Older person: “kids have so much more today than we ever did!”
My thoughts as im nodding in agreement:
So it turns out these egg shaped ones are just a series of little mini plushes supplemental to larger more detailed ones. They don’t have bigger versions of all the above yet but they also have some that were in a different set:
Also I’m willing to bet a lot of you don’t even know that the nudibranch’s eye placement is anatomically accurate
I just saw perhaps the coolest art installation I have ever heard of.
This is a perfectly normal pin. On the head of it are 2.417 quintillion angels, give or take a few billion.
Joe Davis and Sarah Khan, the artist behind Baitul Ma’mur, (House of Angels) encoded the Arabic phrase “Subhan Allah” onto synthesized DNA, and then used that DNA to coat the head of a pin. According to some traditions, any time Subhan Allah is said or written, it creates an angel. With DNA being as dense an information storage medium as it is, this single pin has more created angels on it than have ever been born from human throats across all of human history.
And then in a fucking genius move, the art installation takes the form of a functional vending machine, loaded with an impossibly large quantity of angels. For $25, which goes right to the artists, you can buy a pin. I’m thinking about taking mine out of the test tube sometime and encasing it in resin to turn it into the highest % angel by volume earring ever worn, but that’s a project for the future.
There isn’t much else I can say that isn’t said by the documentation accompanying the exhibit. The photos aren’t the BEST quality but they should hopefully be mostly legible.
As of right now this installation is located at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and if you’re ever in the area you should totally check it out
It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.