The contest is over, the results are in, and the news is so damn good I had to make a whole new post about it.   Come on in and see who won, and check out the new sci-fi crayons while you're here.  Wax on!

Alright, gang, here we go.  I know I've said it about fifty times already, but thank you all once again for participating. You guys did a FANTASTIC job.  Really outstanding. I know this sounds pretty overinflated, but I really mean it when I say that the wide range of these crayon names is a real testament to how much diversity you guys bring to the site.  Total IDIC, baby.  Thanks a million. 

And now, on with the show…

Crayon #3: Yeah, that's right, we're starting with Crayon #3. I'm going to go in order of coolness of the winning names.  I don't want this to seem like I'm busting on these first few crayons, because I'm not.  I just want to save the very best for last.  And the fact that this crayon is farthest away from that position is, trying to save my soul tonight, nobody's fault but mi-i-i-ine, yeah.

Despite the fact that the crayon is kinda sucky, your entries were damn good.  I loved the idea of a crayon called Dagobha, but the colors just aren't right.  Orc Breath is a fairly kickass name for a crayon also, but once again, I'm not feeling it with this color combo. I don't know what the hell Vulcan’s Lament means, but it sounds great. It sounds kind of familiar, and I kept thinking that it was the name of a Star Trek novel, but I searched online and couldn't find one.  What I did find was a poem called A Vulcan Lament, which is so incredibly, mind bogglingly awful that I feel I have no choice but to subject you to it.  I'd apologize in advance, but you know I wouldn't really mean it. 

If you need to cleanse your artistic palate, click here for a Vulcan's Lament that's actually not too bad.

At the end of the day, daddy's all about the visual.  I need my crayon to make sense, colorwise.  That's why I'm going with Suliban Cluster Fuck.  Until I saw this entry, I had somehow managed to completely forget that there were green and purple Star Trek aliens.  Its probably due to the fact that this crayon was a failed first attempt at creating the Devastator crayon, and I just couldn't see beyond what I meant for it to be.  Yeah, that's right.  I remade crayons that didn't turn out just how I wanted them.  Its a perfectly normal thing to do.  Shut up.  Crayon #3, I dub thee:

Suliban Cluster Fuck

Congrats to Dan for coming up with the winning name.  Dan is NOT the winner of our third Shuttlecraft Class Gift Package.  Mark thought up Dagobah and Vulcan's Lament, but he isn't the winner either.  Sci-Fi Girl is.  She thought up Orc Breath, which made it to the finals, so she gets Shuttlecraft Class prize package numero uno. Why, you ask?  What the hell, you scream, indignant and incensed!  Dan and Mark are being cheated! Where's the fairness?  Where's the justice?  Did you finally sell out, Chris?  Did you finally SELL OUT TO THE MAN?!?

No, Mark and Dan win other prizes later on. But for now, give a big hand to Sci-Fi Girl!  You make a brutha proud. 

Crayon #5: I almost chose Vulcan Hemorrhoid.  Seriously, you have no idea how incredibly close this crayon came to being called Vulcan Hemorrhoid.  As a matter of fact, I did choose Vulcan Hemorrhoid.  For a bit.  Then it occurred to me that there would be no red in a Vulcan hemorrhoid. They've got green blood, so unless they shit red - and I think we can all agree that the color of Vulcan shit is a glaring missing page out of Trek lore that the various shows and movies have yet to touch upon - there shouldn't be any red in this crayon at all. 

Would there be red if you stuck a Goa'uld in a blender?  I don't know.  But I think the chances are a lot better.  Crayon #5, I dub thee:

Goa'uld In A Blender

Congrats to bj who has won has won a luxurious Shuttlecraft Class prize package.  Dan, your entry was a tough contender, and you had bj on the ropes, but at the end of the day, she rallied and took you down. She took you down to Chinatown.  But because I like the name Vulcan Hemorrhoid so much, I went ahead and made it for you.  Here, Dan, this is your consolation prize: 

Crayon #4: I have no idea what I was trying to make when I forged this thing, but it turned out ugly as hell.  To be honest, I'm surprised that anyone came up with a good name for it, let alone the three good names that made it to the finals.  My first inclination was to just call this thing Outlaw Star, from the Japanese cartoon featuring a red and blue spaceship of the same name. The color scheme is right, kinda, and I could swipe the cool Outlaw Star logo to make the article look even prettier. But I think its important to remember that not all sci-fi is spaceships, and wormholes, and invaders from the 8th dimension.  Apparently Mark thought so, too, and that's why he used his mystical mind probe amulet of Anubis to sift through my brain and find my very favorite power from my very favorite Dungeons & Dragons monster.

For those of you "normal" guys out there with active sex lives and girlfriends and penises which have been touched by real live women, here's the scoop: the mummies in old school Dungeons & Dragons are bad motherfuckers. You can't kill them 'cause they're already dead. You can't beat them down, because they have no flesh left to damage. You can't overpower them, because they're strong as hell. You can set them on fire, but it usually won't destroy them before they kill you. And even if you do manage to take one down, there's no guarantee that it'll STAY down, because these guys are mummies, and mummies are all about coming back from the grave. It should be pretty clear by now that D&D mummies hang out high at the top of the "DO NOT FUCK WITH" list, but we haven't even touched on the #1 reason for that: mummy rot.

In any decently run D&D adventure in which you happen to tangle with a mummy, even a weak one, you're probably gonna get hit a lot before you manage to defeat it. Mummies usually don't go in for swords or clubs, they're into punching and throwing and crushing. These guys are hands-on. Enter mummy rot. A mummy's touch can be even more devastating than having it pummel you into submission or throw you from the top of a pyramid.  Whenever you make physical contact with a mummy you have a chance of contracting mummy rot, which means you start to decay like a corpse while you're still alive.  Its a horrible way to go, and even in a magic heavy game like D&D, there's not too much you can do about it, because mummy rot is more powerful than most healing potions or spells.

Of course I'm mouthing off a lot about a monster I haven't read about in years. Mummy rot may not be as bad as I remember, and the newer versions of D&D mummies may not even have mummy rot, for all I know. Nevertheless, we need a non-space sci-fi crayon name, and I can kind of imagine human flesh staring to look something like this in the first few days after mummy rot sets in.  Of course, Tutankhamen's Curse would also be an excellent name for a crayon, but I'm not using it since Mark spelled it wrong.  Crayon #4, I dub thee:

Congratulations to Mark on coming up with the winning entry, and to Dan, who's single entry once again lasted all 12 rounds, but just wasn't enough to overcome Mark's devastating Tut-Rot combination. Great job, guys.  Mark has won our thrid and final all expenses paid Shuttlecraft Class prize package.  I told you I wasn't cheating him. And Mark, the name is just too damn good to let it go to waste.  Here is it, and, all modesty aside, I'm really proud of the way this one turned out.

 

CRAYON #1: The race to name Crayon #1 was very, very close.  Leia's Plug is so offensive and disgusting and childish, yet so completely appropriate when you just look at the crayon, that I had to love it as soon as I read it.  On the other hand, Wormhole Pinkstream is a GREAT sounding name.  I have looked all over the damn internet hoping like hell that Wormhole Pinkstream was a real thing from some show, any show, so I could justify giving this crayon a wicked ass Stargate, DS9, or Sliders name. But, no dice. And as much as I love the name Wormhole Pinkstream, I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to name a crayon that I made with a Crayola child's toy after Luke Skywalker's sister's used tampon. I don't have much to add because this name is just too perfect. Crayon #1, I dub thee:

Leia's Plug

Congrautlations to Frog Boy on coming up with the winning entry, and to bj who put up one hell of a fight.  Great job, you guys.  Frog Boy wins our first Starship Class prize package. 

Crayon #2: Ok, folks, this is it.  The big Kahuna. The top dog. The king daddy. The big cheese.  This crayon got the most responses, and the best entries of all five.  Why was this one so popular?  Was it because you were feeding off each other creatively, creating an environment more conducive to artistic expression?  Was it because  you were all consumed with the good natured spirit of competition among friends?  Was it because you had all finally found a fun sci-fi contest to rally around?

NOPE.

Its because this crayon is mostly silver, and even though we don't talk about it anymore, deep down we all still feel very seriously about what was so religiously true to us as children: silver, copper, and gold are the best fucking crayons EVER, and if you don't agree you're a communist shithead ratfink piece of crap who eats his own boogers.

Remember when you'd open up a fresh Crayola 64 pack, and that beautiful wax smell would hit you?  You know, that smell; that warm, Christmas morning, Halloween evening, birthday presents and grandma's hugs smell.  You loved the smell of crayons in the morning.  It smelled like victory.  And after you got enough of that sweet bouquet, what did you do?  You'd immediately start scanning to find those miraculous little wonders of science and alchemy that you loved so very, very much.  Those legendary little sparkling sticks that allowed you, a mere mortal human child, to motherfucking COLOR WITH METAL.  Fuck YES! You LOVED the metallicrayons, admit it.  There's no shame in it; we all did.  It didn't matter if they dressed silver up like it was white, and it didn't matter if gold was never quite as gold as you'd hoped it would be; we knew the score.  Those were the gods of coloring, the Holy Crayons, and the only reason besides the built in sharpener that any of us kids ever really wanted the big 64.  They were sacred.  They were pure.  They were something to believe in.  And woe be upon any of your little friends who stole, or chewed on, or broke one of the Holy Trinity, because as soon as you caught them those other 61 crayons were going straight up their little ass, box, sharpener, and all.

Calling this crayon V-ger was a big temptation.  Not only was V-ger one of the most interesting sci-fi villains ever, but when Captain Kirk finally got a good look at it, it was kind of corroded and mottled, just like this crayon.  Unfortunately, there were a few other entries that fared a little better, but good work anyway, PopRox.  This crayon may not be V-ger, but I'm working on one that will be.

I'll bet she never thought she'd get a mention on the site, but Kristina, aka K-Dizzle, aka her brand new Sci-Fi Guys name Firebush, came up with a damn good one.  Not only is Sorcerer’s Stone Grey a great sci-fi/fantasy name, but she also spelled 'Grey' with an 'e'.  That's how I spell grey, and god as my witness, its a crayon related story.

I was a big reader as a kid, and back in the 4th grade I came across a book with the word 'grey' in it.  That's not how I was taught to spell it, but it was from a book.  It couldn't be wrong. I mean, it was in a goddamn book. I was baffled, and as I do with anything that baffles me, I made a ridiculous fuss about it.  After five minutes of intense argument that I was sure would culminate in a landslide of complaints to the publisher, causing the Kentucky school system to recieve hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds for defective books, my teacher explained to me that 'grey' was used more in England than America, but that both spellings were correct. BOTH WERE CORRECT. Even though my mother chose to saddle my little brother and I with oddly spelled names, two correct ways to spell a word was more or less unheard of.  I had always just considered our names wrong. After that revelation I started seeing the mysterious 'grey' spelling here and there.  Not enough to freak me out, but just enough so that it really sunk in that grey went both ways.  But despite this faint epiphany, I soon lost interest. Until I got my fourth grade 64 box of Crayola, that is.

Frog Boy and I only got a 64 box once a year, at the beginning of the school year.  You would have thought those boxes were filled with liquid gold electric orgasms by the fuss we made over them, but in retrospect, Ma Sci-Fi was right to limit us to one per annum.  After all, by the time school rolled around again, half of the crayons from last year's stash were still left over.  I think they're still in a bag at her house somewhere, waiting for the grandkids she doesn't have because her sons don't love her enough.  Anyway, I was almost to the age when I was over the whole "Crayola 64 = the return of Jesus" phase of my childhood when I opened my 4th grade box.  I'd had it open for days before I ever noticed, but when I finally got around to seeing if any of the crayons had interesting names, I noticed that the grey crayon was labeled 'grey.' Not gray.

Grey.

My little mind was blown.  I had a grey Crayola crayon with the word 'grey' on it. I checked my stash at home; all my other Crayola greys were spelled 'gray.' I asked around, and everybody else's in my class was spelled 'gray.' What the fuck kind of Twilight Zone shit was going on?! In the span of a couple of weeks I went from not knowing the gray/grey thing existed, to seeing it all over the place, and now it was on my own fucking crayon. I didn't know what the deal was, but right then and there I made the decision: from that moment forward, I would only spell it 'grey,' and I didn't care if I got points taken away for incorrect spelling.  It was grey from then on. It took a little while to recondition myself, and I'm sure I've let a few grays slip here and there, but that's how I've spelled it since then.

So clearly if I'm going to go to the trouble of telling you the saga of Chris's grey crayon, Sorcerer's Stone Grey must be the winner, right?  Well, no, but Firebush did real good coming up with that name, especially when you consider that half of her other entries were just the names of similarly colored frozen desserts with the word 'spaceship' tacked onto the end.  Good work, Firebush, and welcome to the web. Firebush may not have given us the winning name, but remember all this talk about gray/grey.  It'll come up again later.

You have no fucking idea how much I love the name Uni-Crayon.  Its hands down my favorite name out of all the entries.  Its just so perfect.  I'm gonna spell it Unicrayon because that's easier for me to type, but it doesn't diminish the sweet rapture of knowing that my own brother thought up a crayon name that pays tribute to the giant evil robot that ate two of Cybertron's moons and still had room to swallow Galvatron whole. 

If it weren't for the fact that the colors aren't right, you can bet your ass this name would have been the winner.  Unfortunately for my little bro, this crayon's colors are more like Megatron's than Unicron's.  This is no accident; this crayon was my fist attempt at making a Megatron crayon.  Obviously I fucked up the mix, but that hasn't stopped me from trying.  I'm still working on making a Megatron crayon, and thanks to Frog Boy, I'm now also working on making Unicrayon.  As soon as I saw the name I knew it was something I had to do.  I've got it all planned out, and I'm melting it together this weekend.  I can't wait. Incredible work, bro. You have no idea how close you came to winning.

When Mark posted 'Riptorn (rides the grey planet),' I didn't have a clue what the hell he was talking about.  He didn't either, but I didn't know that.  I just thought he was trying to be funny or weird or quirky or something.  After a little Googling, though, I was impressed to discover that he wasn't just making it up.  The title of the 1952 British childrens novel was actually Rip Foster Rides The Grey Planet, but Mark was close enough for me to find some info.  I was even more impressed when I learned that it wasn't even Mark's idea, but some teenager whom Mark met a truck stop and then murdered and brought home in the trunk of his car.  I wasn't listening too closely so I may have gotten the last bit of that story wrong a little, but I was nonetheless astounded that a teenager knew about this book.  I think its safe to say that none of the rest of us had ever heard of it.  Its also safe to say that this is the most obscure entry of the lot, and that impresses me to a very large degree.  Rip Foster Rides The Grey Planet is not the winning entry, but its a damned impressive display of sci-fi knowledge. Kid, I don't know what your name is or who you are, but if you post a comment here and Mark can verify your identity, you're getting a prize despite the fact that you didn't win.  Impressive… very impressive.

Rip Foster Rides The Grey Planet was written by Blake Savage (psuedonym for author Harold Leland Goodwin) and republished in America as Rip Foster Rides The Gray Planet, then once again as Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet.  Told you the grey/gray thing would crop up again. Despite the apparent lack of success of Rip Foster Rides The Grey Planet, the Rip Foster series was apparently popular enough that it still has a small following today. Project Gutenberg offers the American version of the book free for download.  Click here to read Blake Savage's Rip Foster Rides The Gray Planet.

Well, this is is people. Here's us, on the raggedy edge. And what do we find out here in the black?  Reaver.  I'll level with you: as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the winner.  If you're familiar with the Firefly franchise, then you probably knew it too.

If I didn't know better, looking at this crayon I would swear to whatever god(s) you asked me to that I had somehow melted down the Reaver/Alliance space battle scene from Serenity and dumped it right into the Melt-O-Tron 6000X.  Its so simple, so perfect, so obvious; the crayon looks exactly like a crayon called Reaver ought to look.  It looks exactly like everything Reaverish from that show.  I tried several times to make a Browncoat crayon before I wrote this article, and I guess my repeated failure to produce one I was happy with blinded me to what was right there in front of my eyes.  I've since been able to come up with this-

Purplebelly

-but so far no Browncoat that I'm satisfied with.  It never occurred to me to make a Reaver crayon, but it turns out I already had.  Crayon #2, it is with great pride and pleasure that I dub thee: 

Reaver

Dan, my hat's off to you. This is the most impressive crayon name of all.  It just fits so god damn well.  If my legs could bend that way, I'd kick my own ass for not thinking of it first.  I told you I wasn't gonna stiff him from the other crayon he named.  Dan wins the second and final Starship Class prize package as well as the first ever

Way to go, guys, you all deserve a big round of applause. But don't think the fun's all over yet.  I'll be setting aside a little part of our little part of the internet where you'll be able to see more Sci-Fi Guys custom crayons now and then.  As far as new devices to help me in this endeavor are concerned, let me just say this: just when you thought you'd seen the last of melted crayons and crazy sci-fi wax, something totally unexpected has turned up that will blow your damn mind. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Crayola GadgetHeadz Robot Lab!