Greetings, Wanderer.

Welcome back to Ley Lines, a regular series of miscellaneous things that I come across that interest, inspire, or intrigue me. Writing these posts is part of an active of being a more conscious consumer of what I read or observe, and is also just ongoing practice of writing and sharing. It’s a bit of a follow up to the “100 Interesting Things” series I wrote last year, and is inspired by Russel Davies’ book Notice, Collect, Share.

This week’s collection is a bit of a lighter, visual touch. Mostly because I spent a lot of time over the last few weeks working a longer writing project, which you can check out here (works best on desktop vs mobile).

#1 The Freedom Of The Bicycle I’ve been commuting by bike to work for more than 22 years now. According to some extremely rough calculations that’s 52,000+ kilometres, not including recreationally riding.

I’ve loved almost every single one of those rides.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this decal on a back of a stop sign earlier today.

Shout out to Rovello Creative for putting it up.

#2 Sci-Fi Scenes From National Geographic Magazines The title says it all. This artist is making super cool collages from old Nat Geos.

In appreciating these collages, I’m asking myself why I find it so problematic that Amazon is destroying books to feed it’s infinitely-hungry machines. Call it cope or call it justification, but I think I can boil it down to a few things:

1.) This artist is creating a net-new physical object.

2.) This artist is creating these new art pieces on a piece-by-piece and handmade scale. This is not industrial-scale destruction of something.

3.) Magazines in general were meant to be more disposable than books.

4.) The books being destroyed by Amazon are, by all accounts, rare artifacts.

#3 Lore Talk: I’m diving into Warhammer 40k. Well, not fully diving in. I’m only going to be playing a small-game variant called KILL TEAM with a friend, and so far I’ve only bought one set of figures that remain unassembled and unpainted. So more of a shallow dive.

But as part of that shallow dive, I’m testing the waters and trying to understand the story of the faction I’ve chosen for myself: The Kasrkin, a special ops team that hails from the planet Cadia. As part of that I watched an en

What I love about this is just how deep the WH40K lore goes, but also how passionate the entire fandom is in bringing it to life. This is an entire history in excruciating detail that still barely scratches the grimy, blood-soaked surface of a singular group of characters in a massive, sprawling universe.

Kasrkin Origins on YouTube

#4 Hotel Coolgardie I don’t watch a ton of movies these days, and when I do watch them I try and make them count with classics, critically acclaimed ones, or ones that otherwise promise to be extremely interesting. Hotel Coolgardie is one of those ones that caught my eye.

Via a review from Instagram:

“What makes this documentary compelling is that there is no mystery to solve, nothing extraordinary happens. You will be on the edge of your seat waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Just a feeling of deeply profound wrongness in a liminal town at the end of the world.”

It’s tough to say that I enjoyed watching it. A lot of the scenes were extremely uncomfortable to watch. Those that weren’t, when they were simply showing the town of Coolgardie or the road trains passing through it, were just unsettling.

I’d still highly recommend it.

PS: Actually I have watched more movies recently. Here are some quick reviews of what I’ve seen in the last week.

Disclosure Day: 2/5. Incredible premise, great trailer. Terribly done. Plot holes galore.

The Last House 3/5. Great, dystopian tension building. Moments of well-done and genuine terror. Weak-ass Home Alone meets Waterworld ending.

Freaky Tales 5/5. Most interesting movie I’ve seen in a long time. Plus, it has Nazis getting their asses kicked by punks and rivals the final scene in Sinners for pure violence-on-white-supremacy satisfaction.

#5 Art As Protest In case it hasn’t been abundantly clear by my previous posts here and on LinkedIn, I’m increasingly interested in the idea of using satirical commercial art as a form of protest.

A few of my favourite examples:

War Fantasy - A Call of Duty style game that aims to de-glamorize fantasy of military video games.

Glasses For People Who Don’t Consent In which fake ads for Meta Ray-Ban’s perv glasses are put up at subway and bus stations.

Apartheid Hummus - Where an artist updated the on-shelf labels in Sainsbury’s to draw attention to the fact that the hummus being sold was Israel, and thus purchasing it contributed to the genocide of Palestinians.

Related to this, I made HootsuiteIce.com a few months ago.

Thanks again for reading. As I mentioned, I also put together a longer piece of writing that is part speculative fiction and part experimentation with Squarespace’s parallax tools. You can check it out here (though it’s better on desktop).