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Love a tetrapod. Well, a concrete tetrapod. Or a tetrapod (structure), if you're Wikipedia.

More.

Bycatch, Daniel Hölzl & Abie Franklin

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Lucite paint advert. According to this eBay listing, it's from 1971.

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British Rail safety posters, from the Science Museum Group collection at Artstor:

Untidy, Unsafe

Untidiness can cause accidents - see that you're not to blame!

Watch your Speed

In smooth-riding diesel and electric locos you may be travelling faster than you think. Check your speedometer to see that you stay inside the limit set for your train and the road.

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I think that most dystopias you see in literature are gray and dark and usually very conformist. The United States, and I think in most industrial countries, we don’t recognize ourselves as dystopias because we’re colorful, we’re marketed to, things are bright and shiny. Our dystopia looks more like a Taco Bell than a concentration camp.

Mark Russell, quoted in an interview on his run of The Flintstones, indirectly via flavor country.

I've been thinking a lot about the way films set around the Second World War, particularly in Europe, are graded - desaturated, usually, and / or dark, even during the daytime. Obviously the terminal point of this is Schindler's List going full black and white - almost - but many other films follow the trope.

However, as you see in the Tomorrow Belongs to Me section in Cabaret, German fascism existed just as happily on a sunny holiday as during a stormy November night. I'll be remembering that this summer.

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Mild Andor s2 e1-3 spoilers below the fold.

Forget an hour of Mon Mothma dancing, I want an hour of the animations of the (comms?) screens in Dedra's apartment.

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Dorothea Lange, Japanese family heads and persons living alone form a line outside Civil Control station located in the Japanese American Citizens League Auditorium at 2031 Bush Street, to appear for processing in response to Civilian Exclusion Order No. 20., April 24, 1942 [Photograph has "impounded" indicating it was deposited in the national archives, not seen until 2006] [Google Street View, 2031 Bush Street, San Francisco, December, 2016]

There are 854 Dorothea Lange photographs in the University of California archive collection of 6,867 War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement.

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I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be.

Edward Ashton, lead researcher on a survey which discovered 128 new moons of Saturn, all '“irregular moons”, potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometres across.'

Given the amount of fuss over the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet, I'm looking forward to the drama if and when the IAU tries to figure out how to define a moon - and what happens when Phobos and Deimos fail to meet the cut, demoting Mars to having only minor moons.

(Alan Stern, who coined the "dwarf planet" designation, also suggested there should be a "satellite planet" group, which maps to the "planetary-mass moon" label. There are seven moons in the solar system more massive than Pluto, of which one, Titan, orbits Saturn.)

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Shell advert, 1936, with a painting by Tristram Hillier of Jezreel's Temple, Gillingham, Kent.

Shell's 1930s poster campaign has a lot of entries, but mostly they're pretty well known tourist attractions - or at least the sort of scenery you expect. This, on the other hand, looks something like a Borg cube, incongruously dropped into the Garden of England. Obviously, I went to Wikipedia.

The article uses the name Jezreel's Tower rather than Temple. It describes how a young British soldier in India took up the teachings of an earlier prophet, changed his name from James White to James Jershom Jezreel, and, on his return to England, decided to build a cubic home for his sect, based on a reading of Revelations. (In the end it wasn't quite as big or as regular as he wanted, but it was still over 35m to a side- quite a structure in the time before steel framed building become routine.)

Unfortunately for the sect, Jezreel died just four years after returning home; his wife, who took over, was only alive for another three. Even before her death, the costs of building the tower caused her - if an uncited passage on Wikipedia is to be believed - to turn the sect vegetarian, more for the savings in the cost of food than for any moral reason. In any case, the group was losing members, even before her death; and the tower was never finished.

However, it was at its full height - presumably, as with modern buildings, a lot of the internals were waiting for the outer shell - but also built well enough that it lasted until 1961, and even then removal was far from easy:

The demolition schedule of three months stretched into 13. Maurice Brown of the demolition firm told local newspaper the Kent Messenger: "The tower was like a fortress - very strong." He added that some of the 3m walls had almost defeated him in what he termed "the toughest of all the tough jobs"

Who knew? (People from Kent, probably.)

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Hawaiian Air routes from a Chevron advertisement.

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This advert is by Suzuki Hachirō, and the text is translated in the paper "The 1968 Social Uprising and Advertising Design in Japan: The Work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachirō" by Ory Bartal:

Women should be mad at advertisements of photocopy machines that show only female models.

While men are used in computer advertisements, women are often used in advertisements for photocopy machines, as if women are just accessories. Copying is a tedious job, so it is a job given to women. While most of our work at Xerox is to copy, we do not concur with this. We are sorry that we have created such advertisements in the past [….] Not because Xerox is feminist, but because we believe that it is not at all strange for a president or a manager to make copies himself. Sometimes this is more efficient, and we know that women can do more than just photocopying. This is the whole story. We live in a male-dominated society: men create, men engage in politics, men make advertisements. This makes women angry. Before you too get angry about what is being said in the name of Women's Lib, we here at Xerox suggest: Let's think about each other. Xerox has made all office work, from copying to collating, fast and automatic to benefit the use of our surplus time.

XEROX, 1970AD

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Posters by French typeface and graphic designer Roger Excoffon, 1910-1983: Rails, TGV.

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PALT Airport System – Ikarus PALT (passenger and luggage together), an experimental design project started in 1982 to allow smoother transfer of passengers from the city to the airplane. It had both customs and check-in/out facilities to handle the process en-route.

A few other prototypes (695.01, 695.02, 692.03) were built, but the project was abandoned in 1986.

(via)

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Boeing advertising, 1950s (?), from the album sspaper ads posted to Flickr by bustbright. Indirectly via dinosaurspen.

Direct links: 1 2 3 4 5 6

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I think we should also look at the stories we tell ourselves about how to solve systemic problems. In Hollywood, it’s the lone-wolf vigilante or rogue C.I.A. agent who breaks the rules, takes revenge and makes things better. People are naturally drawn to a character they can cheer for, rather than analyses of power and policy and prolonged slogs to change how the system works.

Zeynep Tufecki in a New York Times conversation on the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, and the public reaction to it.

Posted because: I would love there to be more films (hell, written fiction!) about systems not people, but the former is hard to dramatise while the latter is a long-standing form of storytelling.

Via kottke (also the source of the article gift link).

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Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, by John Moses Bauan.

Although the photo was posted in September, I suspect it was taken during the Thanksgiving to New Year period, when the buildings are lit with a series of light bulbs (not neon). It is odd not to see the verticals lights also lit, so maybe this was a special occasion?

The photograph is also heavily colour graded, by the way. Don't expect it to look like this in real life, even on a foggy night.