Bob Ross’ Christmas Special: Celebrate, Relax, Nod Off

I don’t know if you got everything you wanted on Christmas, but we here at Open Culture have what you need. And that’s a very special Bob Ross Christmas Special. No special guests, no musical numbers. Just Bob, his palette filled with phthalo blue, Van dyke Brown, and other favorite paints, and a solid black canvas which Bob turns into a Christmas Eve snow scene. (In 2018, Ross' official YouTube Channel posted all 31 seasons of The Joy of Painting online, a total of 403 episodes.)

While watching (and maybe following along at home), consider that Bob Ross accidentally invented ASMR with his shows, all those years ago. His pleasant, slightly gruff southern accent complements the sound of the swishing brush and scraping knife on canvas. Consider also the percentage of people who watch these not to paint, but to meditate or go to sleep. (There’s an app for that.)

Bob Ross *is* the sound of a Christmas Eve nocturne, a moment when the air is crisp and clean, a little bit of peace falls over the world, and there’s a chance to reflect. It’s time to start a new canvas. The possibilities are endless, and you can always change as you go. Heed Ross’ famous words: “We don’t make mistakes. We have happy accidents.”

Puppet Making with Jim Henson: A Priceless Primer from 1969

A Big List of Free Art Lessons on YouTube

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Bob Ross’ Christmas Special: Celebrate, Relax, Nod Off is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

from Open Culture https://ift.tt/35Y1lhw
via Ilumina

Comments

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album Love and Theft , he lifted the title from a book of the same name by Eric Lott , who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their...

Arts and Culture

Search This Blog