Team Unproven Storm imagines the Snooze Cruise, for a smooth border town surgery recovery.

(Source: unprovenstorm)

12amtiger:

Starting to prototype.

The Midnight Tiger, moving from brainstorm to ideation to prototype…

We’re Live.

Since Friday evening, five teams of people have been working to create a border crossing kit for a particular customer in a particular border town. You can follow along on Twitter at #btdj or by tracking their blogs.

Unproven Storm (San Diego / Tijuana | Octogenarian)
Legendary Sunrise (Baarle / Hertog | Single Low-Income Mother)
Necessary Dragon (Stanstead / Derby Line | Flex Worker)
Mountain Hatchet (Detroit / Windsor | DINKs)
Midnight Tiger (Niagara Falls | COG)

Moodbook Part 8: The Every Day Carry

EDC is a gear-loving subculture that focuses on efficient and cool-looking tools that you carry on your person to allow preparedness for common tasks and emergencies. There is an appreciation for functional minimalism and fine design, and no small amount of badass-ness.

everydaycarry: Editor’s Note: That Böker plus folder is way beefier than I had anticipated. I wonder how it will compare to the Spyderco Techno. Nice MAKR wallet and Seiko too. Nice docket pump, regardless~

(Source: tomorrowmaybetomorrowmaybe)

Moodbook Part 7: Lifehacks

via NonCanon Dot Com - Drawings by Tom McHenry

Moodbook Part 6

North and South Korea are still technically at war; an armistice was signed but there was never a peace treaty. The two sides are kept apart by a 2 mile-wide demilitarized zone. Two villages remain inside that zone, one on each side of the border. The North Korean village is called Kijong-dong.

The official position of the North Korean government is that the village contains 200 families who run a collective farm. They live in brightly painted buildings, wired with electricity (a luxury in 1950s North Korea). Observation from the south shows that the buildings are conceret shells, lacking windows and interior rooms. Most likely, the town is staffed by a small cadre of workers who keep the streets swept and turn the lights on an off in an effort to maintain the illusion.

Banks of loudspeakers blare propaganda, agitprop opera and patriotic marching music across the border and the town houses the world’s third tallest flagpole. The flagbpole was built in response to a massive South Korean flagpole built in nearby Daeseong-dong. The loudspeakers aren’t unique either. South Korea has its own array, which was used to blast S-Pop across the border in 2010 after the sinking of the Cheonan.

Moodbook Part 4

The UK Home Office maintains a flickr account, which often includes shots of smugglers’ attempts to bring drugs, people and animals into the nation. The above is a radish, with bonus narcotic core.

Moodbook Part 3: Baarle Hertog/Baarle Nassau

Baarle Hertog/Baarle Nassau is a collection of enclaves at the southern edge of the Netherlands, near that country’s border with Belgium. Due to the vagaries of early-modern-era inheritance claims and political infighting, the Dutch ended up with twenty-two Belgian enclaves within their borders. Some of those Belgian enclaves are large enough to contain Dutch enclaves within their borders. 

All of this leads to complicated systems of language, identity documents, citizenship, transport, and of course, taxes. The borders often divide blocks, farms, houses, or businesses. A child born to Dutch parents in a Belgian hospital gets to pick their citizenship at the age of 18. When the café you’re in closes in the Netherlands, you can switch tables to the Belgian side, and keep right on drinking. If your house is bisected, your property taxes are determined by the nation into which your front door opens. So, it’s not unknown for flurries of construction to result when tax laws change. 

Luckily for the town’s residents, the two nations have long been closely aligned through Benelux and EU membership, so it’s easy enough for citizens of one nation to live or work in another. For more information about these entwined towns, check out the Atlantic Cities blog.

(photo by daveoleary)