Line Art Cafe
Seoul, Korea’s Cafe 연남동 239-20 has a nifty design aesthetic. The entire place is done up in a black-and-white line art style that gives everything an illustrated 2D look. No detail was overlooked, from the chairs to the coffee mugs.
Clue: The Storybook – Scanned for you!
It’s no secret that I love the movie Clue. Besides the movie, there were also some books written by the screenwriters. Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t a big commercial success so the books were quickly discontinued and forgotten. Getting your hands on one of them is rather difficult – and expensive.
Thanks to an inter-library loan, however, I recently acquired a copy of Clue: The Storybook and did a page by page scan. I then combined the scans into a convenient PDF. The book provides a very abbreviated and thin read of the movie proper. The in-book pictures weren’t particularly good quality (very grainy prints), but there were some pictures I had not seen in any other sources nor in the movie itself.
The most interesting part of the book is that it reveals a secret 4th ending that had been rumored at, but supposedly never filmed.
Where can you get your hands on a copy? How about downloading the scanned copy I made right here so you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars. Enjoy!
Download a PDF copy of Clue: The Storybook here!
Clue: The Storybook
by Ann Matthews (Storybook Adaptor), Johnathan Lynn (Screenplay), John Landis (Story)
Published Dec 1, 1985
ISBN: 0671618679
ISBN13: 9780671618674
- ISBN-10: 0671618679
- ISBN-13: 978-0671618674
Oct 2023 Update:
It looks like someone took my scans and then put them together up on the Internet Archive!
Flames. Flames on the side of my face
Clue is one of my favorite movies of all time. I discovered it when I was younger, and was immediately captivated.
Now, the folks over at It Looks So Fake productions are dong a Clue movie documentary called Who Done It.
They are going through an interviewing most of the original cast and crew – and it’s starting to look really promising. While development seems to be going very slowly, I’m excited to see what they come up with.
Ingenious Beetlejuice Broadway stage
The cult classic Beetlejuice is coming to Broadway! Besides being a wild ride to score, it presents a unique challenge for the set design as workers must morph the traditional country home of the recently deceased Maitlands, to the kitsch taste of the Deetzes, and then finally into a demon-infested haunted play land.
Set designers came up with an ingenious design that makes room for puppetry, special effects, quick changes, and dance numbers.
Read more about the process and designers here.
Cardboard 7-speed Manual transmission
Now, this is pretty neat.
Ken Burn’s Civil War series
This 9 episode series, first aired in 1990, recently appeared on Netflix. After a re-watch, I am now convinced more than ever it is one of the best documentaries of all time.
It is so unlike the politically-charged and biased ‘documentaries’ that flood out these days. I think it’s also a great demonstration of what documentaries used to be and what GOOD academics looks like. Based before all else on impartial reporting of facts, source material from all angles, and gives little interpretative judgement.
Today, it seems, we get so wrapped in our current highly politicized re-interpretation of the past/current events that we forget that those events often had altogether different meanings and different reasons than we like to put on them. Today’s documentaries all too often white-wash the actions of the past to a single opinion as seen through the lens of one or two directors. They push the documentarian’s opinion and blast over material with today’s arrogance and biases. Ironically, actually losing the most important lessons those events have to teach us.
I have seen this documentary twice now. Once in my teens, and once now in my adult years. I understood far more this time than before as I could relate to each of the players more fully now – from the lowly soldier to the struggles of Lincoln’s decisions.
I heartily recommend a re-watch and sharing this with your kids. If for no other reason than to understand this kind of high quality academics is what used to be considered the norm.
Skalar
Skalar is a massive audio-visual sculpture – a collaborative piece by light artist Christopher Bauder and musician Kangding Ray. The combination of kinetic mirrors, perfectly synchronized moving lasers, a changing color palette, and a sophisticated multi-channel sound system triggers sensory and psychological reactions and offers a truly innovative experience.
Before you read anything on social media
The series ‘Smarter Everyday’ did a great discussion of the problems of social media – with the actual engineers of Facebook and those researching it. And it is essential people realize the scope and breadth of how manipulated everything you read on social media is. And that outrage and polarization are the key tools they are using to do it.
Facebook: “We delete more than 1 million fake accounts a day.”
“You can go to a company that sells upvotes/downvotes, followers, comments, and views via bots. This one company’s bots were manipulating the upvotes and posting comments for politicians in 2 different countries, a fitness coach, a hair clinic, a rap artist, an immigration company, and the posts relating to the future of shapeware. We see both political and commercial manipulation.
The comments themselves were written by the purchasers and the bot will then upvote/downvote and post them as hundreds of different viewers to the posts. The services are delivered within 15-60 minutes, cost under $10, and are very difficult to detect. You basically have no idea whether the people following, commenting, nor upvoting a post are real or bots.”
Scientists Re-create Speech From Brain Signals
Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”,
tapped out the book letter by letter by blinking an eyelid after being paralyzed by a stroke that left him virtually unable to move a muscle.
Thousands of people are reduced to similarly painstaking means of communication as a result of injuries suffered in accidents, combat, strokes, or neurodegenerative disorders such as A.L.S. – all of which render the patient unable to speak.
Scientists are now reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth.
The new system, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, deciphers the brain’s motor commands guiding vocal movement during speech — the tap of the tongue, the narrowing of the lips — and generates intelligible sentences that approximate a speaker’s natural cadence.
This is astounding development and has untold of implications. Give it a listen below (audio starts at 0:16)
Heavy Metal Ramen?
Japan never ceases to amaze.