joanielspeak - Tumblr blog

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x files studies but this time I tired to achieve that VHS feeling. I very vaguely remember watching some episodes as a kid, and I think this is as close as I've ever got to recreating that memory of a small, grainy tv in a dark room

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Trump’s closest allies are turning on him.

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They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”

88,000 new free images just dropped, to use however you like.

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Neon Dusk

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FERDINAND VAN KESSEL

The Dance of the Rats, ca. 1690

Staedel

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Bay View Motel

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Pasquale Autorino

via clovis melo

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Art by Esao Andrews.

~Honolei Philippia Spein Rue Havorlee

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Fábio Magalhães, Untitled (Intimate Portraits Series), 2013 Oil on canvas

https://paulodaregaleria.com.br/en/artistas/fabio-magalhaes/

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Here's possibly my favorite 'floating city' art ever. It's by Vicente Segrelles for the 1978 German translation of 'Armada of Antares,' by Alan Burt Akers. I love the organic touches - the rope bridge, vines, birds. And why is just one city decaying like that? Mysterious!

​This is my personal scan and, I believe, the highest quality version available online. My free email newsletter subscribers got to see it first! You can check out the full issue here.

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Letterlocking: the long-lost art of using paper-folding to foil snoops

“Letterlocking” is a term coined by MIT Libraries conservator Jana Dambrogio after she discovered a trove of letters while spelunking in the conservation lab of the Vatican Secret Archives; the letters had been ingeniously folded and sealed so that they couldn’t be opened and re-closed without revealing that they had been read. Some even contained “booby traps” to catch the unwary.

Dambroglio and her colleagues have since been painstaking reconstructing these long-lost letterlocking techniques (which they hypothesize led to the development of the modern envelope), and documenting their findings in an online Letterlocking dictionary that documents the techniques, tools, and jargon of their discipline.

Letterlocking got a huge boost in 2012 when Yale’s Rebekah Ahrendt discovered 600 unopened 17th century letters in at the Hague post-office; the letters were in a larger collection of undeliverable post, held against a date that someone came forward to claim them. Prior to the trove’s discovery, letterlocking had been primarily studied through reconstruction, using fold-marks, dirt, and traces of seals on multiple documents to try to recover the lost techniques.

Dambroglio and a colleague named Daniel Starza Smith are self-described letterlocking “evangelists,” having distributed 10,000+ replica letterlocked-letters in the hopes of reviving the practice.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/15/security-thru-topology.html

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prompt 2401

“Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.”  ― China Miéville

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A mock funeral held for Laura Palmer in Tokyo on February 23, 1992.