your friendly neighbourhood draughtsman

Everlasting Blört introduces us to the amazing artwork of illustrator and author Jeffrey Veregge whose portfolio includes figures from popular culture adorned with kinetic references to Native American, specifically of the Pacific Northwest tradition of his ancestral Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, motifs.  I really like his use of negative space. Check out more of Veregge’s works at the links up top.

7x7

spomenik database: ten year’s worth of documenting Eastern European monuments from Darmon Richter, via Present /&/ Correct

clip-art: an appreciation of the medium, discontinued from the Microsoft Office suite of programmes in 2014

clean-up operation: Boyan Slat’s system of floats (previously) designed to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to deploy soon

86ed: a look, in increasing weirdness, that led to the security clearance questionnaire of a politician running for office being leaked to her opposition

globus gömb: a vintage Hungary Rubik’s globe puzzle

balustrade: a series of the spiral staircases of Budapest by Balint Alovits 

may day: a visual lesson on why and how work is celebrated differently in the US (previously)

qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent

It is unhelpful and counter-productive to label anyone and everyone that is against migration and refugee policies who wants to voice their opposition as a Nazi—setting aside for only the briefest of moments what crimes the Nazis carried out, but anyone who marches alongside or in a group infiltrated by Nazis is de facto a Nazi themselves—or a useful idiot thereof, which is arguably an even worse fate, to be a tool without agency of hatred and nihilism.
This applies universally across space and time but Germany has made some very simple guidelines should one find their demonstration impinged upon by Nazis which should prompt one’s hasty retreat and alert the authorities: the Hitler greeting, Swastikas and other symbols of Nazi Germany and denying the Holocaust and extent of their crimes against humanity are illegal and finding oneself in the midst, even marginally and uninvited should signal one to get out and regroup right away. There’s no acceptable common-ground and one’s polite and practical arguments for xenophobia and racism are quickly accelerated to their natural conclusion, institutionalised ostracism and alienation and perhaps even industrialised murder. Are organisers and political figures responsible for the behaviour and outlook of all of their constituents and benighted disciples? In the legal sense, no—lest one prove a calculated neglect, but in the moral sense, leaders should always police for extremism and make the effort to reform their stance and clarify their own position to ensure that there’s truly no place for such views. Anything short of that is dereliction of duty and makes one’s crusade and campaign just another rung in the ladder for the forces of regression and division, no matter how one pleads or equivocates.

the peachdate mall or gruen transfer

Shopping centres all over the world generally have names that reflect a balance between the conservatively familiar and the elegant, exclusive—no matter how humble the location and the anchor stores, and of course artificial intelligence tasked with naming a mall ought not to upstage its human imagineers and nor should it be guilty of the crime of ‘overfitting,’ the tendency of neural networks to sometimes find the most obvious solution through plagiarism. After a few iterations and trial-runs, our friends Lewis & Quark (aka, AI Weirdness, previously) got the hang of the job at hand (with illustrations) and began churning out suggestions like Town Centre at Citylands, Outlets of the Source Mall and South Unit Presence.