Chess board… swim lounge?

Elder Enby Millennial Failed Artist, College Dropout More Cat Pics Than Sense

[hahahahawk]

A few months ago I got an email from LiveJournal congratulating me on 20 years on the site, despite not logging in for probably 15 of them.

When reddit ended 3rd party apps earlier this year, I came (back) to tumblr in search of cat pics, memes, and other small doses of dopamine.

Mostly here to scroll and lurk (my creative confidence is pretty well buried) but figured I’d add a few about me tidbits in case I dare to comment and OP dares to trace it back.

[florencemachines]

Spring in movies:

The Secret Garden (1993) filmed mainly in Yorkshire, England (Allerton House, Fountains Hall and  Luton Hoo). The garden was built from scratch at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

[ahhhdownwego]

I really tried to tip the scales in your favor

[magicratfingers]

if u want to ride the lightning you have to saddle train the lightning

[magicratfingers]

find high value treats and build a trust bond with the lightning

[terraswallows]

You sure about that hun?

[abbiistabbii]

Clicked play, heard the pings, switched desktops to check discord, found nothing, realized it was coming from here.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN CALLED OUT HARDER.

[hahahahawk]

Literally the post above this one on my dash was someone fussing about hallucinating discord notifs

[zwoelffarben]

is this anything?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

as a younger person I'd sometimes get overwhelmed with the violence of the world, not just human violence but the violence done to animals and by animals, the innate violence of being an animal. because an animal is, by definition, an organism that must consume other organisms to live. and this would lodge in my spiraling young adult mind, the tragedy that to live, to be a creature, is to cause harm. that life is sustained by consuming life.

eventually I got older (and medicated), but in the meantime spending time in woodland really helped. it comforted me to be around plantlife, which feeds not on life but on sunlight, and therefore causes no harm.

anyway now I'm reading The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (incredible book) and it turns out that was a big fat LIE. forests are violent as FUCK

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

life as a tree is fucking BRUTAL. ok no they don't actually eat each other (well, not until they've been broken down and digested by microorganisms first) but competition is FIERCE. sunlight and water are finite resources. survival rates are dismal. a tree can release a million seeds in a lifetime and have only one offspring live to maturity. some species evolved ways of stealing sunlight from trees who got there first, bidding their time as a sapling then shooting out from under older canopies to hog as as much light as possible. next-door neighbors? fuck em, let em starve.

then you get shit like epiphytes that decided to just grow on top of other plants. strangler fig vines, for instance, which decided well fuck, im just gonna cling to this tree trunk and let it do the support work. maybe entangle our roots and envelope my host completely over time. oopsie my host died? that's ok I'll just cling to its corpse for eternity

equally horrifying is the honeysuckle, which preys on young trees boa-constrictor style, squeezing the life out of saplings, which grow with permanent deformities before dying prematurely (makes for a neat walking stick though)

then you get out and proud parasites like mistletoe who are happy to attach themselves to tree canopies and suck their blood extract water and nutrients. so yeah some plants do eat each other actually. gives ya some perspective on the old christmas tradition of hunting mistletoe with guns (yes that's a thing, shooting them down out of trees like squirrels. yes, unlike squirrels they deserve it). as for the romance angle, who doesn't want to kiss a lover beneath the dying corpse of a parasitic trophy kill? sexy as heck.

in conclusion, PLANTS ARE VIOLENT AS FUCK, and that's not even getting into the eternal chemical warfare they are forced to wage against insects, fungi, microbes and other enemies.

one day soon the forests will turn on us, and when that day comes I'm cheerfully betraying humanity and skipping away to cross enemy lines 🫡

kofi

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

to those who thought this post was heading in a heartwarming direction, i do NOT apologize and i DO hope the forest and its creeping mycelium tendrils crawl their way into your nightmares

[calllynx]

The shape of love

[calllynx]

This is on paper btw

[hahahahawk]

Literally dozens of us.

[hahahahawk]

There’s a crab character in Dungeon Crawler Carl and in the latest book (inevitable ruin), there’s a line about the crab…

…

Since DCC doesn’t use cultivation terminology, I had a hunch and did a quick search…

…

1) holy shit, internet searches are trash these days

2) this *is* DuckDuckGo, so it didn’t surface Reddit results unprompted, but google did, more on that in a minute

3) only one result on the front page of DDG results mentioned both book series. Oddly enough, most of them were for Heretical Fishing, not DCC, but anyway:

…

So that’s some confirmation of a nod in one direction.

Doing the same search on google brought up (surprise surprise) primarily Lit RPG chatter on Reddit, which pointed out a few things:

- the first book of Heretical Fishing very directly called out other litRPG/progression fantasy books including DCC and Cradle, and was released in March 2024.

- Eye of the Bedlam Bride came out in 2023, so no chance Raul is a direct reference, and Inevitable Ruin in November 2024, which makes it seem unlikely (but still possible) that the line at the top of this post is a direct nod to HF.

Reddit chatter says that Raul is voiced by Travis Baldree in both audiobooks which definitely points more to the Beware of Chicken connection (which I’ve never read, but is in my audible library), but Raul is a CRAB which is basically the whole thing of Heretical Fishing.

Ah well.

[hahahahawk]

Look how they slaughtered my boy.

(It was me)

I loved this pencil case, and I’m heartbroken.

I’ve had this thing for fucking ages and it was a wonderful pencil case. Nice size, sturdy material, it had a lining.

After a couple years of not drawing much, I took my sketchbook and this case to the zoo on Sunday. When it was finally time to set pen to paper, the zipper wouldn’t open. Not just that it was stuck, but I couldn’t get it to budge in either direction.

I decided not to force it while we were at the zoo, since I didn’t want it to open explosively and leave me with a couple dozen loose implements. But I figured there was a thread caught in the zipper, and I could cut it open, repair the zipper, then mend the side.

Despite the small voice in my head telling me to cut it on the bias to minimize fraying, I went with a long lateral cut, imagining a caterpillar embroidery patch. Also longer cut would give easier access for flipping it inside out to work on the zipper. After the incision was made and pens removed, I found there was not a loose thread stuck in the zipper. In fact, the interior seams were all nicely bound! (I ruined a very nice pencil case) (that was already ruined and inoperable)

When the patient was open on my table, the zipper kinda just behaved. I can’t see anything that would’ve caused the sticking except *maybe* (probably) wear/fraying on the zipper tape itself at the closed end.

*Maybe* (probably not), I could have figured out the right pressure/wiggling to get the zipper to work normally and gotten more years of use out of it, but instead I disemboweled it and set myself up for a difficult repair that wouldn’t actually solve the original issue.

A beloved object is lost.

I was strong and put the corpse of my old companion in the trash. I wasn’t strong enough to put it in the kitchen trash with all the wet gunk that goes in there. I put it in my office trash can that’s dry and dusty but still “clean” in case I break down and try to rescue it.

But I know that I’m better off switching my pencil case affection to a new thing-to-hold stuff, maybe one that I make myself with Qualities my old grey one could only dream of.

Maybe.

Probably.

Did you hear how *nice* that old one was? It had a *lining*

[memories-of-ancients]

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

from The Hunt Museum, Limerick

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

[localxenospores]

i was compelled

[beastoftheblackhole]

I was also compelled

[cckid01]

@randomitemdrop

[randomitemdrop]

Item: Walking Honker

[loucifersbitch]

if you need me, i’ll be sobbing on the floor. humans, man

[zegalba]

Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas (2008)

[keynes-fetlife-mutual]

I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.

Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.

If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.

[transhuman-priestess]

@puppygirllaika

[puppygirllaika]

I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!

The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.

Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.

Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.

This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:

The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.

Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).

Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:

Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.

Enter: the Fauteuil 300

This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.

What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.

With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.

And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.

That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.

sources below.

(1) https://www.greggsimpson.com/DCSimpson.htm (2) https://www.greggsimpson.com/Furniture.html (3) https://www.cnn.com/style/article/history-of-plastic-chairs-karim-rashid/index.html (4) https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O372075/bofinger-chair-stacking-chair-rudolf-baresel-bofinger/ (5) https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2006AT2686/full/2200,/0/default.jpg (6) https://www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions/detailpages/monobloc-a-chair-for-the-world.html

@keynes-fetlife-mutual tagging you because your reblog about Baas work makes me think you would appreciate this.

[butterfly-sapphic]

Always fun to learn about a tumblr friends surprise special interest

[cryoverkiltmilk]

We all hear about the hatemail and PVP, but this site is also unmatched for activating a trap card.

[catchymemes]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it's immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like "yeah so this is going to happen to the internet" and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don't even get paid for it

[hahahahawk]

Every time somebody in the Dungeon Crawler Carl books pats someone’s head, take a drink