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directors’ cut: prints of iconic filmmakers informed by elements of their movies plus a lot more poster art

radiohead has 18 webrings: the Avocado reads Yahoo! Internet Life’s February 2001 issue

republicans, democrats, in-betweeners looking for high crimes and misdemeanors: a Schoolhouse Rock style cartoon primer about impeachment  

mister green jeans: Lowering the Bar deconflates kangaroos and courtrooms—see previously

chiclets: during political exile after losing territory to the Republic of Texas brought General Antonio López de Santa Anna brought the world chewing gum, via Strange Company

a rhetorical question: Betteridge’s Law of Headline writing

startling stories and thrilling wonders: a gallery of pitch-perfect mashups of musical touchstones and pulp ephemera—via Nag on the Lake

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reaction faces: Tadas Maksimovas creates a twelve-barrelled sling shot to pelt people with likes and hearts

line item: the humble receipt gets a rather brilliant redesign to visualise how your grocery bill adds up

novgorod: Sergei Eisenstein (previously) collaborated with Sergei Prokofiev to produce the score for Alexander Nevsky (1938), which remains the cinematic standard

pink pop: a delightful vintage Shiseido cosmetic commercial from 1968

saving face: San Francisco becomes the first municipality to prohibit the use of facial recognition surveillance technology

happy accidents: much needed pick-me-ups from Bob Ross—previously  

8x8

shuudan koudou: the Japanese art of synchronised, precision walking

how happy we could be if we’d only listen to our kitschy teacups: cheerfulness is not a virtue and rather an equal opportunity vice

shortlisted: a curated selection of submissions to National Geographic’s travel photography competition

the wookie roars: RIP Peter Mayhew (*1944 – †2019)

tiger on tour: during the height of the Space Race, Esso gave away maps of the Moon

deplatformed: garbage social media ejected a bunch of garbage provocateurs, though the stunt is more publicity for the banned

klimaanlage: researchers in Karlsruhe study enlisting air conditioning units to pull carbon dioxide out of the air

yijin jing: watching Shaolin Kung Fu training from above (previously)

blind house

We’re directed to an exhibition from artists Paloma Muñoz and Walter Martin whose collaboration has produced a disquieting portrait of human habitation with the windows seamlessly edited away.
This subtle erasure has profound affects on perception and prompts a conversation and reflection on the nature of screen time, how windows are made for looking in as well as looking out and how we’re to understand and uphold our private sphere with so much voluntarily given to public inspection—though what we put on display is not always the invitation to repackage it and sell it back to us at a premium. Continue touring the exhibit at the link above.

pawnographic

We regret having missed this scandalising graphic design choice from December of 2017 when the new season’s World Chess Championship logo had its debut, but it is still resonant since the world (on-line and off) is puerile as ever and wont and eager to prise a dirty joke or snicker out of any situation. The studio behind this pugilistic emblem as well as the client organisation that commissioned it called out as something obviously tantric responded in a healthy way, however, appreciating the furore and the focus it brought.
The world is lousy with bad design and there’s a lot of unintended suggestiveness—though of course sex sells, but overall attacking what’s bold or avant-garde makes design as whole boring and more conservative, brands and associations not wanting to risk what might be made the butt of ridicule. This obsession—which I am sure will go into overdrive with candidates developing their campaign imagery—seems to me like a surrogate for that persistent though mythical legend about subliminal advertising (by definition, if it is subliminal, it does not register) that had people trying to find (and in some cases swearing to it) nudes in ice cubes for the past six decades.  More to explore at the link up top.

the relentless amplification of nothing

The always excellent Things Magazine reflects on internet entropy and the tendency of things to fall into a state of neglect and disrepair often in favour of the sleeker, less labour intensive and attention demanding walled-gardens of social media that has become an exercise in judicious cannibalisation and that blog roll-calls in time become a poignant review of abandoned projects and interests, set aside maybe in some cases just a moment too long to ever get back in the habit.
No one is expected to explain oneself or defend changing circumstance and focus but it is a little sad to realise that voracious, giant platforms are usually the culprits. As much as we might cringe at the idea of social media curating our biographies and autobiographies forever open to public inspection and that in certain contexts nostalgia belies a toxic impulse, it can be on the other hand a moment of elation to go spelunking among the hulks of the moribund past and uncover artefacts that attests to a once vibrant hobby. The author shares some rare nuggets at the link above and we’d like to know if you’ve come across some undisturbed treasures yourself.

basicode

Previously we’ve explored how computer games and software applications were in the early 1980s broadcast over the airwaves for recording and executing with Bristol’s Radio West’s Datarama, and now thanks to Amusing Planet we learn that there was a parallel effort underway in the Netherlands with the state public service radio NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting) transmitting code as well. Hobbyscoop was one popular programme for early computer enthusiasts and while the first few episodes were for specific models of computers, the Apple-2 or the Exidy Sorcerer, the producers had the idea to make the content offered more universal by standardising the format, broadcasting BASIC language programmes and installing each computer with a translation programme to interpret the ASCII representation into its native machine language. Radio stations across Europe were quick to start doing the same. Much more to explore at the links above.

les géants du numérique

To the consternation of the US and championing an EU-led initiative that failed to pass the supranational parliament last year, France aims to levy a three percent tax on internet behemoths whose profits surpass certain thresholds—seven hundred billion and fifty billion world wide with twenty-five million euro domestically.
The bill, referred to as GAFA for the biggest interlopers—Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple—is expected to pass the Senate with an equally overwhelming margin and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire says France is honoured to take the first crucial step towards data sovereignty, expecting to glean around half a billion euro in tax revenue annually that will be returned to the public coffers. While the tax burden would certainly not be crippling to the captains of industry, there are fears that the scheme could incite a precedent.

urheberrechtsreform

In protest to European Union’s rather fraught and problematic Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, to be brought before Parliament, German-speaking Wikipedia—at the consensus of its contributors and users—will shut down for twenty-four hours on March 21.
The most upsetting articles included in the language of the proposal to be debated are the so called “link tax” on news and content aggregators and the requirement that websites and hosting services employ upload filters that would screen out potentially pirated or non-attributed images and video. Media-rights holding clearinghouses initially supported the enforcement measures but have now been less enthusiastic and a consortium of journalists see it as a threat to press freedoms. We all ought to join in, in solidarity.

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misirlou: celebrating the life and genre-forming stylings of Dick Dale (RIP *1938 – †2019) and the Del Tones

the people have spoken: voters of a Massachusetts town remove and re-elect their mayor on the same ballot

scarlet letter: Monica Lewinsky on public shaming and cyber-bullying

caturday: a 1986 feline calendar on the Internet Archive—previously

the professor and the madman: preview for a cinematic adaption of the story of one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s foundational contributors

マンホールの蓋: a photographic safari for the most colourful manhole covers (previously) in Japan  

fomo

Never failing to at least furnish if not revive a moribund term from the annals of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary sometimes also often delivers the resonant, relevant and perhaps what may hit a little too close to home—as with this word which last appeared in an 1881 article from our Manchester Guardian: “‘Scripturiency’ appears to vary greatly in different nations. The United States claim 2,800 of these medical authors; France and her colonies, 2,600…” The obsolete word coined in the mid-seventeenth century refers to a compulsion for writing which leads to the urgent publication of the trivial and inferior.

daisy bell

Somehow this 1962 MacLaren’s Imperial Cheddar Club Cheese (club referring to a style that blends cheddar with other mature cheeses is flavoured with peppercorn and garlic, the label since wholly acquired by Kraft) advertisement subtlety prefigures the whole distracted boyfriend, me—also me meme.

 

pon de replay

Currently trending (which is a terribly presumption thing to say and assuredly no longer the case with as quickly as we are on to the next thing) is to find one’s abiding mood and moral compass by conducting an image search with Rihanna plus one’s birthday (day and month) to find the celebrity’s sighting that coincides with that day—and while I quite liked the results that I got of the Barbadian artist spotted on the set of the heist film Ocean’s 8 and think there’s nothing nefarious in this fun—I think it might make for a better daily horoscope if one went with the current date’s paparazzi photo—like this one of her leaving a private bash at Mayfair’s Novikov in 2010.

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shadow-boxing: more clever illustrations from Vincent Bal (previously)

a sid and marty krofft production: the Banana Splits (see also) may get a revival, possibly as homicidal maniacs

animal husbandry: falcon breeders wear special copulation hats to get donor samples (see also the Falcon Hive), via Super Punch

shelf-life: a book whose pages are slices of processed cheese

www: via Kottke’s Quick Links, we discover that CERN has rebuilt the original 1990 browser that Tim Berners-Lee invented as an in-browser emulation—how does your website look through the lens of three decades?

bauhaus: a collection of short documentaries celebrating the design movement’s centenary (previously)

prêt-à-porter: a retrospective look at some of Karl Lagerfeld’s greatest fashion shows

climeworks: the determined Swiss start-up that is working to stop climate change through direct CO₂ capture, via Swiss Miss  

tone it down

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art brut: the incredible portfolio of outsider artist (previously here, here and here) Adolf Wölfi

gamalost: Norway’s campaign to re-popularise a crumbly and aromatic cheese with reputed libidinous qualities—via Nag on the Lake

call sign: radio station logos of the Soviet Union—via Coudal Partner’s Fresh Signals

hey! wait! I’ve got a new complaint: a brief history of the heart-shaped box and how it became a Valentine’s staple

mirror, mirror: the label on this sun-screen bottle are printed backwards to be more photogenic

word vectors: advanced translators are an endorsement Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on language

debunked

The reliably engrossing and entertaining Futility Closet delivers with its latest podcast episode a real object lesson in sociology confirmed with real world observations that really lay bare the concept of cognitive dissonance and how it infiltrates the human psyche.
Not only are we loathe to acknowledge sunk costs and move away from a system of belief that we’ve invested a lot or a little in, we also seek to justify our fear and trepidation, confident that ritual was our saving grace. Infiltrating a doomsday cult that arose as Leon Festinger (*1919 – †1989) and his academic colleagues were theorising about how the human mind copes with the chasm between expectation and reality and the behaviour that manifests in the mid-1950s, their ideas that were a sharp departure from the received wisdom of accounting for hysteria and panic but were vindicated through a mental narrative of members reframing the failure of their dire prophesies to materialise. Festinger was also a pioneer in networking theory, coining the term propinquity (from the Latin for nearness—and by extension familiarity) in kinship-forming and establishing in- and out-groups, which is now of course not limited by physical presence.

social capital or the dunwich horror

As social media behemoth Facebook is proving that bad behaviour does indeed pay, profits up and still the darling of uninventive advertisers, grifters and undermining elements despite the disdain it has for its critics and its users’ privacy and well-being, more and more studies are demonstrating the positive benefits of cutting the platform out of your routine.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” It has not been quite a year yet since I was persuaded to deactivate my account—rebuffing the cloying pleas to come back—and there was a time early on that I thought that the platform could have if not reformed and redeemed itself could merely demonstrate that it wasn’t something sinister and merely a wanton utility, an agnostic force majeure like other technological giants, but it’s since squandered that hope and I’ve not regretted the decision. “An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.”

wi-finder

Via Duck Soup, we discover the really relatable story of a flâneur collecting specimens of service set identifiers (SSIDs, the natural language label of one’s choice) to distinguish their wireless networks. What’s the story behind the name of your home WiFi?
Have you encountered memorable ones in your wanderings? Increasing fascination with the invisible world of call-signs set our walker on the path to more sleuthing, eventually mapping out these locations, categorising them by the nature of the monikers—promotional to passive-aggressive. I wonder how radically the landscape has changed since then and how territories and borders have become unmoored and mutable.

paintception

Not only did this “slow meme” phenomenon remind us of the Droste effect (mise en abyme) in Annie Wang’s photography, this recursive challenge strikes us as rather uncharacteristically uplifting and positive, devoting oneself to an undertaking that’s bears our vulnerabilities while at the same time being an enriching exercise—honing goodwill and empathy as well as our painterly skill-set.