prêt-à-porter or this is not even my final form

Via fellow fashionista Nag on the Lake, we were pleased to discover the elegant solutions to some of the most vexing equations of the cat-walk in artist Jonathan Zawada’s inspired gallery of runway models called Fashematics. White-Out, Bat Girl, heavily-redacted documents and beer-cosies all are on a collision-course to deliver some choice collections of haute-couture. These humorous stylings remind me of how vintage apparel from Peter Max could be described as the offspring of Art Nouveau and Haight-Ashbury.

allthing or all that’s fit to print

Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.

Advocates, who hope to create a Switzerland of bits, hope that this stance will compel other governments to be more transparent and forth-coming about legislation and its enforcement. Cobbling together some of the best whistle-blower protection and anti-censorship laws from different jurisdictions—for instance, the attorney-client privilege that any conversation with a journalist enjoys in Belgium or the public registry of all government documents (even classified ones) in Estonia, is creating a forum where witness to corruption can come forward without fear of reprisal. As if meaningful reform and mindful democracy weren’t occasion enough, perhaps this new media landscape might be able to attract internet start-ups to recover some of the jobs-prospects lost to Iceland’s former dignities where laws are not biased towards copy-holders and a select few with political heft—besides, surely the land of fire and ice is probably an ideal place to operate with a smart labour pool and totally green geothermal energy to power it all.

wright-on, wright brothers

Dangerous Minds shares nice appreciation of a psychedelic and affirming little vintage activity book from environmentalist and artist Peter Max of paper airplanes to cut out, fold and let soar. The designs feature playful short messages, like Today is Your Day and I can’t talk, I’m laughing. Be certain to check out Dangerous Minds for more groovy curations to explore and inspire.

vulgate

Previously we’ve looked into how emojis are rendered differently across different platforms, a sort of diglossic code-switching between sender and receiver, should they have different devices, but here’s a deeper, academic investigation into the potential for misinterpretation by the differences in emotion, sentiment that they signal. Hannah Miller’s thesis abstract is pretty interesting. Via Kottke’s latest batch of quick links, one supposes that through this study (provided that competition extends into the future and allows the time needed for dialogues and regional accents to foment) the way the symbols are used might fracture from the mother language into increasingly non-mutually intelligible and distinct languages, sort of like the Romance tongues emerging as splintered versions of Latin.