take only photographs, leave only footprints

A pun on the way English-speakers used to refer to Volkswagen, abbreviatedly, as veedubs, a company in North Yorkshire is championing the electric, green revolution of the recreation vehicle and camping industry with eDub Trips.
To reduce the impact of the camping trip—ahead of the automotive manufacturer’s pledge to offer alternatively powered vehicles by 2022—eDub is converting classic VW mini-buses into fully electric models and in order to finance further effort, renting out the campers for weekend excursions. As nice and hopeful as the latest advancements in cleaner energy and electric-vehicles are, there’s always the point of return on investment to aspire towards—with presently the amount of pollution generated to build that brand new car won’t ever be balanced out by the tidiness of its performance throughout its lifetime. I’d dare suggest that putting out on the market anything less is just green-washing, but I think what eDub Trips is doing with its modernization campaign represents genuine progress in the right direction.

major arcana

Despite the banal and unsurprising nature of the cards we are dealt by our daily social media digest, it’s still nonetheless exciting to forecast one’s fortune and fate. One clever illustrator from Italy named Jacopo Rosati, we were introduced to by Dangerous Minds, obliges with a collection of tarot cards that make up a narrative of the typical user experience.

in vino veritas (in aqua sanitas)

As a follow-up to last year’s reprinting of a most sublimely surreal cookbook, the German publishing house TASCHEN will re-issue Salvador Dalí’s liberally illustrated field guide to wine grapes, viticulture and history, The Wines of Gala, which was last in print in 1978. The artist’s pairings were emotional driven and classified his wines based on how the contrasted or complimented his moods, with groupings like the Wines of Generosity and Wines of the Impossible.

netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz

Though the defamation case is stalled in the courts, the charges against a social media giant for libelling an individual as the face of terrorism and rampant, uncontrolled immigration illustrated that the legal framework of Germany was insufficient to hold such influential entities to account and informed what’s colloquially known as the “Facebook Law.”
Though highly valued and defended, Germany’s Grundgesetz does not privilege freedom of expression above human dignity and acting as a vehicle for the spread and incitement of hatred carries a heavy fine and networks have until the new year to ensure that they have controls in place to be and remain in compliance. Despite fears of censorship and the potential for differences in interpretation, it seems to me a good policy to adopt as these platforms become de facto surrogates for journalism and reliable reporting and one which might save us from ourselves and be restorative for our esteem in so far as it lends more mediacy to the moment.

signal-to-interference ratio

Admittedly, we’ve probably been swooned by one of these viral, catchpenny maps ourselves and so really appreciated the person who, especially against the backdrop of the scope and scale of the disinformation campaigns launched to destabilise the US and other elections coming to light, rallied against the preponderance of dumb comparative charts. Whether or not any research went into their design is almost immaterial relative to the apparent provocative powers they’re accorded—seemingly an inescapable guarantor and fomentor of contention over an idiotic claim or accusation. This ought not be the conversation that we ought to be having but apparently this is what we’ve come to.