Todays dilemma:
Boredom by Alberto Moravia
The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes
Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
The Hall of the Singing Caryatids by Victor Pelevin
Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson
Virginia might be for lovers but Brooklyn is for nerds.
[North 5th and Bedford]
Vintage posters of Superheroes in their hometowns
Heading over to Metropolis for a vacation to check out Superman’s stomping ground isn’t quite feasible yet, and the shuttle to Gotham City hasn’t yet commenced. But you can get these vintage travel posters for your wall. Dave Ault’s illustrations, covering Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and more DC Comics heroes, give you a minimalist mid-century travel feel.
Designer Breaks Down, Mixes Videogame Characters Into ‘Scrambled Pixels’
Austria-based designer Laura Vidal disassembled classic videogame characters into pixels and ‘stirred’ them to create posters.
In the series ‘Scrambled videogame characters’, characters—such as Sonic, Pac Man, Lemmings, Mario, Luigi—become mushy pixels that can be identified only by color.
Vidal originally created the posters for her friend David, who just moved into a new flat.
“I wanted to buy something useful for him, but he was faster than me and he already got everything he needed, so I decided to mix his two passions—videogames and pixels—and make something not so useful,” she wrote.
More at DesignTaxi
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
—Benjamin Franklin
“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.”
—Samuel Johnson
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Image by Victor Barrera
15 Spectacular Libraries in Europe
The Library of El Escorial, Spain
This library is located in Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the historical residence of the king of Spain. Phillip II was responsible for adding the library and most of the books originally held within. The vaulted ceilings were painted with gorgeous frescoes, each representing one of the seven liberal arts: rhetoric, dialectic, music, grammar, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. These days, the library is a World Heritage Site, and it holds more than 40,000 volumes.
Illustrator Reimagines Video Game Characters As Video Gamers
Belgium-based French illustrator Franck Graetz imagined what video game characters would look like if they were video gamers.
Doing the opposite of running around in a virtual world—the junk food, constant sitting and playing of games have made video game characters, such as Mario, Pac-Man, and Sonic, uncharacteristically unfit.
More at DesignTaxi
Ready Player One / Ernest Cline
I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.
Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coin-op classics. Galaga, Defender, Asteroids. These games were outdated digital dinosaurs that had become museum pieces long before I was born. But I was a gunter, so I didn’t think of them as quaint low-res antiques. To me, they were hallowed artifacts. Pillars of pantheon. When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence.
Ready Player One / Ernest Cline
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
