"The ship Pequod, too, was a vestige of an earlier phase of the whaling industry: "She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her." She was a ship trophied by past hunts, and named after "a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes." Matt Kish's portrait of the Pequod evokes its inimitability and intricacy, but Melville's own image is at least as fantastic."

"Issue 01 contributor Eugenio Recuenco recently updated his portfolio with a striking series of 12 images that span very different eras and cultures, all of which are united by one main character: the violin. The larger images can be seen on Recuenco’s site, and the full series can be seen here, after the cut."

"During the night before the Christmas morning on which Wedge-Wheskit was carried off to the asylum, in 1852, leaving behind a weeping wife and hysterical children, he apparently banged out the designs for a series of six cards, in a frenzy of Victorian sensibility. (He screamed “legs and ligatures, the hideous ligatures!” most piteously, according to an orderly who assisted in restraining the patient.) Tuck and Sons commissioned their man, Haeckel, to add extra legs. Sales were as brisk as the creator’s madness ran deep."

awesome

"The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext."

"There are still some extremely frustrating limitations though. First of these is the resolution of drawing the graph. I’m sure for most graphs the default resolution is fine, but when creating these patterns you need tiny increments. Tiny tiny ones. If the line is going from one side of the graph to the other and back again a thousand times in a couple of radians, you don’t want the graph program to start dropping line segments, or corners, or anything really. Grapher does allow you to increase the resolution, but it’s not sticky - change anything in the equation and it pops right back to the default. Every. Single. Time. The same thing seems to happen with the line thickness too - I wanted all the designs to be at 0.1, but it kept changing it back to 1.0. Frustrating! There are a couple of other UI things I’d change, like having an option to keep axes at 1:1 ratio to each other, even when you resize the window."

"Mishu Warner’s anatomy of a Naga, which are serp[e]nt dieties in Buddhist and Hindu Mythology. The main image is the female Naga, or Nagini, but Mishu included the alternate tail, just in case you wanted to know what a Naga’s testicles might look like."

"Where the Deep Ones Are"

via John Holbo

"The trans-membrane lipid-soluble phosphate-bearing portion of this alpha-helix transports the little people into the cell and sticks them into the database."

First in a series of great illustration posts.

Evan Dorkin's portfolio of recent monster drawings.