This week you will learn:

• Where to find the hottest art collection on the web
• Which Succession cast member’s politics changed a character
• Which sci-fi novel owes a debt to the Koran
• The engineering behind the Most Important Device in the Universe
• Why attempting to create a FAR from iOS is a fool’s errand (early arrivals only).

Thanks to Casper and scb0212 for contributing in a very timely manner this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods at gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and have a Happy Friday!

As a continuation of this site’s discussion about morality and HBO’s Succession, James Cromwell talks to Elle Hunt and The Guardian about his demand for his character’s motivation to be similar to his own:

It was especially important to Cromwell that his character resist the Roys, given the real-life parallels with dynasties such as the Murdochs, he said. “I’ve played crooked characters, but it’s one thing to be the bad guy and chew the scenery up when it’s a totally fictive situation. This is not a fictive situation. There’s a family living in Australia that [they] epitomise. They’re doing even worse than the Roys are doing on television and it still goes on. You watch the Leveson inquiry and you see a performance from Murdoch that no actor could touch.”

At Certified Forgotten, Gem Sedden tells of the monstrous women in Alien and Annihilation:

“I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs,” O’Bannon once explained in The Alien Saga. But as the franchise progressed, O’Bannon’s self-styled attack on men fell flat. This tactic, an attempt at horror equity, changes later in the series, as if no new terrain exists and the only place left for women to occupy is that of a monstrous mother. 

Harris Durrani writes for tor.com about the Muslimness of Frank Herbert’sDune:

One of Dune’s overarching concerns is to locate and explore a “Muslimness in time.”  The novels fixate on change across time and space: How does a tradition adapt, or not, across centuries, environments, and societies? The novels interrogate this question through a range of Muslim approaches to it. They look to Muslim scholarly traditions, historical interpretations, and experiences as they shift from place to place and generation to generation. The saga finds answers in Muslim beliefs in the sanctity of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings; in Muslim practices of mysticism and experience as a response to legalism and scientism, or to the (orientalist) binary of reason against unthinking following; in a respect for other traditions that nevertheless preserves a unique commitment to the bespoke quality of Islam; and in Muslim narratives of political succession and revolutionary power.

After having nude art censored on other social media platforms, the museums of Vienna find an unexpected new online home:

The board and some of Vienna’s museums had previously posted images of the artwork on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for promotional purposes, but the images were removed and in some cases, the accounts were closed, according to Helena Hartlauer, a spokesperson for the Vienna Tourist Board. That’s when it made sense to move to the less restrictive OnlyFans.

And finally, a sci-fi prop dubbed “The Most Important Device in the Universe” gets its own supercut. Hackaday notes the comments reveal the tech behind it:

This particular piece is called The Most Important Device In The Universe due to its ubiquity in modern productions that we’ve all heard of: several Star Trek franchises, The Last Starfighter, Knight Rider, Airplane II, Austin Powers, and countless others. The next time you sit down to watch a Sci-Fi show, see if you can spot it! Be sure to check the video below the break to see several examples. Nobody is sure what The Most Important Device does, aside from the fact that it has red lights that go back and forth.