tåskkråbët

In a move that heralds the beginning of a vertical monopoly of sorts, Swedish furniture and lifestyle purveyor IKEA has acquired the San Francisco-based online platform TaskRabbit that allows people to contract freelance labour for a wide-range of services—including presumably assembling IKEA furniture.
The handyman services company has another sixty-thousand independent workers signed on and has already struck similar deals with other major on-line retailers to supplement installation and delivery. What do you think of the gig-economy—or rather the “sharing-economy” as the newly-minted partners characterise it? I can’t speak to the reputation of either company separately but something in the combined enterprise strikes me as exploitative and symptomatic of our rather precarious profit-models.

we don't deserve nice things

This post is maybe too morose and dejected for a fair early Autumn Friday morning, and though only learning of this particularly photogenic Swedish tree’s existence and demise, the episode struck a chord within me and how celebrity is a crisis of character. Naturally the Broccoli Tree did not seek out the fame that led to its destruction—that was the senseless vandalism of some Herostratic offender, but it nonetheless became too famous to be left alone. So called Hugs of Death usually don’t have physical targets but adoration amplified can have lethal consequences and seeing what became of this pretty tree seems a very powerful and poignant reminder of the dangers and responsibilities of stardom—especially the self-propelled variety.

memory hole

An archive dedicated to delving through a quarter of a century of radio talk shows to cull nihilistically embarrassing interviews between the provocative host and Dear Dotard has been silenced with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) order to cease and desist.
The broadcaster that is the rightful owner of this catalogue—and the investigative archivists ought to be lauded for their stamina as the original recordings were cringe-worthy enough without the abject horror knowing that America would one day elevate this D-List celebrity to high office—is refusing to air these back episodes, but if it changed its mind the Washington, DC-based litigant would happily drop its challenge. The intellectual property owners feel that Trump’s words might be too easily taken out of context and argue that there is no way to bolster the sessions with enough background to constitute a fair-use case—that is, deeming it research or of journalistic merit. These factors and shrill cries of infringement, of course stand in sharp contrast to the special dispensation afforded Trump for his entertainment value despite the fact his deportment clearly violates company policies on libellous and abusive speech. Dear Dotard has not just threatened North Korea with destruction via his medium of choice but has repeated hurled hateful and violent insults at individuals and whole groups of people that would merit a lifelong banishment.

tambo āto

For nearly the past quarter of a century the villagers of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture have strategically, meticulously planted dozens of varieties of heirloom and modern rice to create a colourful canvas out of their surrounding paddies. The scale and complexity of the works of art has grown every year—including Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in 2007—have helped revitalise local tourism and is truly a community effort. Be sure to visit the link up top for more landscaped murals and a video presentation on rice paddy art, or tambo āto as it is called in Japanese.

vansploitation

Prolific custom-vehicle creator George Barris (previously) also designed and built the Love Machine that was the central figure (Vandora) of the film Super Van and spawned a sub-genre of romance on the road. As with some of Barris’ other creations, the chassis of the Love Machine went through several incarnations that avoided acknowledging its spotted past including an appearance as a shuttle bus on Back to the Future II and on the television series seaQuest DSV.

darmok and jalad at tenagra

Sourced without a doubt from The Greatest Generation, io9 (named for a theoretical input-output device that allows users to peer into the future at the price of their sanity) presents a collection of some of the strangest plotlines from Star Trek: TNG for the series’ thirtieth anniversary, which debuted on this day in 1987.