To me, this category involves the following traits: it’s complicated, it demonstrates skill, and you get art as a result. (Or potentially a very useful object, but eldrae seem to want their useful objects to be as beautiful as practicality allows.)
“The Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg, performed by Jonathan Scott with the Bartók National Concert Hall. Not “performed at the Bartók National Concert Hall”, performed with: the rear wall consists of one of the largest pipe organs in Europe, with which Scott is performing a modified orchestrial score of the piece instead of the more common piano solo version.
As the video displays, it involves many many pedals, five tiers of keyboard, and four highly coordinated limbs.
A custom computer case made out of a bourbon barrel, with a liquid cooling loop made to resemble pumping said bourbon through the system. The rest of the gallery is a build log of the project.
To throw a historical figure into this particular list:
Jack Churchill. Because you have to admire the élan of the sort of mad bastard who’d fight his way through World War II with bagpipes, a claymore, and a longbow, all of which saw use. (Also quoted, upon arriving in Burma to discover they’d finished the Pacific theater without him, as saying “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!”)
So, the other day I was a mite bored and accidentally clicked through to one of those boredpanda click-generating articles, this one in particular:
This is relevant here because I do always spend time trying to think of the various little things that go into sense-of-place worldbuilding, specifically all those tiny things that show someone really took the time to think about “okay, so how do we make this thing just the tiniest bit better”. Apparently, all I needed was to be living on the opposite side of the planet all along.
(Of especial close-to-Imperial-flavor note are #2, #4, #5 but on animated smartpaper, #8, #9, #10, #12, #13, #16, #18, #21, #22, #25, #27, #29, #30 (a rare example of doing something excellent with modernist architecture, as is #39), #33 (only with more robot), #34, #42, #43, #44, #45 and #48.)
I keep finding odd computer cases. In this case, someone building their first ever PC (instead of buying pre-builts), deciding that no regular cases don’t suit her aesthetic, and spending a week with skill and laser cutters and stubborness building her own custom fantasy-manse to house it.
The official World Chess Championship chess sets all have to be identical to reduce the chances of fumbling a piece during a heated game. The hardest piece to carve is the knight; the knights alone can take as long as the set of the set put together.
Yeah, points for style.
But how would it have been to service? Asking as someone who was a plumber and A/C tech, b/c the architects and engineers made it damn near impossible for us to do our jobs
Every time I listen to The Parting Glass, it seems to me that this is more or less exactly the music, in theme and tone and lyrics, played as someone voluntarily retires and ascends to become one of the Transcend’s ancestral subroutines.
