Mad Quickies: in which the Soviets win this round.

It’s the Friday Quickies! Pencils down! Surf’s up!

• Kate Norlander is working hard to make her book venture a reality: Geek Culture, a coffee-table book about CONvergence, the Minnesota sci-fi and fantasy convention. Norlander teamed with photographer Emmerlee Sherman and her assistant, Russ Gamache. Let’s Kickstart this, you guys.
• In this segment from The Moth, astronaut Michael J. Massimino details his high stakes mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Included at the site is a minute of video showing Massimino’s infamous MacGyvered repair.
• Artist Maico Akiba has created toy mammals and dinosaurs burdened with miniature civilizations.
• Your moment of beauty: scroll through this very personal work of natural sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy, a British artist who creates fleeting outdoor installations from found materials.
• These images are from the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik and are a pretty gory and grotesque example of Soviet antireligious propaganda. You could never fault these pieces for being subtle, that’s for sure. {via Daniela}
• And here’s another example of Soviet art that is a far cry from subtle as well. Except this one is decidedly NSFW. Erotic Soviet-era typography was designed to combat adult illiteracy. I…What? {via Courtney}
• An interesting think piece at Pajiba by Steven Lloyd Wilson: How Memory Interconnects Everything We Watch and Read.
• The New Yorker‘s Margaret Talbot has nothing good to say about Penguin UK’s cover of the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Talbot reports, “Commenters on Penguin’s Facebook page called it ‘creepy,’ ‘sexualized’ and ‘inappropriate garbage.’” It’s a dilly of a misstep.