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Part of the 2020 Vancouver Mural Festival

During the public comment portion of a recent San Diego city council meeting, the council called for the next comment to take the podium: "Darth Vader?" As he approached the microphone in his black helmet and cape, his heavy breathing reached the mic before he did.

At the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee Meeting on August 19, Vader — whose identity is not revealed during the meeting — spoke passionately in support of Flock in San Diego.

"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," Vader said. "Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers; they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?" 

Vader asked the council members to "work their Jedi mind tricks" and use "double speaking" to convince people that more surveillance is good. He referenced a June 2023 city council vote in favor of San Diego's Unsafe Camping Ordinance, which critics say effectively criminalized homelessness.

"This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force," Vader said. 

There are more than 550 Flock cameras installed around the city of San Diego, according to publicly available data aggregated by Flock tracking map DeFlock. 

San Diego signed a year-long deal to join Flock's Nova service, giving the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) access to "open source intelligence" and data from other law enforcement agencies, Axios reported in April. 

As 404 Media recently reported, Nova supplements license plate data with personal information sourced from other companies and the wider web. “You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person [...] marriage or through gang affiliation, et cetera,” a Flock employee said during an internal company meeting, according to an audio recording obtained by 404 Media. “There’s very powerful linking.”

In June, SDPD stopped sharing surveillance data with federal authorities and other out-of-state agencies following Attorney General Rob Bonta's office warning the police the actions were likely violating state law that prohibits local police departments from sharing ALPR data with outside law enforcement agencies, according to local news outlet KPBS.

A San Diego man recently spent a month in jail after a Flock camera wrongfully flagged him for a felony crime involving brandishing a handgun, his attorney claims. That man is now preparing to sue the city, the Times of San Diego reported. 

If you are the Sith Lord who spoke at the August 19 meeting, please get in touch: sam@404media.co.

Direct midday sun falls on one side of this 1,800-square-foot apartment, and Inga Kordya designed the living room around it. The custom shutter doors are made from tinted oak, built to the proportions of traditional Korean doors and fitted with brass handles shaped like eight-petal flowers. Closed, they convert a hard beam into a pattern of intervals across the floor. The mechanism draws from the same principle used in a hanok, where changhoji—mulberry paper stretched over a wooden lattice—diffuses daylight into an even wash before it enters the room.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

Kordya spent time in the historic South Korean districts of Bukchon and Namsangol studying those 14th-century structures while designing the Moscow apartment. The home is for a Korean couple raising two young daughters in a monolithic residential complex several thousand kilometers from Seoul.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

The Rimadesio sliding doors apply the same principle using industrial materials. Matte glass replaces the paper and vertical mullions replace the lattice, with both components performing similar functions: the glass scatters transmitted light, and the mullions set a rhythm across the opening. The living room stays visually connected to the central hall while remaining a separate zone, replicating the flexibility a paper screen provides where a solid wall cannot.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

Three bedrooms and three bathrooms are arranged around a central hall that absorbs circulation and draws light into the apartment’s core, occupying a role similar to the madang courtyard in a hanok. The two daughters share a sliding partition between their rooms that opens the pair into one space for play. The apartment is therefore not a fixed set of rooms but a series of surfaces that can be repositioned, echoing the way hanok interiors have traditionally allowed families to reconfigure the same volume through the day and across seasons.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

Material selection supports the light strategy. Marble, granite, natural wood, brass, ceramics, linen, wool, and cotton all read through texture and reflectance rather than saturated color. Large-format ceramic tiles cover the hall floor, chosen for their texture and tactile quality, beneath a Japanese woodblock print on handmade paper sourced in the Netherlands for the project. The main bathroom shifts to deep gray for a more graphic character, while the primary bedroom uses rotating brass sconces, giving occupants control over where light lands, much like the shutters in the living room.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

Rather than reproducing the appearance of a traditional Korean home, Kordya translated some of its underlying principles—filtered light, flexible boundaries, and adaptable rooms—into a contemporary apartment. The result carries those ideas across thousands of kilometers without asking the architecture to imitate where they came from.

Photography by Mikhail Loskutov

Loud, colorful statement watches tend to arrive with summer, but vivid color has also become increasingly visible across the watch world. Industry heavy hitters have embraced brighter palettes, including Rolex with its multicolored Jubilee-motif Oyster Perpetual 36 and the recent Audemars Piguet x Swatch collab. The Hublot Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue fits neatly into that landscape, while building on the brand’s decade-long experimentation with color and transparent materials.

Photography courtesy of Hublot

For the past 10 years, Hublot has made sapphire-cased watches a significant part of its material experimentation. Where the material presents significant challenges in machining and finishing, Hublot has made those technical constraints a recurring part of its design language. The brand has released numerous sapphire-cased timepieces, including several pieces using colored sapphire. With its latest addition to the sapphire arsenal, Hublot returned to clear sapphire with the new Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue, released in July and limited to 100 pieces globally at $84,300.

Photography courtesy of Hublot

This latest release centers on the brand’s distinctly complex Big Bang multi-piece case, with its construction fully visible through the transparent material. The 44 mm clear case is paired with a structured sky-blue rubber strap, and thanks to the brand’s quick-release system, owners can swap to a variety of alternative straps at the push of a button without tools.

Powering the watch is Hublot’s Manufacture HUB1201 Meca-10, a manually wound movement whose skeletonized architecture draws on mechanical construction systems. Its 223 components include two parallel mainspring barrels that deliver a 10-day power reserve, along with a rack-and-pinion system that creates the movement’s distinctive dual power-reserve display. Rather than relying on a conventional dial to carry the color, Hublot pairs a matte sky-blue skeleton dial with matching movement bridges, making the mechanics part of the color story rather than hiding them behind a conventional dial.

Photography courtesy of Hublot

This new version of the Meca-10 offers a sharp visual contrast to its counterparts: Nearly all other Meca-10 models are finished in shades of black, gray, and gold, giving them a more austere, almost brutalist aesthetic than the Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue.

Pairing the sky-blue dial and movement bridges with a clear rather than tinted sapphire case also sets the watch apart from other models in Hublot’s current lineup. The Big Bang Unico Water Blue Sapphire, for example, features a light blue-tinted sapphire case and a silver skeletonized movement. Here, reversing that relationship shifts the color from the case to the watch’s inner architecture, with the transparent sapphire providing an unobstructed view.

Photography courtesy of Hublot

That combination brings together two threads Hublot has been developing for a decade: sapphire cases and the exposed mechanical architecture of the Meca-10, both of which the brand introduced in 2016. In the Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue, the transparent case puts that architecture on display while the sky-blue dial and bridges give its individual components greater visual definition.

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” on Tuesday night. The moratorium is a delaying tactic, the latest in the Township’s long fight to stop the construction of a $1.2 billion data center that’s backed by the University of Michigan and the Pentagon’s nuclear war scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Last year, the university announced it was partnering with LANL on the construction of a massive 220,000 square foot hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township and residents have been fighting it ever since. During a meeting of the Township Board on August 18, the council unanimously passed a resolution that will delay the construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days.

Data centers need a lot of energy, and Michigan’s power authority will have to build new substations in the Township to power the proposed facility. The moratorium asked the local power authorities to use the six month delay to study noise pollution and how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers. 

The moratorium is narrowly focused on “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users.”

Earlier this month, the University of Michigan announced it had settled on a specific plot of land in Ypsilanti Township — a 144-acre plot on Textile Road. In a press release about the decision, the University said the data center would have the “capacity to change the world” and insisted it would not be a “high value target risk” in a war, that it would not store any hazardous nuclear material, and was not a weapons production facility. LANL previously confirmed that the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told WEMU news that the selection of the site was a “travesty of justice” because it ignores constituents’ concerns about environmental impact.

During the August 18 moratorium vote, the Board projected a large stock photograph of an electric substation behind its members. The photo was meant to remind people of the size of the incoming infrastructure and the lack of communication from the university about it.

“This picture’s really important to think about because U of M has been so crystal clear that they’ve been communicating to us abundantly — which is not true,” Strumbo said during the meeting. “That speaks to the lack of respect.”

Ypsilanti Township's data center fight is unique in that its board of local leaders are united with the community in opposition to the project. Township Board members have repeatedly spoken about the University's lack of respect and lack of communication. “We will fight to our very last breath,” Strumbo said during a Board meeting in June. In April, the Board voted to institute a 365 moratorium on delivering water to data centers. The University threatened legal action in response and called the move “discriminatory.” 

The University of Michigan declined to comment on this story.