Wow, I was not expecting to be reminded of Jean Michel Basquiat, but here we are!

Because the thing you want, is to keep these shitheads living in your head 24/7.

Ah yes… the cover art for Isaac Asimov’s excellent 1980s sequel to the original Foundation Trilogy - Foundation’s Edge.

I could look at this painting every day, and it would bring a smile each time.

There’s something that often feels a bit shallow about Rococo, a bit “style over substance” (I feel like Baroque had more psychological complexity) but as with every art movement, there are artists who shatter these stereotypes, transcend their era and style.
With this in mind and from my purely subjective point of view, the best of the Rococo painters was Thomas Gainsborough.

I mean this in the best possible way, with utmost admiration:
This feels like a classic Tintin cartoon panel.

Inspiration does come… but it has to find you working.

Scooping up a root folder alias without noticing and dumping it in the trash icon.

This would make for a great large poster for a hip, crowded bar, placed in the area where people stand and wait to use the restroom.

Ah yes… the rock n roll lifestyle.

First chance they got, they started swigging Jack Daniels, didn’t they? That was still two centuries in the future, though.

I think it’s more like only Blake-heads can comprehend.
Then Blake himself was a Milton-head, “Paradise Lost” and all that.

Adding to that, Blake never published any of his own work during his lifetime, it was only after his death that reams of his poetry and drawings were found, Blake posthumously revealed as a deep, secret mystic.

Probably the hope, not completely unfounded, that the migration from one “legacy” (from the 00s) platform to a more recent alternative service - twitter to Bluesky - will help inspire people in other legacy platforms to also realize that alternatives do exist now, they are part of a broader conversation that they weren’t a part of even two years ago.

Even a year and a half ago, this place felt like it hadn’t yet installed the drywall, the wiring and tubing was incomplete. Now it feels more seamless, ready for a spurt of growth.

“Hey… Bluesky isn’t all that bad, I’m glad to be out of the clutches of a billionaire asshole, and not feel utterly lost here”, now cue what OP believes a number of people will also think: “Hmm… maybe I’ll check out Lemmy, too. See what the alternative to reddit is like.”

Some of them could have tried it, didn’t like it, might come back and be like: “Hey, Lemmy’s not too bad since last I last looked a year ago”, and here’s a clincher that definitely wasn’t here a year and a half ago: “The app works pretty good”, and there are a lot of new apps, having a choice gives a sense and weight of legitimacy.

And this, kids, is what is known as a tour de force.

The opposite of a Bulwer-Lytton!

How about a threefer with
Jerry
Lee
Lewis!

Reminds me of that Simon & Garfunkel lyric, along the lines of

…he’s so unhip
when you say Dylan
he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas!
Whoever he was.

The compass… the circle.

Do you know what the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is?
It is a giant spherical compass of light, 46.5 billion light years from the center (that’s us) to the edge.
And this compass keeps on expanding ever wider, at the speed of light, in fact.

THIS in my view is the circle being traced by God in the painting.

Business Rabbit!
Executive Board Rabbit.

This painting is briefly but intensely featured in Ken Russell’s berserk 80s movie “Gothic”, a fictional recounting of Lord Byron and friends getting together for demonic games one night in Byron’s castle on a Swiss lake island.
The hallucinations of that night planted the seed of an idea in Mary Shelley’s mind, which became the story of Frankenstein’s monster.

Now this sort of thing is precisely what I’ve always thought about when the term “Rococo” gets bandied about.