Boing Boing » flickr

Just look at this banana being shot with a steel bearing fired from an air-cannon.

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 17:22:15 +0000

Just look at it.

How to Peel a Banana/Alan_sailer (Thanks, Philip!)

Steampunk clockmaker Roger Wood among his creations

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:00:05 +0000

Stephen sez, "Masterful gadget-maker Roger Wood poses alongside some of his whimsical clock creations at his Hamilton-based workshop and steampunk emporium, Klockwerks. When he came out in his goggles and steampunk kit, I told him, 'You look so much like an inventor.' He answered, 'I AM an inventor.'"

Roger was my neighbour for a decade, and his workshop was always a wonderland. I haven't been to his new place in Hamilton, but if this picture is any indication, it's every bit as wonderful.

Steampunk Thing-Maker Roger Wood and Assorted Klockwerks (Thanks, Stephen!)

Laser-cut bento box

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 20:25:42 +0000

Matthew sez, "I just finished making this bento box featuring laser cut nori and thought you might care for it. The bento box features a scene from Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime) as well as some good old fashioned tempura shrimp, shu mai, grilled octopus, and tamagoyaki."

Princess Jellyfish Laser Bento, Kuragehime Laser Bento (Thanks, Matthew!)

Gallery of 1960s library posters

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:20:01 +0000

Enokson on Flickr has collected a beautiful gallery of dozens of 1960s library posters, each more delightful than the last. Alas, they're only at a medium resolution.

Retro Library Posters (1960's) (via Bookshelf)

Library in abandoned house

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 14:03:59 +0000

I'm very taken with James Charlick's photo, "The Grand Library," shot in an abandoned house during an urban exploration expedition.

The Grand Library

Vintage Chinese firecracker label-art

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 02:44:36 +0000

MrBrickLabel has a Flickr set of absolutely gorgeous vintage Chinese firecracker labels.

I have been collecting firecracker and firework labels since I was 5 years old (1968). I appraise, buy, sell and trade firecracker labels. Everything you see here could possibly be for trade. I will try to post everything eventually. Hopefully more collectors can do the same and we can use this as a trading and sharing tool...

My Collection of Chinese Firecracker Labels (via Neatorama)

Iconic images recreated with Star Wars toys

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 05:41:39 +0000

David Eger, a Canadian teacher, has a project on Flickr called "Cloned Photos" that uses "Clone Troopers and other Star Wars characters to recreate important and historical images" (it's a sequel to another project, 365 Days of Clones). He sells various products based on his illustrations at Redbubble and Society6. Many of these are inspired, including American (Galactic) Gothic, (Cloned) Guernica, Troopers atop a Skyscraper, Iwo Jima and The (Cloned) Kiss.

Eger posted many of these on the anniversaries of their source's original publications: "The original Cloned Photos from my 365 Days of Clones were created, taken and edited on the same date as the original photograph or on the birthday of the photographer or artist who created the image. There were; however, many images that I missed, didn't have the time to create or hadn't thought about that I have now begun to go back and create in my new series."

Cloned Photos (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

"How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet"—Mat Honan

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:35:06 +0000

An excellent long-read about Flickr and Yahoo by Mat Honan at Gizmodo today. Anyone who has loved and been let down by the once-great photo-sharing site now caught in the purple zombie's death spiral will nod in agreement throughout. The opening graf:

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

Read: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. (Gizmodo)

Hi-rez scans of Easter candy wrappers through the ages

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:54:11 +0000

The Flickr stream of Jason Liebig -- previously featured for his sticker and packaging photos -- is a good place to go for some bloated, semi-sickened post-Easter-sweets perusal. His "Easter"-tagged candy wrappers include groovy 1960s Life Savers holiday packaging, 1970s Fuzzy Bunny packaging, and an extraordinary 1978 Rodda Candy Company ad (pictured here). All of them are available at very high rez (the one pictured here can be had at 4962 px wide!). I love Liebig's feed of odd candy packaging and ephemera, and was moved by his "collector heartbreak" story about the troubles of shipping rare old paper through the US mail.

JasonLiebig's photostream / Tags / easter

Lego Russian ray-gun

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:17:41 +0000

Avi sez, "AFOL Shannon Sproule built this charming Raygun entirely from LEGO parts." Shannon calls it the Russian Tokarev TT-34 Atomiser and notes, "Every mechanonaut was issued with a Tokarev laser pistol. They were small, lightweight and proved very reliable on the lunar battlefield." As this implies, there's a whole contrafactual mythology that this belongs to, called Battle for the Moon.

Russian Tokarev TT-34 Atomiser (Thanks, Avi!)

Bizarre V-day cards of yesteryear

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:00:39 +0000

Further to Mark's bizarre old Valentines post from yesterday: Flickr user Page of Bats has assembled a marvellous and often inexplicable collection of tasteless, gross and weird vintage V-day cards. I can't figure out of some of these were from the likes of MAD magazine, or if they were all created in earnest by clueless card companies.

pageofbats' photostream / Tags / vintagevalentine (via How to Be a Retronaut)

Italian Isaac Asimov graffiti

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:17:21 +0000

Chrisperfer sez, "I randomly came upon this Isaac Asimov graffiti when attending a birthday party in Rome for my 4 year old daughter's friend."

Isaac Asimov

Public domain WPA posters from the Library of Congress

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:31:28 +0000

Mynonymouse sez, "The Library of Congress just posted a Flickr set of lovely WPA posters. There are awesome ones about keeping your teeth clean, science and one that seems to be about drunk driving but also might warn of a previously unknown deadly reactive incompatibility between gas and whiskey."

These are awesome designs, but it's a disappointment that the LoC posted them at such crummy low-resolutions. The nation's treasures deserve better than that.

Update: See the comments for lots of places where you can get higher rez ones.

WPA Posters

Roomba art

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:10:50 +0000

A Flickr pool for art made using colored lights, long exposures, and Roombas. (Via Sii Bo)

Prominent Republican leaders in clown makeup

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:15:29 +0000

WMxdesign's GOP Clown College Flickr set is a collection of prominent Republicans and Republican commentators in clown makeup.

GOP Clown College (via Kottke)

Chubettes, the badly-named clothing line for overweight girls, 1957

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:12:03 +0000

This 1957 ad for "Chubettes," a line of clothes for "plump" youngsters, betrays an ad agency where the person who thought up the product names was vastly outclassed by the illustrator. I mean, seriously: was there ever an overweight kid who greeted the news that Mom was buying her some "Chubettes" with delight?

Chubbettes, 1957 (via Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Future of Citizen Science: "honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots"

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Fiona Romeo, who has worked with Greenwich Observatory on some successful "citizen science" initiatives, gave a presentation called "The near future of citizen science," explaining what she's learned and what she thinks the future will hold:

It’s my contention that the near future of science is all about honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots...
Selecting Flickr as our platform for the competition immediately got us to ask, what would be the space equivalent of geotagging? Astrotagging, obviously. If astrophotographers were to accurately describe what their photo depicts, and where in space that is, we could create a user-generated map of the night sky. But – as you might have already been thinking – working out where you are in space is much trickier than putting a pin on a map because there are the added dimensions of depth and movement. In addition to the space equivalents of longitude and latitude (RA and Dec), we required pixel scale and orientation.
Would anyone really go to the trouble of figuring out and tagging all of that information? Probably not. We were going to need a bot.
Fortunately Flickr isn’t just ‘a great place to be a photo’, the API also allows you to develop bots that act autonomously for a user or a group. Early bots in use on Flickr include Hipbot and HAL. Hipbot, for example, automates some of the moderation tasks in the well-defined squared circle Group, automatically removing photos that are not square, or are too small.

BERG presents Tomorrow’s World: The near future of citizen science

Ben from Ben and Jerry's serves ice-cream to OWSers

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:02:20 +0000

Scott Lynch was kind enough to place this photo of Ben "Ben and Jerry's" Cohen scooping up free ice-cream for the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the Boing Boing Flickr pool.

Occupy Wall Street: Day 52, Zuccotti Park, Ben and Jerry's, scooped by the real, actual Ben

OWS: the sand-sculpture/Day of the Dead edition

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:36:38 +0000

Carl Jara writes, "Calavera del Toro: Gold Medal sand sculpture by Carl Jara, depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Texas. A banker and a politician sit comfortably toasting their overflowing champagne flutes to the skull of their recently slain Wall Street bull, draped in a Golden Parachute."

Calavera del Toro (Thanks, Carl!)

Intrepid junkbot from Tinkerbots

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:33:07 +0000

Dan Jones (AKA Tinkerbots) was kind enough to add this charming fellow to the Boing Boing Flickr pool. There's plenty more where that came from.

4:59 [secure.flickr.com]

Photos of people being terrified in a spook house

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:59:55 +0000

Niagara Falls, Ontario's Nightmares Fear Factory has a Flickr feed full of visitors being terrorized in its environs. I grew up with the spookhouses of Niagara Falls, and they can be incredibly scary, even the basic Lundy's Lane spookhouse, which is often just a dark maze populated by bored locals with night-vision scopes who whisper menacingly in your ear or touch you unexpectedly. I've never tried Nightmares, but it has a reputation for being seriously terrifying.

(via Colossal)

Nightmares Fear Factory's photostream [secure.flickr.com]

Glass floor

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:06:53 +0000

Esther Dyson snapped this vertiginous shot of a glass floor at the Digital Moscow event. I have a mild fear of heights, but this kind of thing goes straight into my spine and my digestive-tract's pucker-reflex without consulting my brain.

(via Super Punch)

stepping on the glass floor [secure.flickr.com]

Fire-escape haircut

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:43:13 +0000

From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, a candid moment of a young man cutting his hair on a San Francisco fire-escape, by Erik Wilson.

Fire Escape Haircut 2 [secure.flickr.com]

Fractal Menger sponge made from Post-Its

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:32:32 +0000

Nicholas Rougeux made this fabulous Menger sponge fractal out of mini Post-its, which he swears by for erecting fractals:

Each Post-It was torn into 16 equal squares, then folded into units and assembled into the sponge.
Post-its offer surprisingly structural durability and are easy to get in large quantities making them ideal for assembling structures like these.

(via Kottke)

Mini Post-It sponge [flickr.com]

Broken-hearted boat-builder seeks garage

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:26:23 +0000

A broken-hearted person in Heather's neighbourhood is building a boat. He wants your help, your garage, and your company.

hayes [flickr.com]

Photos from North Korea's Mass Games

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:43:24 +0000

Sam Gellman's tourist photos from North Korea's Mass Games are wonderful and weird studies in repetition at scale, where all sorts of pomp and spectacle are performed with thousands of identically dressed performers in close-order drill, which echoes the enormous housing blocks and all the other mass-scale motifs of Stalinist bureaucracy.

(via Kottke)

North Korea [flickr.com]

Revolver takes a picture every time you pull the trigger

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:24:26 +0000

From the Netherlands' National Archive, a 1938 photo taken in New York City of a Colt revolver that has been modified to shoot a picture with every trigger pull. Presumably most of those photos are of people looking horrified and about to say something like, "Oh Christ, you turned your gun into a camera? No, don't point it at me! Ahh!"

(via Super Punch)

Revolver-camera / Revolver camera [flickr.com]

Steampunky junkbots

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:54:24 +0000

Spaceboy Robot makes beautiful, steampunky junkbot sculptures; he's also a talented photographer of same, and he has an Etsy store (though it's on hiatus).

Spaceboy Robot (via Neatorama)

Flying Spaghetti Monster cosplayer

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:05:24 +0000

DotD snapped this excellent photo of an adorable Flying Spaghetti Monster cosplayer at this year's DragonCon.I love the noodly appendages!

Flying Spaghetti Monster (sexy version!)

Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto's New City Hall

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:17:49 +0000

Responding to the death of Jack Layton, head of Canada's New Democratic Party and a former Toronto City Councillor, Torontonians thronged Nathan Phillips Square, a large public space in front of New City Hall, and chalked memorial messages over every surface.

Remembering Jack Layton at Nathan Phillips Square (Thanks, Emily!)