a target-rich environment

Chuck Klosterman on zombie culture:

"Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don't want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever's directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid. Battling zombies is like battling anything...or everything."

let's see who strikes the loudest

Professor Elemental - Fighting Trousers.

the man who arranges the blocks

Pig With The Face Of A Boy - A Complete History Of The Soviet Union Through The Eyes Of A Humble Worker.

(via wondermark)

it's real, it is happening to you

Dylan Moran, genius.

sunday cephalopods

From China Miéville's Kraken:

"Beyond the gate the walls were not featureless. Billy's mouth opened. Still concrete and windowless, the walls were intricately moulded. Stained by London dirt no scrubbing could remove, a nautilus entwined with an octopus, with a cuttlefish, its flattened frilled mantle like a skirt edge. It encoiled limbs with an argonaut bobbing below its extruded eggcase-house. And squid everywhere. Shaped when the walls were wet.

What a corridor, this council-office walkway. A tentacular border of Disney-malevolent vampire squid; ornery Humboldt; whiplash squid in tuning-fork posture. Their bodies were rendered similar sizes, specificities effaced by shared squidness, teuthic quiddity. Their – the word came to Billy and would not lie down – sqiuddity. Architeuthis in the shabby manner of the building."

sunday cephalopods

"Squidhouse in Wintertime," by Andy Helms.

(via thisisnthappiness)

hylozoic ground

Philip Beesley's ambitious and somewhat eerie installation Hylozoic Ground is representing Canada at this year's Venice Biennale in Architecture.

The sculpture is described by its creators as "an artificial forest made of an intricate lattice of small transparent acrylic meshwork links, covered with a network of interactive mechanical fronds, filters, and whiskers."

Its individual elements are rigged with an array of sensors and microprocessors that react to human presence and other stimuli. Very cool.

(via bldgblog.)

coffee, please

A short clip from Louis CK's Louie.

sunday cephalopods

I realize I'm a few weeks late to the game here, but this Reuters story piqued my interest:

"Researchers have discovered four new species of octopus in Antarctica with venom that works at sub-zero temperatures...

Experts have long known there were octopuses in Antarctica, but what surprised Fry and his colleagues was the sheer biodiversity and how natural selection changed the way they hunted and the nature of their venom.

The octopuses would drill small holes in large, shelled prey, through which they inject their toxic saliva."

(via clusterflock)

a shared existence, if only for a minute

How To Be Alone, by Tanya Davis.

(via clusterflock)