BoredReading

Memento Mori: How Smiling Skeletons Have Reminded Us to Live Fully Since Ancient Times

16 hours ago

from Open Culture in creative

The expression “YOLO” may now be just passé enough to require explanation. It stands, as only some of us would try to deny remembering, for “You only...

Scarcity and abundance

15 hours ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

There are two ways to think about achievement and the idea of getting ahead: Perhaps it’s a race. Getting ahead means beating the competition. But...

One-in-70-Trillion: An Evolutionary Biologist Explains the Mind-Bending Probability of Our Existence

15 hours ago

from Open Culture in creative

At a 1998 conference on technology and life, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams once proposed the notion of a sentient puddle....

Compounding luck

2 days ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Human luck doesn’t even out. Regression to the mean explains that in statistics, outlying events tend to be overcome by average ones. But in society,...

The Spinal Tap Sequel Arrives Next Month: Watch the Trailer and a Scene with Elton John & Paul McCartney

2 days ago

from Open Culture in creative

This Is Spinal Tap came out more than 40 years ago. At the time, says director Rob Reiner in a recent interview at San Diego Comic-Con, “nobody got...

Meet The Maker: Fiona Rimmer

3 days ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

Hi, my name is Fiona Rimmer and I'm a printmaker/etcher from Hampshire, UK where I live with my husband, 3 sons and a beautiful dog called Skyla (the...

The table of contents (and the index)

3 days ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

The index is the search bar, the random access to the facts we can look up. The table of contents, though, that’s a point of view. It’s a taxonomy of...

Watch Meshes of the Afternoon, the Experimental Short Voted the 16th Best Film of All Time

3 days ago

from Open Culture in creative

It seems not to be documented whether the Santa Ana winds were blowing when Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied shot Meshes of the Afternoon. But...

Speedball Speedy Carve Block using Process Colours

3 days ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

Speedy Carve Blocks are delicious to cut and a joy to print. We have featured them many times in our blog, but this time we have created a process...

Emma Willard, the First Female Mapmaker in America, Creates Pioneering Maps of Time to Teach Students about Democracy (Circa 1851)

3 days ago

from Open Culture in creative

We all know Marshall McLuhan’s pithy, endlessly quotable line “the medium is the message,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The...

A new tool to help you get unstuck

4 days ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

I’ve spent months creating something I’m excited to share: The Mentor Deck. Here’s an invite for 2,000 people to purchase and test the very first...

A Live Studio Cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Finish

4 days ago

from Open Culture in creative

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is such a work of art that to split it up into nine tracks—like classic rock radio has done for years—always sounds...

What sort of better?

5 days ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Sneakers are better for running a marathon, but shoes are better for a wedding reception. This is the better of utility. Finding something that does...

Watch Anémic Cinéma, Marcel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926)

5 days ago

from Open Culture in creative

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) made some heady art. His whole goal was to “put art back in the service of the mind,” or to create what Jasper Johns once...

Movies, books and paintings

6 days ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

No important movie has ever been a solo project. While we can see a director’s point of view from movie to movie, the collaborative nature of the work...

Hundreds of Medieval Medical Manuscripts with Strange Cures Get Digitized & Put Online: From Leeches to Crushed Weasel Testicles

a week ago

from Open Culture in creative

If any discussion of medieval medicine gets going, it’s only a matter of time before someone brings up leeches. And it turns out that the centrality...

In theory…

a week ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Anything that works in practice can work in theory. When a theory tells us something that is working is impossible, we’ve either measured wrong or the...

Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only 5 Years Old

a week ago

from Open Culture in creative

A preternaturally talented, precocious child, barely out of toddlerhood, in powdered wig and knee-breeches, capering around the great houses of 18th...

Mostly unreasonable

a week ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

It’s tempting to go to an extreme. Unreasonable design standards, quality or hospitality are an effective way to gain share, delight customers and...

An Introduction to Aleister Crowley, History’s Most Infamous Occultist

a week ago

from Open Culture in creative

“Do what thou wilt”: as the central principle of a worldview, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many people ready and...

The menu

a week ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

A while ago, I ate in a restaurant that had no menu. The waiter simply walked over to the table and said, “what do you want?” As bold as statement as...

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

a week ago

from Open Culture in creative

Image by Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia Commons When New York City hosted The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asimov, the prolific...

The order and the medium of feedback

a week ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Who do you pay attention to? Do you respond or react to the feedback that’s coming in? Do you seek it out or wait for it to arrive? Does vivid online...

Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”

a week ago

from Open Culture in creative

Image by Dosseman, via Wikimedia Commons In 2012, archaeologists discovered in Southern Turkey a well-preserved mosaic featuring a skeleton savoring a...

Hi beams

a week ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

(Car dashboards don’t have room to spell out the whole word). On a country road, late at night, when there are no other cars around, the hi beams are...

How Disney Fought Fascism with Propaganda Cartoons During World War II & Averted Financial Collapse

2 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

Today, the Walt Disney Company seems like one of those entities that’s “too big to fail” — but during the Second World War, fail it nearly did. Like...

How much extra is the gift wrap?

2 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

One way to turn a product or service into a story is to gift wrap it. Yes, you did my taxes, but did you include a two-page summary and a useful...

Plato, Aristotle & Other Greek Philosophers in Raphael’s Renaissance Masterpiece, The School of Athens

2 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

Among the wonders to behold at the Vatican Museums are the larger-than-life forms of the titans of Greek philosophy. It’s widely known that at the...

Meet The Maker: Polly Marix Evans

2 weeks ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

Hello, I’m Polly, and I’m a linocut printmaker based in the Eden Valley in rural Cumbria. Much of my work features a character known as Bun-Head, a...

Seeing the lottery

2 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

At least the Powerball tells the truth. In a state run lottery, the deal is very simple: You pay your money, you take your chances. The government...

Watch The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne: A Documentary on the Heavy Metal Pioneer (RIP)

2 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

“This is supposed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip included in the Biography television documentary above. He then gives the...

Casual cruelty

2 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume? What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule? The cat and the dog probably...

The Iconic Glass House Built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—and the Lawsuit That Cast a Shadow Over It

2 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

It’s tempting, in telling the story of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”...

Resilience is a practice

2 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up...

The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein

2 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

With the Halloween season mere months away, the time has come to start thinking about what frightening reads to line up for ourselves this year. Some...

Lunging

2 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

A useful metaphor from juggling: When you find yourself lunging for a ball or club, let it drop. Lunging will always lead to a drop sooner or later,...

And around we go... Making We're So Over, We're So Back

3 weeks ago

from Blog - Mac Pierce in creative

The process of making an single purpose art PC that uses an aluminum casting as the radiator for a water-cooling loop.

Tasks and projects

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

School is a training ground for task-based thinking. “Will this be on the test?” You finish your homework and then you can go out and play. This is...

Revisit One of the Most Polarizing Albums in Rock History: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Which Came Out 50 Years Ago

3 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed nearly destroyed his own career with one double album. Metal Machine Music sold 100,000 copies during the three...

The talking dog

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

First mistake: If you meet a talking dog in the street and it makes a few grammatical errors or speaks with an accent, you don’t use a few errors to...

How Jackie Chan Filmed the Best Fight Scene in Cinema History

3 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

Though now in his seventies, Jackie Chan continues to appear on the big screen with regularity. For most world-famous actors, that’s hardly notable,...

Creating Screen Films using Sumi Ink

3 weeks ago

from Handprinted - Blog in creative

Sumi Ink is fantastic for making hand-drawn screen films that create exposed screens with texture and loose spontaneous marks. Sumi ink can be painted...

Overappreciated

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

It’s all too easy to be familiar with being underappreciated. Customers, clients, vendors, colleagues–we’d like them to notice and acknowledge our...

The Story Told on the Famous Bayeux Tapestry Explained from Start to Finish

3 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

They say that history is written by the victors, but that isn’t always true: sometimes it’s embroidered by the victors. Such was the case with the...

Sunk costs and the framework for forward motion

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Everything that happened yesterday, and the yesterdays before that, is real. It happened. Perhaps it’s the hard work you did to earn a degree, or a...

The Entire History of English in 22 Minutes

3 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

When we speak English, we might say we’re speaking the language of Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote its first dictionary. Or we could say we’re...

The Superman metaphors

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

Sooner or later, we are all superheroes. Superman wears a costume. As we all do. He isn’t great at time management, always focused on the urgency at...

How the Ancient Greeks Built Their Magnificent Temples: The Art of Ancient Engineering

3 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian: these, as practically everyone who went through school in the West somehow remembers, are the three varieties of classical...

The four arcs

3 weeks ago

from Seth's Blog in creative

They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make...

The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Discover 4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Babylon

4 weeks ago

from Open Culture in creative

If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Italian, Mexican, or...