It’s a sad fact that most of us are guaranteed at least one hearse ride.
Most of us, however, will not ride in hearses as radical as the ones depicted in the video, posted above for your viewing pleasure.
According to the aforementioned film clip, the Denver Hearse Club was barred from participating in…shall we say, mainstream car shows due, one would assume, to their somewhat darque demeanor and choice of whip. I say it’s their damn loss, and our damn gain, because this is the coolest video your Humble Correspondent has seen in a month of Sundays. A pack of unruly Gothic do-gooders kicking ass with assault rifles goes a long way with me, and the fact these acts are committed to the strident tones of the theme to “The A-Team”? Come on.
Come on.
They whack a Soviet with a hearse door, for Cromm Cruaich’s sakes. And who hasn’t wanted to do that?
My graphic designer friends assure me that this is a factual representation of the day-to-day operations of a design office. Mega-Man-esque psuedo-fashionistas in skin-tight leopard-print pants and leather, constantly fighting with rotund corporate overlords in spandex, all of whom have actually been known to don a cardboard box from time to time, depending on their current medication saturation levels.
Granted, these assurances are from the kind of people that would spend enough time in the offices of a corporate graphic design firm to observe these private rituals, so their respective words are already highly suspect.
Trawling the deep recesses of the tangled Web every day provides me with an opportunity to view amazing works on a constant basis, but the very same practice tends to inure one to the fantastic. It’s like mental heroin, and over time my craving has become increasingly ferocious. The strange and wonderful must be more strange and more wonderful in order to elicit more than a weary sigh and a click through to the next bit of underwhelming content.
But when I came across the works of Carioca, a Romanian design house, I began to feel that old excitement. The people populating this place have it, that indeterminable thing that results in work both beautiful and arresting. Each image took hold of the unraveled strings of stories stored in the dusty cabinet of my mind and tugged — pulling loose a whole world from a single frame. This, my friends, is the new brain candy.
I abhor novelty t-shirts. I realize that some people like them, but over the years I’ve learned that displaying your wit or preference in media on your chest is a less than desirable fashion trait. Yet in spite of years of turning my nose up at such offerings I’m finding it hard to resist the siren song of the novelty t-shirts at Atomic Tarantula.
These radioactive arachnids have found the weakness in my casual clothing defenses; attacking the front lines with a barrage of “old school” science fiction references while flanking with an elite squad of well designed hitmen. There is nothing to do now but lock myself in my high tower of fashion snobbery and await my seemingly inevitable defeat.
I’ve featured my fair share of unobtainable designs here on Ectomo, loudly preaching the gospel of DIY approaches to the prohibitively expensive (or simply non-existent) designs of which I’m so fond. Sadly, not everyone has access to the tools, materials, and workspace required to give form to their dream creations. That time is over my friends.
A Parisian art collective calling themselves Le Cartonnistes utilize cardboard to create all manner of furniture, ranging from simple shelves to beds to entire room sets. While it may seem a questionable load-bearing source material, the technique used to form the structures that will eventually become furniture insures the stability of the creation — to a reasonable point of course.
The technique requires a bit of trial and error as well as accuracy within millimeters, but the oaths with which you’ll purple the air as you make mistakes (and learn valuable lessons) are all worth it when the TV box covered in a sheet being used as a coffee table actually becomes a coffee table, and a damn fine one at that.
I highly encourage each and every one of you to try your hand at this. The only limits to your swank boudoir now are the bounds of your own imagination.
Art Center College of Design student Jake Loniak designed this motorcycle concept, which he dubbed the Deus Ex Machina. His concept is an electric vertically parking motorcycle controlled by 36 pneumatic muscles with 2 linear actuators. It can reach 60mph in three seconds and has a top speed of 75mph. The exo-skeleton has seven artificial vertebrae and a pneumatically attached helmet. One thing is for certain, it’s a much more interesting “future of transportation” idea than the Segway.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
