inventive

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In patent law, invention is a two-step process: the inventor first develops a complete mental picture of the invention, then physically makes the invention or describes it in sufficient detail for an artisan to make it. Both steps must take place, in that order, for a creation to qualify as an invention. This…

A man walks into a bar. Well, no. At the beginning of poet Joelle Taylor’s first novel, a woman called Jones walks into a tattoo parlour. It’s 2233 and weather programmers have calibrated this part of London to “endless spring”. The already heavily tattooed Jones asks the two artists, Small and Cass, to connect all the images on her body by a thin line, using ink mixed with a vial of her mother’s blood. This will be an act of unification and completion.The 23rd-century tattoo parlour is a retro one. The tattooists may use…

Three songs into the second album by the Smile, Thom Yorke informs us that he’s had it. “It takes away, it takes the fun out,” he keens, to Read the Room’s vinegary guitar riff. “Maybe I can’t be arsed.” Long-term observers of Yorke’s songwriting might also greet this with a shrug. For decades, his lyrics have mapped out an overcast emotional territory bordered by fear, anger, despair and ennui. So it is on Wall of Eyes. There are twitchy songs inhabited by nameless sources of dread, suggestions that something terrible is…

“American Arcadia turns The Truman Show into an interactive indie thriller you don't want to miss.” Pros Great retro future art style Gripping story Strong lead performance Clever puzzle platforming Cons Satire loses its focus at times Chase scenes get repetitive Trevor…

Wordle 766 answer for July 25: Even for the most experienced and skilled players of the game, it is common to get an early hiccup or struggle in an average puzzle. And this happens because a person is not able to apply the same level of thought to the game every day. Some days, you don't feel like solving the puzzle or just get over it quickly. It can be because you're in vacation mode, have a lot of workloads, or just because you're feeling unwell. But since the Wordle streak is a big thing and losing a day means losing…

The debut film from Irish director Andrew Legge is a pacy, thrillingly inventive found-footage mockumentary that purports to show the invention, in 1940, of a machine that can intercept television and radio broadcasts from the future. The device is named Lola in honour of the mother of the machine’s creators: two sisters, Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Mars (Stefanie Martini). And at first, Lola is a portal to new artistic and cultural frontiers. But then, as the second world war escalates, the machine becomes part of the…

The writing of Haruki Murakami has inspired numerous cinema adaptations, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. But nothing, so far, as odd and inventive as the adult animation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, the feature film-making debut of French composer Pierre Földes. This surreal English-language collection of interlinked stories is set in and around Tokyo in the recent aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. A cat goes missing, a marriage breaks down, a large, extravagantly…

I know what you’re thinking: “You’re trying to sell me on tinned fish? How ... exciting.” But let me explain. Yes, tinned fish — canned tuna, sardines, anchovies, etc. — might seem dowdy and boring, but a few applications over the past week have made me see them in a new light.First, I attended a dinner cooked by Corrado Assenza, the Sicilian gelato maker made famous on the Netflix series “Chef’s Table.” Assenza is a master of preserving and transforming fruit into delicious conserves and marmalades. One dish we had was…

Polite Society, the feature debut from British writer-director Nida Manzoor, traffics in several familiar lanes: the coming-of-age high school comedy, a Bollywood movie, the light gravity-bending and slo-mo shots of a martial arts flick. Its particular flavor, however, is immediately distinctive and winning – at least at first. The 104-minute film from the creator of the TV series We Are Lady Parts has one of the most refreshing first halves of a comedy that I’ve seen, with a promising set-up: genuine sibling concern over…

In her spectacularly successful career to date, the composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw has already collaborated with an astonishingly wide range of performers, from Kanye West to Anne Sofie von Otter. And in 2021 she released two albums with Sō Percussion, the four-piece ensemble who, like Shaw, gleefully trample across the boundaries of musical genres, and who constantly provoke reassessments of what a percussion group can do.Together they have been touring a set drawn from those two albums, Narrow Sea and Let the Soil…