Once in a great while, I am pleasantly shocked by the direction taken by self-appointed internet comedy teams. Once in a great, great while.
My friends and I have a yearly tradition that we refer to as LobsterFest. LobsterFest consists entirely of us comically harassing a Red Lobster restaurant and then seeing if they will be willing to serve us afterwards. This year was the 5th year anniversary of LobsterFest so we decided to go for broke and attempt to get banned from the restaurant forever.
Princeton University has announced the winners of the 2009 Art of Science competition. First place this year was awarded to Celeste M. Nelson for this gorgeous, bright field micrograph of squid embryos.
The poster for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s MoCCA Festival 2009 brought a smile to my face this morning, festooned as it is with sea creatures and dapper hats. Running from June 6-9 at the famous 69th Regiment Armory in New York — scant blocks from my alma mater — the festival features an impressive list of comic book heavy hitters including Seth, Gary Panter, Al Jaffee, Molly Crabapple, David Mazzuchelli, and Adrian Tomine. Passes are $10.00 a day or $15.00 for the entire weekend. Definitely worth a look.
I very much enjoy this particular piece by Nemo Gould although perhaps not for the reasons which he indented; for while I understand the idea behind it, and while I appreciate its sleek, shiny carapace and barbed arms it still strikes me as a squid riding a bicycle, an image that fills me with an almost indescribable glee.
Check out his YouTube channel to see this and his other sculptures in action.
Having documented the battles betwixt warring cephalopods in Feudal Japan, and having failed to convince the denizens of Threadless of the hipster coolness of his t-shirt design, Phineas X. Jones does what he should have done all along and put out another spectacular print with which he shall drain your bank account.
There is no doubt that the marble staircase is a watermark for high-class and sophistication. Few things convey a sense of history and taste like the finely veined, polished surface of this sought-after stone.
Yet I say to you that the vast majority of marble, while beautiful, is no better than, say, quartz or cement. I know this may seem absurd, but that is only until you see pictures like these, taken from a variety of Japanese department stores built between 1914 and 1933, because these marble skinned staircases are dotted with fossils. Most of these fossils are of ammonites — extinct cephalopods whose closest living relative is the nautilus — whose only remains are their spiral shells.
This, then, is the kind of marble that will one day adorn the main staircase of my book-lined mansion. There I will be able to examine in detail every tread and riser, to press my face against the nosing and trim without having to worry about shoppers stepping over my crouched body.
Elizabeth Henry’s series of illustrations inspired by a nightmare she had in which a giant cuttlefish devoured the moon. I love pieces like these because — like a good children’s book illustration — they maintain that delicate balance between lightheartedness and menace.
It seems cephalopods have had it up to here with these Remote Operated Vehicles and underwater cameras and are beginning to take up tentacles against out voyeuristic ways. Here, a large but as yet unidentified squid attacks an ROV at a depth of 1650 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. A few weeks ago — as many, many, many of you pointed out, thank you — National Geographic posted footage taken by a Shell owned ROV last year in which an “elbowed”, otherworldly Magnapinna squid floated up to stare menacingly into the cameras lens.
I suspect that shows of force like these will continue, most likely culminating in all out war. Hopefully our government is prepared.
It would be easy to dismiss, on first glance, Miguel Sternberg’s Night of the Cephalopod. It relies on the outdated, yet still popular, sprite based graphics and its premise is a model of simplicity: you find yourself in a forest, shotgun in hand, surrounded by floating, milky-eyed cephalopods and are told that the sun rises in six hours time. On the face of it there is not much here, just the usual survival-horror trappings: run from enemy, find and conserve ammo, don’t die.
The real meat of NotC , however, is the narration. It begins immediately, the voice of Scott Moyle intoning “I had run from the cottage in a blind fear, having only time to grab my shotgun and a handful of shells. Hours, or minutes, later, when the madness finally fled from my heart, I found myself lost, but blessedly alone.” and from there on it proceeds to narrate your entire play through. It’s a brilliant feature, a running, Lovecraftian color commentary detailing almost every move and action the player makes. Its success is based on both the quality of the writing and the unexpected timing of the narrative tidbits. At one point I failed to reload and when I finally did so — after having “wandered about like an impotent fool” — the narrator thrilled “Oh, how I love reloading during battle!”
In those two lines I may have actually given away too much. Discovering these flourishes is a joy in and of itself. There is a demo available, small with a self contained executable, and you would be cheating yourself if you did not not take a quick look at it. If the breathless voice of the Lovecraftian scribe fills you with glee, then this is most certainly for you.
Apologies to ye Apple users as it appears to be Windows only, but there is a video if you would like a basic idea of the game.
Someone, somewhere saw this photo by one jimofwales depicting a warning to swimmers of cephalopodal jellyfish rapists and thought “My god, this is absurd; a squid would never molest a swimmer. The real danger is tentacled cock monsters with transgender fetishes. I’ve got to warn them!” And so, they did.
Since 2000, over 2000 scientists from 82 nations have been hard at work, going door to door, clipboard in hand conducting the first Census of Marine Life. Eight years into it, fascinating new discoveries have been made, one of which focuses on this little fellow, Megaleledone setebos, which lives in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and can grow up to one meter in length.
This particular cephalopod is now thought to be the common ancestor of the first deep-sea octopuses. Dr Jan Strugnell, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast recently headed a study which compared the genes of various octopuses and incorporated fossil records finally concluding that the first divergence from Megaleledone occurred roughly 30 million years ago.
The census continues even as I write this, and is scheduled to be completed by 2010, more than enough time to find R’lyeh.
Electricians at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany were confounded by a series of mysterious blackouts affecting the aquarium of one Otto, an octopus. After staking it out one night they discovered that the cause was Otto himself who, seemingly annoyed by the 2000 watt spotlight above his tank, had figured out he could extinguish the offending light source by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction.
This is not the first time the aquarium has had a problem with Otto, says Director Elfriede Kummer:
“Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.”
Kummer supposes that the octopus is merely bored or perhaps attention starved although, considering his behavior, I’m inclined to theorize that Otto might have a little problem with the drink.
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.
