Final picture in a long and detailed analysis of how to build a scale model of the Death Star out of Lego. Having concluded that in order to build a Lego ball with a diameter of 3.52 km you’d have to do so in space the author works out what this would look like from Earth.

I’d say it’s worth the estimated $10 Trillion (for the bricks alone. Shipping it up there is extra).

via Kottke

Cute hipsters showing off their breeding capacity, for sure, but golly this is a cool way to do so.

Music video and interview.

I can’t pretend to get this or even like it, but by fuck I’m glad it’s out there. I gather Plan B is fairly popular and signed to Warners but who cares, it’s about time music that kids listen to got political again.

(Although I do kinda like it.)

via RussL

Jean “Moebius” Giraud died yesterday. I’ve been looking for a comprehensive and meaninful obituary and I think Sean Witzke’s is pretty much on the mark.

In a medium where so little is profound, even the worst of Moebius’ comics achieve a level of serenity simply by how they have been drawn. Each panel is imbued with a sense of absolute assurance of the line conveying meaning, motion, feeling, story. Moebius’ surfaces are tactile, his characters are not only defined by their design but by expression, by how they carry themselves, how they move. His pages are fraught with detail, but rarely are those details overworked or sterile. The consistency of his hand gives his landscapes and cityscapes a kind of depth that is different from the way most illustration renders depth; his faces convey just how deft and expressive his hand could be – and how that meant a face battered by life or one untouched by stress.

via Simon Gane

Richard and Judith Lang have been combing their local beach for plastic for years and make beautiful works of art with it. Much linkage on Laughing Squid.

I found a couple of lovely documentaries which show them to be lovely people and not at all preachy and condemning. The evil, says Richard, is single use plastic, not plastic in and of itself.

Needless to say this work hits a number of my buttons. I particularly like how they concentrate on the same beach, returning to it again and again and never straying. It’s a piece about a specific place and how that place relates to the whole world through the detritus of civilisation. It’s fantastic.

If you don’t like the idea of your porn browser suddenly deciding not to work one day then you should choose a browser that is stable, highly customizable, and, most importantly, one that no one who borrows your computer would ever use voluntarily. I’m of course referring to Opera.

Lest you be a prude this article is actually a really useful guide to web browsers and how they work. So go read it.

Bonus – did you know Tumblr is full of porn? Me neither.

A fantastic photo essay by Timothy Allen who was determined to visit The Buzludzha Monument atop a Bulgarian mountain.

I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria. Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’. Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself.

The result is a mix of Communist-era hubris, Brutalist architecture in ruins and snow. Lots of snow. The photos are gorgeous but the story makes it.

via Kottke

There’s a big budget movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter popping up in the cinemas, which is all well and nice, but Heidi MacDonald has uncovered a much more entertaining version by far. A comic strip done by James Killian Spratt which is loyal to the nudity and violence of ERB’s books. He says:

Since I was drawing initially for my own amusement, with no thought of publishing, I pulled all the normal stops and drew the way I imagined the classic story to be written. The characters are highly underclad, yet oblivious to it; it’s their normal way, and they don’t see much naughty or titillating about it. The men are men and the women are women and blood is red and scary. I set out to be honest with the nudity and violence, and the devil take Pollyanna, she needs to grow up anyway.

It’s a fantastic piece of art-for-art’s-sake, hidden away from view and even now only hosted on some shonky hinternet site. As Heidi says, it really needs to be rescued from obscurity and published in a handsome edition. In some ways it’s up there with Fletcher Hanks, only without the bleak insanity.

Came via Dylan Horrocks who mentioned The First Kingdom which I then very nearly bought some issues of on eBay before stopping myself and thinking “what am I doing?” Seventies underground fantasy comics are seductive but no, one really shouldn’t.

Over on the estimable Comics Reporter, Bart Beaty reports on Katz, a sort-of-parody of Art Spiegelman’s Maus where all the characters, Nazis, Jews and Poles, are drawn as cats, which has been published in France (where they take comics very seriously). It’s a curiosity, particularly as it’s not just a few pages but the whole book and it appears to have been done with professionalism and style.

Naturally, given the revered status of Maus, the lawyers are out in force and it’s being pulped, but I’m sure it’ll live on electronically. Bart reckons it has value.

The decision to appropriate the entirety of Spiegelman’s work — every page, every line of dialogue — seems central to its implicit argument that Maus, as a key text that has shaped comics culture unlike almost any other, is already an object belonging to the community as a whole. It is, this book seems to be saying, a revered work, open to challenges and contestations by others.

[...]

I would argue that it is the very thoroughness of the appropriation that makes it so compelling. Katz challenges us to see one of the most important comics ever produced with new eyes. How is that a bad thing?

He also gives us what has to be the quote of the year, at least in comics circles. “I think that Spiegelman fruitfully problematizes the potentially essentializing aspect of his representations in the pages of Maus itself.”

Perfection.

via Kenny Penman

See also Tintin: Breaking Free, a similar-ish piece of wholesale copyright infringement to make a point.

I have an interest in averaging out colours at the moment so this is right up my alley. Oscar Lhermitte attached a camera to a drill with the lens right at the centre and shot video. The resulting footage looks like this.

Only moving.

I tried a similar thing years ago with a compact digital camera. I set it to timer so it would take a shot after 5 seconds and spun it around by the wristband really fast.

I think a revisit might be in order…

via BoingBoing

Ultimate TAK Ball sees grown men running around a football pitch with beachballs while other men attack them with stun guns.

Really.

via Kottke

Sometimes a literal title is all you need.

via Jon Bounds in the pub

Fart jokes were always funny.

St Pancras Panda is an strip by Alan Moore back when he was a drawer as well as a writer. Many know of Maxwell the Magic Cat but this one was news to me. It ran in the Back Street Bugle, an underground paper from Oxford, circa 1978-9.

All 11 pages have been scanned and uploaded by Alan Moore aficionado and archivist Pádraig Ó Méalóid.

via LMG

Białowieża Forest – Detaild account of a walk into one of Europe’s few remaining primeval forests on the border of Poland and Belarus.

There hasn’t been a motor vehicle in the forest since World War II, and that’s only because a couple of Nazis (of course) needed to unload bodies in a hurry and violated the driving ban. But even the Nazis only did it once. Before them, the last vehicle to enter the forest did so in 1922.

One town’s war on gay teens – Rolling Stone feature on Michele Bachmann’s backyard and the effect the ideological fight over “family values” is having on school kids.

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

Twenty-One Not Exactly Original Notes On More Watchmen, Written At A Slight Remove – The last words on the DC Comics / Alan Moore / Watchmen prequels situation from wise and honest Tom Spurgeon.

16. That More Watchmen represents the triumph of brand over literary content, I think is more true than overly facile. Watchmen the work doesn’t require a sequel and never did. Watchmen the collection of cool characters and isolated story moments and licensing opportunities demands one. It may really be that simple.

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – Under the guise of a bonkers story about people’s brains being infected by their cats, thus proving the “crazy cat lady” thesis, this is a fascinating look at parasites and how their affect the behaviour of their hosts to their benefit, and often the fatal disadvantage of the host.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. [...] But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Also noted:

Why I am an atheist and a naturalist

Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane

Checking Out. “Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship.”

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning.

Construction firm aims at space elevator in 2050

The myth of the eight-hour sleep

The ‘Wow!’ Signal: One Man’s Search for SETI’s Most Tantalizing Trace of Alien Life

Enjoy.

A clear cola in a steampunk themed can designed by John Coulthart on sale in branches of Cybercandy, of which there is one in Birmingham? Why yes, that’ll do nicely.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer science, shows David Letterman how she illustrates nanoseconds in this highly enjoyable interview.

From her Wikipedia page:

Grace Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. [...] At many of her talks and visits, she handed out “nanoseconds” to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond. Later [...] she passed out packets of pepper which she called picoseconds.

This starts of as one of those “hey wouldn’t it be cool if we took some meme and did it with like proper instruments and that” but then quickly turns into something much more interesting. From Boing Boing:

On a large scale, the work is structured along a simple alternation pattern. The theme and its variations alternate, similarly to rondo form. However, the theme is progressively dissolved, meaning that each time it returns it contains less percentage of the source material. This chipping-away continues until there’s nothing recognizable left. In the variation episodes, more tools are employed to change the essence of the theme, especially, pronounced changes of duration, texture, harmonic character, and of the intervallic makeup of the melody.

I probably won’t be playing this at the next 8bit Lounge.

This painting, Born with Every Bright Morning by Chris Murtagh, is a delight for anyone familiar with the streets of Digbeth, Birmingham.

Click through for more details.