Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL’s and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the “cream of the crop” of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
My first up is a major personal favorite. I could spend hours flipping though the photos here…
Shorpy
Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring hundreds of thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.
What is really cool about this site is that you can see what things were like “back in the day”. The visions of everyday life, the buildings, the cars, and the people are just wonderful to browse and explore.
It often carries me back to a simpler time…
All the photos are in glorious clarity.
Most are black and white, but some are in color. Additionally, super high resolution photos are available for you to obtain, and put on your wall if you want. It’s a fantastic resource, and super fun. Not to mention, a great way to reconnect with our past.
Here’s another photo…
And the photographs of the buildings are absolutely astounding. Seriously. Why in good-Gods name would these structures be demolished back in the 1960’s and 1970’s? What were people thinking?
The Woodpile Report
Update 28APR21. Ol' Remus passed on. The website is still up but it hasn't been update in months. FYI.
From the beautiful photos to some thought-provoking articles. We go to the Woodpile Report. It’s glorious.
Here’s what it’s all about, from o’ Remus himself…
Woodpilereport.com is an entirely private information service that is my sole property made available to others as a form of free personal expression under my de jure Preamble Citizen’s right as later guaranteed in the First Article in Amendment to the Constitution. Woodpilereport.com is not a “public accommodation” and it is preemptively exempt from any forced or coerced accommodation, via legislation or bureaucratic interpretation thereof or any dictate, directive, or decree by any agency of government or by any NGO or by any individual under any future “Fairness Doctrine” or similar charade. I reserve the right to refuse service - to wit: to refuse posting, linking, or mention of anyone or anything, at my sole discretion - to any person, agency, corporation, or other entity. Woodpile Report is from the Hermetic School of websites. There is no advertising, no partnerships, log-ins, popups, subscriptions, print version, Disqus, feedback section, tip jar or shop. There are no trackers, cookies, LSOs, analytics or widgets. Posted links are cleansed of superfluous identifiers.
The woodpile report is a wonderful weekly report by ol’ Remus.
He collects and reads the news and articles from all over the internet. Ones that he finds interesting, he places a paragraph or two and his opinions plus a link. These articles are what are of interest to him, and most lie outside the mainstream media.
As such, each week is a great cross section of alternative (non-mainstream) thought on the internet. There are great links to such diverse topics from canning, to history of old radios, to prepping, and opinions on modern American politics.
It’s all worth a visit. Don’t you know.
Like this here blog, it’s not a well-known and heavily trafficked site, and I think that part of what adds to it’s charms. Go ahead and take a visit, you will not be disappointed.
Here’s an example, as this screen capture can plainly show…
But, you know, I do like to look at art and enjoy the beauty and the meaning that lies with in. As such I often go to the…
The Art Renewal Center
The Art Renewal Center was founded by an Art Lover who was perplexed why museums and the “art industry” rejected the works of the old masters.
He wondered why, instead, they embraced the “new, progressive” art without form and meaning. (Such things like turd in a jar of olive oil, and a painting of dog foot prints on a white background.)
So, he built this website, and to his surprise, discovered that others, much like himself, were appalled at the treatment of the old artists, and the embrace of new “junk art”. He discovered that there is a world full of people, much like himself, that loved art for the sake of beauty and poetry. They, like himself, felt deprived as modern “progressive” thought was eradicating real beautiful art from society…
He created a website that collected all the known beautiful works of art in the world, and offers them up for free to view and appreciate.
This is what he has to say about the Art Renewal Center…
Leading the revival of realism in the visual arts, the Art Renewal Center (ARC), a 501(c)(3), non-profit, educational foundation, hosts the largest online museum dedicated to representational art and includes works by the old masters, 19th century, and 21st Century Artists as well as articles, letters and other online resources. The ARC is the foremost and only vetting service for representational art schools ensuring that the teaching curricula and quality of teacher and student work meet our strict standards to become ARC Approved™. The ARC also runs the ARC Salon Competition, which is the largest and most prestigious competition in the world for realist artists painting, sculpting and drawing today with eleven categories and thousands of works competing, culminating in a traveling live exhibition of many of the winning works. The ARC works with other ARC Allied Organizations™, artist groups, museums, and publications to become a central news hub for the 21st Century Representational Art Movement. Read the ARC Philosophy written by ARC Chairman, Frederick C. Ross, to learn why ARC is so passionately dedicated to representational art.
Well, we know now, that the “new, modern, progressive art” is just a mechanism for transferring enormous sums of money. It does this back and forth between the global oligarchy so as to avoid the tracking and banking (read taxation) issues that the rest of us have to deal with.
- Laundering money through art
- How does one launder money using art work? – Quora
- 11 Tax Secrets Every Art Collector Needs to Know – Artsy
- Tax Break Used by Investors in Flipping Art Faces Scrutiny …
- How The Super Rich Avoid Paying Taxes
- How to Avoid Paying Taxes Legally — and the 4 Craziest …
Never the less, those of us that appreciate art, want to be exposed to it, and share our love of art with others. Thus this site.
Here, you can find many, many beautiful works of art done in the classical sense. This is the stop for beauty and art.
It’s got everything from the old masters…
To new up and coming artists…
I cannot stress how profoundly important this website is. As such, I am including ” The Philosophy of ARC”. If you agree with this philosophy, perhaps you might want to browse the collections and make a donation and become a member. They are doing great work. I’ll tell you what.
Fine art at its best has the power to move one to tears, or grab your sensibilities and rivet you in the moment with an overwhelming sense of beauty and excitement.
People often report the sensation of cold chills going up and down their spine. It may be the rare work that accomplishes this, but for those who have had this experience, many have credited it as the stimulus that set them on a personal lifetime quest; whether as an artist, collector or art historian.
Other human activities can create a similar experience, whether in poetry, literature, dance, theatre, or music, but it is the experience of beauty in fine art and beauty and its relationship to fine art that is the focus of this essay.
If you are reading this, in all probability you are one of the millions of art lovers who in the 21st Century are disillusioned with the Modernist paradigm which for more than a century has been the dominant way the concept of art has been taught and presented in nearly all institutions of higher learning throughout the world.
If you are like us, it seems more than a little self-evident to you that works of art have infinitely more to say and communicate if they portray the real world, or use figures and objects from the real world even when portraying fantasies and dreams.
You experience such "realist" works as infinitely more successful than any Modernist works.
The success of Modernism seems like a form of mass insanity, a nightmarish anomaly from which we pray the art world will finally soon awake.
For most of the 20th century, people who felt as we do, found themselves attracted to fine art in most if not all cases from having been to museums and fallen in love with a number of works of art created in the 15th through 19th centuries.
You may have wanted to become an artist yourself and were channeled by advisors into fine art courses taught in the art departments of colleges and Universities where you were promptly told that your instincts were all wrong.
That such works had a place in their time, but that modernist works were far superior.
What followed was an attempt to change your attitudes and beliefs and to convince you that works, which commemorated the destructions of some aspect of what used to be traditional Realism were the only worthwhile artworks and concepts.
You were never told that these "educators" had never themselves learned any of those skills needed by all artists during prior centuries, and so were completely bereft of any of the experience, skills and knowledge for which you had assumed your tuition bills would be paying.
They made you believe that they all could draw and paint but had chosen to abandon those skills due to some great epiphany.
If you were true to yourself and your feelings and beliefs, you probably left that "art" department and considered doing something else with your life.
Many of you went into commercial art.
Others became art historians, but most found other fields entirely. A rare few of you searched out and found one of a handful of ateliers who actually still taught the methods of the old masters. To the best of our knowledge there were 7 such ateliers in 1980 and all of them were taught by students of Pietro Annigoni or Ives Gammell 1. Both atelier masters could trace their training seamlessly to the 19th century and beyond.
By 2002 when the Art Renewal Center decided to add to their website a section of ARC Approved® Ateliers schools the number of such schools had grown to 14 with each having between 5 and 15 students.
We added a map of the world where it became very easy to identify all the schools and to find the nearest one to any local. Within a few months the numbers of students able to find these schools started to grow geometrically, and today, just 14 years later, there are over 100 schools teaching the atelier style training and thousands of students.2
So, what do all these students and educators see that Modernists do not? And why is it that most educated people who are not part of the art world seem to also prefer traditional realism?3
It is the purpose of this essay to answer that question in the clearest most direct way possible, and to thereby help establish for artists and the consumers of art, a set of criteria by which they can judge works of art, understand their own preferences, and if needed, to arm them with the facts, concepts and information to deal with the modernists, educators and apologists who are constantly attacking and denigrating the skills and subjects which enable fine art.
The skills like with literature, poetry and theatre that enable us to communicate our shared humanity.
We will accomplish this by delineating a simple way to understand and define what fine art is. We will also look in particular at the aesthetic foundation of fine art as it evolved during the 19th Century and the Modernist juggernaut which almost lead to its complete suppression during most of the 20th Century.
The following information also advances criteria by which to view artists and movements, and help to determine why some works of art are experienced as beautiful and successful and why others seems to fall flat or are even boring.
It will hopefully also satisfy the needs of practicing artists to determine what type of art and subjects they wish to explore and which skills and techniques they will need to learn and practice in order to accomplish this.
As in all education, individuals should ultimately decide for themselves what makes sense and what is nonsense or babble.
CONTINUED HERE
Fark
Fark is what Free Republic should of evolved into, instead of being bought-out by progressive liberal interests. People post links and a sort introductory paragraph, and others comment on it. It’s clean and just getting started. It has a lot of potential, and a healthy dose of sarcasm.
Archie McPhee
This is a store, but… what a store!
Boys like being mischievous and playing tricks. It’s a boy thing I suppose. (I just don’t remember any girls doing these types of things. Though, I am quite sure that they were involved in more cerebral activities playing “head games” with other girls.) Boys like to see the physical results of their torment. They want to see girls react in horror to a toad. They want to light firecrackers outside people’s bedrooms, and set bags of dog poo on fire on people’s porches.
I remember as a boy how we had somehow come across a gadget catalog that was advertised in the back of one of the comic books that we would often read. You know the kind. Pages and pages of things like magic tricks, pranks, books on Black Magic, fake (pellet shooting) fingers, trick buzzers, masks and ”pea shooters”. As a kid, we loved it and wanted everything. We must have circled over a hundred items in that catalog.
I think that it is an interest of growing children to expand and explore these tricks and devices of prankster humor. Too bad that the days of yodeling pickles are long gone. Indeed, you need to leave the ultra-sanitized United States to find some politically incorrect playthings for your child to enjoy.
…Or, do you?
Let me introduce the reader to the Archie McPhee store.
This is the kind of place that is a young boy’s wet dream. Inside the store (physical as well as the Internet version) are absolutely enormous assortments of useless pursuits. They’ve got boxing nuns and bacon scarves. They’ve got yodeling pickles and finger hands. Don’t know what a finger hand is, well then go HERE to find out. They have stuff that only a madman could think of.
“Less talk. More monkey.”
How about rotisserie chicken flavored candy canes, emergency inflatable toast (why?), rubber chickens (big and small), and propeller beanies. Ah we all wanted one of these as a kid. They have trick gum, Holy toast, and bags of busted businessmen. They carry x-ray glasses (yes, you wanted these didn’t you?) and hypno-glasses, wind-up lederhosen, and strange action figures to include horrified movie victims. They’ve got everything from plastic arks, to singing fish. It’s a childhood delight. This store brings out the little kid in all of us. It’s many things, but above all, it’s the go-to place for plastic poop.
I just can’t stop! It’s such an amazing place.
“If there’s a heaven for the deranged, Archie McPhee is probably it.” -Josh B in Seattle
How about vinderhosen, an emergency Santa kit, crime scene sandwich bags, and classic disguises. What about underwear for your pet squirrel, inflatable turkey (again, why?), and contemporaneous prayer cards. Here is probably the only place where you can find cool World War II occupation money. How about medical posters from India, they’ve got religious themes, cat themes, food themes, mad scientist themes, and themes that defy description. I am not at all kidding!
Do yourself a favor. Let your child buy something from this store. Give them ten dollars to spend, and wait while they go back and forth, back and forth deciding what to buy. It’s all in good fun.
SOTT (Signs of the Times)
Sott is another collection of articles. This one tends to be on the intellectual side, with occasional forays into human interest.
Collective Evolution
Here are some great articles that are out of the mainstream, yet do not fall under “doom porn”, ‘Global Warming” or “Reptilian Government secrecy”. LOL. Maybe some of the articles are out there, but they do make you think. And at that, it’s a good thing.
Leenks
Leenks is another website where links are posted. These links tend to be entertainment links, and includes porn, memes, and articles worth a passing glance. If you are bored, this site will give you a ting or two to look at.
Ace of Spades
This is a reasonably decent conservative site with great links and organization. I tend to visit it from time to time to get my American-insanity political fix.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Funny Pictures
Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.
Articles & Links
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