I feel I would argue about the placement of many of the films on this list, but they definitely got #1 right.
Category: Art
Objectively the best inhabitants of Collabris: The Dragonmen of Zir.
Arabic (Fremen) Dragonborn of the desert. Civilized, not nomadic…Capital city: Ziris, the Glass City, the Shining Star of the Sand. Literally made of stone and glass.
A democracy where only and all wizards can vote, the Grand Vizir is elected by the Council of Seven, the leading wizards from each school of magic.
Geometry and calligraphic knotwork have to be our touchpoints here.
The Glass City
This is my indulgence in calligraphic knotwork. It fails the simplicity test but as a symbol of the city I love it (I imagine the central tower is where the Council of Seven meet). It also doesn’t take much to turn this to a turn a cityscape into a dragon:
Zir
I couldn’t decide whether this should be simple or intricate so I’ve ended up with a bunch of ideas. They’re all based around symbols that have a rotational symmetry order of 10 (to represent the 5 chromatic and 5 metallic dragon colours).
The simplest example is a riff on the Seal of Solomon:
This also has the neat touch that it’s made of two five-sided figures interwoven: the chromatic and metallic joined in a single nation.
Taking that idea and ramping up the intricacy:
I quite like this mandala (to be honest I picture all of these getting used in one way or another!), you could emphasise the knotwork, or perhaps groups of dragons pick out one of the figures to highlight?
An alternate knotted figure:
Dragon scales are also a logical option:
Or more rounded scales with explicit motifs for the dragon types:
I’ve largely avoided colour in these designs. I picture the men of Zir using yellow (sand), white (glass) and red (fire) primarily but when you’re using 10 spoked figures the temptation is to try to include all the colours and metals which can end up looking disjointed.
The Council of Seven
Something simpler but following the symmettry and knotwork themes:
Zir
This was actually the first thing I ever did for Zir:
If you rotate it 180 you can see it’s a Z, an R, and the tittle from the i with an extra fork added to the Z to as a forked tongue or tail.
I quite like everything here! And I think you could combine pretty much any of them and they’d work together.
Categories
Pennington’s Dune
This is the cover my copy of Dune has (and it’s clearly the best) but I’ve never seen the covers Bruce Pennington did for the other books in the Dune series:
They’re so awesome!
Categories
The first iPhone
Well, not really.
While in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) spotted what looked to him like an iPhone in a 350 year old painting.
“You know, I thought I knew until last night [where and when the iPhone was invented]. Last night Neelie took me over to look at some Rembrandt and in one of the paintings I was so shocked. There was an iPhone in one of the paintings,” Cook jokingly explained.
As the title of the painting “Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House” suggests the item is actually a letter, and that the artist, Pieter de Hooch saved his imagination for the painting rather than the titling.
Looking at the painting as a whole, of far greater concern should be the creepy kid looking in through the door.
Categories
Audubon’s fake species
John James Audubon is best known for his Birds of America; if you think you don’t know it, you do:
But it turns out that in his younger days he made up almost 30 species to prank a fellow naturalist.
During their visit, though, Audubon fed Rafinesque descriptions of American creatures, including 11 species of fish that never really existed. Rafinesque duly jotted them down in his notebook and later proffered those descriptions as evidence of new species. For 50 or so years, those 11 fish remained in the scientific record as real species, despite their very unusual features, including bulletproof (!) scales.
When he figured out that Rafinesque had also been naming mammals based on his time with Audubon, he started worrying.
In the descriptions he gave to Rafinesque, some of these animals had very odd features. The “three-striped mole rat” was attributed to a genus that had no business being in North America. The “white-stripe lemming” carried its young on its back, despite have teats on its chest. The brindled stamiter had its cheek pouches, usually an interior feature, on the outside.
What japes!
The “Brindled Stamiter”
Categories
The most expensive photo
This is Rhein II by Andreas Gursky, it’s the most expensive photo ever sold (if you exclude celeb wedding and baby photos) and I’m really not sure why.
I can pretty safely say this is the most boring photo in the top 10 most expensive photos. I would much rather have Billy the Kid:
Or this hundred year old, hand layered photo of a moonlight relfected in a pond:
Or, to be honest, almost any photo. $4.4m is utterly absurd.