Smallist

Sure, you can build scale models with a bazillion legos, like this penguin and fish. It’s basically a giant lego bitmap in 3d; a diagonal becomes a jagged series of square bricks.

But Chris Deck has a different vision for lego miniatures: He makes ‘em small:

Just more proof that constraints can make art better. Chris pretty much sticks to Star Wars, (I especially like his Cloud City) but there are other “microscale” Lego artists.

This is all via MetaFilter.

Dawn at Frugal for Life digs up Time’s April 8th 1991 cover story, “The Simple Life“. I particularly liked this part:

The beginnings of the new mind-set probably go back as far as the stock- market crash of 1987, which had little immediate effect on the overall economy but gave many people an uneasy feeling about the Roaring Eighties. The spectacular failures of such ’80s heroes as Michael Milken and Donald Trump have discredited the era’s role models as well.

That’s right kids, before he was a tv star, the Donald was a spectacular failure. Anyway, the article is rich with such ironies and reversals, and definitely worth a read. Maybe it’s time for another look at downsizing, after fifteen years of supersizing.

Treehugger alerted me to this library alternative. If you’re willing to part with a few of your paperbacks, PaperBackSwap allows you to trade them in for credits, in order to recieve other books. The service is free — you just have to pay postage when you send the books out. I suppose it also depends on the honesty of the receiving user: if he decides the book never got there, you don’t get credited. But I imagine for products as inexpensive as used paperbacks, there’s probably a very low probability of sleazeballs gaming the system. Oh — and they also do CDs. Unlike the book service, they charge 49 cents on top of postage, but if the disc skips, they’ll give you your money back. That beats iTunes.

Related: Thinning the book herd.

Brendan Monroe makes sculptures of microbes.

Artist Oliver Munday created an alphabet constructed from plastic army guys. via BoingBoing.

Link. And here’s more info on Army Men.

In a comment to this post, Stephanie writes:

Did you check the pocketMod (http://www.pocketmod.com/). It’s a good way to reuse paper that’s already been printed on one side/
Don’t bother printing all the preset pages. Just create a white pocketMod template to know how to cut and fold it.
You get a wallet size booklet!

Well I tried it out and I’m happy to report it works great! The folding’s tricky at first, but it’s a great way to reuse paper, and you get to play with scissors. They have a bunch of strange little reference tables too, like a dvorak keyboard reference and a morse code chart.

Thanks, MetaFilter, for all your kind comments this weekend! And thanks, Josh, for posting.

The MeFites had some great small links of their own. Puke & Cry reminded everyone of Harvey Birdman’s nemesis, the Reductor. Rhomboid found a series of keychain drives even smaller than Sony’s. And quin had a story about this tiny cat.

On the art front, ericb had Willard Wigan’s microsculptures, and this eensy weensy street art that’s been popping up around London. And miniature books too. I really like the origami-like copy of Robert Frost’s A Patch of Old Snow. The descriptive blurb is longer than the poem.

ClaudiaCenter mentioned the fantastic Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, which were recently featured on Oprah, and was actually one of the inspirations for me to start blogging about small things. (Yes, I occasionally get ideas from Oprah. No, not that “The Secret” crap.)
They’re truly works of art, in that they challenge the way we see shelter. The house becomes a thing within a larger environment, instead of an escape from the environment. It’s the absolute opposite of a McMansion, which absorbs every square foot of its lot.

That said, they also seem to suffer from the SUV commercial fallacy: Sure, if you had acres of land in Montana to have one as a camping spot, it’d be a fun trip. But am I really going to tow one of these to an empty lot in Westchester?

Sigh. I suppose I must mention Wired’s “Snack Attack” issue, since it seems on-topic for a block about Smallist. My reluctance stems from Wired’s editorial tone, which has been like a fifteen year crack-fueled manifesto entitled Everything is Awesome. Manifestos exhaust me.

Be that as it may, they do get some decent talent to write for them, and there’s a few great little pieces here:

• The art of the TV recap, which have gained in complexity since the days of the occasional two-part Golden Girls. Art loves constraints! (More on this in a later post)
• A chart of the 23 ways — and 403 separate SKU’s — to market a single album.
• My brother swears by these Target clinics. They’re cheap and effective.

Mill Ends Park’s designation as such is pretty dubious if you ask me. See, Portland, back east we’d call that a “planter.” At least Salem’s Waldo Park has a tree, and you can walk around in it. If it weren’t for the pachysandra.

On the other hand, Mill Ends does have a nice backstory involving leprechauns, and made the news a few days ago, when it was moved back to its original location. Here’s some pics of the occasion.

And it seems to be the Madonna of parks, changing its flora with the fashions. Sometimes it has a cactus, sometimes it’s a bit more bonsai-ish, sometimes it’s more like a failed Chia pet.

There are many versions of extremely short fiction, and the surrealists have been finishing each other’s thoughts for decades. But ficlets is a novel idea:

Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos.

The result is a web of prequels and sequels to popular stories, branching out into every genre and spiraling into great levels of absurdity. It’s a lot of fun, and I couldn’t help but contribute a short of my own.

One petty critique:I hate that their menu rollovers are strikeouts.