I love Apple Computers for their ease of use, interface and design. All that love didn’t mean a whole lot when I unboxed a new iMac and saw this.
wtf??!!
You have a clean and open aesthetic in your OS and in your stores and then you jam some poor sap’s hands into a keyboard roughly exactly the size of an Apple laptop keyboard. I guess it helped reduce the overall price but seriously, wtf?
The world of Jasper Morello is one of many works in the genre known as steampunk. Wikipedia says that steampunk:
…is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of “the path not taken” of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers; these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or a presumption of functionality.
…Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by the science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, 1983), James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986) and himself (Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices, 1987) which took place in a 19th-century (usually Victorian) setting and imitated conventions of actual Victorian speculative fiction such as H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
I was contacted by a US government publication who wanted to use this photo. I didn’t think much of the original, so I decided to bump it around in photoshop. I found it pretty cool how a picture that made me yawn was transformed into something that captured a little of the energy and pop of the very cool Traverse City Film Festival (July 31 – Aug 5, 2007, annually thereafter).
My digital photography ethic has been to try and do all the work with the camera. I think that may be changing.
Sooo … one part of the job I invented for myself is spending an hour or so every morning looking through Michigan photos on Flickr to find a photo for the Michigan in Pictures photo blog. I stumbled across the above picture of 1961 Studebaker Lark…
Me: I want one of these … I wonder why a car company hasn’t started building cars using old designs with modern hardware.
Leann: I believe this Lark is for sale…
Me: I thought it might be. Then I thought “where would I get parts for it?”
Still, I can’t see why in this age of modular cars the American car companies wouldn’t leverage decades of cutting edge industrial design and roll out updated versions of classics. How about it GM?
Also, via the partial omniscience of the internet (specifically the Institute of Artificial Smartness), here’s a commercial for the Studebaker Lark featuring Mr. Ed.
farlane.blog 