mertensian mimicry

Brighton-based illustrator Richard Wilkinson has creatively reimagined insects as vehicles and characters from the Star Wars saga, complete with pseudo-Latin taxonomical designations. These realistically rendered creatures that come to our attention via Colossal are a teaser of sorts for a much larger up-coming volume entitled Arthropoda Iconicus which will reference other characters in popular culture.

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el diablo: a ghoulish gallery of the comic and pulp art of Mexican publications of the 50s and 60s

和菓子: Edo period illustrations of Japanese confections called wagashi

in memoriam: ten stunning structures designed by recently departed architect Will Alsop

red carpet: Star Wars actress dazzles with a Vivienne Westwood original that celebrates increasing diversity in science fiction

landlines: an assortment of vintage telephones from Western Electric, via Weird Universe

from bauhaus to our house: celebrating the wide-ranging contributions and influence of author and journalist Tom Wolfe

ma bell

The congressman who represents California’s Silicon Valley wants to summon a telecommunications behemoth to testify before the legislature to account for over a half a million dollars in payments made to the consulting firm, shell company that Trump’s lawyer and ambulance-chaser Michael Cohen established in order to pay hush money to keep secret a tryst between Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.
The payments from AT&T only came to light in the wake of the attempt to silence Ms Daniels and although AT&T claims it only secured the services of Mr Cohen to gain insights into the inner workings of the administration, it’s intimated that the company was buying influence with the Federal Communications Commission to persuade them to repeal regulations that helped enshrine the principles of net neutrality and anti-trust laws that might be roadblocks to company acquiring a media monopoly.

mockbuster

After two years of restoration of the last known reel of the movie in existence and digital conversion, the atrociously campy cult film that’s better known by the moniker “Turkish Star Wars,” the 1982 Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (previously) or The Man Who Saved the World will be enjoying a limited theatre run in London and Glasgow later this summer (May the Fourth be with you).
The movie—hitherto only watchable on bootlegged video cassette copies—gained notoriety for its unauthorised use of footage from the actual Star Wars, with other science fiction films and space programme scenes spliced in, has quite an incoherent plot and was roundly panned by critics at the time. Despite its poor reception, a sequel was produced in 2006, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam'ın Oğlu (The Son of the Man who Saved the World—otherwise “Turks in Space”) but audiences (never easily satisfied) were also critical of the second movie for having professional actors and special effects and was no longer true to the original. Visit the link above to see a video of a few scenes.  I think it’s fun that there’s a revival of such an unambiguously bad movie, but I also hope that the attention it garners directs more people to the finer side of Turkish cinema and film-making, as well.

droide astromeccanico

From the Italian word for a jaunty saunter, Gita the cargo droid from the company Piaggio (famous for their Vespas—that is, wasps in italiano and Popemobiles) meant to accompany humans on errands and help bare burdens that are two heavy or awkward to convey otherwise.
Designed with the goal that it should be able to carry a case of wine—and leave it’s human’s hands free for other things, Gita is self-navigating and can avoid obstacles and balance a load of up to twenty kilogrammes and seems to be a disruptor somewhere in a happy medium between (segue to) Segways and unaccompanied delivery robots and drones, which have both earned derision. Visit the links above for a demonstration and to learn more.

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luddites: standing up for dumb (but not dumbed-down) devices, via Naked Capitalism

it’s what’s for dinner: US Cattlemen’s Association declares war on fake, plant-based meat, via Super Punch

rydberg polarons: at extremely low temperatures atoms can be crowded inside other atoms

good ju-ju: an assortment of modern cyber lucky charms

mileștii mici: tour the world’s largest wine-cellar located in Moldova, via Messy Nessy Chic

aurabesh: the alien script of the Star Wars Universe

les shadoks: the cult French cartoon from Jacques Rouxel and René Borg with a fantastic musique concrète theme song

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screen time: a curated collection of flip-books that delivered movies that fit in the palm of one’s hand a century before smart phones

star wars, nothing but star wars: Meco Monardo’s disco remakes of Hollywood film scores

first ladies: gender reassignments for all the US presidents

blue planet: stunning underwater photography competition winners and honourable-mentions

dot-matrix: computer-generated artwork from 1969 by Frederick Hammersley

virtue signalling: White House budget proposal (again) is very disaspirational and sets the US even further behind in the sciences

secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum

Having missed out on the earlier furore and excitement over speculation that Star Wars battleship designs might have been inspired by the work of a late medieval Italian draughtsman, we appreciated how Super Punch brought us up to speed.
While the pareidolia of seeing a fully-operational Death Star escorted by an array of Star Destroyers (plus earlier conceptions of the Imperial and Rebel fleets) is lure enough on its own, the imagination and career of the fifteenth-century Venetian surgeon and engineer, Giovanni Fontana (Johannes de Fontana), is pretty engrossing as well. Though only illustrations have survived the ages, Fontana invented and built functioning prototypes of what we’d recognise as the bicycle, the magic lantern, the torpedo plus many innovations in hydraulics and trigonometry and cryptography. Fontana’s overarching goal was to recreate those machines and devices of great antiquity, the stuff of legend, and some see a similarity between his style of illustration and the baffling pictures and text of the mysterious Voynich manuscript.

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нова нада: the Star Wars saga posters of Soviet Europe (plus a notable knock-off)

treemaps: classic oil paintings pixelated algorithmically

turbofolk: Serbia’s kitschy pop-folk music scene runs counter to  Western stereotypes about alternative lifestyles acceptance in the former Yugoslavia

lunchbox on wheels: former Google engineers create a driverless delivery vehicle to counter the last-mile problem

reasonable accommodation: a US airline declines to allow an emotional support peacock to board a flight

lexical gap: a jury of linguists declare “influencer” to be the German import of the year

coming attractions

In 1999, two friends uncovered a treasure trove in a Nebraska antiques shop of over sixty thousand letterpress blocks used to advertise films in newspapers. Their two thousand dollar investment which covers nearly the entire history of motion pictures (from the silent-era up until 1984) has been appraised at ten million. At the link above, there is a short documentary that showcases a part of the vast collection.

check your privilege, obi-wan

Kottke is now the host and curator of The People’s History of Tattoonie, which itself was in danger of becoming rarefied and disjointed as an anthology of sorts. Usually I find such satire a little heavy-handed for my taste as we all ought know not to impose our cachet and culture upon something long, long ago and far, far away (notwithstanding how a more advanced culture would have more mature definitions of identity than we do, and in the end we usually just look smug fancying ourselves to be the soul of consideration and accomodation) but this dialogue, line of argument is pretty brilliant and needless to say illustrative. “Your ‘Big Story’ of the military-imperial complex lets you ignore what’s right in your FACE.”

bess, you is my woman now

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volley: ping pong champion lobs back balls with a variety of items, producing different noises

scorched earth campaign: perhaps the Silicon Valley mind-set is the bigger threat to civilisation than machine super intelligence, via Waxy

locavore: shipping container farming approaches cost parity with traditional methods

eec: not heeding warnings from central bankers, Estonia is launching a crypto-currency, hoping to further solidify its reputation as a digital nation

that’s no moon: mesmerising time-lapse showing the stages of construction for a Death Star

playthings

It seemed a much simpler when toys came to life by dint of their personalities and one’s imagination and whatever extra features or accessories were attached were just bonuses.
The pretend of yesterday, however, is approaching companionship and one has to wonder what it means to educate and then abandon for the next entertainment. Perhaps it is this ability to learn and keep us engaged that makes it less likely for us to move on—since I hope that we learn too that play is not just some frivolity that one matures out of. By the same token, we ought not to resign what we create to the same indenture as our own formative freedoms sometimes unobligingly enters into through circumstance and necessity (and cannot escape) and not make present toys tomorrow’s involuntary labour-force. What do you think? Not to be too serious over matters of fun and games, but our Yoda would indulge some philosophic-sparring and it does seem far less palatable to be trafficker than to be trafficked oneself and to be making inferiors with superior capabilities.

jai guru deva om

Against the advice of his gurus and meditative-betters, philosopher and author Robert Wright not only took notes to be later adapted into a book during his silent retreats, he also shared his feelings of inadequacies and failing when it comes to practicing mindfulness.  
Why Buddhism is True does not privilege it above other religious traditions and articles of faith are not addressed but is rather true in the sense that its core teachings and methods of coping—suffering comes from misunderstanding and meditation leads to liberation—work on a physical and psychological level because they allow us to transcend the inscrutables of billions of generations of evolution. The great chain of being that has led to you and your condition is miraculous but also has brought the hitchhikers of history which may have conferred advantage (Fear is the mind-killer.) at one point when our lives were more precarious but are now nuisances and sources of unbidden bias and anxiety. Perhaps not to be edited away could we identify the offending gene, the willingness to be still and confront and embrace the distressing renders it less powerful. The take-away is—by the way—that there is no wrong way of being attentive (Do or do not. There is no try.) and that daily practice yields daily reward.

la guerre des étoiles

While much of the epic space opera’s influences and homages have been studied and extolled in great detail, including Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and the comic Flash Gordon, there’s been little  acknowledgement for a French series of comics from the early 1970s, as Messy Nessy Chic helps us to uncover, that informed the arch of the story almost scene for scene at points. Artist Jean-Claude Mézières’ creation Valerian and Laureline is now starting to be accredited for its plot and stylistic contributions—including ice, desert and marsh planets, a Millennium Falcon-type ship, a hero encased in a resin and another held hostage by an overweight mobster who is forced to wear a metal bikini—after the characters are getting their own cinematic adaptation with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.  Though perhaps four decades overdue, Mézières’ role in establishing the saga is beginning to garner recognition.

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phantom pavilions: more wire frame architecture from Edoardo Tresoldi

aragog: for the bold, a paralysing cocktail that includes tarantula venom, via Nag on the Lake

anchors away: dispatching with human crews will make shipping on the high seas safer, cleaner and cheaper—and be disruptive for sailors’ careers, via Super Punch

pardon and prophecy: as you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner

steering committee: a decency council to be assembled that will advise the Duma and help guide its decision-making

star wars, nothing but star wars: one cinema’s celebratory lead up to the fortieth anniversary of the franchise

princess leia’s stolen death star plans

Go ahead and say it aloud. For the fortieth anniversary of the launch of the Star Wars saga and incredibly for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ monumental SGT Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I’m surprised these two cultural touchstones are only a decade apart), we’re presented (by way of Waxy) with the pitch-perfect musical stylings of Palette-Swap Ninja merging the two. Doing justice to both franchises with a five year labour of love, the complete album is set to new lyrics that tells the story of A New Hope. Check out all eleven videos at the band’s link above.

travelling matte

Via Kottke, we are acquainted with the artistry, which while far from being overlooked was strictly relegated to the background, of the painters who created the matte panels for the Star Wars trilogy and other franchises in an age before computer generated landscapes and digital photo-realistic manipulation. Of course, the technique does not begin with the 1970s space opera but quite a few wide-angle, panning and establishing shots executed with precision allowed audiences to remain in the fantasies being portrayed and stand alone as iconic, virtual sets.

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cabin-brew: brewery formulates a beer that’s optimised for enjoyment whilst flying

dynamo: the Earth core and magnetic field is powered by the crystallization of silicon dioxide

faster empire, strike, strike: a clever fan made a modern trailer for Star Wars Episode V

the night Chicago died: the story of how angry white men tried to destroy disco

lift every voice and sing: the lost, forgotten artwork of Augusta Savage

wiphala: the strikingly colourful mansions of La Paz

momofuku: a visit to the Cup Noodles museum in Japan