Holiday season grab bag / a big tube map round-up post / smallest records ever. The quest for miniaturisation, as seen from a late C20 viewpoint. We’ve probably lamented this before, but we wish we could find the Sunday Times from the 1980s or thereabouts wherein the prospect of ‘music on computer chips’ was mooted, with a Phil Collins solo album chip used an illustration / Tunnel Networks / the Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine / Tumb.la, a tumblr viewer / see also TumView / Paper Scooter models for you to make! / Collect and Archive, fashion and illustration / The Bedbug Registry, ‘a free, public database of bedbug infestations’.

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Brutalism and Ballard, splicing the cold, hard surfaces of a fast-vanishing Brutalism with the technological and social alienation integral to the work of J.G.Ballard. The visual web seems rife with a masochistic dystopianism, an admiration for failed futurism and imploded utopianism. This particular thread – concrete architecture, good or bad? – seems to come round every once in a while (I, II). Crucially, the participants rarely go beyond their gut feelings when explaining why they like or dislike certain architectural styles. Quantifying aesthetics is practically a spectactor sport in the UK, a battleground between old and new, right and wrong, functional and dysfunctional, modern and traditional. Consider the media interest in the Carbuncle Cup; here the rich mix of schadenfreude and techno-pessimism is in full flow.

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Moscow from above, via Worldbuilding at Reddit / knitting meets Japanese pop culture at Mochimochi Land’s photostream / the Bignert Collection, architectural letterheads, via Marginal Revolution / SlushPile Hell, which needs to be spliced with Fiction Bitch / Plastidecore, a tumblr / photographing private jets (via).