Six Things, Volume 94

Landscapes | Animal Farm | Future | Ink | Languages | Stimulation

Thing 1 – Landscapes

A visual rabbit hole to kick us off this week.

Entire Landscapes is ‘a never finished project’ by Colin Chudyk – photographs, drawings, diagrams and so forth, grouped together by category and/or subject matter. So if you’re after photographs of Siberian wooden houses, bottle kilns or log flumes, or perhaps diagrams of pinball machines, examples of dazzle camouflage or random playgrounds, you’ll find something of interest here.

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Thing 2 – Animal Farm

I enjoyed this 1955 publicity film about the making of the classic animation ‘Animal Farm’. Particularly arresting is the sequence in which animator John Halas gurns into a mirror in an effort to capture pig-like expressions and transfer them to paper.

Animal Farm was the first British animated film – slightly bizarrely, it was partly funded by the CIA, more about which you can learn in this article – and was the best known production of Halas and Batchelor, the animation company founded by Halas and his partner (and later wife) Joy Batchelor.

Here’s another of their offerings, the 1963 short Automania 2000, a satirical and dystopian vision of the future which will have many people’s Strangely Prescient And Relevant Today klaxons ringing full tilt.

You can learn more about Halas and Batchelor on the website devoted to their work. And here’s a tribute to them by Jez Stewart, the curator of animation at the BFI national archive, with his selection of five favourite Halas and Batchelor films.

Meanwhile, Orwell fans might or might not be interested to know that there’s a new animated version of Animal Farm in the pipeline – directed and produced by Andy Serkis, it’s due for release this summer.

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Thing 3 – Future

Talking of visions of the future, here’s a series of cigarette cards and postcards produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris visualising the world in 2000. Automation, personal flying devices and underwater living are the prevailing themes. It’s always fun to look back at these visions of the future and see not just what they got wrong (and sometimes extravagantly so) but also what they got right. I for one am distraught that underwater fish racing never caught on.

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Thing 4 – Ink

As a left-hander with, at best, scratchy handwriting, my relationship with fountain pens has always been complex. I adore the idea of them – I can picture myself sitting at my desk, writing swathes of flowing cursive with a fine and elegant (but not showily expensive) pen, and not a smear in sight – but reality often disappoints.

It’s not that Peanuts is my first reference point, simply that Schulz so often captured my own life experience.

Nevertheless, a man can dream. And where better to indulge such fantasies than Mountain Of Ink, a website devoted to the glories of, well, ink. Honestly, just scrolling through all the images has a calming effect.

As for the handwriting thing, I think I might have found a solution (or at least had a solution handed to me on a plate by Suw Charman-Anderson, whose newsletters Word Count and Fieldwork are both well worth your attention – thanks for the recommendation, Suw). It’s the lovely and extremely smooth-writing Wren pen from Tom’s Studio (no of course I wasn’t influenced by its being named after an excellent bird yes yes you have me bang to rights). Other pens are of course available, but first impressions are extremely favourable – my handwriting will never be beautiful, but the experience is smooth and splat-free, and the pen itself is a thing of elegance and beauty.

I feel obliged to say at this point that I have (as yet) received no reward for this endorsement.

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Thing 5 – Languages

How many languages are there in the world?

Glad you asked. 7,164, according to Ethnologue (they immediately issue the caveat that the number fluctuates all the time, what with new ones being discovered and others going extinct). Of these, approximately 44% are endangered.

Ethnologue is an excellent site to rootle round if you’re at all interested in languages – whether you want to know about language families or which are the most spoken (if you can name the top 10 without clicking through to that page, then award yourself a special prize – I certainly couldn’t).

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Thing 6 – Stimulation

And finally, Neal Agarwal’s latest offering, Stimulation Clicker.

Amazing and appalling in equal measure, it starts innocently enough.

THE MANAGEMENT ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING THAT MAY ARISE FROM CLICKING THE CLICK ME BUTTON

Here’s how it went for me:

• after 1 minute I turned the sound down.

• after 10 minutes I left it to its own devices in an open browser window and read a book.

• after about 30 minutes I came back to see how it was doing, continued for a few minutes, clicking and clicking and clicking and wondering exactly how long it could go on.

• a few minutes later I found out, and have rarely felt such an overwhelming sense of relief.

As a sort-of-mindless what’s-going-to-happen-next time suck, it’s effective, enjoyable (if that’s the kind of thing you like), and sometimes very funny.

As a dystopian satire on exactly how inured we’ve become to stimulation creep, it’s peerless, and might just be enough to make you reconsider your life choices.

Rest assured that if you do have the devotion to pursue it to its conclusion, (and as I say, you can, to an extent, just let it run in the background while you get on with other, more constructive things) there is a very peaceful and calming reward.