Living with a hoarder can be hard, but it's hardest on the children who don’t know why their parents are hoarding, or how to get them to stop.
You wake up every day surrounded by trash and/or junk wondering “what the heck am I going to do with all this stuff?”, feeling helpless among the heaps.
Artist Stephanie Calvert grew up in a hoarder household, and she came up with a clever way to put that trash to use while working past the discomfort of having hoarder parents- she creates sculptures with their hoarded trash.
Stephanie’s Shame To Pride project is just as much about making great art out of recycled materials as it is about helping her move past the scars of childhood by turning the trash that made her life hell into something heavenly for the world to admire.
The ring bearer enters the wedding procession with the flower girl. Her job is more fun than his, so he joins in scattering flower petals, with the aim of emptying the basket as quickly and efficiently as possible. He considers it a competition.
Success! All the petals are gone and we’re only half way there! He knows how to celebrate, too, with a jump and holler and a few high fives for strangers in the crowd. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Before street art gained acceptance it was seen as merely vandalism, which to be fair some works being passed off as street art actually are.
But then there are those amazing murals that make the cityscape a little less drab- they’re works of urban art put up outside for people to freely enjoy, but some street art works really belong in a museum.
The Long Beach Museum of Art felt it was time to bring some street art works indoors, and let some traditional painters try their hand at street styles, so they let a bunch of artists paint the walls of their museum.
Results varied in degree of awesomeness, from “hey, that’s pretty cool!” to “ZOMG Wowee Zowee Kapowee!”, and the exhibition proved that letting a bunch of street artists paint the walls inside your museum is a great idea!
There is a myth that medical science did not progress during the Middle Ages. Maybe it was because the early Middle Ages were sometimes called the Dark Ages, although that was really more about our lack of information about the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance than it was about its history and culture. Anyway, some believe that medieval physicians only relied on ancient knowledge passed down from Galen, but in reality, they were experimenting with medical treatments, testing drugs, and studying human bodies through dissection.
Dissection was still rare in the Middle Ages, as few people would be willing to have their deceased family members used as a cadaver. The most likely source of bodies came from condemned criminals. The Byzantine historian Theophanes (752–818) records how “an apostate from the Christian faith and leader of the Scamari, was captured. They cut off his hands and feet on the Mole of St Thomas, brought in physicians, and dissected him from his pubic region to his chest while he was alive. This they did with a view to understanding the structure of man. In this condition they gave him over to the flames.”
Meanwhile, in 1319 four medical students at Bologna were caught trying to exhume the grave of a criminal who was executed earlier that day so they could perform a dissection on him.By the later Middle Ages, those interested in anatomy would also look for the poor and elderly who had no family to give them a burial. Leonardo da Vinci himself performed more than 30 dissections, including that of a 100-year-old man he had met a Florentine hospital and befriended.
While many of the cures that medieval doctors came up were terrifying and often useless, it was the best they could do with what they had. Medical knowledge did advance in some ways. Read more about the medical experiments of the Middle Ages at Medievalist. -via Everlasting Blort
The bible shown here is three feet tall and weighs 165 pounds. It’s made of the skins of 160 animals. The handwriting throughout the Codex Gigas is consistent, leading experts to believe it was hand written by a single 13th century Benedictine monk, including the illustrations. That feat would have taken 30 years, even if he worked every day. But this book is called the “Devil’s Bible” for a reason. Read about the Codex Gigas and the legend that grew up around the mysterious text at Urban Ghosts.
You know you’ve delivered a good burn line when the burn victim is at a loss for words and you’re left feeling like the smile is going to fly right off your face!
You try to keep your cool, making the burn that much more effective, but inside you feel like having a Joker laughathon at the burn victim’s expense.
Those red hot witty retorts are the stuff legends are made of, and sure to get a verbal reshare from all who witnessed the burn in action, but it takes decades of practice to burn ‘em like Batman.
He’s got a comeback for everything, and victims of his burns are often individuals with super powers so you know that burn has got to be heroic to get through their defenses!
The year 2005 was when the number of blogs on the internet exploded, with around 50 million people deciding that they could do that. Ten years later, most of those blogs have been taken down or abandoned, while millions more took their place. The ones that survived required real dedication to make it this far. On August 9th of that year, Alex Santoso launched his blog Neatorama, with a pledge to himself to post at least five items a day. Ten years later, a half-dozen writers post a couple dozen items a day plus exclusive features. We have a shop to support the blog, where artists from all over the internet display their creative t-shirt designs. We have an active presence on social media, plus partners, friends, and contributors. This all came about not only because of Alex’s hard work, also but because he always believed in sharing, promoting, and encouraging bloggers, artists, writers, and content creators. That generosity made Neatorama stand out from the crowd.
For the occasion of Neatorama’s tenth anniversary, I decided to go back and find the biggest posts ever. These are the ones people loved, shared, and remembered, and many of them are still popular years later. They are extreme standouts; a post had to have at least a quarter-million views just to be considered for this list. That said, I can’t vouch for its complete accuracy. The metrics we use to tally views weren’t instituted until 2012, so posts that went viral before that are seriously undercounted. I gave extra weight to some of those older posts, but other articles that deserve to be on this list may have been so undercounted that we overlooked them. You know, it really says something about an article from, say, 2007, when half a million people read it after it was five years old!
I sifted through more than 80,000 posts to compile this list, so I hope you take some time to check out the links you are interested in, especially if you haven’t been hanging around Neatorama for the entire past ten years. If you have, or even if you’ve joined us recently, you’re invited to share your favorite posts, memories, questions, kudos, complaints, and suggestions with us.
The fat cats list was Alex's first big viral feature, in May of 2006. It should probably rank higher, since we don't know how many views it garnered before 2012. Posting about cats was a genius move at the time. The term LOLcat wasn't even coined until the next month, but we were LOL-ing already. The post was later added as an external reading link at Wikipedia.
Unless you were a youngster, you were already familiar with the photographs. They are the ones we want to see again. And the stories of how each affected the world were fascinating.
Bruce Lee was the little guy who could plaster the wall with Chuck Norris's body parts, and look good doing it. He was even more interesting off screen, as we learned in Alex's trivia post from 2007.
Andrew Cremeans grew up in Tampa, Florida, in the neighborhood that was used as the setting of the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. In the movie, the area seemed eerily fresh and suburban, with houses painted pastel colors and, eventually, custom topiary shrubbery in every yard. Twenty-five years later, Cremeans returned to the neighborhood to see how it had changed. And took pictures. He talked to Mashable about his project.
I couldn't believe how small of a section the neighborhood was used, it seemed so huge in the movie. It feels especially small when you are standing and looking down the street to the cul de sac the castle was on. It really just felt like any old Tampa neighborhood. I caught myself wondering many times if all these people know that their house was in the movie. If it were my house, I'd have a huge framed poster of my screenshot of the movie in my living room.
Believe it or not, the object in this photo is a clock. It's called the Mengenlehreur and can be found in Berlin. The yellow light at the top blinks, showing the seconds. The top row shows the hours. The bottom row shows the minutes.
This is 1 of 11 unusual clocks in public places rounded up by Atlas Obscura. They include a sandglass that takes a full year to flow and an animatronic clock in Dubai designed 900 years ago.
Did you ever build a ship out of LEGO bricks and then try to make it look like it actually crashed by dropping it on the floor? I tried that technique a time or two, but LEGO bricks fit together so well that it never really worked out the way I wanted it to.
But where I failed to crash a LEGO vehicle the right way Brickster KevFett2011 succeeded in style by using a whopping 12,000 bricks to build this impressive crashed Star Destroyer scene from Star Wars Episode VII.
KevFett2011’s Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens Apoca Star Destroyer On Jakku LEGO model is one super square work of art, and it totally would have made childhood me go squee!
Time flies when you're having fun! Today is Neatorama's 10th anniversary (that'll make this blog a fourth grader, right?) and I'd like to take a moment to reflect and give thanks.
It all started ten years ago in a spare bedroom in my house with this very first post (and the link is still good). Some 80,000 posts, 250 million visits, 155 million unique visitors and nearly 400 million pageviews later, we're still at it!
I'd like to thank Neatorama's wonderful team - Miss C, John, Jill, Zeon, Lisa, Rommel, Brian, Jen, Anthony, and my lovely wife Tiffany, and to all of you Neatoramanauts for making it a fun journey so far.
We've been working hard on the shop-side (have you checked out the NeatoShop lately? We'll do something fun there soon to celebrate!) We've also got a few neat things planned for the blog as well.
I can't wait to see what the next ten years will bring us :)
The streets of Gotham were all abuzz with rumors of Mr. J's disappearance, but those rumors were greatly exaggerated. Truth is, that Joker had gone to see a gal pal of his about some heavy artillery, something big enough to do more than wing the Bat, and boy did that girl deliver. The Clown Prince was now the proud owner of one garishly painted tank, complete with cannon and top mounted sprayer which would enable him to cover the city in Joker Juice, turning everyone and everything into a clown white pile of goo...
Boys and girls and Batfans of all kinds are sure to enjoy this Tank Joke t-shirt by Fishmas, and they'll be grinning like goons when they see you sporting this comic masterpiece!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Some of the most frequently heard voices on television, film and others we experience in our everyday lives courtesy of advertising, customer service recordings or electronic devices belong to people we'd not recognize if we saw them on the subway. This article links to videos of the faces behind popular and often heard voices, from those of airport announcements and movie trailers to that of Siri, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob, Mario, a beloved Muppet and more.
The Cyberpunk subgenre isn’t just about mankind losing touch with our humanity thanks to an (often biological) link with machines, it’s also about discovering how we can remain human as tech overruns our lives, and an individual as the mega-corps take over the planet.
This search for humanism in a world where tech is fully integrated into our lives is what comes to mind as I look at these simply wonderful images by Adrian Dadich, a concept artist from Australia.
Adrian's illustrations capture the Cyberpunk aesthetic perfectly, demonstrating how people will look when tech is integrated into their bodies and how these “upgrades” will forever change the standard of beauty.
