A quicky here celebrating the wonder that is retro game covers. Sort of. They’re not strictly realistic (as pointed out by many geek commenters who really should lighten up) but it’s a fun reimagining of some current games and how they might look twere they downgraded to a pixel steeze.

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I don’t see how anyone would fail to be a fan of old game covers/booklets. Much like illustrated movie posters, there’s this certain quality which can only really be achieved by many many hours of painstaking hand drawing. Proper works of art.

There’s plenty of examples to be seen at car boot sales up and down the country if you don’t mind getting up at 7 on a cold wet Sunday morning.. Or you could just check out this flickr set that I’ve been looking for an excuse to link to for years or this post full of atari game covers which has should help you to put those ‘modern’ ones at the top into context.

I’m not usually one to get overly sentimental but this series of photos by Phillip Toledano actually almost brought a tear to my eye. Really.

‘Days With My Father‘ is a collection of photos he took of his 98 year old Dad as an “ongoing record of my father, and of our relationship … for whatever days we have together“. The photos alone tell an amazing story but occasionally, he’s added a couple of paragraphs to accompany the images and it’s those that perhaps strike the biggest chord. Clearly (based on the comments at the end of the project), it’s especially poignant if you’re in a similar situation, but I think for anyone that might feel like they don’t get to make the most of their time with a particular person, this site will bring it home.

Go look.

If you believe what pessimistic, panicky uninformed nutters are saying, the world will end tomorrow. It’s been fun.

In case the news has escaped you, tomorrow is finally the day when CERN are unleashing the Large Hadron Collider (not at all to be confused with the Hardon Collider as seen on cracked…).

The details are far far far far too complex for a lowly blog like mine, but National Geographic did a nice piece about it earlier in the year that’s now available to read online and worth a peep if you’re baffled by the idea of subparticles, neutrinos, antimatter, supersymmetry and multiple dimensions that affect gravity. Actually, I’ve read it a few times, and still don’t fully get it, so maybe it wont help, but it should. Basically, it’s exciting if you’re into quantum things or even if you’re just curious about what a $6 billion 17 mile long machine that can fire things at 99.99 percent the speed of light will end up doing.

The whole ‘end of the world’ thing stems from the potential of some sort of black hole being created, but even it if did happen, it’d be so massively small that it’d do nothing other than destroy itself. Which is reassuring, but at the same time, slightly disappointing The worse thing that could happen is nothing; the best thing is.. who knows. All sorts of crazy particle/matter/dimensional stuff is going on and seeing as the LHC records 15 million gigabytes of information yearly (that’s about 41 thousand gb a day), it might take a while to sift through the results. Still, that’s what we pay those scientists for. Watch this space!

I was going through some old records last night and it made me think of this video of Paul Mawhinney’s music collection. The video has been doing the rounds for the last month or so but I remember reading about it at the start of the year when he was trying to sell it on eBay and I presumed that it had actually sold and was in safe hands, but apparently not. A $3m bid fell through and as far as I can work out, the collection is still for sale.. Surely someone wants to buy it(?) DJ Shadow? Premier? Dre? If I had a few milli to spare, I’d happily snap it up.

Anyway, the video is only short, and worth a watch if only to get a vague idea of what a couple of million pieces of vinyl in the same place looks like. Crazy.

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

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