The gasmask is an integral part of any space-hobo’s fashion arsenal, and while there’s a nearly infinite number of stylistic permutations from which to choose the mask that best suits you nearly all of them are drab militaristic affairs. Hardly surprising considering they’ve never been intended as anything other than tools to avoid taking lung-fulls of poisonous gas or air swirling with microscopic debris during a siege.

Thankfully an enterprising designer, Diddo Velema, saw the gaping couture void in post-apocalyptic style and decided it needed a good filling, creating high fashion gasmasks, studded in diamonds and logos, thus cementing her place in the annals of fashion history.

Personally I prefer the understated elegance of the Vuitton, but if gaudy is your thing there’s more than enough Gucci analog to go around. Hit the jump for larger versions of the masks.

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A meeting of the Albuquerque Optimist Club of 1954. Note the banner hanging in the background: “Why wait till 1955? We might not even be alive!”

From this incredibly retarded Vintage Photo thread.

She Took a Free Stress Test, originally uploaded by Ectomo.

Photographs from the San Francisco Scientology protests are up at Ectomo’s flickr. San Francisco is being called the best dressed protest, though it was probably only around 200 people. I was very impressed with the level of professionalism, politeness, and focus. There was an almost total lack of meaningless catchphrases and memes, though I think a certain amount of that is good for morale. I observed a huge amount of public and police support for the cause and the action, and people actually read the flyers they were handed.

Well done, San Francisco.

A ‘war ballet’ photograph with ballerinas Alexandra Danilova, Irina Baronova and Paul Petroff, 1939 [vintage photo]

With pictures, both real and photoshopped, of Georgian riot police and their Disney-esque gas masks saturating the internet, it’s interesting to know that, one month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an actual Mickey Mouse gas mask was, in fact, produced. Disney approved the mask, made by the Sun Rubber Company, for use by children, the thinking being that it would help to calm children during a chemical attack. These are the images that scuttle through my feverish nightmares; armies of zombie children masked in the soulless visage of a famous rodent.

The Mickey Mouse Mask [GASMASKMUSEUM] : WFMU’s Beware of the Blog

Photography by Bru [Artjob.ru] : : Pavlog

mechanical bird pilot #1 [Shoutfit]

masks tested with real poison gas (mar, 1933) [Russian Gasmask Livejournal] : pavlog

Unhallowed Metropolis is the tabletop roleplaying game of retropostapocalyptic horror that I’ve been working on for the past couple years. The process has been arduous, the art draining, the photography persnickety, and the entire concept so ludicrously appealing that I did it anyway.

It has been two hundred years since first the outbreak of the Plague, when without warning the dead rose to feed on the flesh of the living. […]

Seventy percent of the world’s population succumbed to the Plague, secondary epidemics, or the mass starvation that followed.

The year was 1905; it was the dawn of a new dark age.

In the following decades, the survivors to learned to fight back and to retake what they had lost. Recalling the golden age that had come before, the Neo-Victorians set out to rebuild their shattered nation. […]

London 2105. The capitol of the Neo-Victorian Empire is a vast, densely crowded city surrounded by fortifications fifty-feet high. The dead walk the Wastelands beyond the walls, and spontaneous outbreaks of the Plague ravage the population within. It is only through constant vigilance and massed firepower that order is maintained.

I heard recently from Jason Soles, one of the writers and project heads (the other being Nicole Vega) that the first UnMet book will be released at GenCon Indy, a gigantic gaming convention in Indianapolis. I will probably be in attendance to sign and shmooze, we’ll be hawking books and prints, and you’ll finally get to see what the hell we’ve been posting about for the past however many months.

They are the most remarkable pictures of one of the most hellish places on earth.

Never seen before, these astonishing photographs, lovingly hand-touched in colour to bring to life the nightmare of Passchendaele, were released this week to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle that, between July and November 1917, claimed a staggering 2,121 lives a day and in total some quarter of a million Allied soldiers.

Hell on Earth: The never before seen colour photographs of the bloody battle of Passchendaele [Daily Mail] : Cynical-C

Mickey the Knight: a post-apocalyptic samurai warrior of the wastes, equipped with a spear, a suit of armor and a Mickey Mouse gasmask approved by Walt Disney himself for use in Hawaii during World War II in case of a gas attack by the Japanese. By neo-pop artist Yanobe Kenji.

Mickey the Knight [Pink Tentacle]

The goddess Kali poised at the moment of destruction. Behind her a city’s last moments before the shockwave of, well, doom comes. In the sky above reads the last refrain of the T.S. Eliot quote “This is the way the world ends; not with a bang but a whimper”. At the left, bottom corner a butterfly perches. Perhaps it was the flap of its delicate wings that set this all in motion.

Kali Yuga [menum @ Deviant Art] : ectotweeted by cheshter