I saw something very funny online this week: A headline about teens "sadfishing" which is a made up word (all words are made up) for teens performing sadness online for attention. I don't know how real a phenomenon this actually is in the universe, but I do know a lot of people my age who would performatively post the saddest, most emo lyrics in our AIM away messages, and if that's not sadfishing, then I don't know what else it could be. A Thing in my Possession: Lungs Now before you get all weird on me, these are my normal lungs inside my body. I didn't pick up an extra set down at the farmer's market or anything.* But I have lungs in my chest, and now I have official documentation that they work correctly. For reasons that aren't very interesting my doctor referred me to a pulminologist for a pulmonary screening. In this screening they use a fancy device to measure how much air you are breathing into and out of your lungs. And it turns out I breathe in and out the right amount of air. Well within the normal paramaters, and because I'm a larger than average dude, my lungs are a little larger than average too. But not too big. Or too little. These are Goldilocks lungs right here.
*Side note: Watch Hannibal, the three season show that was on NBC, somehow.
Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Stuart Semple and Anish Kapoor. So in 2014 an engineering company announced a new product/process called Vantablack. It’s a chemical coating made of carbon nanotubes (no, I don’t know what that means either) which has the property of absorbing 99.965% of visible light (according to the manufacturers.) That’s really neat! It has some interesting potential applications in engineering products (like space telescopes) where any light reflection can cause problems. But it’s also a pretty expensive and relatively difficult thing to do. You won’t be running to your local art store to pick up a bottle of vantablack to slap on your canvas or warhammerr 40k minis.
So far so cool. But in 2016 it came out that the exclusive artistic license of the product had been sold to a single artist, Anish Kapoor. Kapoor is a sculptor, often focusing on very large products. For example you are probably familiar with his very well known sculpture Cloud Gate, AKA the giant reflective bean in Chicago. But he’s done a lot of other stuff as well. To be clear Vantablack can be used for other purposes by other people, but not for artistic purposes, but I don’t love the idea of a company limiting even one particular use to a single person. It’s not my all to make, but maybe they were trying to stir up controversy and marketing. It sure worked at the time. Lots of artists got mad about this. https://www.artforum.com/news/artists-angered-as-anish-kapoor-receives-exclusive-rights-to-vantablack-228162/ and one even went so far as to make a lovely little piece of performance art about it.
That artist, who at the time was named Stuart Semple, was so incensed by this whole exclusivity thing, that he decided to make something that everyone but Anish Kapoor could use. He developed a pigment he called The Pinkest Pink. I even bough a sample jar because I thought it was funny.
And in the years since he has been releasing more paints. He has a series of Black paints that get progressively blacker (so he claims) and other x-est X paints. He’s got a bright flow in the dark, a very white white, a shiny mirror and glittery glitter. and he also tried to “liberate” corporately owned colors, releasing a paint based on Tiffany Blue, Calvin Klein Blue, and maybe some others. He’s kind of made “liberating art” his whole brand.
And he went a step further a while ago and had a kickstarter for an Adobe photoshop knockoff because he was tired of Adobe charging monthly or annual licenses for the software and he thinks (and I agree) it’s better when soupy for software once and then own it. But that project, while successfully funded, seems to have gone dark. Which isn’t great. There’s a lot of stuff that has turned out “not so great” in regards to this artist. Delayed shipments, weird things like making hot sauce, and most recently he announced a new dubmphone.
A dubmphone, if you didn’t figure it out already, it meant to be an alternative to smart phones. They harken back to the days when cell phones did one or two things: Call and/or Text. There’s a market for these phones, and a small community of people who really like them The idea is that you can stay connected for emergencies or the like, but you don’t have a distraction machine in your pocket all the time.
The market exists, and there are dozens of phones out there you can choose from if you want to. If you don’t just want to buy an old used nokia (which you can do) there are newer nokia style phones, some even from nokia themself! They’re often sold as Feature Phones instead of being called dubmphones, but the idea is there and people buy them. And they’re pretty cheap! The market stats at about 30 bucks US, and can go up to a couple hundred if you want to be able to install android phone apps (which seems against the purpose, but someone must be buying them.)
So last week the artist formally known as Stuart Semple legally changed his name to Anish Kapoor. Or he claims he did. He shared pictures of what appear to be real legal documents, confirming the change. I’m not sure why he did this. The easiest guess is that’s it’s just marketing. He got international attention with his very one-sided feud against the original Anish Kapoor, so this could just be an extension of that. He may also think it’s a clever loophole to get around the ban on using vantablack by any artist that isn’t Anish Kapoor, but I hardly think he’s going to have much luck if he just calls up the company and says “I’m Anish Kapoor now, give me vantablack!”
It’a a weird decision, and it makes talking about him a little bit difficult. I want to respect his chosen name and use it accordingly, and I’m trying to do that. But it’s particularly difficult do do so if one is also talking about new-flavor Kapoor and his fight against original Kapoor. But it’s make a little easier by the fact that the Anish Kapoor who is legally allowed to use Vantablack and made The Bean in Chicago, left this story a long time ago. So now when I refer to Anish Kapoor, you can be rest assured I’m talking about the guy who changed his name to that last week.
So Anish Kapoor, one day after announcing his name change, launched an indiegogo campaign for his dumb phone called, Burnr. And how does he start the announcement? “My name is Stuart Semple.” My dude, I really need you to be a little more consistent here.
Burnr is meant to be a dumb phone like all the others, but Kapoor/Semple can’t say that. Instead he’s pretending that he had this great idea to use dumb phones to cure mental illness and stop online bullying (somehow?) And there’s the other problem that Burnr doesn’t exist. There’s one piece of concept art that, if we’re being honest, looks like it was made by an AI image generation software. It’s a little wobbly around the edges in ways that only those kinds of images are. I can’t promise that it was made by an image generator, but I can promise that the actual phone doesn’t exist. He doesn’t even have a working prototype. How do I know? It says so right at the top of the page.
But despite having no actual phones, not even a prototype, he’s promised that the final phone will be incredibly rugged and even have an IP66 water and dust resistance rating. A very specific claim for a phone that doesn’t exist and actually requires testing to meet that standard. He’s also promising to ship the phone in October of this year. Phones take time to manufacture and even if you’re taking off the shelf parts and slapping a new case with a custom sticker it can take 5 months to ship from China alone. But the phones aren’t shipping yet. If they will ship at all.
Most folks who have looked at this have clearly backed away from the project. Only 75 people as of this writing have backed the campaign and he’ll need about 1500 minimum to reach the funding goal. So this phone probably isn’t happening. Which is good! I don’t think people should give this guy money for something that doesn’t exist. Uf you want a dumb phone you can buy one, I’ve even thought about it in the past. But buy one that actually exists.
Stuff I'm Videogaming I booted up Cookie Clicker again this week, and have had it running in the background ever since. Cookie Clicker is one of the oldest and most robust idle games, and while it didn't invent the genre, it did do a lot to codify it. The short version is you click a giant cookie on screen to make cookies. Then you use those cookies to automate the cookie making process. You can keep stacking on upgrades and make the number of cookies go up. There's more to it than that, but some of the fun is in the exploration. For example, if you hire too many grandma's you can potentially anger them and trigger the Grandmapocalypse. Which sounds bad. But also it ends up in making more cookies, so who can say for sure.
My friends and I got to the end of the available content in Abiotic Factor last week. This is a survival crafting game, in the vein of so many others out there like Valheim, the more recent Palworld, or even the original Minecraft. But the twist in this one is that you're not in an unspoiled wilderness chopping down trees and making campfires. Instead you are in a vast underground science facility where countless terrible experiments have been performed and things went very wrong. So you play a group of scientists trying to get along. Instead of chopping down trees, you're chopping up desks and hunting wild staplers to make new inventions to help you get through another night of killer robots and mutated creatures. It's a lot of fun, and the new setting takes a lot of the old tropes in these games (of which I have played many) and makes them feel fresh again. The game is in early access, so they'll likely be adding stuff for a while, and it'll be fun to come back and see what has changed or been added.
I haven't actually pulled the trigger, but they finally added all the Kingdom Hearts games to Steam. This is one of those series that I hav aleays been fascinated by, despite only ever playing the one entry for the Game Boy Advance. Unlike every other game in the series, it was a card battler. I am sorely tempted to jump in and play all of them for the first time now that they're on steam. It feels like a series I could get really into if I'm not careful.
This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Textmergency
