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.
The house in which I spent my formative years was a creaky, Victorian affair packed to the brim with a strange collection of dusty antiquities. All my attempts at affecting a rebellious minimalism resulted in a sense of mourning for my abandoned nest of detritus, and eventually I came to accept my magpie tendencies.
One such fellow magpie is Mr. A.R.M., the founder of The Secret Society of Odd Acquisition, a group who devote themselves to amassing a strange collection of wonders and learning their secrets. Mr. A.R.M.’s antiquated archive of macabre delights is framed in the age polished wood of Trundle Manor — a nefarious, and thus perfect, abode. Not content to simply collect, the members of the S.S.O.A. produce conglomerations of their strange googaws in the form of custom crafted jewelry, photos of which are viewable after the jump along with images of Trundle Manor itself.
As much as we enjoy conjecture and extravagant speculation regarding the future and the treasures it holds it’s a shock when something from the pages of the professional speculators, aka sci-fi authors, worms its way into our disappointingly nonfictional reality. Though in all fairness, less so when it comes from Japan.
Yet the newest way in which the metropolitan Japanese surprise and confound we less progressive western dullards is a bit surprising even with the knowledge of its origins. Frenetic salarymen dissatisfied with the pink-cheeked rush the pharmaceutical melange of energy drinks has to offer can now pop in to Tenteki10 for a vein full of “vitamins and other nutritional supplements”.
Yes that’s right; if you’ve got $20 (2,000 Yen) and 10 minutes you can have a doctor stuff your veins with the mysterious “vitamins and nutritional supplements” for what they describe as a “pick-me-up”. While I’m intimately familiar with the potentially less than pleasant effects of a botched intravening (to say nothing of potential “supplement” overdoses) I can’t help but wonder when we’ll have similar set ups in the States.
Even now you can swing by your local plastic surgeon’s office for a speedy syringe full of botulism for all your muscle paralysis needs. How long until Starbucks trades baristas for nurses? And further, how long until our “supplements” are supplemented with the wares of illicit chemists and old-fashioned coffeehouse snobbery is supplanted by a caste system of stat-boost aficionados?
My hope is not long; my daily ritual of chasing down a handful of No-Doze with three or four Viente Quad-Americanos has long since stopped clearing away the borderline somnambulance of the morning.
Before you is the culmination of all my post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk fashion dreams. Oh sure, my compatriots and I clothe ourselves in all manner of garb designed with futurelust in mind, but not a stitch of those epic high-collared wardrobes is really functional. We’re simply playing dystopian dress-up.
But with this piece by Tim Smit — made of neoprene, lined with kevlar, and seemingly designed with my ilk in mind — we’re really getting into the business of being the no-nonsense, disaffected futuretots we’ve always known ourselves to be.
While it’s not specifically stated that this is just a conceptual design I can’t imagine it’s anything but. Yet simply knowing it exists helps to soothe the hurt of being unable to rush out and buy my first piece of Apocalypse Couture.
Hit the jump for a few more shots of this exquisite design.
British emcee Elemental busts a fresh flow on the subject of Ectomo’s preferred beverage: delicious, delicious tea. We at EctoCorp support this bold new direction for rap music and advocate the adoption of tea as the favored subject of choice for “sick rhymes” in lieu of the woefully oft’ preferred bitches, hos, and the pimping there of. Pith helmets, while optional, are highly recommended.
I am engaged in a constant search to expand on my haughty crew of irreverent imps, and to discriminate based on unimportant factors, least of all sex, would be a disservice to the imaginary islands we inhabit. Candice has secured her spot in my raucous gang of children, and woe to those foolhardy pirates that may stand in her way.
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.
