Factory Fifteen’s Megalomania is the perfect blend of wistful see-what-we-got-ourselves-into sublime fantasy.

Wait for the ferris wheel… (it gave me palpitations).

See the stills here.

MEGALOMANIA from Jonathan Gales on Vimeo.

Photographer Timothy Allen not only drove and hiked deep into the snowbound Balkan Mountains to give Buzludzha the love it deserves, he braved the elements and flew over it in a microlight to document the lonesome concrete saucer from above.

Oh, Buzludzha. I think I’m in love.

(via Boing Boing)

On a Saturday no less, with nothing to do but work and chat with friends awake in other time zones.

And so I acclimatize myself to the quiet and the rain and the forest and the mountain.

When the rest of the house wakes up, they’ll call me the overworked Montrealer who can’t take a holiday.

But when I get back to the city in a few weeks they’ll call me a hippie. What IS a girl to do?

Until I saw these photos of real dogs underwater. Wow.

Now I’m not sure what seals look like. Seals?

I’m always bringing home super hero shirts for my son. Nothing on Earth makes him happier. What, I thought, would be cooler than a (classic) super hero shirt for a girl?

But she would hear nothing of it. She pouted. She yelled. She cried: “I don’t like cool. You like cool. I like princesses.”

I told her just how awesome Wonder Woman is. I offered to show her clips on YouTube. I told her that the girls at school would think it was the coolest.

She would hear nothing of it. I started to feel bad. Clearly, I don’t understand her. I let her down. I told her maybe I could exchange the T-shirt for something she would like.

The next morning, the T-shirt sat discarded. I dressed her. She looked at me for a minute, then asked me to put on the Wonder Woman T-shirt. So nonchalant, like it was no big deal.

It started when I was a tot on Vancouver Island, staring across the straight at freighters laden with colourful, Lego-like shapes. Up close, shipping containers were cryptic: What are those strange logos on the outside? And what marvels are hiding on the inside?

My fixation continued when I lived in Vancouver and traversed vast yards stacked with giant metal boxes from faraway places. Ahhh…

See. It’s a problem.

And I get pure, unadulterated joy every time I see a new architectural conversion of shipping containers into homes, restaurants, hotels.

The latest: a Starbucks. Made of shipping containers. But oh, what a Starbucks. I’m in love.

(via Good, via Inhabitat… photo credit Starbucks)

“What kind of accounts?” I ask. 

“Eh, like spreadsheets, they make Excel.”

I almost choke, and feel compeled to unbutton my collar and ask for clarification, “You say they work on computers making Excel spreadsheets?” Alex’s face is straight. “Yes, they use the computer, they make the spread-sheets.”

– Hamilton Morris, I Walked with a Zombie, Harpers, November 2011

(Look for shadowy people working furiously behind the light paintings.)

Rippled from Oh Yeah Wow on Vimeo.

(Found on Colossal)

(via Colossal)