  Stop typing now.

Insects and Violence...

Our humble planet boasts an incredible range of living things, and here at Darkvale Studios, we seek to showcase the repulsive ones.  Our field agents have sought out some of the most incredibly rare and unlikely creatures an imaginative creator could tuck into Earth's shadowy recesses, then promptly dunked them in ether and shipped them to us for a quick buck.  From the South American Bird Eating Tarantula to the Danish Yodeling Beetle, from the Chinese Twerking Frog to the extremely rare and optimistic Yemeni Cricket, our acquisitions department have hacked through the steamiest of jungles and shopped in the blackest of black markets to send us specimen jars and air holed crates of fantastical beasts only a drug addled god could have conjured.  So whether you want a dried adolescent chupacabra skeleton from a Yucatan silver mine or a beautifully preserved satyr skull obtained in a Roman gypsy village, you’re much more likely to scratch your cryptozoological itch in the Darkvale Emporium than oh, say, Wayfair.com.  They do have some lovely lampshades over there, though.  If there’s a creature you’ve heard of but not been able to find, contact us and you may be pleasantly surprised how quickly we can go destroy an extremely rare living thing to make you happy.  So reach out to Darkvalestudios.com for your creature needs, and your money can help us bribe the World Wildlife Fund into continuing to pretend we’re just an Orlando prop shop.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Despite Darkvale Studios' strict "no puns" policy, we're going to let "Yemeni Cricket" slide.  That one's pretty good.

Never fear art. Well, maybe fear electrified art a little.

Many creeped out Radio Shack clerks ago, we decided to venture beyond the quiet world of sketchpads and clay sculptures and into the bold and sparky realm of amateur electronics.  It’s amazing how little you miss the burned off bits of you that don’t grow back, and we’ve managed to get a fair amount of experience with circuitboards, solder irons, and fire extinguishers under our belts since then.  In the last few years, we’ve built an articulated steampunk robot, a full scale mad science lab set, radio controlled butterflies, an LED starry sky sewn into an umbrella, and a hacked Tickle Me Elmo that throws feces and swears like a drunken riverboat captain (still in beta testing). This is perhaps an awkward way to remind you all that we are happy to take on weird electronic gadgetry projects, as well as the much safer paint and sketchbook related ones.    Our insurance premiums would probably be kinder if we stuck with easel mounted madness, but our deep seated love of chaos simply won’t allow it.  Plus, you’d be amazed how much the local children’s hospital seems to love this bold new twist on their beloved Elmo.

Monsters, Inc. Wait, is that name taken?

It seems like most modern people love pretty things.  Lovable, big eyed, aesthetically pleasant creatures are a treat for the eyes, the heart, and the camera, and we respect that.  But everyone on Earth has a little bit of ugly in them, and Darkvale Studios is here to pay tribute to the light-fearing creature in all of us, by happily building whatever any customer’s inner monster desires.  Whether it’s a spring and cable driven puppet beastie like the one pictured above, or a Pepper’s Ghost projection effect popular with everyone from magicians of the 1870’s to modern billionaire theme park empires, look no farther than Darkvale Studios for all your cursed creature creative needs.   We have happily built strange things for even stranger people for many years, and as our humble planet marches into ever stranger times, we will be happy to keep up with its most shadowy needs.  The next time you feel the desire to click away from your YouTube kitten videos and venture into some more dimly lit territory, please take a digital stroll through the hallways of darkvalestudios.com, and see if any of our handcrafted miscreations scratch your guilty itch.  To quote Baudelaire, "Life swarms with innocent monsters", and to quote us, “For a few bucks, you can take one home.”  I bet Baudelaire never dreamed he’d one day be shilling for some jackhole Orlando prop builder.  Perhaps tonight’s monster is the one doing the typing right now. 

Tiki Treasures. Boring Title. Sorry.

Despite the sinister style usually associated with Darkvale Studios, we do reach out to those with more lighthearted tastes as well.  While we won’t be selling kitten posters or doorstops with the word “dream” on them anytime soon, we are happy to feature a line of products for those who love tiki culture and vintage exotica.  Custom purses and accessories, tropical murals, and, if we can finally get US Customs to accept a bribe without getting all snitty about it, authentic shrunken human heads.  Despite a closet full of Hawaiian shirts, we still tend to get pretty dark around here.  We look forward to growing our line of tiki products, so if there’s anything you yearn for that doesn’t exist yet, well, weird crap that was probably never meant to be happens to be our specialty.  We should probably hire a marketing person to clean that up a bit for us, but it works for now.  

Darkvale Studios.

Weird crap that was probably never meant to be.

Skip the marketing guru, we need Morgan Freeman.

"I'm a Cowboy. On a Dubious Claim I Ride."

Jon Bon Jovi was 24 when the album Slippery When Wet was recorded, which would likely put him at 23 or younger when he wrote the lyric, “I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.”  Assuming he rocked no faces before he was 3 years old, this gives us 20 years of face rockin’ to work with.  He would need to rock an average of 50 thousand faces a year to hit this ambitious “million” metric, which works out to 4,167 faces a month, or about 1042 faces a week. Allowing for 8 hours of sleep a night, since face rockin’ is a considerable calorie burner, the 149 faces he needed to rock every day would have to happen at a rate of just over 9 faces an hour, allowing for no breaks or holidays.  He most likely tried to rock several faces at once to save time, but attempting to rock more than 20 faces simultaneously makes it difficult to know who’s just faking a good face rockin', while hoping you’ll go away.  We believe it’s safe to assume Mr. Bon Jovi has fudged his numbers a bit, but thus far his people have offered no response to our numerous emails or phone messages.  These are difficult days for those who love the truth, and if you’re going to declare the ability to rock a human face every 6 minutes and 40 seconds of your entire young life, you should expect to be called out on it.  Even with the album played at full volume, this researcher’s face never even wobbled, so suffice it to say we here at Darkvale Laboratories take Mr. B. Jovi’s swaggering lyrics with a grain of salt.  The battle for truth is an important one, and you can all rest easy knowing that we at Darkvale Studios are here to shine the cold light of scientific investigation onto the shadowy claims being made by those who shape our world.  Darkvale Studios proudly seeks out the crucial truths others pretend they don’t care about.

The Cure For the Boring Bookshelf...

If you work in an office, you probably have a shelf.  And your office shelf is probably full of sad, grey things, like employee manuals or IT procedures or a folder of creepy anime' pictures you didn't think anyone knew about.  We at Darkvale Studios would love your office to show off your true inner character, at least the parts of it that don't lead to pepper spray and HR paperwork.  Take a few minutes from your cubicle grind and peruse our delightful Emporium, just a few clicks away from you now, to see what strikes your fancy.  Imagine the looks on the faces of your colleagues when your workspace features an authentic Chupacabra skeleton, vampire skull, or cannibal shaman staff topper (pictured above), featured as a beautiful contrapunta to your "Hang in There!" kitten poster.  If nothing else, the elbow room you'll gain at the breakroom microwave will be well worth the investment.  You may as well liven up your desk area now, before the IT people find all those anime' tentacle pics in your search history, am I right?

My (Hazardous) Chemical Romance...

Working in the Darkvale shops is not for the faint of heart.  If you have a problem with toxic chemicals, cruel sarcasm, poorly maintained power tools, occasional rabid lemur attacks, explosive profanity, or not being paid, you may wish to seek employment elsewhere.  But for those hardy, fearless, or dimwitted few who make the cut, you will have tales of workplace adventure to last a lifetime.  It also helps that we drastically shorten your expected lifetime.  Our employees endure long hours, unrealistic management demands, and an unquestionably hazardous work environment.  At the very least, our rabid lemur containment could stand a serious upgrade.  Despite all this, the work we do is rewarding and those who survive it seem willing to come back for more.  So if you're interested in a truly unique, if not terribly well paid, work experience, drop us an email and join the Darkvale adventure.  On an unrelated note, if you have need of up to seven angry rabid lemurs, look no further than Darkvale Studios to scratch your unusual itch.  We ask no questions. 

Blasting Our Way to the Top...

Raising an evil empire?  Striking terror into the hearts of the masses?  Giving the finger to all that is kind and decent?  We’ve got you covered.  Darkvale Studios is here to make sure that you and your glaze eyed minions of destruction are outfitted with unique and beautiful weaponry, befitting only the classiest of spittle flinging despots.  Whether you’re planning to terrify local street criminals or to flush out any weird looking foreigners you haven’t chosen to marry, accept no substitutes for the stunning firepower and bold designs that can only be found in the Darkvale arsenal.  So when you take your next break from another redfaced session of shaking your fist at the television cameras, settle down with our weaponry catalog and pick out a few nice life enders to dazzle your foes and make the pretty ladies swoon.  Your blood soaked vision for the future isn’t going to build itself, so whip out your checkbook and let our scruples-free laboratory build some of the most stylish and needlessly deadly handheld weaponry a loosely policed internet will allow us to sell.  If you act quickly enough, we’ll even help you create a little elbow room in those noisy overcrowded streets out there.  It’s only money, and you probably have too much of it - Darkvale Studios will happily help you shape the future that finally lets us put our rusting Y2K shelters to good use.

When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro...

Whatever else can be said about 2016, things got weird.  They appear to be remaining weird as the new year rises from the ooze to menace us all, and we plan to embrace the change by embracing the strange.  From atomic space weaponry to fire breathing stage puppets to glow in the dark guitar picks, it appears that even now, our 2017 is lining up to be a busy and beastly one.  As we clear off the Darkvale workbench and sweep up the embarrassing ashes of former projects gone wrong, we look forward to some of the new directions we can anticipate in 2017.  We’ve added 3D printing to our menu of services, and almost none of our tests of the new equipment have ended in tears or bloodshed, much to our boredom.  We are also preparing to build a Darkvale Studios showroom at the Iron Robot Films facility in Sanford, so the public will finally be able to experience our props and Emporium wares in person, without having to deal with our shady warehouse staff or any of the ensuing police paperwork.  It appears that our mural department already has a few clients lined up, so expect our online galleries to keep growing as our portfolio does, and check back often.  Thank you all for a productive and creatively challenging 2016, and we anticipate bigger and stranger ventures on the horizon.  We'll even try to keep them legal this year, if the money's right.

From Our Cold, Dead Tentacles...

The people who carry weapons like these are very rare.  These belong to people of courage, action, honor, and destiny.  They belong to people who face potential death and refuse to flinch.  They belong to people none of you even deserve to meet.  Let’s face it, half of you are sitting in the bathroom while you read this, don’t pretend otherwise.  But thanks to Darkvale Studios, even if you can’t be one of those people, you can be outfitted like one.   Space monsters are hard to find and even harder to kill, but thanks to our complete lack of background checks (Florida is occasionally good for some things), you and all your drunken maniac friends can arm yourselves with the very latest in atomic disintegration weaponry, shiny and fresh from the famous Darkvale workbench.  Even if all your stories of space monster destruction are utter lies, the fact that you own the proper weaponry will defeat any doubts of your bravery, or at least any willingness to argue about it.  So send us a message, and we’ll see to it that you are far better prepared for epic deeds of stunning intergalactic courage than your tiny suburban reality will ever require.  Darkvale Studios - proudly capitalizing on an ever less truthful world.

From the Center of the Earth to a Suburb of Orlando...

To thoroughly prepare for an upcoming steampunk adventure themed project, we recently dispatched one of our field researchers (admittedly the only one we have left, thanks to all the cannibal islands we do business with) to Iceland to seek out the inspiration for Jules Verne’s bestseller Journey to the Center of the Earth, and its much lesser known sequel, Journey to the Center of the Earth Two - Electric Boogaloo.  Pictured here is the chasm that Monsieur Verne visited, probably while looking for a restroom.  Our researcher brought back photos, sketches, field notes, and a mild social disease, as well as a yearning to display what he found on the Snaeffels volcano peninsula on exhibit here in our upcoming club in Central Florida.  In the weeks ahead, we will be posting more information about how you can participate in bringing our Steampunk Adventurer’s Club to life, and become a member of a very unique thematic experience, which we have clearly gone to great lengths to realize.  Darkvale studios' blog, which has admittedly been rather quiet lately, has a great deal of new things to report, so expect much more frequent posts that you can look forward to (or dread, we won’t tell you how to feel).  Big strangeness is in the works, and we can’t wait to share the pictures and uncomfortable stories of our upcoming projects with you all.  Keep your antennae up, and so long for now.

Paradise in Pigment...

In recent weeks, Darkvale’s art department has had the opportunity to create panoramic paradises for clientele looking to scratch their adventurer’s itch by turning the very walls that confine them into two dimensional exotic escapes.  While we greatly enjoy the sawdust and thunder of a production shop creating physical props and sets, there is a beautiful serenity to making the rent by slinging paint, combined with a greater chance of ending each day with all ten fingers and no need for an eye patch.  We will be expanding our art galleries in the days ahead to reflect our newest paint projects, and we are looking to add “portable murals” to our Emporium stock soon (we know, they’re just called “paintings” when they can be moved around, but we like to rename things and act like we’ve invented something).  Customizable, ready to hang panoramas, any size up to 8 feet long by 4 feet high with a huge selection of subject matter, will be available as soon as we can figure out how to integrate them into our online shop.  In the meantime, if this idea interests you, simply contact us through FaceBook or directly through our website, and we will be happy to accommodate you.  In the meantime, as always, like and share our posts, and help us to grow our humble little digital pirate empire into something respectable, or at least something with a bunch of money.  Stay tuned, and so long for now.

Our Science Isn't Mad, Just Very, Very Disappointed...

We have been strangely silent online lately, and our moody immaturity is only partly to blame.  Projects of great variety and scope have been rolling across our production floor, and it has stretched all of our resources to keep up with them.  We run a very small staff here at Darkvale, partly due to our demand for nearly unattainable quality, and partly due to our refusal to pay anyone.  Possibly not in that order.  That said, when the proverbial poo strikes the proverbial propeller, our website blog is among the first plugs we pull.  We're sorry about that if you are a blog addict, but if that’s the case, we probably helped you out with this recent little break.  Maybe you got to catch back up on your other addictions, like soap operas or alcohol or whatever.  At any rate, we plan to stay more up to date, despite today’s blog photo, which is from a year ago, when we were wiring Tank to speak along with an actor.  Either that or we were wiring him to howl profanity at Jehovah’s Witnesses.  We had some questionable interns in the lab back then.  We thank you all for your patience, and plan to keep things a little livelier online from now on.  We have some new developments in the works, and are eager to blog at you about them.  God help me, I can’t believe that’s an acceptable verb, but there you go.  You’re gonna be blogged at, folks.  Somewhere Shakespeare is filling his tomb with vomit.

Prop Shop 'til you Drop...

While our Emporium has seemed quiet lately, we remain busy as ever creating and finding strange new artifacts and oddities to fill our stockroom and the shelves of our discerning clientele.  As soon as we uncrate each new piece and determine that it is neither explosive, rabid, cursed, nor endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, we rush it to our stockroom shelves and to our Emporium webpage, which is now only a mouse click or two away from you.  So take a few minutes and roam around our Emporium and the rest of our Darkvale website - you never know what you will find, and virtually everything on every page is for sale if you ask us nicely.  From the darkest corners of our world and worlds unknown we have accumulated our unique catalog of merchandise, and our stock grows every week, so check back often.  Thank you all, happy shopping, and so long for now.

Tempis Fuggit

"Congratulations, discerning shopper, on the purchase of your Boston Dynamics brand Galactus 4.6 Personal Time Travel Device.  We are certain you will enjoy many happy centuries with your Galactus series machine, which has been rigorously tested by our quality control department through a process of repeated bludgeoning with only the finest hockey sticks.  Before you activate this complicated device, we refer you to the following ground rules to ensure maximum safety and cosmic stability.

- Safety goggles should be worn at all times during temporal transit - get yourself some cool ones like Bono’s.

- The Renaissance was not quite the mead-fueled romp your local LARP chapter would have you believe.  Unless you enjoy farming, starving, and defecating until you die, you may wish to avoid this period.

- To avoid life destroying temporal madness, try chewing gum during transits in excess of a thousand years.

- Despite millions of good reasons not to, you must leave the Hitler family alone.  Failure to do so will result in deep cosmic entropy and even more historians crippled by alcoholism than we have now.

- Corduroy bellbottoms have NEVER looked good.  Save your machine’s batteries and avoid that particular investigation altogether.

- If visiting the Battle of Hastings, please say hi to Harry Godwinson for us.  Try to get to him before the unfortunate “arrow moment”, if possible.

- As neither Che Guevara himself nor any of the people he murdered will understand that t-shirt, it’s probably best to leave it in your closet and spare yourself some uncomfortable moments. 

- As it turns out, the Cavern Club was completely empty that night.  The Quarrymen were performing exclusively for a room full of hipster time travelers from the future.

- If traveling into the American past, it is strongly recommended that you be caucasian.

With the use of proper safety equipment and common sense, you and your Galactus 4.6 Personal Time Travel Device can enjoy all of human history with minimal amounts of blood or syphilitic madness to deal with afterwards.  On behalf of the Boston Dynamics Time Travel division, we thank you for your business and hope you survive to purchase more examples of our groundbreaking technology in years to come."

The Expedition Continues...

Just past the edge of the map is a great place to start.  While our Emporium has been quiet on social media lately, we still have adventurers facing dangers untold in some of the more shadowy corners of our humble planet, as they sweat and bleed to bring us exotic wares to sell online to bored people shopping in their underwear.  You can be one of those people, underwear or not, we don’t judge; simply click through to our Emporium link and see what strikes your fancy.  If you don’t see what you’d like, email us, and you may be surprised what we can acquire for those who need weird things in their lives.  There’s also a hidden game for those with time to spare - anyone who can decipher the meanings behind our seemingly random artifact numbers is eligible for a discount, so the truly dedicated fans of horror, science fiction, and obscure pop culture can finally put their skulls full of trivia to good use.  We will be posting some of our newest acquisitions very shortly, as we strive to make the Darkvale Emporium one of the most unique shopping opportunities online in the years ahead.  Our doors are also open to new artisans or adventurers looking for a venue for their wares; drop us an email and we can discuss terms (you’ll be glad to hear we only require 3/4 of a pound of flesh, unlike much of our competition).  So hop over to our Emporium, read the stories the items have to tell, and perhaps you can provide one of them a nice new home.  You may find that the best way to face the darkness is to buy a piece of it to scare your friends.