Comment by card_zero
1 day ago
> a normal fan that for some reason has a border around it
So, a ducted fan! That would be a sensible and practical design if your ceiling needed extra thrust for takeoff.
Cheap and stupid goods with threatening auras, indeed. Possibly a step up from the 90s when it was cheap and stupid goods with a Memphis Group primary school aesthetic. Hard to choose.
> Memphis Group primary school aesthetic
I had to look that up and found some pretty cool articles. I like that the vapourwave trend from the 2010s created a lot of focus on the different aesthetics of software and everyday things on the internet.
The latter two links are from a dedicated "aesthetics wiki". I tend to like the detailed user-created content on fandom.com wikis, but I loathe the site itself. At least a lot of the fan wikis have moved to wiki.gg, which has a much less intrusive design (speaking of aesthetics).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Memphis_Design
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Memphis_Jr.
The movie Beetlejuice (1988) contains within it a sort of aesthetic manifesto from Tim Burton, in which he rails against the passing of traditional architecture under the wave of Memphis modernity.
Before they die, the Maitlands lovingly restore their Connecticut Victorian home and even keep a model of the whole town up in their attic, as if capturing for themselves a bit of the town's bucolic New England charm. When they die, the Dietzes move in, and Delia declares psychotically, "I'll go crazy if you don't let me remodel this house!" With help from the obnoxious Otho she strips away the traditional Victorian trappings and turns the house into a modernist, Memphis-inspired nightmare, forcing the Maitlands to watch in horror as their hard work is destroyed (that is until they summon the title character). In keeping with the movie's structure as a "reverse ghost story" in which the ghosts are nice and the living humans are the horror.
Personally I find Memphis fascinating (though I wouldn't want to live there). I especially appreciate its influence on the design language of Sonic the Hedgehog games, as a complement to the greater variety of slopes, gradients, and curved ramps the early games afforded, to showcase the greater capabilities of the Sega Genesis. (That's really entirely why Sonic exists; some guys at Sega played Mario 3 and figured that they could "do Mario, but better".)