Maps of tunnel networks
Oobject collects some maps of the world’s most fascinating tunnel networks.
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kottke.org posts about lists
Best TV of the decade
Variety polled members of the Television Critics Association for their picks for the best TV of the past decade. Here are their choices for drama series and comedy series:
Drama: Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire.
Comedy: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office.
A list of summer reading lists
Rebecca Blood kicks off her annual list of summer reading lists for 2009.
Update: Here is Blood’s second installment. The entire list (with future updates) is available here.
On rebooting Star Trek
This post by Greg Hatcher contains two equally interesting parts:
1. A detailed examination of the Star Trek franchise which shows that the film by JJ Abrams is merely the latest in a long series of successful reboots.
2. A list of rules to follow to successfully reboot a franchise, whether it’s Star Trek or Bond or Batman.
Don’t abuse the audience goodwill. Remember, you sell the audience on your story based on certain expectations. Break that unspoken contract and you’re in trouble. No one bought a ticket for Spider-Man 3 thinking they were going to get a romance with musical comedy interludes, yet that’s what it felt like we got.
If you’re doing a new version of a beloved old property, that means you need to figure out what it was people liked and make damn sure it’s in there. That doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way every time, you just have to do it. James Bond movies have been retooled a number of times, but we never lose the license to kill, the exquisite stunt work, the Bond theme music, or the cool cars and hot girls. There’s about a million miles of difference between Moonraker and Casino Royale, but they’re both recognizably Bond movies and they were both successful, because they met the baseline audience expectation of what a James Bond movie would give them.
(via rebecca blood)
25 and life to go
When you reach 25, it’s finally time to fully grow up and be an adult.
You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.
The best advice: “Be interested so that you can be interesting.”
Rules for time travelers
Sean Carroll lays out the rules for time travel for movies (but also more generally) based on our current understanding of physics.
1. Traveling into the future is easy. We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.
Rules of style
I don’t agree with everything on Scott Sternberg’s rules of style list, but a couple of his points are pretty interesting. I’ll spot you this one:
Whenever you start a new project or a new job, don’t tell anyone what you’re working on, because it can change direction a million times and once you start telling the world about it, you get constrained by your own mouth.
but you’ll have to find the others on your own. (via andrea inspired)
Update: A recent study has indicated that people who don’t share their goals are more successful in achieving them.
Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn’t necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain “a premature sense of completeness” about the goal.
(thx, sam)
Hellish housing
Oobject has collected 15 housing projects from hell.
Despite the title of this list, several of these housing projects were designed by some of the world’s most famous architects and lauded at the time. The undeniable squalor of 19th Century slums combined with modernism to produce and attempt to clean things up and create a crystalline utopia. The end result was often an anti-septic vision of hell, a place devoid of organic spaces and evolved social interaction.
Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight
There’s very little information about this online, but here’s what I’ve scraped together. Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight is a documentary on the legendary designer and it will be released in theaters sometime near the end of May. You know, one of those huge summer blockbusters.
I posted about Glaser’s Ten Things I Have Learned several years ago, mostly for point #5’s rejoinder to “less is more”: “Just enough is more”. Rereading it now, I’m much more interested in some of the other points, particularly 1-3.
And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord
How to be a successful evil overlord and avoid all the mistakes that bad guys usually make in books, movies, and TV.
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragon of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible spot.
(via memeticians)
The Ten Most Influential Films of The Last Ten Years
/film has an interesting list of the most influential films of the last ten years. You’d expect to see The Matrix and The Bourne Ultimatum on there but Sky Captain? The Polar Express? The comments contain some better choices.
Untitled Gravity
The Virginia Quarterly Review has a list of the ten most popular titles for the submissions they receive, including Untitled, Night, and Drowning. Interestingly, there’s no overlap in titles from a previous list.
A new golden age of type
After a thorough review, Typographica has chosen their favorite typefaces of 2008.
Sensationalism aside, it’s significant that the ever-increasing quality in type design these days — dubbed by some as the new “golden age” of type — has caused this year’s list to supersede previous lists in many ways.
Death becomes him
Which actor dies the most in his movies? Two problems with this list: 1) lots of spoilers, and 2) where are the women? There’s not a single one in the list.
Update: Cinemorgue is an extensive listing of actors and actresses and how many times they’ve died in movies. (thx, andy)
The scientifically unexplained
Science magazines seem to write this list about once a year but they are always fun to read: thirteen things that science cannot explain. This version of the list includes the Kuiper cliff, tetraneutrons, cold fusion, and our old friend the Pioneer anomaly.
A world without Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb lists ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world. Most points relate directly to the current economic situation in the US.
No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.
It was difficult to choose just one of Taleb’s points to excerpt; they’re all worth considering. BTW, a Black Swan is an event that is rare, has a large impact, and is deemed predictable after the fact. I might have to push Taleb’s book of the same name to the top of my reading list.
Design paradoxes
Adrian Shaughnessy shares ten paradoxes about graphic design; by paradox he means “an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted wisdom”. I particularly liked these two bits of wisdom:
As part of their training, all designers should be obliged to spend a sum of their own money on graphic design.
And:
If we want to make money as a graphic designer, we must concentrate on the work — not the money.
Top ten reasons managers become great
Scott Berkun shares how great managers get that way.
8. Self aware, including weaknesses. This is the kicker. Great leaders know what they suck at, and either work on those skills or hire people they know make up for their own weaknesses, and empower them to do so. This tiny little bit of self-awareness makes them open to feedback and criticism to new areas they need to work on, and creates an example for movement in how people should be growing and learning about new things.
(via world airmail links)
Banned album covers
Thirty controversial album covers. I had forgotten about Nirvana’s “Waif Me”! A bit NSFW. (via design observer)
More than one in a row
The A.V. Club picks 25 albums that work best when listened to from start to finish. +1 for In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I tend to listen to albums more than individual songs…Sigur Ros or Boards of Canada doesn’t make any sense on shuffle.
Best movie ensembles
The House Next Door has a post up about their favorite movie ensembles.
My selections are movies featuring fairly large herds of individuals who clash or collude directly, whose lives intersect or intertwine, who sustain the illusion of continuing to lead their lives beyond the frame, long after the credits roll.
The initial selections include Gosford Park and LA Confidential with the commenters adding many more excellent suggestions like Ocean’s Eleven, Glengarry Glen Ross, Big Night, and Do the Right Thing.
April Fool’s that actually aren’t
From across the pond, here’s a list of 10 stories that could be April Fool’s but aren’t. On the list:
Pubs are telling expectant mothers when they’ve had enough to drink.
Entirely unfunny. For a more joke-filled first of the month, you can always get that yodeling game for XBox360.
Nothing but pet
A list of the Top 10 Mascots of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Though not completely relevant to March Madness, here’s a list of the worst mascots in college sports.
Number eighty
80. Wear a sportcoat when traveling by plane. It has easily accessible pockets.
1001 Rules For My Unborn Son is a poignant idea that’s well-executed.
Your better half
A gallery of not-famous twins and their celebrity siblings.
It must suck so much to have to explain that, no, really, you’re not that guy from Napoleon Dynamite.
Crayon compendium
From a post that includes all 120 crayon names, codes, and trivia:
The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin, and a former school teacher. She combined the words craie, which is French for chalk, and ola, for oleaginous, because crayons are made from petroleum based paraffin.
I don’t remember ever having scribbled with sticks of Manatee or Jazzberry Jam, but I do distinctly recall meticulously practicing my hearts and starts with the dulled point of Carnation Pink.
via Colour Lovers
Up in a down market
Mother Jones magazine has a list of ten people who have profited from the current financial crisis.
[John] Paulson is a hedge fund manager who has been ridiculously successful betting against banks and other entities that had exposure to the subprime crisis: In 2007, his funds were up $15 billion. In 2008, he didn’t do as well: His main fund rose 38 percent in a year when the S&P 500 fell almost 40 percent. His 2007 earnings were in the neighborhood of $3.7 billion. According to Forbes, while 656 billionaires lost money last year, Paulson was one of the 44 who added to their fortunes.
This is the peculiar thing about financial markets: if you know something bad is going to happen (you know, like the global collapse of the financial markets), you can either sound the alarm and save a lot of people a lot of grief or you can make a billion dollars.
Things needing a redesign
A couple of months ago, Jessica Helfand posted a list of 10 things that needed to be redesigned. Her list included the hearse, plastic packaging, and IRS forms. Fast Company recently asked a few other designers what they thought was in need of fixing.
How about it? What would you like to see redesigned? (More than one-line answers appreciated.)
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