[alexanderwales]

I was reading through the U.S. Copyright Office's "What Does Copyright Protect?" page, mostly to make sure that I wasn't being wrong on the internet, but I absolutely love that this is part of their FAQ:

How do I protect my sighting of Elvis? Copyright law does not protect sightings. [,,,]

There are only 12 questions on the FAQ, and this is one of them.

[qxix]

Fanart for 2024's most absurd accidental deity.

[qxix]

Another intriguing ambiguity extracted from the noise. They aren't really anything, but the set of artistic and narrative constructs that could coherently contain them forms interesting shapes that I can almost make out.

[qxix]

[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.

[qxix]

i love prompt injection...i hope they never make their search AI smart enough to avoid being tricked

[qxix]

[qxix]

I'm back to injecting unnecessary levels of detail into curated semi-random AI scenes.

[str-ngeloop]

the rule of tumblr is that all your most insightful commentary must be buried under a mandatory "This is What You stupid fucking people Don't Fucking Get" just make it as hostile and offputting as possible. really aim to make people unsafe, cause we all know that's when people are most likely to listen

[collapsedsquid]

The workers must support the dictatorship of the Claude

[kleinergeist]

You don't even need to study for the Rorschach test, btw, it's super easy. All they do is show you a bunch of stupid pictures of your dad getting eaten by a horse

[hermann-rorschach]

Do not share the answers with your classmates.

[kleinergeist]

Yes Dr Rorschach

Sorry Dr Rorschach

[qxix]

Sorry for derailing a perfectly good joke with serious information, but I'd like to add that it actually is a good idea to study for the test if you suspect someone is going to use it on you.

The Rorschach test is pseudoscientific and untrustworthy, and should absolutely not be used as a serious analytical tool. Here's the list of all the standard images, along with details about how practitioners are supposed to interpret your interpretations of them: https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-personkort.htm

Before they start the test, they're supposed to ask if you know these details already, and skip it if you do. You can use that to easily get out of it, and hopefully force the tester to stick to more legitimate tests. Alternatively, if someone is seriously trying to use this on you, I think it's totally fair not to trust them with that honesty, and just use the test information to present whatever picture of yourself you'd like them to see.

[qxix]

Because of the semantic overlap, referencing any artist named Jean in a stable diffusion prompt tends to add gratuitous denim to the image. Every once in a while the results are funny enough to be worth keeping and improving on.

[infiniteartmachine]

"a large blue ball is in an elaborate planet like structure" "an earth surrounded by liquid and water floating around it," "an alien explosion is seen in the air above a futuristic city"

[70sscifiart]

A set of interior illustrations by Robert Tinney, for BYTE magazine's August 1989 issue, accompanying a series about neural networks.

More info in my art blog newsletter post: Robert Tinney: BYTE Magazine and Beyond

[qxix]

Another old one I started in like 2022 finished. I like how you can definitely tell from the compositions that these older images were made with much more primitive tech, even if I've polished up the details with a newer model.

[jetix]

Demented Papercrane, 2010-02-15

[qxix]

From the link: A modification of Jeremy Shafer's "Folding the Flapping Bird."

Wow, I haven't heard that name in a while. Jeremy Shafer's "Origami to Astonish and Amuse" was one of my favorites as a kid. I've got the diagrams for the model this one is based on, I think I'll give it a shot:

It's nowhere near as good as this guy's version, but it's a fun one to make regardless.

I wonder how much being into origami as a child influenced my views on copying and intellectual property in general. Origami is one of the few art forms where copying is not only encouraged but directly enabled by artists, and it's clearly better off because of it. Imagine how much easier learning every other form of art would be if it was the norm for artists to release their creations with clear and comprehensive instructions other people could use to duplicate them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

No one wants to read your AI slop

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.

The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).

I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.

‡ Ugh

It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.

There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.

Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.

You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.

Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author – that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.

Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue – it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.

Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.

That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.

There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[qxix]

Worth pairing with this kinder, crisper take on the same idea: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/

I'm glad people are naming this as a clear social rule, even if I'd leave a little room for rare cases where sharing the raw output is actually what the conversation calls for.