with every sunrise we are one day closer to elon musk killing himself in an embarrassing way

does anyone have that tweet that's like "talking to the ace hardware employee: gonna remodel an old brownstone by myself can I get the fisher price tool kit and stupid white paint"

THATS EXACTLY IT THANK YOU SO MUCH

STOP BEING CHRISTIAN!!!!!!!

we’re well into january we need to put fuckedelf back into the christmas decoration box

Dont forget me

They say hers is grippy but mine is scrubby

”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.

I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.

All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.

and thank you so much for doing all that!

The New Yorker July 20, 1957

the follow up here is absolutely fucking vital

It hurts so bad to see something so fun and whimsical be so far out of my price range

One of my parent friends attended a “kid friendly” new year celebration at the home of her well-off friends. Part of the idea was showing a recorded firework display on the big, shiny, expensive brand-new smart TV in the living room. Thus the small kids, aged 3 to 8 or so, could enjoy fireworks indoors, not waiting until midnight, and still enjoy the feeling of a new year party!

Unfortunately, part of the smart TV’s features and benefits was a function to responsively get louder in response to background noise, with the TV always trying to make itself the loudest thing in the room.

Experienced parents, upon hearing this, we all shared a moment of horror.

Imagine kids and a television battling it out to be heard above each other.

That family created their own hell.

this is the kind of feature that makes sense for like, five minutes, or until you start thinking about how it works in real life

I was on two house parties where everyone was drunk, some people couldn't hear the music so they were increasing the volume on the music player, and some people were trying to talk louder, because that damn music was too loud

So what I kept doing was lowering the volume of the music when no one noticed

I can't imagine how Fun would that TV be if we were to use it back then

Im getting emotional about this korean man who speaks in such poetic english