Sons of Loki

A few links I’ve picked up over the last week:

The Death of the Blog Post I’ve always liked bold graphic design, to the point where I sometimes get strange urges to run away from uni and become a graphic designer. Anyway, it’s interesting to see some of the new original magazine-inspired designs you can find on blog articles these days, and that article itself is a prime example. I’d stitch together such a thing for my own blog posts, but I lack the time and the knack and I really have nothing quite so interesting to say. It does make me want to re-jig this theme a little, though.

The remnants of Biosphere 2 When I was a kid I was fascinated by Biosphere 2, a great socio-biological experiment in the Arizona desert that aimed to create a sealed ecosystem. Now, like many things from the mid-90s, including East 17, it’s all a bit depressing and abandoned. Photographer Noah Sheldon documents the remains, which are ironically being taken over by the very nature the experiment sort to duplicate.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings”—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai.

What happened to the hominids who may have been smarter than us? It’s a little over-enthusiastic in its extrapolations, but this article presents a fascinating Scratch that. The idea of a super-intelligent hominid has been thoroughly debunked.

Watched The Big Lebowski the other day, and was thoroughly amused. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but the final impetus was the sublime Shakespeare version recently released, which does more than a straight “olde english” parody and hits the Shakespearean style right on the head with delicious puns and wordplay and oh-so-perfect writing.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

[They insert his head into the commode]

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

Yah, been a quiet couple of days. Well, actually no. Went out on Saturday night with the guys/girls for a cheap (1000 yen) night at Atom, a club somewhere in the backstreets of Shibuya (I’ll never find these places again). It was an alright place, especially for that sort of price.

I am freshly committed to finishing my novel, because I’ve realised that if I leave it a couple of years it will begin to look outdated, given that it touches on contemporary events. Almost without realising it, I’ve discovered that this third section is all about social media and social networking and the differences it will make to our lives. But I don’t want to go all technologically evangelistic, because despite the posturings of the Twitterati most of the web is about unintelligible #hashtags and braindead YouTube comments and bad spelling. I’m hoping that will work well as a thematic conflict of ideologies. Maybe. We shall see.