With slight, precise, carefully-timed taps of his hammer, Simon Berger cracks glass so that the fracture lines depict vibrant faces. Five years into his exploration of this medium, Berger has already astonished exhibition visitors with the beauty of shattered glass. He described to My Modern Met how his first experiments lead to joy through a new type of art:

I was immediately enthusiastic about this possibility because I was always striving to find a new form of representation. I like creating beautiful things through destruction.

In this video from last year, you can see Berger at work creating one of his enormous glass portraits.

Once upon a time, wax seals were an important form of identification. Messy Nessy Chic introduces us to some of the more elaborate and elegant seal making tools from past centuries, such as this Victorian wheel that allows a user to choose from a variety of symbols to press into wax. Each intaglio--the carved gem--conveys a different sentiment to the reader.

Perhaps, like letter writing, sentiment could move us moderns to experiment with this ancient, deeply personal practice.

Photo: Antique Boutique

Peter Waldraff's N gauge scale model railroad diorama is a masterpiece of precision craftsmanship, electrical engineering, furniture making, and creative problem solving. The result of his inventing and labors is a tabletop that converts into a three-season display of a train moving through the mountains.

And Waldraff isn't done yet! He plans to make the device WiFi-enabled so that he can control it from a phone. That will make demonstrations even more amazing.

-via Gizmodo

Fionnán O'Connor is a respected historian of Irish whiskey. He has not only consumed a lot of it, but has carefully studied its production over the centuries. For this doctoral program at Technological University Dublin, he has revived many old whiskeys from "mashbills", which are lists of ingredients that distillers used. Irish Central quotes him about the project:

"We’re talking to ghosts by distilling these mashbills again," O'Connor said. 

"The mashbills chosen are creating a map, a language about how all these things might have worked," he said. 

"The bulk of these mashbills haven’t been tasted in over 70 years and the earliest ones I’ve found come from the early 1800s.

"It would be a shame if all that history and those flavors were lost. This project has been about making up for lost time." 

-via Atlas Obscura | Image: Boann Distillery

Oh, so two actors on The Bold and the Beautiful are getting close, moving in for a kiss. How do they do that and maintain COVID-19 protocols?

No, wait, that's not an actress. That's a mannequin. What the heck is going on here?

Russian inventor Eduard Luzyanin took a 150cc scooter engine and tracks from a snowmobile to invent the Hamster. Three pairs of shock absorbers help ease the ride, although steering it is hard: all the rider can do is lean into turns to shift directions. But it can move as quickly as 27 MPH.

Luzyanin has equipped his ultimate commuter vehicle for hard conditions. There's a gas can mounted on the back, as well as survival tools and 49 feet of rope. I can't wait for this to hit the American market!

-via Core 77

Webcams can be so impersonal. Why not make them more realistic? That's what Marc Teyssier, a researcher at Saarland University has done. His Eyecam is a "design fiction prototype" for a new type of webcam and watches you constantly, moving and blinking in realistic fashion. It even even changes expression as it passes judgment upon you. Thus Eyecam is a warning about the future:

Sensing devices are everywhere, up to the point where we become aware of their presence.

-via The Awesomer

It's hard enough to keep up with an ever-growing list of passwords with increasingly complex requirements. How would a medieval peasant manage? Alasdair Beckett-King, a comedian and screenwriter, suggests an answer: poorly.

-via Laughing Squid

Do you see Sigmund Freud in this image? The boatman forms his right eye and the woman's hair his left eye.

This fantastic portrait from a fever dream is by Ukrainian artist Oleg Shupliak. He offers up reverent and mysterious images of great artists, thinkers, and writers.

I'm especially taken with Shupliak's portraits of artists inspired by the styles of those artists. You can see so much of Starry Night in this depiction of Van Gogh.

A monitor lizard in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand crawled out of a canal and strolled into a 7-Eleven. Although interested in the small grocery selection, he mostly made a mess and left without paying. Narumpa Tangsin, the customer who recorded this video, described the startling experience:

He said, "I only stopped at the shop to buy some food and then saw the huge monitor lizard inside. I wanted to buy a drink but the animal was too close to the drinks aisle."

He continued, "They're dangerous animals, especially when they're angry, so I stayed back and recorded it on my phone. I guess that shops have everything, even for lizards."

-via Marilyn Bellamy

In the final months of the Soviet Union's existence, filmmakers there produced a TV adaptation of Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. After all copies had been lost for thirty years, one recently resurfaced and has been uploaded to YouTube.

While browsing through a mail order catalog for small, precision tools, I ran across a listing for a "gourd saw." It appears to be a handheld stiff-bladed jigsaw. The seller describes it as one used by gourd artists for cutting into gourds.

Such specialized tools can often have multiple uses. The chop saw that I use for cutting stained glass zinc came is sometimes called an "arrow saw" because it's frequently used by people who make their own arrows.

(They Can Talk/Jimmy Craig)

Cats can feel an array of emotions shared by humans. But, despite what animal behaviorists say, I'm convinced that guilt is not among them.

A dog in Russia grabbed the reporter's microphone and ran away during a live broadcast pic.twitter.com/R1T8VZ5Kpt

— Ali Özkök (@Ozkok_A) April 2, 2021

This video from Mir TV in Russia appears to depict reporter Nadezhda Serezhkina wrestling a Golden Retriever for control of her microphone. The show host cut away from the technical difficulties.

Later, the program revealed that Serezhkina and the dog were able to reconcile their differences, as humans and dogs should.

-via Super Punch

Technabob introduces us to the Concours d'Lemons, which is a series of car shows featuring the ugliest and most ridiculous car mods. Its Instagram page is filled with creative delights such as this Volvo station wagon converted into a Super Star Destroyer. It represents a greater emphasis on crew safety by the Galactic Empire.

The shipbuilders in the UK sold it last year, warning potential buyers that many features were not yet fully functional:

Chase down Rebel scum and tame Princess leia in this somewhat to scale Galactic Empire Destroyer. Featuring functional Turbo Lasers and Hyperdrive (disclaimer sub warp engine non fucntional) 

The ship sustained a direct hit from a X Wing to one of the Shield domes and some hits to the general body from an asteroid field.