In many ways I think the internet is more exciting for the visual arts than it is for reading. I mean, just in my own bedroom I have hundreds of books containing thousands of hours of great reading, all of which is far better written than anything I can find online. But interesting artwork is harder to come by in daily life. I can’t do justice to the scale of visual arts on the web — I’ll leave the task to those far more astute than I — but occasionally I stumble upon something that really strik...

Been tryin’ to dust off this website lately and maybe even make it functional , and what could inspire me more than these action-figure-like figurines based on famous artists ? I got this link (via a Flores email) and immediately started drooling. Monster Playing the Harp based on Hieronymus Bosch. It reminds me of a Skeksis. A lot of the time I don’t like things like adaptations of famous artwork, and doing pseudo-action figures seems like a terrible idea. All we need is more overexposure of th...

And sometimes things just appear at your fingertips. Today (thanks to del.icio.us/popular ) I stumbed upon Ðarkςτridεr.net . From Jiri Barta’s Krysar (Pied Piper) / Ðarkςτridεr.net Damn. This site is amazing: a look at stop-motion animation from around the world, concentrating on Czech and other Eastern European animators. It is filled with video clips and seems to be updated very frequently too. I watched about an hour’s worth of clips (a couple of them are as much as ten minutes long) and ever...

I’ve been slogging through The Good Soldier Švejk , a well-known World War I novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek. This is a book that I’ve been wanting to read for years; I was supposed to read it for a class in college but never got around to it. I’m almost done now and the whole thing has been rather underwhelming. In fact, I might have just given up were it not for the amazing illustrations by Josef Lada: Švejk and some officers / Josef Lada My problem with the book might just come from the ...

“He looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges: maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders. ” — The Fellowship of the Ring I’ve had a long-time fascination with maps, so what better way to kick off a new section of this slowly-coalescing website than with a look at one of my favorite sites for medieval maps ? Eh? What do you say? Budapest / from Historic Cities Whatever happened to map-making? Maps were once filled with decoration, with speculation, with a...