If you’ve ever fantasized about living in a real-life Lego home, your dream could finally come true.
French architecture firm Multipod Studio recently unveiled a prototype for the PopUp House, a customizable home made from stackable blocks. It can be designed, ordered, and built in about a month.
Check out the design for the first homes, located in the pine valleys of Southern France.
And you thought building Ikea furniture was daunting.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a quaintly morbid alphabet book written by Edward Gorey in 1963. The book recounts the unsettling deaths of 26 children, each representing a letter of the alphabet, in rhyming dactylic couplets.
Source: The Gashlycrumb Tinies: Alphabet Book for the Morbid – disinformation
you are water
I’m water
we’re all water in different containers
that’s why it’s so easy to meet
someday we’ll evaporate together
but even after the water’s gone
we’ll probably point out to the containers
and say, “that’s me there, that one.”
we’re container minders
– Yoko Ono, 1967
Dr. Masaru Emoto’s Water Experiment reminds me of Yoko Ono’s “We’re all Water,” except this adds a fascinating metaphysical element. If words, music, and environment can alter water in such profound ways, imagine how we are all affected, considering humans are 60% water.
Through the 1990’s, Dr. Masaru Emoto performed a series of experiments observing the physical effect of words, prayers, music and environment on the crystalline structure of water. Emoto hired photographers to take pictures of water after being exposed to the different variables and subsequently frozen so that they would form crystalline structures. The results were nothing short of remarkable.
Read more here: http://highexistence.com/water-experiment/
Dr. Emoto’s site: http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/water-crystal.html
Below is a documentary on Dr. Emoto’s work:
This is fantastic. Artist Dan Savage has partnered with Wondersauce and over 100 filmmakers to create streaming yule log-inspired short films. Here’s a taste:
Check out all 52 Yule Logs at watchyulelog.com (scroll down to get to the videos).
They’ve really thought this through: once you select a video, you can choose to loop it, or just let the site serve up one video after another.
Read more at Cool Hunting.
Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it’s the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole story, and leave your characters feeling pointless. Here are seven deadly sins of worldbuilding.
1. Not thinking about basic infrastructure. How do they eat? What do they eat? Who takes away the garbage? Who deals with their bodily wastes? How do they get around? What do the majority of people do to survive? You’re not just constructing a society, you’re creating an economy. People don’t oppress each other for fun — usually, systems of hierarchy and oppression have an economic component to them. Maybe you need a lot of peasants to grow labor-intensive crops, or maybe you need lots of cannon fodder in your space war. Maybe your only source of protein is a weird fungus that needs to be tended by specially trained people. Maybe everybody’s eating algae. In any case, there’s nothing worse than a fictional world where there are elaborate social structures, which seem completely separated from the realities of food, shelter and clothing.
Continues at: 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding
If nothing tickles your tastebuds, don’t be fooled into ordering apps.
Source: The Secret Psychology Of Restaurant Menus
Citation: Aaron Allen & Associates
http://aaronallen.com/
http://aaronallen.com/blog/the-psychology-of-menu-design
I’ve been trying to track down this track for years.
“My name is Yon Yonson,
I come from Wisconsin.
I work in a lumber mill there.
When I walk down the street,
The people I meet.
Say: What’s your name?
And I say:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I come from Wisconsin.
I work in a lumber mill there…”by Kurt Vonnegut
In 1988 Timothy Wilkinson, a British designer at frog design in Silicon Valley, was tasked with creating a logo for the biggest peripheral maker in the world: Logitech. The company kept Wilkinson’s logo around for almost 30 years. And while it long seemed weird to me, it’s also completely brilliant.
When he designed it, Wilkinson didn’t even own a PC, but the company’s “intoxicating” vision of the future, where hardware was an extension of the human body, was enough to go on. The logo that Wilkinson designed remained in place for decades in all its blocky teal glory, a scribbled eye that a mouse looked naked without. Last month, Logitech unveiled an entirely new logo and brand—meet Logi—that did away with the 1980s classic.
But the story of how Logitech got its logo, and the designer who came up with it, is uniquely interesting. It’s a glimpse at how the relationship between consumers and their technology has evolved over the past 30 years.
Continued at Gizmodo: The Life and Untimely Death of Technology’s Weirdest Logo
7th Street, East Village
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is … or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.
Today, where disposable instant messaging, emails, texts and tweets are all around us, it is a pleasant surprise to find out that the grandfather of quick communication is still with us.
Yes, it is still possible to send a personal, hand-delivered telegram.
Source: Technology You Didn’t Know Still Existed: The Telegram
