The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
A professor gave us an extra credit option: take a picture of yourself outside, doing something that you would not usually do. We were told not to take it too seriously. Here is my entry:
I maintain that sticking my head in the mailbox is not something I do on a regular basis.
The professor has said that he will put all submitted pictures into a powerpoint to be shown in class tomorrow (Tuesday, March 9th). I am very much looking forward to seeing the reaction from him and from the rest of the class. I promise to keep you informed.
Update: the professor saved my picture for last. I was told that I had "truly embodied the spirit of the assignment" and that I had gone "above and beyond."
Also, to everyone who is worrying about whether or not I got my head out, I was gifted with a very small head, and while I got out just fine I would NOT recommend this if you have a large head or even a normal sized head.
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.
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.
You are in the middle of it, squinting at every little detail. You know which brush strokes were intentional and which ones were your hand twitching. Or that you mixed your paint a little off.
Other people don't know that.
They only see the finished product from a distance. And yeah they "could" get up in your artwork with a magnifying glass and pick out what they think are mistakes. But some of those may have been intentional om your part and some things they will miss.
They aren't in your head.
My thing is to step a ways back from my work and look at it from a distance where the individual little details just start to get muzzy (i can achieve this by taking off my glasses but do what works for you). I guarantee you will get a much more accurate view of what others will see.
This is the map you drew. Of course you know every little hill and valley. You're too close.
Shen Jiu's cognitive dissonance when it comes to emotions and physiological reactions is so incredibly important to me, actually. It's particularly important that no, it's not that he can't feel a positive emotion, but that he's just incapable of recognizing it, to the point where he automatically ends up interpreting any heightened feelings as something negative. If his heart rate is increasing as a reaction to something good happening, he sorts it as fear, and so it becomes fear-- if he's blushing he'll automatically think of it as embarrassment or shame, even if it's not. It's all part of the pattern of self-sabotage that's woven through everything he does, thinks, and feels.
It's what makes it so hard to give him "redemption" or healing stories, because even healing itself becomes something negative and reinforces the same patterns in his mind.
This is ESPECIALLY about physiological reactions to emotional stimuli. I feel like Shen Jiu is someone with a very... complicated and combative relationship with his own body and himself as a person. He is so thoroughly repulsed by himself that to acknowledge that he feels things is to acknowledge something repulsive.
And since cultivation requires a close attunement with your body and its responses, it just makes even more sense why he has such difficulties with it and ends up in qi deviation so often.
All this so much. Almost 600k into my massive "give-qijiu-a-happy-ending" fic and he's gotten a little better but every. single. step. is like dragging a whole tree through the forest while it's getting stuck on every other tree around it. He's gotta be one of the most difficult characters to give happiness I swear...
Doing some digging and it's called Cybersix, based on an Argentinian comic book but created in English, never fully aired in the US and I think was censored there, but all 13 eps were shown in Canada. It's apparently on Hulu atm but I have no idea in what form
the entire show is up for free on TMS' youtube channel
CYBERSIX (EP01 - 13) Von Reichter is a professor who works on experiments in South America, creating the Cyber Series, artificial humanoids
Also it was not animated by Trigger. Trigger didn't exist yet. It was animated by TMS who famously did the animation for several early 90s cartoons like Animaniacs and Batman the Animated Series. As well as local anime like Lupin the third, Dr. Stone, and Fruits Basket. They also work in Collaboration shows like Cybersix and the 1990s Moomin show.
Studio Trigger was formed in 2011 by former Gainax studio members.
I'd like to note they left out the best part the love interest flirts with the Mc in both masc and fem identities, the masc less so but the sub text there
