We've seen cities around the world ruined by radiation, pollution, political shifts, and depleted resources. At first glance, Zabbaleen looks like another set of modern ruins, a city crushed beneath our waste — a real-life version of Futurama's "Big Piece of Garbage."

But Zabbaleen is actually a thriving community built on the use and repurposing of waste. Residents of the city, which sits just outside of Cairo, collect trash from wealthier cities and use or reuse some 80 to 90 percent of it. Some of the waste is fed to livestock or burned for fuel; what can be repaired is fixed and sold. Much of their business consists of sorting and cleaning items and then selling them as scrap. Zabbaleen residents performed the service for the government, and now many waste management companies outsource their business to the city. But the citizens still live at poverty levels and amidst heaps and heaps of garbage.

Incredible ‘Garbage City' Rises Outside of Cairo [Inhabitat]

And writer Paul McAuley says it may be about to happen again:

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it's about to implode again. And because they can't hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that's changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably.... While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

The question is, if SF publishing does have another implosion, where will authors go this time? Porn publishing has been even harder hit by the Internet than other genres. Where will the suddenly starving SF authors turn this time around? [Paul McAuley]

Blommaert creates whimsical scenes of trash-inspired aliens and monsters: a giant bird made of plastic trophies, a pair of critters who retrieve their companion's head (which is made up of back issues of Nature), and spiky-topped bipeds with egg crate arms and coffee cup fingers. In addition to the finished products, Blommaert's Flickr stream includes a series of "making of" photos, showing the strange array of materials that went into his trashy creatures.

[Blommaert's Flickr via FFFFOUND!]

Looks like Wall-E's little bug sidekick will make it to the game as well, so that might be a bit of a spoiler news: he doesn't get squished and sent to insectoid heaven in the flick. Players will be able to play head-to-head in the multiplayer version of this game, so we're not sure if that means multiple Wall-E's or what. but we're sincerely hoping they don't rush this game out to coincide with the flick, giving us a crappy game that vanishes from shelves in the blink of an eye. If it does, at least we'll have this artwork to fondly remember it by. Wall-E: First Screenshots [Team Xbox]