Tag Archives: popular culture

Craft and creativity

A history of the design of Magic: The Gathering cards

Video

Framing 25 Years of Magic

Rhystic Studies, a YouTube channel that explores the art, history, and culture of Magic: The Gathering, takes a detailed look at the design of Magic’s card frames.

Magic card frame design

See also

Light-based media

The Collection: Letterpress plates for print film advertisments

Video

The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.

The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)

What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.

See also

The Collection - Wizard of Oz

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The Smash Brothers: How it became a competitive phenomenon, a documentary

Video

The Smash Brothers documentary series

The Smash Brothers posterThe Smash Brothers is a 9-part documentary series about seven of the greatest “smashers” of all time. Through years-long rivalries spanning coasts and countries, discover the passion for a game which started as a casual experience only to become a heart-pounding competitive lifestyle.

r/place

sudoscript: Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

r/place timelapse

For April Fool’s Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

Above, some of my favourite little areas // Below, a static look at the ‘finished’ piece

The final form of r/place

Read more

  • Sudoscript: When Pixels Collide — But at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.
  • Waxy: This Must Be The /r/Place — Every tiny patch of the Place is a story. Every piece of real estate represents a hard-fought battle, drawn from the collective activity of hundreds of smaller communities teaming together, and often against each other.
  • The r/place Atlas

And here’s a video timelapse that shows areas in detail →

Life on the Internet

r/place: a social experiment on a large canvas

“On April Fool’s Day, when the rest of the internet devolves into a cesspool of unfunny press releases and fake product launches, Reddit becomes the most interesting place online by unleashing a social experiment on its enormous community.” — Andy Baio / Waxy

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Zelda original game map

Take a look behind-the-scenes with design documents from The Legend of Zelda!

Nintendo: It’s The Legend of Zelda’s 30th anniversary this year, and so we thought you might appreciate a look at some illustrations created during the development of the first The Legend of Zelda game, originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

These design docs include a video of the hand drawn overworld map and show how some of the original dungeon sketches translated into the game.

(via Gamasutra)

See the video showcasing the Zelda overworld map →

Light-based media

Nintendo’s design documents from The Legend of Zelda

Some of the hand-drawn maps Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto used when designing the original Legend of Zelda. A fascinating glimpse at Nintendo’s game design process from days gone by.

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Star Trek Original Series Set Tour

Boldly Go to Upstate New York to Board the USS Enterprise

Wired: [In] Ticonderoga, New York, in a former supermarket. There, at 112 Montcalm St., a valiant would-be commander named James Cawley has constructed a precise replica of the original starship set used for Star Trek: The Original Series.

Cawley began construction in 1996, crafting set pieces in his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop. Over the past 20 years, he has spent an “astronomical” (he said it, not us) sum painstakingly rebuilding the Enterprise. Some items, like Scotty’s wrenches and a Klingon costume, are originals from the show. Others, like Captain Kirk’s chair, Cawley built from scratch.

The Star Trek Tour is permanently housed in Historic downtown Ticonderoga, New York. The sets are full recreations based upon original blueprints. ⋮ The recreated sets achieve a high-degree of accuracy based on original blueprints, hundreds of hours of serious research and thousands of photos – both period images and images culled from extensive review and capture from latest Blu-ray images.

See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘Star Trek’, including many on the restoration of the original USS Enterprise model at the Smithsonian.

Craft and creativity

Tour replica original Star Trek sets in upstate New York

Visitors can sit in Captain Kirk’s chair and punch buttons just like William Shatner did 60 years ago, or perhaps gaze into Spock’s scanner and search for signs of life. Everyone has to make that decision at some point. — Wired

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