and i endorse this message

Sometimes simplicity can speak volumes, and from an economy of design perspective, there is quite some immediacy to it that is almost stronger for the juxtaposition. Found here.

5x5

bars and bathhouses: in 1983, a gay version of the Monopoly board game was produced

weinkönigin: Trier crowns a Syrian refugee as its Wine Queen

simcity: a new game invites players to redesign NYC’s subway system and test the outcomes of different scenarios

tiki room: the intrepid explorers of Atlas Obscura examine how romancing fake Polynesian culture taught Americans how to relax and be more social

lossless: the Olympics committee has forbidden the creation or sharing animated GIFs of any of its events, via Boing Boing

free-return trajectory

An internet giant and associates intend to land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon before the end of 2017, we learn via Kottke, after overcoming the administrative embargos established under the terms governing the parties of the Outer Space Treaty, which provides that no government can claim ownership of any celestial body, nor can weaponise space and is responsible for commercial spacecraft launched under their jurisdiction—no matter how close or loose that association is, what with multinational entities beholden to no state.  The treaty was installed shortly after the US government seeded the upper atmosphere with tens of thousands of microscopic needles at the height of the Cold War as a contingency for maintaining global communications in case the Soviets cut the undersea cables spanning the Atlantic.
Incidentally, the first private, commercial mission to the Moon was a fly-by and fourteen day Earth orbit executed by a German ærospace company in October of 2014 (EN/DE), memorialising its founder who had recently departed, but entailed no actual touch-down or permanent presence and this upcoming enterprise will be a first. In addition to being liable for the craft that take-off under their auspices, space-faring nations also retain ownership of the artifacts that they leave behind, space-junk, equipment, rovers and flags but can stake no claim—despite America’s push to have Tranquility Base protected as a national historic monument. I wonder how the Outer Space Treaty applies to wholly private activities—like asteroid mining, whose mere spectre should have already stopped the gold speculators, or space tourism. While we have to have confidence that governments with the urge to explore and not exploit, will only vet businesses of a like character, on the other hand, one has to wonder about burdening entrepreneurs with an insufficient regulatory framework and disincentives when private innovations may be a far greater boon to all of humanity than anything government can produce. What do you think? Not only do I not want to see tatty resorts crowding up the lunar surface, who’s to say that one could brand hollowed-out planetoids (or at least overlay them with advertising in a virtual augmented reality) or net a comet and remove it from the skies forever?  I think the potential amazing advances will carry the day and prevail, however, in the end.

flux capacitor or abey and abet

I really enjoyed reading this ode to an exclusive, insider image of the liver-spotted hands of Thomas Alva Edison, cantankerous tinker and vicious crank, described as the clickbait of 1919, making the rounds of the popular engineering magazines of the day.
It is especially ironic, howsoever this scoop was obtained, since Edison railed against all things he deemed as “catchpenny,” including the inventions of his competitors: the battery being a “mechanism for swindling the public” and through some means not elaborated, eroding the work-ethic of the common-man and inducing “a latent capacity for lying.” I wonder what Edison made of this idolatry, even when driven by the pulpy journalism that regale our margins. Edison probably posed for that photograph to spite his competition.