Molecular

Marginalia on my jacket! This was such an impulse project but I’m very pleased with how it turned out!

Details:

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

This is a spreadsheet from Old Kingdom Egypt, written about 4500 years ago. It was part of the diary and logbook of Merer, an inspector responsible for the transportation of materials to Giza for the construction of Khufu's pyramid. There's something beautiful about the organization here, how his rows and columns would fit in just as well in Excel as any modern spreadsheet of delivery records. Across the yawning gulf of ages, we're united by this mundane and incredibly human task. I love reading things like this. They remind me of the fundamental similarity of humans across time. They were no less intelligent or skilled than we, and oftentimes had to be moreso, to account for the many technological aids they lacked.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Most period illustrations of Landsknechts are black-and-white woodcuts…

…though in 1905 a book called „Geschichte des Kostüms“ - History of Costume - assembled a bunch of black-and-whites and added colour.

If they look excessively gaudy, they’re not, because these next prints were coloured in-period by an artist called Erhard Schön, and it’s fair to assume he was representing what he saw.

Metal Detectorist Discovers Medieval Wedding Ring  

Every metal detectorist dreams of unearthing something valuable. For one man the English countryside yielded an incredible find when he stumbled upon a medieval diamond wedding ring in “almost perfect condition” near Thorncombe, in the South West of the country.

Now the item is expected to fetch between £30,000 and £40,000 (Sold For: £38,000) when it goes on auction later this month.

David Board, 69, found the “stunning” ring on his second attempt at becoming a metal detectorist after a stint in the 1970s in which he scoured local beaches but found nothing of much consequence, a press release from auction house Noonans said earlier this week.

Board called the ring “a once-in-a-lifetime” find.

During a recent interview, he said: “There will probably never be another one like it. Back then, each ring was individual and unique, not mass produced like today. It’s stunning.”

Board took up metal detecting again in 2019. During the second day of a field search, he had almost given up when he got a signal on his metal detector by a footpath.

Initially, the culprit looked like a sweet wrapper but Board soon realized that it was a gold ring.

When he dug it up all covered in mud, Board said he thought it was just “scrap metal” and popped it into his pocket.

“It was once I got home and washed it off that we realized it was a lot better than we thought,” he explained.

The ring is in “almost perfect condition,” Nigel Mills, a consultant in coins and antiquities at Noonans, said in the release. The jewelery has a golden hoop of two entwined bands to symbolize marital union and an inverted diamond set into it.

Inside the band is a medieval French inscription that reads, “Ieo vos tien foi tenes le moy,” translating as, “I hold your faith, hold mine,” according to the auction house.

Due to the location of the find and the quality of the ring, Noonans’ experts surmised that it’s the wedding ring of Joan Brook, given to her by her husband, Thomas Brook.

Their marriage in 1388 brought great wealth to the Brook family, the release said, as Joan was the widow of Robert Cheddar, a wealthy cloth merchant and twice mayor of Bristol – a city in western England.

It was at a time when medieval notions of chivalry and courtly love were at their zenith, concepts which the ring reflects, Noonans said.

Now known as The Lady Brook Medieval diamond ring, the item will be auctioned on November 29.

Board goes out three times a week, weather permitting, in hope of uncovering another great relic among the musket balls and King George I coins. “It will be amazing if I did,” he responded, adding “you never know what the next signal is going to bring.”

The discovery adds to a list of incredible finds by detectorists in the UK.

One amateur uncovered a haul of Bronze Age objects in a Scottish field in 2020, in what experts at the time called a “nationally significant” discovery.

And last year it was reported that a huge hoard of Iron Age gold artifacts had been found by a rookie detectorist in Denmark.