For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world? --- When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being _un_happy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

Substation DIY is a free, open, and secure way to set up simple recurring payments and member messaging — as easily as pressing a remix button and adding credentials for Braintree and Mailgun. Try the demo, learn more, then remix your own!

Mix & match avatar illustrations in Sketch App with this free library.

Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library for InVIsion Studio and Sketch.

Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, quinceañera invitations, or whatever you want! ⠀

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that? --- Closeness is impossible between an artist and a critic. Each wants from the other something—the artist’s mojo, the critic’s sagacity—that belongs strictly to the audiences for their respective work. It’s like two vacuum cleaners sucking at each other. […] To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people’s ways of walking. The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.

An extremely real and heartbreaking story for a number of reasons. In 2017, I got an interview for the Master’s degree program at the Yale School of Art. When I returned a week later to pick up work I had left there, one of my paintings was gone. What happened to it? This is the story.

The story of DJ Renegade: a poet, a mentor to Ta-Nehisi Coates, now a poker grinder in Atlantic City who lives on two-day comps at luxury hotels by keeping tables warm.

Classic MS Paint in the browser, with extra features.

Since starting development on the Electric Zine Maker I’ve been hoarding links to interesting, unusual, strange, small, or just cute tools. This has grown to be a strong area of interest as I’ve been diving into what even makes a tool approachable… How much experimental UI or humor is too much? Do people even want tools that are goofy? What else is out there from creators making small and interesting tools that solve a variety of creative problems?

Zimoun is a Swiss artist, composer and musician who's most known for his sound sculptures, sound architectures and installation art that combine raw, industrial materials with mechanical elements.

Pixel artist supreme.

Just a bunch of cool/interesting/funny/thought-provoking websites from 2000–2019.

Only Anime & Pixelart Rain

What we hear from companies like T and F and Y is that monitoring communication at this scale, preventing that harm, is an unprecedented technical challenge. That’s correct. However… no one asked for communication at this scale! To be clear, it’s a challenge these companies designed for themselves; a challenge they enlarged through relentless, ingenious growth; a challenge they now invoke as if it’s some longstanding problem in fundamental physics. [...] Social media platforms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.

Your daily dose of pixelated skies and 8-bit clouds, from vintage and retro video games.

Moss graffiti, also called eco-graffiti or green graffiti, replaces spray paint, paint-markers or other such toxic chemicals and paints with a paintbrush and a moss "paint" that can grow on its own. As people become more eco-friendly and environmentally aware, the idea of making living, breathing graffiti has become a more green and creative outlet for graffiti artists. It can also be considered another form of guerrilla gardening.

When I'm traveling and am at a loss for how to spend my time, I look up as many libraries I can in the area I'll be traveling to, and I check to see if they have special collections. Then I make an appointment with the library to visit those special collections, and usually it means I get to spend a day in a quiet, climate-controlled room with cool old documents. It's like a museum but with no people, and where you have to do all the work, which is honestly my idea of a perfect vacation.

Art/music can be disruptive technologies. Art doesn’t just come from reorganization of cultural forms. It is radical when it perturbs dominant cultural modes & shakes people out of their ordinary experience. It has the power to connect us to mysteries of imagination and being.

A woman did a painting and then people made paintings of that painting and then people made paintings of that painting and…

Sissix and Rosemary, again from Becky Chambers’ ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.’ I finished the second one last week as well, which has another cast of excellent characters. I love how cozy and lived in these books feel, while still being really thoughtful on challenging your perspective—it’s not something I’d come to expect from science fiction.

53K+ high-resolution pieces of art. Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.

Renee Gladman is the author of ten works of prose and poetry, most recently *Calamities*, a collection of essay-fictions. Her first monograph of drawings, *Prose Architectures*, was published by Wave Books in 2017. She lives in New England with the poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

The series had its clandestine début, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Bell critiqued the Times’s coverage of the death of Mike Brown, in 2014, in which the paper ran side-by-side profiles of the victim and his killer, Darren Wilson, under the joint headline “Two Lives at a Crossroads in Ferguson.” Bell and many other readers felt that the framing of equivalence, and of tragic coincidence, diminished what had happened that August afternoon. Bell erected a diptych of her own, with Wilson’s profile whittled down to read, simply, “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.” The second panel bore the new headline “A Teenager with Promise,” I noted last year, when I interviewed Bell.

As West sells it, ‘ye’ is an album devoted to the stand-off between visceral self-loathing and baroque levels of narcissism, further complicated by mental illness and a recent opiate addiction. Listening to ‘Killing You,’ it’s unclear whether West’s violent thoughts are directed at his wife or towards himself, or if he even means it at all: maybe a homicidal fantasy is just another badass way to start an album, an inverted “Ultralight Beam.” It is the work of a broken man, whatever the case. But to meet West on his terms here feels impossible. In his world, self-expression justifies itself, and speaking your most twisted thoughts out loud is an act of bravery, one that makes ‘I Thought About Killing You’ not just a fine thing to write and share, but a work made from a place of love. Art, then, is a way of existing beyond reproach, an excuse for everything.

Back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made. Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle.

so quite a lot of people expressed interest in a guide to lion dance! and since the lunar new year is coming up in a couple weeks, which means everyone’s exposure to lions is probably going to increase, i figured i’d go ahead and make it! right click + open in new tab to fullview, etc etc, i hope it’s helpful, although if you only take one thing away from this powerpoint, it’s this: lions are not dragons

procedural salt flats, mountains, forests

We spoke to some of our favorite bot-makers about their favorite Twitter bots — their own, and made by others in the #botALLY community — to surface some lesser-known projects worth following.

Digital glitch geometry animation.