Royal Mint fucks up

[Alberon]

The Royal Mint has issued a new two pound coin this week to mark 75 years since the death of H.G. Wells which has recieved a great many complaints. It has a Martian war machine and the Invisible Man on it. Can you see the mistake?



That's right - The Invisible Man is wearing a top hat when he should have a wide brimmed hat on!

What a bunch of chumps!

[imitationleather]

#cashlesssocietynow

[madhair60]

the mistake is on the opposite side of the coin they have accidentally printed some child pornography.

[steve98]

One leg too many.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Money is now a lizard and a martian and an invisible man

[greencalx]

And there was me hoping they'd minted some Euros by mistake and we'd all have to use them.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Damn. I was hoping they had minted some Brexit coin and fucked that up.

[Goldentony]

who is HG Wells, what do we know about him

[greenman]

The invisible man actually operates by his skin mimicking the local environment so you wouldn't be able to see anything as specific as the tripods leg though him.

[idunnosomename]

Maybe the thing at front of the tripod is an arm

[Alberon]

Then what's that tentacle thing hanging down underneath?

Oh, never mind I just worked it out.  Disgusting!

[Norton Canes]

Obv not a leg or would be attached to the same bit as the other three. Looks like one of those escape slides like on aeroplanes.

[steve98]

Obv not a leg or would be attached to the same bit as the other three.

Four. It's got four legs.

[H-O-W-L]

The invisible man actually operates by his skin mimicking the local environment so you wouldn't be able to see anything as specific as the tripods leg though him.

To be pedantic you would. It's dodgy but in the book Griffin uses a mix of serums and surgeries to reduce his refractive and reflective indices below the visible spectra. So anything behind on or around him is visible but not his organic body. It is mentioned even that digesting food can be seen in him along with blood in his  veins coagulating after a wound.

[Johnny Yesno]

The invisible man actually operates by his skin mimicking the local environment so you wouldn't be able to see anything as specific as the tripods leg though him.

Quadrapod.

[H-O-W-L]

And to be even further pedantic: Yeah this is a proper fuckup. Wells describes them as having a myriad of extra limbs and stuff but only specifically three actual limbs. He also hated representations of them that had stiff or jointed legs; it was before the time of sci-fi with "biomechanical" as a concept but that appears to be his intention for the Tripods' construction; although they don't really adhere to the Tripod design overall, the Striders in Half-Life 2, in terms of their biomechanical synthetic construction, appear to adhere more to what Wells would describe the tripods as.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

who is HG Wells, what do we know about him

He's a series of holes in the ground, with pools of mercury at the bottom.

[gib]

To be pedantic you would. It's dodgy but in the book Griffin uses a mix of serums and surgeries to reduce his refractive and reflective indices below the visible spectra. So anything behind on or around him is visible but not his organic body. It is mentioned even that digesting food can be seen in him along with blood in his  veins coagulating after a wound.

what about a poo, could you see if he needed a poo?

[Norton Canes]

Four. It's got four legs

Yeah sorry, thought the 4th leg was instead attached to the underside of the dome but can now see it's got another segment attaching to the leg hub

Should've just kept quiet really

[Norton Canes]

Anyway turns out the guy that designed the coin also designed the typeface Papyrus, which is a far greater crime.

[Bernice]

what about a poo, could you see if he needed a poo?

Pretty sure it's actually established in the book that you can see his poo.

[idunnosomename]

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand...

YES IM POSTING IT AT HI RES BECAUSE IT FUCKING ROCKS

it's actually really hard to animate a walk cycle for those things

[TrenterPercenter]

the mistake is on the opposite side of the coin they have accidentally printed some child pornography.

they said "this is one thing they didn't want to happen"

[Goldentony]

putting the fucking invisible man on there too given his entire existence is down to the fact somebody wanted a guilt free wank but miscalculated the guilt free part

[Dex Sawash]

looks like steve98's avatar

[Aaron500]

Why would the invisible man wear clothes anyway, just draws attention to himself. And if he does sneak into the ladies (or gents, diversity) changing rooms at a Victorian gym for a wank, does his ejaculate show up as it exits his body and flies towards its target?

[Jittlebags]

When's the Farage Commemorative Coin coming out? Made of Nazi gold and blood diamonds.

[Alberon]

The one thing the Royal Mint should be absolutely on top of is quality control. They're really not. Another balls up on the H G Wells coin has been unearthed.

Then the Wells expert Prof Simon James spotted the quote chosen for the edge of the coin: "Good books are warehouses of ideas." James and his fellow academic Adam Roberts, a vice-president of the Wells Society, could source no such quote in Wells's writing – although it is credited to him on various inspirational quote websites.

Author Eleanor Fitzsimons solved the mystery. She tried searching Wells's writing for a quote with "warehouses" in it, and found an approximation in his obscure work Select Conversations With an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences. That quote, however, is not what appears on the coin: it reads, "Good books are the warehouses of ideals."

Unfortunately for the Royal Mint, not only is the Wells quotation inaccurate, the actual sentiments expressed are likely to be far from what the author intended. The words are spoken by a character who believes that ideals should be hidden away in books, and goes on to say that "there is a time for ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way".

"The correct quotation is not Wells speaking in his own voice, but in the voice of a character whose opinion is definitely not always to be trusted. English academics exhort our students to check the original source when they can – what a shame the Royal Mint didn't think to do so before producing all these coins with a letter missing," said James, adding that Wells had an antipathy to 19th-century notions of high culture: "He would have been all for people reading The Republic or The Origin of Species or Wells's own work ... [but] the notion of 'books are wonderful' would make his blood boil."

And what does the Royal Mint have to say about this?

Asked about the source of its quotation, the Royal Mint told the Guardian that "Good books are the warehouses of ideas" was "widely associated with HG Wells".

Its four-legged tripod, meanwhile, is "an interpretation of the various machines in War of the Worlds", and the invisible man is "wearing a Victorian top hat to signify the era".

It added that all themes considered for Royal Mint coins go through a planning and design selection process governed by an independent panel known as the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, which includes experts in art, heraldry, typography, sculpture, history and numismatics. It did not mention that any literary experts had been consulted.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/08/war-of-the-words-hg-wells-coin-also-features-false-quote

[Huxleys Babkins]

To make matters worse, the Invisible Man has also got his cock out.

[Rizla]

YES IM POSTING IT AT HI RES BECAUSE IT FUCKING ROCKS

No joke, that's brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes. "Come on Thunderchild!"

That album stands as one of the greatest achievements in the history of popular music. (Oh, apart from the epilogue which makes no sense - did they forget they got invaded before or what?)