OKAY but like the woman is a super famous sculptor herself. Two major players in their own respective industries and they don’t know it! What are the chances? Life is amazing!
Ok, so I flipped back through the notes to find the name of the artist who isn’t Jay Z – she’s Ellen Grossman and it turns out her work is massively cool! She makes drawings and sculptures that look like delicate lace or something, but are actually based on topographic maps and scientific data – ‘the sensuous aspects of water currents, land masses and the wind made visible’. I THINK SHE MAY BE A WIZARD. Anyway, check it out – ellengrossman.com
It’s amazing that this woman is famous in her own right, but just for a moment I wanna point out that when she didn’t know the man next to her from a hole in the ground, she was still so immediately all about his success. “I’m proud of you.”
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
This is fucking mesmerizing. I’ve watched it at least 20 times. Some highlights:
Pretty guy with hammer
Repetitive stim with the satisfying “clink” noise
The way he just knows which chisel he has to go back to after hammering them all evenly
The perfectly straight and smooth surface after the break.
The quote exactly encapsulating my feelings on it.
TL;DR: Tattoos are associated with organized crime in Japan.
Longer explanation: While tattoos in Japan may have originally been considered to be a status symbol and have religious importance (we have accounts of tattooed Japanese people from Chinese diplomats during the Yayoi period, 300BC-300AD), during the Kofun period (300-540AD), they became a tool used to mark criminals, coming to a head in 1720 where full-arm tattoos were used exclusively for ‘minor’ offenses instead of cutting off noses and/or ears.
All of this led to tattoos getting hugely stigmatized. Until fairly recently, the only people you could find who did have tattoos were generally part of the yakuza (Japanese mafia), who often chose hugely elaborate tattoos based off of traditional Japanese art. Here’s a few of them:
Tattoos in Japan are still so controversial that in 2012, the then-mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, launched a campaign to get companies to get rid of their employees who had visible tattoos that was very well-received, with many companies siding with him.
Many swimming pools and onsen still ban tattooed people for all of this. During the 2019 rugby championship in Japan, the government effectively begged the foreign players and supporters to please cover up in public because people will react badly, and with the 2020 Olympics in Japan, apparently the government has tried to launch an awareness campaign amongst the public that tattoos on foreigners aren’t considered a sign of criminal conduct in their home countries, because the press backlash would be a nightmare.
Athletes: *arrive with tattoo sleeves and openly brandishing it*
The Japanese: “oh my god they just sent us all their murderers”
When I was in college, my Stage Craft teacher showed us this. Basically the machine heats up a sheet of plastic, and once it’s malleable enough it’ll be blown up to make room for whatever you want to imprint in the plastic. Once it’s in place, the air reverses and the plastic vacuum-sucks all around the object.
He demonstrated it on a baby doll and it was like a baby had been frozen in carbonite. I got to take it home and I still have frozen-carbonite-baby to this day (his name is Franklin XD)
“The camera adds 10 pounds” is a phrase of the past. Now people look better in their pictures than they do in person
When people say that the camera adds ten pounds it’s because cameras used in filmmaking/TV production have a wider focal length and therefore subjects look wider or bigger. Whereas cellphone cameras have a short focal length that makes subjects appear thinner or smaller.
Nowadays, with DSLR’s and a variety of lenses, we are able to depict a wide range of focal lengths by using one kind of camera.
So that is why most people on social media may seem to look thinner than they do in person (especially in selfies because the front facing camera on phones especially have short focal lengths).
And that is also how the phrase “the camera adds ten pounds” came about.
ifesbob 