photo roundup: probably alone

hello internet, here are some more pictures i took.





i can't decide which of these i like better. it's probably the first one. i think its tone is more ambiguous and that is kind of neat.

photo roundup: dining room geometry

i have been obsessively taking pictures lately: a sure sign that it is summer. i thought i would post a few here in little collections over the next few days.





all these were taken on this mat my roommate left behind on the dining room table. i kept using it as a placemat. it's an excellent shade of green and i find the lines very inspiring, for some reason.





whoops, yeah, when you're me it's never long until the skulls show up.

image of the day: skylights by Lisa Wiseman

(photo credit: Lisa Wiseman)

oh my, isn't this just the loveliest thing. every day i browse hundreds of design and photography blogs, and i click through the images at that furious pace to which we all have become accustomed -- but i actually gasped when this popped on my screen. in fact it's pictures like this which are why i am so persistent and voracious in my internet image hunger: i relearn every day that i have not seen all the ideas yet. and i especially love ideas that make the quotidian extraordinary.

this was taken on an iPhone by professional photographer Lisa Wiseman. she also takes a lot of polaroid photos, and she has begun to refer to the iPhone camera as "The New Polaroid." i love her reasoning:

"Because the iPhone is becoming a ubiquitous and trendy acccessory, on-the-go picture taking is now the norm. I see people using their iPhones to take spontaneous photos in the same carefree way that cheap polaroid has been used in the past. In concept and ideology the iPhone mimics polaroid, however it pushes the aesthetic forward by utilizing a new non-film (but technologically infantile) medium. Just like traditional polaroids had a specific size and unique look, iPhone photos are unmistakeable because the technology limits them to a fixed size and resolution and imbues them with a unique chromatic aberration that says iPhone and nothing else.

I love the new polaroid."

hot damn. i highly recommend exploring her gallery of iPhone photos. what a great reminder of how easy it is to find gorgeous things around you, and that -- if i may paraphrase the National Rifle Association's dictum -- cameras don't make pictures: people make pictures.

welcome back to Dorkas's Adventures on the Internet

(photo credit: Lizzy Stewart)

hi hello, it is summer! i am extremely psyched to spend it in Chicago. as soon as i get some of this lingering work from the school year over with i will dazzle you with tales of lying around and taking pictures. yessssssss.

how have you been?

in which i am bonkers for medical ephemera from the Otis Archive.

ladies and gentlemen! it is 3a.m. on a Sunday night, so what else would i be doing than obsessively browsing archives of medical photography? i don't know about you but i can't think of anything else i'd rather be doing -- especially when the Otis Archives have put all of their "unofficial 'favorite photos'" on their flickr stream!

the Otis Archives are part of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, headquartered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and are dedicated to collecting relics of army medical history. the images they have been collecting on flickr of late are mind-blowingly, heart-stoppingly, blood-curdlingly magnificent, and i would be deeply remiss if i did not share some of my favorites here with you. PLEASE NOTE that some of the following images are of a MEDICALLY GRAPHIC NATURE. there are no boobies, but there are some viscera. enjoy!

you should be clicking on this: Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

i like victoriana. i like typefaces. and i like smart-assed anachronistic recontextualizations. and that is why i LOVE Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre.



not only are these hilarious but they are actually rather lovely feats of graphic design.



and look, you can buy prints of them here!

you should be watching this: "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy."

embedding on this video has been disabled, but you should nevertheless watch this clip of comedian Louis CK on Conan. he seriously nails a few things about the emptiness and dissatisfaction we feel despite all the technological wonders at our fingertips, and how we seem to have lost the ability to appreciate how freakin' awesome they are.

This generation, they've got their phone and they're like "Enh... it won't..." GIVE IT A SECOND! It's going to SPACE! Can you give it a second to get back from SPACE?!

[...]I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing i know of that exists. [...] And then it breaks down. And they apologize, the internet's not working, and the guy next to me goes "Psh, this is BULLSHIT." Like, how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago!

[...]Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story, and it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in Germany in the forties. "First of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes!"[...]

Oh really? What happened next? Did you FLY through the AIR like a BIRD, incredibly? Did you partake in the miracle of HUMAN FLIGHT, you non-contributing zero? You got to fly! You're FLYING! It's AMAZING! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going "OH MY GOD! WOW!!" I mean, it's, you're sitting in a CHAIR in the SKY.