It’s 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future (Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)
(↝via FFFFound)
Small Screen Potatoes
Stephanie Zacharek’s X Files 2 review for Salon about sums up my feelings on the movie.
I was impressed at how understated it was, feeling much more like a familiar small screen affair than the explosion filled blockbuster attempt of Fight the Future. Obviously there’s a much smaller budget (and audience) for the X Files in 2008, but Carter and Spotnitz play it to their advantage, creating a dark, intimate world for their main characters to explore. I also appreciate that these characters haven’t been frozen on a shelf since the series finale– they have changed, and we aren’t privy to what has occurred in that gap. It becomes another mystery for the audience to unravel.
Unfortunately, I doubt this is the type of film that will be a box office (or critical) success. The multitude of in-jokes and weighty history might not detract from the plot for the uninitiated, but without them, Mulder and Scully’s motivations could appear impenetrable. The quiet, snowy dread (welcome back Vancouver) has nothing on the billion dollar visual spectacle of The Dark Night. Ultimately, The X Files 2 begs for an outlet that doesn’t have to compete for theater goers with FX-laden billion dollar blockbusters, or require watering down to capture a weekly television audience of new viewers. Perhaps Chris Carter should take a page from Joss Whedon’s book.
“
You may wonder — if the rules are so simple to express — what is there that makes a builder great?
And indeed, there is an answer. Even though the rules are simple, by the time you have twenty, perhaps fifty rules like this in your mind, it takes almost inhuman singleness of purpose to insist on them— not to let go of them.
It is so easy to say— oh well, it is too hard to have light on two sides of this room, and that room — at the same time as all other things we are trying to do. It will be alright if we allow this room to have light on just one side. The fact is it will not be alright. But to insist, to keep all the rules which matter, freely in your mind, and not to let go of them — that does perhaps require unusual character of purpose.
—Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
Submitted for your consideration as album cover of the decade.
(↝via my record collection)
full size view strongly recommended.
the white vinyl was a nice touch.
illustration style explores the territory between Boris Vallejo and the guy who draws Groo.
sergio aragones! in earlier days on the internet some guy on the groo list (“the groop”) was the only other person with my first name/last name combo that came up in searches.
now available on a shirt.
so we’ve covered t shirts and cross stitch, now we just need this image on a cake, as a tattoo, and laser etched onto a moleskine.
One of the French bicycle aficionados who loiters in front of my apartment was sporting the SY shirt a couple days ago too. If I’dve put him on here that would have covered the “shot in the wild” base.
Is French Bicycle Aficionados a new Brooklyn band?
Weird Universe, a weblog by Paul Di Filippo, Alex Boese, and Chuck Shepherd.
(↝via John Crowley’s LJ)
An interview with Joel Hedge, master of Xybots and Battlezone, from the King of Kong DVD extras. He was the high score record holder on twin galaxies until just a couple months ago.
Unfortunately the word “Xybots” can only be used to answer the question “What is Xybots?”
DEFENDER of the favicon lets you play the arcade classic Defender in, well, the favicon of the page.
(↝via MB)
John Leech Sketch from Punch (1853)
Railway Guard, “Now, ma’am, is this your luggage?”
Old Lady (who concludes she is attacked by Brigands), “Oh, yes! Gentlemen, it’s mine! Take it—take all I have—but spare, oh spare our lives!!”
The moustache movement, that pivotal moment in the mid C19 when facial hair became not just socially acceptable (after a long spell in the cultural doldrums - the beards of the C16th having been supplanted by wigs) but almost essential.
(↝via things magazine)
This and more available at Pictures from Punch