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Carolyn Eakins has a goal to lose 100 pounds. To accomplish this, she is copying the diet of wartime rations from the 1940s. For a year.
The 1940s Experiment is a personal journey and social experiment living for one year on a wartime ration book diet to conquer obesity. 100 wartime recipes will be recreated with photos as well as experiences of living on a 1940s WW2 ration diet… 1 authentic wartime recipe will be re-created for every 1 lb lost.
My highest ever weight was 345 lbs… I started the 1940s Experiment at 315 lbs and today I am 277 lbs. I’ve had a few stops and started along the way but now I’m committed to seeing this through…
My goal is to shift 100 lb in one year using a 1940s ration diet as my foundation….. at the moment I am also vegan.
Eakin is now two months into the experiment. You can follow her progress and learn more about the wartime diet at her blog. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Check out this collection of posters made for classrooms in the 1970s. The captions have been removed, and newer (and funnier) captions attached by Michael Roberts of Denver Westword. The caption for the above image is “I’ll bet I can make big bucks selling those chemicals on the side.”
This image has the new caption, “I’d do a helluva lot better in this job than he would — and be paid 60 percent of his salary.”
Link -via Boing Boing
Steampunk as a fashion trend might be fading away, but steampunk inspired inventions and designs will never die. Matt Armstrong brings his version of steampunk inspired design to these LEGO brick sculptures, and the resulting inventions/artworks are quite handsome looking indeed. With classic designs, simplistic retro flair, and the look of full functionality, this is how you put the bricks to good use!
Link –via DesignTAXI
Are you tired of your friends, family or co-workers ruining the plots of your favorite movies and tv shows? Then put these anti-spoiler campaign posters up all over the place and let the spoilers be forewarned-ruin the surprise and there’s going to be hell to pay! This is a hush campaign for the 21st century, to silence the spoilers and find out what the surprise twist is on our own schedule.
I once referred to the candy bar as Peter Paul’s Almond Joy and my kids thought I was crazy. But that’s what the candy was called when I learned to love it! You’ll see all kinds of sweets that were sold a half-century ago in the 1949 NWCA Candy Salesman Book. Link -via the Presurfer
This is what Elder Scrolls: Skyrim would have looked like if it had been released in the 1980s, complete with cheesy 8-bit soundtrack and glorious pixelated graphics.
This fun parody trailer pays homage to such classic video games as: Legend Of Zelda, Duck Hunt, SkiFree, and Final Fantasy. Maybe the team at Bethesda should take a break from making hi-resolution games and explore their pixelated roots.
–via Geekosystem
Beavis and Butthead are back, and their fans have come up with many creative ways to show their love. This quality gallery shows various fan art interpretations of the duo that don’t suck. Insert snarky comment here.
Thomas Beg animated the Lifecycle of a Mushroom for the Spectacular Science collaboration project in the style of the cartoons of the 1920s. Link -via Dangerous Minds
The Science Museum of Minnesota obtained the collection of the Museum of Quackery and Medical Frauds and set it up as the “Questionable Medical Device” collection.
This collection of dubious medical devices reminds us that sometimes, medicine is best left to the doctors. Exhibits on display include a phrenological machine that gauges personality by measuring the size of bumps on the head, a foot-powered breast enlarger, and glasses and soap products designed for weight-loss.
You can still have your phrenology read by the fully functional machine today, and as the machine outlines the bumps on your skull, the phrenology reader “maps” intelligence, morality, and much more. Machines such as these were all the rage at State Fairs of the early 1900s, as were other questionable medical devices. The infomercials of their time, these snake oils and pseudoscience gadgets could cure impotence, tell how smart you were, and make you live forever.
Read more about this strange museum within a museum at Atlas Obscura. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user A.M. Kuchling)
I remember seeing stacks of these awful things on the shelves when I was a youngster, and hearing parents say things like “look for the ones that say non-flammable” and “well, at least you can use the mask”, as their kids stifled tears over their terribly disappointing selection of flimsy plastic costumes.
Browse through this gallery of awfulness and see just how good kids have it these days when it comes to Halloween costumes.
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It would have been great if the game Prince of Persia had come out for the Commodore 64 in 1989 when I actually owned and used a C64, but sadly we had to endure the greatness of this classic game rubbed in our faces by our friends with Apple II computers.
However, hope is not lost, as the tireless efforts of retro gaming enthusiasts have finally paid off- Prince of Persia has been ported to the C64! So dust off your emulator and take this bad boy for a spin, or check out the video and pretend you played it through oh so many years ago.
In case you are too young to remember, macramé owls were all the rage about 40 years ago. Now rarely spotted and near the brink of extinction, there is an organization dedicated to saving this cultural landmark.
This organisation is dedicated to saving, rehabilitating and reviving the Macramé Owl.
The Macramé Owl is a rare species that is dreadfully declining in numbers worldwide. This heartbreaking situation is partly due to the difficulty in finding jute at local craft shops. It is further exacerbated by a lack of a sense of humour in humans for the sake of Seriousity.
Learn about owl watching, macrame owl hoots, the different variety of owls, and what you can do to save them. Link -via Laughing Squid
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These paintings by Laura Bifano depict animals as a bunch of squares, but this ain’t your grandma’s Cubism. This is 8-bit Cubist artworks for the video game generation, with cubic animals that look like they’ve leaped off the tv screen and into their “natural” habitats, and are having trouble fitting in with the classical art world.
There are plenty more cool paintings at the artist’s site below, take a gander and you’ll see a whole wide world of cubic critters trying to act natural.
Link -via ComicsAlliance
Ty Mattson constructed an alternate show intro for the Showtime series Dexter that is reminiscent of Saul Bass’ movie titles from the ’60s. Groovy! The video is based on a series of posters Mattson created, which you can see at his site. Link -Thanks, Ty!
Ooh, this one is fantastic: a set of retro Muppet concert posters by Michael De Pippo, who wrote:
I love the Muppets. And with the movie coming out in the next couple of months, there is no better time for a fun little side project involving the best band ever conceived: Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.
My idea was simple; create a vintage concert poster for each band member (Dr. Teeth, Janice, Sgt. Floyd Pepper, Zoot and Animal). Using clean, crisp vectors, negative space and few colours, I wanted to keep them as simple and stylized as possible; reminiscent of retro posters from back in the day.
Link - via design work life
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Take a trip back with this fun PopSci archive gallery of ways to reuse household items and see if you can’t find a way to spruce up your boring old house, or an idea for a fun christmas gift made from your leftover stuff. The kid in the drawing sure looks happy with his abacus made from thread spools, so this article may bring happiness into your life!
Re
It’s hard to believe that people once thought we’d all be living in domes by the year 2000, but this delightful retro article from Popular Science confirms that the future is a lot squarer than people in the 60s and 70s thought it would be. The geodesic dome was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller, who felt that the simplicity of design and ease with which it could be built would catch on like wildfire across the country, and claimed rather ambitiously that it could replace all manner of traditional housing. However, Fuller hadn’t taken the cost of repairs into consideration, nor the problems that would be encountered bringing the dome up to code, and the awkward shape of the panels made replacing them a real pain, so the geodesic dome fad fell along the wayside, becoming nothing more than a vision of the future that was never meant to be. If you want to read more about the “dome of the future”, follow the link to PopSci, where you’ll find lots more info, and pages from past Popular Science articles detailing the rise and fall of the housing dome fad.
If you like your games old school and pixelated, then you will love this surprisingly difficult dungeon crawler created in under 48 hours by Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. It hearkens back to the days when games came without explanation, where you had to stumble around to figure out what’s going on, and the simple style masked a devilishly difficult puzzle element. It’s fun, quirky, and can be played for free if you follow the link. Now get busy punching some bats and eyeballs!
Remember
the 1990s? You know, Rugrats, Saved by the Bell, and - gasp - New Kids
on the Block? Well ... love 'em or not, get ready: they're baaaack!
Claire Suddath of TIME gets us all ready for the inevitable arrival of the scrunchies:
Recently, the pace of '90s references and revivals has quickened. In May, the New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys reunited; they're currently touring as one giant acronym monstrosity called NKOTBSB. This fall, MTV will restart Beavis and Butt-Head; their music-video show 120 Minutes is already back on the air on MTV2. VH1 is about to reboot Pop-Up Video. And then a few weeks ago, Nickelodeon started airing its "classic" children's television shows like Clarissa Explains It All and All That on its sister station, TeenNick. That made it official: the '90s have been gone long enough that we've decided to bring them back.
If Nyan Cat were around in 1988, he would the star of an NES game. And it would be in the bargain bin now. J. R. Baker took this idea and ran with it, designing both the front and back of the game case in the style of Konami games from the ’80s. See the expanded art and work in progress at his site. Link
If you’ve been following Neatorama for awhile, you are familiar with the work of Sillof. His latest line of pop culture figures imagines Star Wars characters if they had been produced in the 1940s era of sci-fi serials. Get a closer view of each character (the bad guys are there, too) at Sillof’s Workshop. Link
Journalism students at Florida Atlantic University recently constructed their final summer issue of the student newspaper. It was a very special and different issue, as they avoided all their digital equipment and did it the old-fashioned way: with typewriters, paste-up editing, and cameras with film- which they had to develop themselves.
Managing editor Mariam Aldhahi was stymied after typing her first line. “What do I do now?” she asked. “There’s no RETURN key.”
I pointed to the lever that would propel the carriage back to the left, while the gears inside would simultaneously ratchet the paper to the next line.
She tapped it lightly.
“No, this is a manual typewriter,” I told her. “You actually have to expend some calories.”
I slammed the lever to the right, and the carriage flew back to the left margin, stopping with a thud. A look of understanding, laced with horror, crossed her face.
“It’s going to be like this the entire time, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” I said. “It gets worse.”
The typing turned out to be easier than editing and designing each page. But the issue was finished! Link to part one. Link to part two. -via Laughing Squid
At one time, the future was glorious. Golden Age space illustrations were colorful, exciting, and made us hope to live long enough to see such wondrous things come about! See some fantastic vintage artwork depicting the future at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
The British creative team called Concept Shed produced this odd but beautiful vending machine to performed automated weddings for Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum in Detroit. Enter your information on the keyboard, and it spits out a plastic ring, asks you to enter your vows, and prints out a certificate! The eight-foot-tall computerized machine has a beautiful retro look. They’ll make you one to your specifications if you want. See a video of the machine in action at their website. Link -via the Presurfer
In 1983 many people were discovering home computing for the first time. This book was unearthed recently and found to have some pretty accurate predictions for the future of computing.
Best of all though is the section on the history and future of computing. As with all computing histories, the emphasis is on how quickly things have progressed, with plenty of laughter at how ENIAC could carry out a calculation in three millionths of a second, while the 1980s machines could to it in one ten-millionth of a second. To put that into context, while the 1980s machine was thirty times faster than its 1945 counterpart, today’s fastest supercomputer is something like 260 million times faster than the 1980s model described in the book.
The fashion industry unveils the latest swimsuits for the summer of 1952, designed to elicit wolf whistles. I can’t decide which I like better, the Wingding (for “obvious” reasons) or the Dunk Me. -via Nag on the Lake
I keep getting phone books and the Yellow Pages dropped in front of my door and I keep throwing them out. Who needs a phone book anymore? Most people I know primarily use a cell phone and wouldn’t be listed in the local phone book anyway. So it’s funny to think that there was a time when people had to learn how to dial their own phone. This short film from the early 1950’s was created by AT&T to show the public how to use a rotary phone. Such helpful words of wisdom include “When you want to make a call always be sure you have the right number.”
Surge hasn’t been sold in ten years. These 40 things will make you feel old (assuming you’re not young in which case you won’t get these references which in turn will make the rest of us feel old.)
Steampunk ascetics glorifies the Victorian age though creating retro futuristic technology. This computer terminal goes all the way. See link for full gallery. Link
It’s amazing how the storage of music and movies and increased exponentially over the years. This diagram illustrates how far we have come from vinyl records which could hold 44 minutes of music to today’s iPods which can hold over 83 days of music. Link
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