Hello Bauldoff

“If you slip or have a minor fall, don’t allow yourself an instant’s pause. Find your pace again the moment you get up. In your mind take careful note of the circumstances of your fall, but don’t let your body linger over what happened. The body constantly tries to draw attention to itself by its shiverings, its breathlessness, its palpitations, its shudders and sweats and cramps; but it reacts quickly to any scorn and indifference in its master. Once it senses that he is not taken in by its jeremiads, once it understands that it will inspire no pity for it that way, then it comes into line and obediently accomplishes its task.”

—René Daumal on climbing the mountain. Found in notes written for his unfinished story, Mount Analogue. He footnotes this passage as follows:

The moment of danger
The difference between panic and presence of mind
Automatism (master or servant)

Daumal died of tuberculosis in 1944, age 36, before completing the novel. Interestingly, it is the absence of closure to his story that makes it all the more compelling. Alejandro Jodorowsky found his own ingenious way of bringing The Holy Mountain to a satisfying close; a film which draws much metaphysiphorical inspiration from Daumal’s work.

I found the above photo in a Dream The End article. If anyone knows the context of the photo, or the significance of the Rorschachian owl Daumal is holding, I’d love to hear from you. Daumal considered himself a mystic of sorts. In Mount Analogue, he even makes mention of the superstitious nailing of owls to doors to deter forces of wickedness. I’m not sure if similar metaphysical purposes were photographed above.

Disconnect, a lovely series of oil work by San Francisco artist Hsin-Yao Tseng.

Alexander Chen, a Creative Director at Google Creative Lab, built pianophase.com, a tribute to Steve Reich’s 1967 composition, Piano Phase.

True to form, the dueling, in-browser pianists begin by playing the twelve-note sequence in unison. The second piano gradually speeds up, shifting out of phase until the second is exactly a note ahead of the first in the pattern. This gradual shifting continues as the second piano moves further and further ahead, creating surprising and interesting variations of the repeating twelve notes.

What is truly wonderful is the visualization that Chen brings to Reich’s composition. To be able to watch along as your ears work to make sense of the rival tempos at play is a joy. There is some minor interactivity available as well, offering the user the chance to drag the dots around the circular scene with all the grace of a cat bounding across the keys. Simply letting go of the dots returns them to their regularly-scheduled process.

Bonus: A personal YouTube favorite, Steve Reich Looks at a Cake.

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

—James Baldwin, writer & social critic, from this 1984 interview.

The Instagram feed of Jakartan designer & illustrator Jati Putra is an evolving experiment in atmospheric restraint and abrupt veerings in perspective, with work spanning the last year or so.

(Source: instagram.com)

I thought this was worth crawling out from the woodwork to call attention to.

Indy Brand, a small, Utah-based apparel shop, has recently noted that, not only a design of theirs, but their very logo, has been copied without permission as a graphic in Tilly’s new 2015 autumn line.

It is probably the case that an individual designer—either contracted or payrolled by Tilly’s—is the culprit, rather than this being a deliberate, corporate ploy by Tilly’s to leech from the creativity of others. This uncompensated pilferage of another’s work needs to be called out and corrected, nevertheless.

Please make a visit to Tilly’s Facebook page, or contact them through other public venues to let them know of the theft, but try and avoid the typical symptoms of frothing-at-the-mouth witch hunts, if you can. Calm, reasoned assertiveness goes a long way, in my opinion. via Imgur

Flickr user inimini revels in nature, at least that is what I interpret from her photography collection. Her photostream is just rich with rock-laden coastlines; fantastical, buttressing forests; primitive life that blurs the archaic lines between flora & fauna; and attentive studies of nature’s intricacies.

One such photographic study is found in her album of composite organisms: a love letter, as it were, to lichen. In these macro captures, inimini details an elegant beauty within the creature’s many complex meshes and tendrils. via Thinx

Austin, Texas artist Harrison Carter Watkins is a graphic designer by trade, but is also busy establishing a very intriguing side hustle.

Using a mix of beeswax, pine resin, and paraffin wax, Watkins adorns animal skulls with glass seed beads, all set in geometric patterns prevalent to his native southwest. The complimentation of color and pattern along the topography of the host skull in his latest—Robs Ram, the comissioned piece shown above—is particularly on point. via Imgur/Reddit

An in-house prototyping team at the German digital lifestyle site CURVED has created this adorable tribute to the original 128K Macintosh.

CURVED/labs repurposed the components of an 11-inch MacBook Air for their aluminum-cased concept, which also features an 11.6-inch touchscreen (looking good next to the 9-inch monitor of the original), SSD, FaceTime camera, speakers, mic, WiFi, battery, Lightning & USB ports, and the cutest little SD card slot in place of the original 3.5" floppy drive.

As you can see, they have also gone to the trouble of visualizing their design in silver, grey (TAM flashbacks, anyone?), and posh-Jony-Ive-spice gold.

Is it practical? Not necessarily, but that isn’t what design concepts like this are for, really—I love how it traces the forward silhouette of the original Mac, for no other reason than the nostalgic flutters it yields me. Are there prudent aspects of its engineering which should be commended? Indeed. Does it send me back to a simpler time of playing Trinity, doodling pixel art à la FatBits, and building choose-your-own-adventure games from HyperCard stacks? Most certainly. via designboom

“In the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it’. If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth … . If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

George Orwell, from his essay The Freedom of the Press, originally written to be the preface to Animal Farm, but was ultimately omitted from the book.