I found this perfectly cubic block of reconstituted foam. It immediately made me think of a) Minecraft, and b) William Gibson's description of recycled plastics from Communist-era East Germany.
They made, for instance, light-fixtures out of recycled plastics; the plastic was chopped up, melted and molded, but the various chopped bits retained their original color, resulting in a translucent solid that looks exactly like joke-shop vomit. Quite a lot of the infrastructural detail of East Germany, you see, looked as though it was made of solidified puke. The cruelty extended to the esthetic. Or perhaps it began there. Ugly. Unimaginably ugly.
