Tag Archives: mars

WORST BOOKS OF 2013

yellow pages

We couldn’t find a lot of interesting books around, lately. No wonder the publishing industry is in deep ‘sheet’.  The majority of publishers seems to have developed a certain taste for crap wrapped in a glossy dustjacket. To make things worse, talented writers with something to say are disappearing, just like happened to big reptiles and alcohol-free beer. Good books, very good books, are rarer than astatine. The rest, and we are talking about 1 million titles every year, is just trees sacrificed for no reason. If, to all of the above, you add the fact there are more writers than readers, and that readers mostly read what they write, you get the whole picture. The Brandpowder Team, in a drastic attempt to instill a sense of pride in the publishing industry and to push good writers to abandon Harry Potterism and type some goddam’ good stories, would like to introduce you to the top worst books of 2013. We personally published these books at our own expenses,  as a no-profit experiment to provoke publishers, writers, readers and, why not? hopefully also analphabets, to do something about it.

Opening Picture: The Not So Yellow Pages are a guide to imprecise listing. You can browse them, let’s say, when you are not looking for something in particular and you just jerk around thinking life is about getting lost somewhere, nowhere. Fakebook (below) is a novel talking about demotivation, failure, depression, solitude, despair, staging an anxious, over-perspirating guy with smelly armpits. It sold just one copy, bought by the author.

fakebook

Below: This opus in two volumes, which comes in a lavishly hardcover leather-bound edition, is a meditation about nothing to say. The 240 empty pages are a masterpiece on silence and creative white out. A must non-read for whoever feels  blocked or simply overwhelmed by data overflow. Mostly unsold.

nothing

This book (below) is highly recommended for the daring investor who’s always looking ahead for new opportunities. Unfortunately, also this one didn’t sell a single copy (out of the 50 we printed). We were shocked, since Mars is the next frontier. Not to mention KitKat and Bounty.

unreal estate

save money

The worst-best seller on our list is this rather imposing, meek-looking book with a challenging title aimed to the disobedient. We didn’t find a single customer willing to pay 20 bucks for its precious insight. The cause may be people are much better off than we think, or they are simply convinced they know better?

This project, as many others developed buy the Brandpowder Team, was a complete fiasco. Indirectly, it was a success. It proved our point. Thank you for your attention.

SOME MAPS.

Cartography, sometimes, can be a form of art. It can introduce us to a parallel world where man represents himself under thousands forms. Every map is thus a metaphor of reality, an invention, a creative interpretation of space and things in the theatre of time. Maps give name to the unnamed, chart the uncharted, disclose the arcane. It’s a god-like activity, the blossoming of an inebriated intellect.

Above: A few samples from a series of geological maps of the Moon, plus pictures of Mars’ surface. You can browse the complete collection at the US Geological Survey website and, if you are a map lover, you should check also Radical Cartography. But be careful. The risk is to get lost.

Below: dimensional comparison between the US and Europe. It’s worth to notice that Washington ends up facing Iran, while Miami enjoys the beautiful climate of the Red Sea; California goes back to its Spanish etymology; The Great Lakes mix their sweet water with the salty Black Sea; British Columbia, meanwhile, becomes more British than ever and Texas finds some more oil in North Africa. May this ironic overlay of territories be of good omen for a closer relationship among different countries and cultures.

Above: the US’ contour as it would appear if placed along different latitudes. Below: a tiny section of Antarctica. A barren landscape covered by ice, where mountain’s peaks surface like small islands from a frozen sea.

All maps courtesy of USGS and radicalcartography.net. Many thanks to both of them for sharing a thought provoking point of view on the world we all live in.

The Brandpowder Team.
https://brandpowder.wordpress.com/tag/mars/
brandpowder.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-34
72424
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YPUV4P2AWJ6MV3RRRO5QGRV5SKLOGLUQ
<urn:uuid:0079cc7e-89d5-4ef9-bc26-6f6c5264c2b9>
2017-08-23T00:46:05Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:R42OQS4OFXOQN5RLABP54Q6G6IZ4ZCLC
<urn:uuid:aaddbd38-1ae7-4eb3-9116-7b5d058147e8>
https://brandpowder.wordpress.com/tag/mars/
length
response
<urn:uuid:444c9a30-4ad5-4cb1-b4a1-e56c69f719e2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-178-11-113.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-34
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf