Florida’s Space Coast

Photographer Rob Stephenson chronicles Florida's Space Coast, a community grappling with its past.

Kennedy Space Center was for two generations the public face of a space program that ended when the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time on July 21, 2011. Thousands of NASA employees lost their jobs, Kennedy was essentially mothballed and Space Coast became a shadow of itself Yet everywhere you look, there are reminders of its once glorious past. A life-size replica of a shuttle cockpit moulders on Merritt Island. The faded silhouette of a space shuttle remains on the marquee of a bowling alley. A space shuttle-themed room in a hotel goes largely unused.

Welcome to the studio

Welcome to our design studio, where you'll never see the light of day but you can bring your dog.

Just a quick word on our creatives. You’ll notice that several of the designers have stacks and stacks of design books and publications on their desks, their Paul Rands, their Vignellis, and so on. This is great to capture. It makes the designers feel good because it allows them to think that one day they’ll also design an airline logo or redesign a subway wayfinding system or create timeless animated movie credits when in fact we all know that they’ll mostly be creating rubbish animations in Keynote that only sales managers in the Midwest will see, and more importantly, not even give half an eff about.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

All the feels – Chi Luu on the morphology of reaction GIFs:

Once a reaction has been identified, codified into an emoticon or emotion GIF, and then widely used and shared, it can often start to develop a morphological short form in language as users make more fluid reference to it in text. Based on the shared understanding of these terms within a speech community these phrases could become lexicalized into compounds. This appears to be happening with ‘facepalm’ and its fellow gestural neologisms, which has gone from a shorthand phrase such as ‘*face palm*’(which literally describes the gesture and might be appended to text), to the compound ‘face-palm’ (sometimes fully lexicalized into a single word ‘facepalm’) which may be used metaphorically as part of the utterance. … These compounds can gain traction outside the subculture from which it originated, and might also jump from the sphere of the written word into spoken language. These new gestural compounds such as face-palm, head-desk, side-eye, table-flip can already be observed in mainstream news publications in productive noun and verb forms.

John Portman

Ruins of the future – how John Portman's architecture made Atlanta the backdrop for dystopia:

Filmmakers use architecture to represent societies that are forming or collapsing, and conceptual structures are too eccentric to symbolise the collective groups that dominate dystopian storylines. Portman’s work fits on film in part because his design philosophy straddles the modernism and brutalism handed down to his generation from predecessors such as Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer, who strove to incorporate functionality and community into their buildings. … All the flesh has been removed and you just see the architectural bones. Portman’s buildings would make very beautiful ruins, because the essence of them is so powerful and so direct.

Prince’s secret vault

What's in Prince's secret vault? Even if you're not a fan, this is fascinating (and will make you feel very, very unproductive).

The story goes that if Prince were to leave the world tomorrow, he has enough unreleased material to put out an album a year. I’ve been chasing his PR people for months to talk about these songs, before Prince’s lawyer gets in touch to tell me Prince ‘is the only person qualified to talk about his music’. When I suggest this the perfect opportunity for him to show us all just how qualified he is, she laughs an ‘it’s never going to happen’ kind of laugh.

Ballard on the future of the future

The Future of the Future, JG Ballard's 1977 essay for Vogue, successfully predicted the now:

Far more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene, above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man — the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star … All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate starring role.

Rocky II

The writers of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grosse Pointe Blank and Sherlock Holmes have spent the last ten years searching the Mojave desert for Rocky II, a fake boulder put there by Ed Ruscha:

A BBC crew filmed Ruscha during its creation for a 1980 documentary, which also captured him depositing the work somewhere in the desert, where it has apparently remained ever since, indistinguishable from all the other rocks around it. … Rocky II is so mysterious it neither appears on the call for information about missing artworks listed on the artist’s website, nor in the catalogue listing all his known works – almost as if its existence has been intentionally obscured.

I love this. I kind of hope they never find it, but also that they never, ever stop looking.

The devil’s rope

The devil's rope – a history of barbed wire.

Right around the same time that barbed wire was invented, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. At first, telephone companies were laying telephone wire in cities, but they weren’t interested in the rural market. Still, farmers also needed phones, which meant that they needed a network of wires to connect the farms. Barbed wire fences could serve this purpose. The barbed wire couldn’t transmit a signal quite as clearly as a nice insulated copper wire, but for many years, they did the trick. A dozen or so farms might be connected on one system and for about 25 dollars, farmers could buy a kit to rig themselves into the network. In 1907 there were 18,000 independent telephone cooperative serving nearly a million and half people. Because of this, farmers were some of the earliest adopters of telephone technology.

Best Animated Feature … feature

Okay, so this is pretty pointless, but also kind of interesting.

What are the chances of an animated film ever getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination, now that Best Animated Feature Film exists? The category was only introduced in 2001, but what should have won, had it always existed? And what exactly is the difference between a “Picture” and a “Feature” anyway?

Ponder these questions no longer! Here is a full(ish) list of actual and probable winners from the past couple of decades. And yes, that’s right, my critical judgment is equivalent to the entire voting membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In some cases, it's not even a matter of opinion, it's just that nothing else was released that year, so films like The Rescuers Down Under would have won by default.

The actual winners:

2014 – Big Hero 6

2013 – Frozen

2012 – Brave

2011 – Rango

2010 – Toy Story 3

2009 – Up

2008 – Wall-E

2007 – Ratatouille

2006 – Happy Feet

2005 – Wallace And Gromit And The Curse Of The Wererabbit

2004 – The Incredibles

2003 – Finding Nemo

2002 – Spirited Away

2001 – Shrek (Monsters Inc was robbed!)

The winners that weren't winners because the category didn't exist yet but they probably would have been winners in my humble opinion:

2000 – Chicken Run

1999 – The Iron Giant

1998 – Antz

1997 – Princess Mononoke

1996 – James And The Giant Peach

1995 – Toy Story

1994 – The Lion King

1993 – The Nightmare Before Christmas

1992 – Aladdin

1991 – Beauty And The Beast

1990 – The Rescuers Down Under

1989 – The Little Mermaid

1988 – Akira

1987 – I can’t find a single recognisable animated film released this year. 

1986 – Castle In The Sky

1985 – The Black Cauldron

1984 – Nope, nothing here either.

1983 – Nothing.

1982 – The Secret Of NIMH

1981 – Heavy Metal

… and then that’s where my research ends. It’s a bit depressing that there are entire years without any recognisable films. What we can learn from this: the eighties was a terrible decade for animation, and we have it very, very good right now.

Enter the novella

Tor’s Carl Engle-Laird explains why the future of publishing is short:

When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation. Enter the novella …

The subliminal power of city fonts

From this post on the subliminal power of city fonts:

The electronics company Philips was to the Dutch city of Eindhoven what Rolls Royce is to Derby, or Mercedes to Stuttgart. It was founded there, and grew to become the biggest employer. But when from the 1980s on Philips began to shift its operations out of Eindhoven, culminating with the move of its head office to Amsterdam in 1997, it left a void. Like a lover scorned, Eindhoven needed to go out and get itself a makeover. Technology and design sectors blossomed, and many of the old factories became homes to creative start-ups.As part of the effort to rebrand itself, it seemed apt that Eindhoven should turn to an aspect of design – namely, typeface.

Eleven historical uses for invisible ink

Wonderful slice of history in this Mental Floss article on 11 Historical Uses for Invisible Ink:

James Stockdale, a Navy pilot, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and sent to the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ where he was to stay for seven and a half years. With the help of U.S. Naval Intelligence, his wife Sybil initiated secret communications with Stockdale by enclosing a photograph of her mother in a letter to him. He was confused, but (as he said later) he thought: ‘It’s dumb to throw away something from the States without doing more with it. James Bond would soak it in piss and see if a message came out of it.’ So he did. After it dried, print appeared on the back, establishing the code that he later used to communicate with the Navy, informing them of conditions at the prison.

And now I’m thinking … is that what James Bond would do? Has he ever done that in print or on screen? When he’s in a jam does he just start soaking things in piss?

The weird science of naming products

Loving this New York Times piece on the weird science of naming new products:

Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them. ‘You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order dolphin fish,’ Shore points out. ‘You order mahi-mahi. You don’t order Patagonian toothfish. You order Chilean sea bass. You don’t buy prunes anymore; they’re now called dried plums.

Calvino

From Peter Mendelsund's visual essay exploring his own approach to the work of Italo Calvino – fascinating stuff, and a great use of tumblr: 

As the same moment that this design was taking shape, I was growing ever more nostalgic about several of the older editions of Calvino, and as a result of these pangs, an insight came to me: why not pick and choose amongst the previous Calvino editions, photograph them, and present pictures of them upon the new editions? Book covers repurposing other book covers. Which is to say: a catalog of readymades. Of course (and I think we all can agree on this) no publisher in his or her right mind would ever sign off on this concept. Imagine the cover meeting: ‘we are paying the designer for new covers—and here they are—the old covers!’ I doubted whether anyone would warm to the (I thought inspired) eccentricity of the idea. So these never made it past my computer screen. Though the concept did lead to another related idea, which was the construction of a library of imaginary book covers.

Cinema 2014

A slow year for me at the cinema. Parenting etc. 

• 12 Years a Slave
• Wolf of Wall Street
• The Lego Movie
• Her
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• The Double 
• X-Men: Days of Future Past
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Boyhood
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Jurassic Park
• Gone Girl
• Fury
• Interstellar
• Die Hard

All in all, a pretty good bunch (apart from The Double, which was excruciating). And it was jolly nice to see a couple of my all time favourites on the big screen.