Cool Stuff Friday.

spirited

Spirited Away. Chihiro eats an onigiri.

If you’ve never been to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, out in the Western suburbs of Tokyo, now would be a good time to plan your trip. The museum is planning an upcoming, year-long special exhibition that will focus on the many food-related scenes from all of Studio Ghibli films.

Meals and food play an incredibly important role in almost every Studio Ghibli film. In Laputa, Pazu splits his egg on bread in half and shares it with Sheeta. By doing so, the two become closer. In Spirited Away, Chihiro eats an onigiri and gains the courage to face her uphill struggle. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters become like family when they surround a dinner table over a meal of eggs and bacon.

Taberu wo kaku (which roughly translates to Drawing Eating) begins May 27, 2017 and will be on view through May 2018 so you’ll have plenty of time to see it. The exhibition will be largely separated into 2 sections – one on eating and one on cooking – and will detail the many ways Studio Ghibli animators brought their foods to life.

Via Spoon & Tamago.

Designer Mark Noad.

Designer Mark Noad.

The triggering of Article 50 last week means that Brexit is a certainty – and that the UK will need a new passport. Luckily last week also saw the judging for our unofficial Brexit passport design competition… here is a look at the nine proposals shortlisted by our judges.

We received over 200 entries from 34 different countries. The youngest entrant was 12 years old and the oldest was 83. Most submissions were from architects and designers but there were also entries from non-designers, students, retired people and unemployed people. Below are the nine designs that most impressed our judges ahead of the announcement of the winner on 11 April: [Click on over to see all the finalists, or watch the video below.]

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Artist Achilleas Souras used hundreds of discarded life jackets to assemble an igloo for Moroso’s SOS Save Our Souls installation at Milan design week.

The 16-year-old, who has already shown a similar igloo at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, used jackets collected from the shores of Lesbos – the Greek island that has become a regular landing place for refugees entering Europe.

While his first igloo used 52 jackets, his SOS Save Our Souls structure is made from 1,000 abandoned garments. Souras cut and folded the jackets to resemble blocks of ice before assembling them together.

The resulting waterproof structure is intended as both a shelter and a welcome point for arriving migrants.

“The refugee crisis was simply a set of numbers on the news,” said the artist, who was born in London and now resides in Barcelona.

“But when I picked a jacket up, it stopped being just material. When you hold the jacket in your hand and you smell the sea, you look at things through a different prism and you realise that every jacket represents a human life.”

“The refugees, the homeless, and the less privileged cannot be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ anymore,” added Souras, who hopes his igloos could eventually be used in rescue operations.

“These are global issues that affect us all, and we must try to solve them for everyone’s sake.”

You can see much more here.

The Hat’s Limitation.

boushi-170

boushi-376

boushi-039

A collaborative project between architect Kosaku Matsumoto and Japan Braid Hat Mfg. Co., ltd.

Japan Braid Hat is known for making blade hats (or Sanada hat) woven with fabric tape and natural grass straw in a swirl-like pattern. Unlike hats made by sewing, they are woven seamlessly together and completely jointless. The hat has an elegant simplicity of shape and form that made feasible to increase the hat’s scale to the limit. How big can a hat really be?

The outcome of this experiment was a hat five times larger than the standard, stretching the technical limit of the craftsman, and extending the very definition of we can see as a hat. It has been expanded so much that the brim cannot bear its own weight, draping toward the ground to cascade and wrap the whole body of who wears it. Like a coat, a veil, or a small, sculptural tent, the hat gives various fluid impressions according to the way it is worn.

By challenging the very definition and the limitation of a hat, the work attempts to discover a scale of new functions and design possibilities in what we understand as a blade hat.

Photo by Nobutada OMOTE.

You can see much more at Kosaku Matsumoto. Via Spoon & Tamago.

Stephen King on the Tiny Tyrant.

2681

Stephen King has an article up at The Guardian, pondering the rise of the Tiny Tyrant, and the hows and whys of it. Entertaining reading.

I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.

Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome is cut from the same cloth. He’s a car salesman (selling being a key requirement for the successful politician), who is the head selectman in the small town of Chester’s Mill, when a dome comes down and cuts the community off from the world. He’s a crook, a cozener and a sociopath, the worst possible choice in a time of crisis, but he’s got a folksy, straight-from-the-shoulder delivery that people relate to. The fact that he’s incompetent at best and downright malevolent at worst doesn’t matter.

Both these stories were written years ago, but Stillson and Rennie bear enough of a resemblance to the current resident of the White House for me to flatter myself I have a country-fair understanding of how such men rise: first as a joke, then as a viable alternative to the status quo, and finally as elected officials who are headstrong, self-centered and inexperienced. Such men do not succeed to high office often, but when they do, the times are always troubled, the candidates in question charismatic, their proposed solutions to complex problems simple, straightforward and impractical. The baggage that should weigh these hucksters down becomes magically light, lifting them over the competition like Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar film Up. Trump’s negatives didn’t drag him down; on the contrary, they helped get him elected.

I decided to convene six Trump voters to discover how and why all this happened. Because I selected them from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit), I felt perfectly OK feeding them powerful truth serum before officially convening the round table. And because they are fictional – my creatures – they all agreed to this. They gulped the serum down in Snapple iced tea, and half an hour later we began. My panelists were:

Click on over for the full story.

Jesus Tree.

Copyright 2017 by KPRC Click2Houston - All rights reserved.

Copyright 2017 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.

Do you see Jesus? Right there, in the tree, for true! A woman has claimed to see Jesus in an oak tree, and if you click over and watch the video, it’s easy enough to see why. Her house is crammed full of religious icons, statues, paintings, all that. I did laugh, watching part of the video, where they zoomed back from the tree, and superimposed a white Jesus image over the tree, so that people would know how to locate Tree Jesus.

“I was looking out the window and there he was,” Clack said. “I have little square panes in my windows, and it looked like it was framed. I just laughed and said, ‘Lord, you even framed it for me.’”

Clack, who is Catholic, said she noticed it around 4 p.m. when the sun shone on it. She describes the figure as “a big face.”

“Remember, it’s bark,” she said. “When you stand back 15 feet or so, (you can see it) — it’s a big face.”

Now I’m curious – do all the acorns have tiny baby Jesuses? This would also make Jesus a Dryad. Uh oh, he fell into the wrong mythos.

Via KPRC.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Fri

I really, really don’t want to spoil the surprise here. I’ll just say I was laughing myself silly, and this is someone who is delightfully familiar with the flat rat phenomenon. Go see!

One of my most favourite authors, Jim C. Hines, came out of model retirement for a good cause:

Click for full size!

Click for full size!

And, from The Creators Project, Vintage Posters can now be yours, for free!

1490115251312-Berger45-vintage-printable-wwwfreevintageposterscom_

1490115310194-destination-moon-vintage-poster-wwwfreevintageposterscom

If the posters of today still had the look of those of yesteryear, would they still get tagged and trolled as often? Much work today, it seems, lacks the graphic audacity of yore, opting instead for forms and formats we’ve become accustomed to. That’s why, when you find vintage posters in flea markets, you find prices that might suggest they were just printed.

Many of these posters are available online, but it’s often difficult to find high enough quality to print them beyond standard A4 printer paper sizing. Finally, our savior: FreeVintagePosters.Com. The name explains the concept rather well. From Soviet propaganda posters and advertisements for airlines of the 60s, it’s up to you—there are several categories ranging from “Sport” to “Film” to “Nature” and everywhere in between. At Creators in France, we’ve been redecorating. Check out a few of our favorites below:

Head on over to see their picks, or go straight to FreeVintagePosters.com.

“RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!”

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

This week, the White House began sending out an official email newsletter, “Your 1600 Daily,” to promote video clips of the president, pertinent news articles or endorsements, and other items of note happening that day.

On Friday, there was an odd inclusion at the bottom, where normally one can find friendly headlines from Fox News, Breitbart, or other conservative outlets that have become media safe harbors for the administration. One of the two featured articles was a parody piece titled “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why,” written by Alexandra Petri, who writes satirical pieces for the Washington Post’s lighthearted ComPost blog.

[…]

ThinkProgress asked the White House press office if they were aware the article was a parody, and if so, why they selected it, but received no response by press time.

If this was a simple mistake, then the staff member who chose and approved the article’s inclusion on official White House communications did not read beyond the first paragraph, which makes abundantly clear that the headline is deeply sarcastic:

Some people are complaining that the budget proffered by the Trump administration, despite its wonderful macho-sounding name, is too vague and makes all sorts of cuts to needed programs in favor of increasing military spending by leaps and bounds. These people are wimps. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has called it a “hard power budget” which is, I think, the name of an exercise program where you eat only what you can catch, pump up your guns and then punch the impoverished in the face. This, conveniently, is also what the budget does.

The article concluded, “RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!”

[…]

Other sections of the newsletter are anodyne White House agenda items that urge supporters to “get involved” or share important tweets “from President Trump,” promote “Oval Office highlights,” link to press room briefings, and detail Trump’s schedule.

Sometimes these links, always titled “News Reports,” are op-eds or letters to the editor by friendly voices or administration officials, or a straight news piece about a positive economic development or administration announcement. None of the other days of the “News Reports” section featured anything like Petri’s parody.

The links included in Tuesday’s newsletter, for example, are representative of Trump allies’ favorite outlets:

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

Wednesday was the second day in a row the newsletter linked to a Breitbart article about Obamacare. Other featured items include stories from Fox News, Townhall, Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Yahoo, and an endorsement of AHCA by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. On Thursday many mainstream outlets were cited, as well as the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s news site, called The Daily Signal.

Oh my. It seems this is amusement Friday, with some kind entity somewhere answering Voltaire’s Prayer. Full story at Think Progress.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Librairie Mollat.

Librairie Mollat.

These are some of the best photos I’ve have seen in a very long time, such a spirit of fun, and it’s amazing how well these book store employees match their picks! Whatever you’re doing, find a small window of time to go and look at them all, each one is a delight, this is pure treasure, and reminder of just how grand we people can be. A few more:

librairie-mollat-3-595x604

Librairie Mollat.

librairie-mollat-4-595x593

Librairie Mollat.

librairie-mollat-17-595x595

Librairie Mollat.

librairie-mollat-18-595x592

Librairie Mollat.

Oh, go look at them all!

Next up, some truly stunning photos … of people drenched in honey. Just one here, the rest below the fold, because nakedness, so watch yourself at work.

Blake Little.

Blake Little.

[Read more…]

Attack of the Cyber Octopuses!

Published on Jan 7, 2017

Support it on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
“Attack of the Cyber Octopuses” is a retro-futuristic cyberpunk short film. The aim is to recreate the look and feel of the Eighties Sci-fi classics, without using CGI nor chroma key.
official website: http://www.chaosmonger.com/aotco/
making of blog: http://cyberoctopuses.blogspot.com
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
instagram: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
twitter: https://twitter.com/CyberOctopuses

Octopus_02

Make has an interview about how the Cyber Octopuses were made, which makes for fun and interesting reading!

Couch Gag.

1489092836805-Screen-Shot-2017-03-09-at-35243-PM.png

Bill Plympton’s instantly-recognizable mix of naïveté and rule-breaking will greet viewers of The Simpsons‘ 613th episode, “22 for 30.” The Oscar-nominated indie animator behind I Married a Strange Person! (1997), Mutant Aliens (2001), and Cheatin’ (2014) returns to Matt Groening’s juggernaut sitcom for the fifth time on March 12, delivering a meta love letter to animation that breaks the fourth, and kicks it while it’s down.

It’s great to see Plympton again, but a word of warning, don’t get carried along too much by charm of this particular couch scene, it has a rather unexpected ending. (If you’ve ever stabbed yourself with a pencil, might want to skip it all together.)

The Creators Project has the full story.