It’s been thirty years since Amon Tobin released Adventures in Foam under the Cujo moniker. He returns to form with Paranova, his latest Cujo release, and it’s a splendid album (upon first listen). Let’s see if it holds up for another thirty years.
Heard about Andrew W.K.’s new album (allegedly we’re calling this jazz-noir) in, of all places, a marketing email from Blackwing. Darcy Smyth describes it perfectly:
This is lounge music for a room that might not exist, all smoke and red curtains, the kind of piano that sounds like it’s remembering something it can’t quite say. Total Twin Peaks Roadhouse energy, like Lynch left the lights on and wandered off.
Been in rotation for days now.
Nice episode of the Version History podcast, with a focus on The Oregon Trail videogame (from which I learned started as a text adventure game first). It was fun playing this at school growing up. I have no idea if they do anything like this in school these days, but it felt educational back then.
The fusion of some of my favorite things: typography and Super Metroid. Incredible find by Marcin Wichary, in a topical piece on the challenges of fully justified text columns.
(A mad genius wrote a 17k word guide to the game by simply selecting the right words to be perfectly justified on-page.)
Really appreciate Cyan doing another print run of their Myst trilogy. Without hesitation, I’ll be backing this.
Our outings to the MN State Fair were more subdued this year, but still great food at the classic spots (Baba and Midway Men’s Club forever), and this piece in the Fine Arts building really stuck with me.
Neon lighting. We all love it. WSJ with a nice dive into maintaining the format, and reformulating an historically terminated (due to cost effectiveness) color of neon, cyan green. Nice cinematic call-outs to Casablanca and Eyes Wide Shut, too.
[Photo mine, unrelated; gift link URL]
I didn’t realize regrinding old vinyl records was possible, but in the face of our climate crisis, it’s another trick the resuscitated industry has focused on.
Good piece by Kyle Devine — Longreads link here, which is an excerpt from his book.
A bleak, but likely prophetic take from Aftermath of the collapsing videogame industry — insofar as larger, AAA games are concerned. Independent development, however, has been particularly healthy, fun, and innovative, and I hope that corner continues to grow.
A very nice MacOS app was released today — Aphera — for photo triaging and editing. Folks behind it: Ryan Carver, Naz Hamid, and Juan Pablo Zambrano, all bringing expertise to the project. Trying it out for a few weeks — and looking forward to using it after an upcoming vacation.
The path of art takes artists on journeys of knowledge. Good one on the humble but highly complex octopus from Strook. New to me was the Mimic Octopus:
[…]discovered as recently as 1998, is capable of mimicking various predators. It chooses which species to mimic based on its attacker.
The history of the chopsticks sleeve is kind of riveting. Even more surprising is that non-Japanese restaurants never took to advertising on equivalent fork-knife-spoon utensil packaging (as almost immediately after wider deployment, “printed paper chopstick sleeves became vernacular advertisements for shops and restaurants”).
(~via Veronique.)
A collection of thirty 1950s Milwaukee bus tickets harkens back to terrific typographic design.
(via Robb Knight)
I can’t get enough of Midnight Radio from James Reeves. His twice-monthly mixtape drops might just be musical prisms of my brain. His anti-bullshit music app, Spite, is worth trying in tandem with Midnight Radio (and all the owned music you’ve ever accumulated). It’s fast becoming my go-to player.
NASA drops more than 12,000 new photographs from the Artemis II mission.
Two master illustrators meet for an interview — Luis Mendo chats with Satoshi Hashimoto. I’ve loved Hashimoto’s work ever since perusing the pages of Monocle over 15 years ago, and just recently starting recognizing more of Mendo’s work. This was a delight to read.
Something mystical and timely about the subject of this read — a series of now-removed pixelated videos on YouTube, with the premier one backed by a tune from Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES), that operated as the “internet checkpoint” for many people during its ephemeral couple of years of existence.
The Disney and OpenAI licensing partnership seems like a terrible idea, insofar as controlling IP representation and the risk of diluting branding — unless, of course, there are critical limitations for usage and context.
Brian Eno:
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement”—and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc.… The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way.
Just discovered this post-war architectural collective of “buildings inspired by pyramids and mastabas that rise above the sandy, green expanse of a former farm” just outside the French Mediterranean coastline.
Allegedly architect Jean Balladur’s work (officially titled La Grande Motte) was disparaged as architectural pollution, but this looks anything but. It’s got that dreamy mid century flavor of futurism, and stark contrast with the surrounding green landscapes is catnip for aesthetics.
I may be late to the party on this, but Robin Sloan’s Moonbound is a terrific read. It’s like he took several shelves of adventurous genres at a bookstore and whisked them into a cauldron to brew a remixed elixir of everything we love about high-spirited, whimsical, fantastical fiction.
False spring came early to the midwest. Had to dig quite a trench out of this heavy, semi-wet hazard in the morning. Also nice to see Noah Kolina, photographer up in Lumberland, NY, saw a similar “ice storm”.
Buckling up for some relaxation and reading this holiday week. (Creation Lake / Julia) 📚
Louie Mantia has been on a tear lately releasing (or re-releasing?) new icon packs, the latest of which reflects on the controller button styles of the Sony PlayStation.
One of those unexpected, sudden rising to fame stories that happens every so often in the literature wold: this time with Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series. I’ve only watched the Apple TV series so far (which is stellar and on its 4th season), but I’ve got my eye on the books next…