2 min read

Friday, January 5, 2024

Happy new year and welcome back.

Before we get started, some important follow-up on this Wolmania post from August 2022: the Triple Aught Foundation is now taking reservations for the 2024 season (May-November) of Michael Heizer's City. I already got my request in so I feel comfortable sharing the link now: take a shot here.

And some equally important follow-up on this Wolmania post from June 2023: Minnesota has a new flag. It looks like this:

Navy blue and light blue flag with a white star

It's a massive improvement and moves Minnesota up in the rankings, all the way from #15 to #13. (The original design has a slightly worse star, and some stripes with nice symbolism but somewhat pallid colors. Overall I think the final design is a slight improvement.)

Okay, on with the show.

"Internet Artifacts" on a tile with the AOL running guy icon and a picture of a cartoon Godzilla from The Ultimate Showdown eating a Transformer action figure.

Neal Agarwal put together this online gallery of artifacts from the early internet, featuring stuff like this primordial online chain letter and the truly legendary dancing baby animation, and it's extremely up my alley. (Mourn the more innocent web we've lost, and count the minutes until Ask Jeeves relaunches as an AI-enabled service.)

Item 2: a list

Wonders of the Ancient World, ranked:

  1. The Lighthouse of Alexandria
  2. The Colossus of Rhodes
  3. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
  4. The Great Pyramid of Giza
  5. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
  6. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (would be #2 but loses tons of points due to doubt about whether they actually existed)
  7. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Item 3: a media recommendation

The Velvet Underground - Ocean (Live)

Item 4: word of the week

Cenotaph

I know you miss your pet gecko, but I'm not sure we're going to be able to convince the government of Costa Rica to erect a 30 meter tall cenotaph in King Gizzard the Lizard Wizard (the Lizard)'s memory.

Item 5: a photograph

Dark and Light Composition - Rugs. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, 6th ed. (New York: The Baker and Taylor Company, 1905). [This is a great summary of why this book is important and interesting. After you're done with that, click through to the book itself, there's a ton of awesome stuff in this - ed]

See ya!

Everything in my newsletter is precious and I hope you read everything and click on all the links. But on the off chance that you... maybe... skimmed it today, I want to encourage you to find whatever of your internet-connected devices has the biggest screen and actually look through Arthur Dow's composition exercise book (you know, from Item 5? the part right before this part?). It has lots of pretty pictures and is fun to look at, but it's also just a really interesting way for non-artist rubes like me to get a peek at how budding artists can be guided towards good taste and design sense. Also, it has lots of pretty pictures.

I think that's enough for one day. Thanks as always for reading. See you next week.

Published by:

Jacob Wolman

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