Morning Pages - A clear out...

Extreme buildings, Satanic panics, incredible watercolours, NFTs and modernist movie villain lairs...

Morning Pages - A clear out...

Morning! Having a bit of a clear out of stuff that's been hanging around my reading list on DEVONthink. I don't think I've posted any of these before, but apologies if there turns out to have been some duplication.

I'm sending this one out to newsletter subscribers as well, because I think there's enough to chew on to make it worthwhile.

These extreme buildings are hanging on at the ends of the Earth

The Island That Humans Can’t Conquer

Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos

Watercolor Illustrations by Steeven Salvat Cloak Natural Specimens with Elaborate Metallic Motifs

The next piece concerns something that has been on my mind for a while. Try as I might, I really struggle to understand cryptocurrency and NFTs, but something in me is deeply suspicious of the whole thing. This could be a sign that I'm finally getting old and that the modern world is accelerating away from me, but it seems to be becoming harder and harder to distinguish between the NEXT BIG THING and another stupid craze.

Over the past few days, a lot of amazing artists, designers and photographers have been sharing their work on Twitter (#PortfolioDay is the hashtag, if you're interested) and I have been digging in to a lot of great work. But repeatedly, especially in the case of photographers, the links lead to NFT marketplace sites where you can buy the images as non-fungible tokens, often for several hundred or several thousand dollars (and only if you have a crypto wallet). But for the money, you don't get a print, you just get the digital file. And none of them seem to have sold a thing. It's all kind of bizarre, especially when there are already several widely used photography sites which do a far better job of displaying the work, and which allow you to buy either a digital copy or a print, in real money, at the click of a button.

I'm not sure what the perceived advantage to the artists of selling their work as NFTs is.

Anyway, this piece in Nautilus is quite persuasive that NFTs are kind of silly and deeply wasteful.

The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

Lastly, and I tweeted this out separately a few minutes ago, A Brief Compendium of Modernist Homes for Movie Villains with Flawless Taste offers something for architecture fans and movie geeks alike. If you click on nothing else this morning, click on this.

Have a good one.