Dito Von Tease:

In Classicool the subjects of the paintings abandon their classical pose by literally taking the canvas to “paint themselves”.

Via BruceS.

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A post shared by Cookiecuttercom (@otbp_cookiecutters) on Aug 24, 2018 at 9:56am PDT

Via kottke.

BFI:

Once upon a Line (1947)

“Model husbands” from 1947 show off the pulling power of their miniature trains.

Brendan Gaffney at Lost Art Press:

When I was a kid, my family had a wide selection of “bathroom books.” These were books that had been taken down from the shelves on a whim and left behind on the shelf above the toilet, either because their contents were intriguing or seemed appropriate for a brief perusal. I remember a manual on grading gravel roads, a book of palindromes and, most memorably, one called “The Art of Chindogu.” Chindogu, as I learned over many short reading sessions, is the Japanese art of the unuseless (yes, unuseless) invention. These creations either fulfilled a need or solved a problem, with the catch that the solution was often overbuilt, silly looking or impractical.

What I grew to like about chindogu was the enthusiasm and professionalism with which the wacky, hyper-specialized or odd inventions were pursued by their inventors. Each one was (somewhat) professionally manufactured and photographed, despite being prototypes that were never meant to be sold. They seem like a byproduct of the design process – sometimes, pursuing something niche, unprofitable or outlandish can teach us a lot about our work that doesn’t fall to such an extreme.

Via Marcus Trimble

Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand.

Berlin Club Memes:

Akiyoshi KITAOKA:

Via BruceS. See also Akiyoshi’s main page.

As a fan of Sandstorm covers with alternate instruments, I can’t not post this:

Of course this will never be topped:

Sakunthala:

This is sort of like an end-of-year book list, but a lot of good ideas are communicated via blogs and twitter, and they need recognition too! So, here’s a list of high-quality ideas and theories I read, and who I found them from.

Lexi Pandell at Wired:

It’s hard to explain Poppy to the uninitiated. But I’m going to try.

Let’s start with the edge of the Poppy rabbit hole: You see a woman in a YouTube video. She is blond and petite with the kind of Bambi-sized brown eyes you rarely encounter in real life. She seems to be in her late teens or early twenties, though her pastel clothing and soft voice are much more childlike.

Maybe you start with “I’m Poppy,” a video where she repeats that phrase over and over in different inflections for 10 minutes. That’s right. Ten minutes. She seems, by turns, bored, curious, and sweet. As it continues, you notice that her voice does not quite match the movement of her lips; it’s delayed just a beat.

You watch more. There’s a video of her interviewing a basil plant.

And two of her reading out loud from the Bible. In one, her nose spontaneously starts bleeding. All of her videos are like this: unsettling, repetitive, sparse. Imagine anime mixed with a healthy heap of David Lynch, a dash of Ariana Grande, and one stick of bubblegum.

I discovered a new part of the internet today:

Gonwild is a place for closed, Euclidean Geometric shapes to exchange their nth terms for karma; showing off their edges in a comfortable environment without pressure.

Dave at Bees and Bombs is pretty great:

and not so gemetric, but very artistic:

Owen Phillips in The Outline:

It was a Friday evening on the first T-shirt weather weekend of the year, but almost everyone in the small city of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was indoors. Families and friends hunkered down in basements or camped out in attics. Stores on Main Street were shuttered, black-out curtains hung in the windows. And everyone’s radio was tuned to the local college station, 90FM, where question after question was being read live over the air.

The occasion was the start of an annual tradition in Stevens Point: Trivia, the self-proclaimed world’s biggest trivia contest, in which thousands of players compete on hundreds of teams to answer eight questions every hour, for 54 hours straight.