Visual Basic for MS-DOS, 1992. A text mode Visual Basic, the last stop in the line that began with QuickBASIC.

I am completely mesmerized by this view! The monumental "Guardians of Traffic" on the Cleveland bridge (dating back to 1932!) combine mythology, Art Deco craftsmanship, and transportation history, while powerful modern glass skyscrapers rise in the background. I just love these visual contrasts—this isn't just a city photo, but a living lesson in how handcraft and tradition blend seamlessly with the cold elegance and progress of the modern era.

The sun became dangerous in about 1950, and it took a factory to do it. Two million years on the African plain, naked, on the equator, midday. Roman legions marched from Spain to Syria in a tunic and sandals. Polynesians crossed 3,000 miles of open Pacific in a canoe with nothing over their heads. Irish navvies dug the railways of England shirtless through the 1840s. Victorian cricketers stood in a field for 5 days in August. Welsh hill farmers brought in the hay with their sleeves rolled up for 40 summers and died of something else. Bondi, 1935. Thousands of fair-skinned Australians on the sand all day, and the only thing anyone rubbed in was coconut oil. Melanoma that year was 1 in 1,500. A curiosity. Then the fat changed. Cottonseed oil, soybean oil, corn oil, sunflower oil. Pressed out of seeds by machinery that did not exist before 1900 and put in every tin, jar and fryer on earth by 1960. Seed oil goes rancid. Leave a bottle open on the counter and it turns. Heat it and it turns faster. Ultraviolet light turns it fastest of all. Rancidity is oxygen getting into the weak points of a fat molecule. Seed oil has two weak points on every molecule. Butter has none. Dripping has none. Your skin is built out of the fat you eat, replaced every couple of years. Sunlight lands on skin built from seed oil and the fat goes rancid inside you. The redness, the heat, the blistering, the peeling. That is rancid fat being cleared away by your immune system. Sunburn is your skin going off like a bottle of sunflower oil left on a windowsill. Melanoma today is 1 in 33. The sun did the same thing to your skin that it did to your great-grandfather's. He was made of beef.

my politics are whatever this is

“Two bicycle mechanics on Kitty Hawk described a man flying on a contraption for 10 seconds during an event that no public attended”

These 3.5 seconds did more to fortify American Identity than any establishment politician or political party in the last generation. 100 years of neoliberal rule was vaporized in 3.5 seconds. Rejoice, we are still America. 🇺🇸

This is how Art Deco does bathrooms.

Nope. They can do pretty much anything this year im chillin

A fascinating discovery inside a late-Kamakura-period Buddhist statue: During the restoration of the Jūichimen Kannon 十一面観世音菩薩 at Shōjuin 正寿院 in Ujitawara, Kyoto Prefecture, conservators found 95 sheets of paper within the image. 94 of which bore stamped images of Kannon and one containing a handwritten text in ink. The statue, approximately 60 cm tall, is the temple’s principal image and is normally kept concealed as a hibutsu 秘仏 ("secret Buddha"). In announcing the discovery, the temple described the Kannon images' function to magically protect the written document. The contents and date of the document have yet to be established. It will be fascinating to learn what it reveals about the statue’s history and the people who placed these materials inside it. Images below, and a short Japanese news report here: asahi.co.jp/webnews/pages/ab…

Winged imagery in Art Deco designs will always be one of my favourite motifs

Oct 12, 1870: Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Virginia, five and a half years after he surrendered at Appomattox. When the war ended, Lee was the most famous man in the South and he had nothing. His family home at Arlington had been seized by the federal government and turned into a cemetery for Union dead. He was 58, his health was failing, and he was under indictment for treason, though he was never tried. Offers came in. Businesses wanted to put his name on their letterhead for big salaries. He turned them down. Instead he took a job as president of Washington College, a tiny school in the Shenandoah Valley that had been looted by Union troops during the war. It had a few dozen students and a handful of professors. The salary was $1,500 a year. He threw himself into it. He knew most of the students by name. He added courses in engineering, business, and journalism, which were unusual for the time. He replaced a long list of rules with an honor system and told students the school had only one rule: every student must be a gentleman. He spent those years telling Southerners to accept the result of the war. He told former soldiers to go home and rebuild. According to an often-told story, when a widow complained bitterly to him about the Union, he told her not to raise her sons to hate the United States and to make them Americans. In 1869 he paid a short visit to President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. His heart was giving out. In the spring of 1870 he took a long trip south, partly for his health. Crowds met him at every stop. On Cumberland Island in Georgia he visited the grave of his father, Revolutionary War hero Light-Horse Harry Lee. On Sept 28, a cold, rainy day, he went to a long meeting at his church about raising money for the minister's salary. When they came up short, Lee pledged the difference himself. He walked home in the rain and sat down to dinner with his family. When he tried to say grace, no words came out. He had suffered a stroke. They made a bed for him in the dining room. For two weeks he lay there, mostly silent, while one of the worst floods in Virginia history swept through the region outside. He died around 9:30 in the morning on Oct 12. He was 63. Accounts written later said his last words were "Strike the tent," along with an order for A.P. Hill to come up, as if he were back on the battlefield. Doctors who have studied the case think the stroke had taken his ability to speak, and many historians doubt those words were ever said. The flood had washed away the town undertaker's stock of coffins. Some were found downriver, and the only usable one was too short. Lee was buried in his suit without shoes. He was laid to rest in a crypt beneath the chapel on the college grounds. Within days the school's trustees voted to rename it Washington and Lee. His horse Traveller, who walked behind the funeral procession, is buried just outside. After the war Lee had signed an oath of allegiance and applied for a pardon. The oath was lost and never acted on. It was found in the National Archives a century later, and in 1975 Congress restored his citizenship. Americans still argue over how to remember him and the cause he fought for, and they probably always will. But in the last five years of his life, he chose to spend what he had left teaching young men, rebuilding a broken school, and telling a defeated people to put down their anger and become Americans again. 156 years ago today. Rest easy General.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Ad (1993) 📺

I spent a lovely afternoon in X11 Massachusetts.

We need to go back to this era of icons.

The Art Deco elevator door is in the JW Marriott Essex House built 1930s.

Brick Victorian. Always liked gable trim/ornaments. It’s so unnecessary which is why it’s great.

#KDE Plasma 6.8 is going #Wayland-only in a few days, so we forked it for you: #SonicDE, pure #X11, a home for your KDE and Qt6 native apps. Currently at about 140 components on 6.7.5, soon on 6.8 too. Find the packages for your distribution at sonicde.org

happy 32 years of DOOM II

Before 1954, stop signs were yellow with black lettering because red dye faded too quickly in sunlight. The invention of fade-resistant porcelain enamel allowed sign makers to switch to red with white lettering, which became the standard.

🚨 MILTON FRIEDMAN (1978): Young lawyer asked Milton about when it is okay for a Govt to force a free citizen to act. Did you get the nuance in Milton's question about the difference between "society" and "govt"... Do you think a man should be free to sin?