Once again, a team of archaeologists from Japan’s Yamagata University have discovered new Nazca Lines, this time announcing that they’ve spotted 168 previously undocumented geoglyphs on the Pampas de Juman in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru.
Hundreds of mysterious drawings, often monumental in scale, dot the Peruvian landscape, many of them visible only from an aerial view. The newly identified figures on the desert sands depict humans, camelids, birds, killer orca whales, cats, and snakes, and are thought to date to between 100 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.
Tangible and physical, stop-motion animation is the art of manipulating objects and figures frame by frame, creating the illusion of fluid movement. It’s an almost atavistic art form of ours: Instinct tells us if you have a lump of clay in your hands, start making stuff out of it. Shape a chicken and a fox, mold some pirates, heck, make a movie. It’s what filmmakers have been doing for over a century, so we’re taking a look through time with the 47 best stop-motion animated movies ever made.
N&B Block was a toy line created by Nintendo in the late 60s. They were designed by Nintendo’s game department, headed by Gunpei Yokoi (you know, that dude who designed the Game Boy, Virtual Boy, and WonderSwan). The N&B Block used a stud-locking system similar to LEGO bricks, although there was a variation to the design as not to copy LEGO’s patented tube-locking system. That didn’t stop LEGO from suing Nintendo, and while Nintendo won, they eventually discontinued the toy in the early 1970s.
No one is entirely sure exactly when or how the green bags of Kuai Kuai crisps became seen as symbolic tech whisperers whose mere presence could keep electronics in line. The Kuai Kuai company was established in 1968 by Liao Jing Gang and his son Spencer, a team who needed to find a way to keep their main business, a pharmaceutical importing and manufacturing company, busy during slow periods, so they began making snacks and confectionery.
“Kuai Kuai were specifically created to be sold to children. Back then, there was nothing like that on the market,” says Irene Liao, who is Spencer’s daughter and the firm’s current general manager. But that all changed when the crisps, whose name means ‘behave’ or ‘be good’ in both Mandarin and Taiwanese, caught the eye of a graduate student.
Livia Gershon explored the first stories about Rodney King and his brutal assault by a group of LAPD officers, and how the focus shifted from racial injustice to “political feuding among city leaders”:
When the trial began, the papers reported on the defendants’ legal strategies. While the Post referred to the “chilling tape” of the defendants “savagely beating” King, the Times downplayed King’s injuries. Both mentioned the decision to move the trial to “a conservative, overwhelmingly white area,” as the Times put it, but neither paper paid close attention to the defense tactic of breaking the video down frame by frame.
Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, a Times reporter took part in a ride-along with an LAPD officer, reporting on the difficult situations officers dealt with on the job. The Times also interviewed members of the public in local Black and white communities, reporting that everyone agreed the police should be punished for their actions.
Unlike when the assault on King first took place, there was little focus on the broader issue of societal racism and the role of the police in Black communities. [William L.] Solomon notes that neither paper analyzed the way the defense drew on racist tropes to present King as “at once all-powerful, animalistic, dazed by drugs, and insensate to pain.”
This is rongorongo, the only indigenous writing system to develop in Oceania before the 20th century and, according to James Grant-Peterkin, author of A Companion to Easter Island, one of “the last remaining mysteries on Easter Island.”
As adaptations go, Lupin is close to perfect. Rather than directly translate the character to television, the writer George Kay imagines Lupin as the inspiration for a 21st-century con artist named Assane (played by Omar Sy).
