The rise and fall of Pratolino: Tuscany’s ‘proto-theme park’ – he video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things takes viewers through the once-extraordinary grounds, as well as the fascinating history, of the Villa di Pratolino in Tuscany. Built in the late 16th century amid the Medici dynasty’s rule of Florence, this estate was deeply unusual for its time and place. Its creators eschewed refined Renaissance tastes in favour of something more like a ‘proto-theme park’, with world-class engineers populating the grounds with automata, fountains designed to surprise and soak visitors and, perhaps most famously, an 11-metre stone colossus that can still be visited today. –> https://aeon.co/videos/the-rise-and-fall-of-pratolino-tuscanys-pr...

Jean-Claude Campana, 1941 – Jean-Claude Campana is an French painter, who has been painting for more than thirty years, started his career by exhibiting together with Baboulène, Buffet, Hilaire, Brayer... The approach of these Masters encourages the talent of Campana, who already in his youth, builds up a strong character. Strengthened by his expérience in surrealism, symbolism and realism, Jean-Claude Campana has been devoted to Venice since about a fifteen years, in a very personal style. –> https://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/03/jean-c...

Can Jurassic Park become reality? Angela Gram urges us to open our eyes in her most political exhibition yet –> https://beautifulbizarre.net/angela-gram-absolute-elsewhere-exhib...

You Walk 5 Minutes in Glasgow and See This (18 Murals) –> https://streetartutopia.com/2026/04/05/glasgow-mural-city-walls-e...

Elizabeth I’s Manuscript Copy of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1559) – Divided into forty-four chapters, Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses is something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects. His sources were wide: the Bible, Greek and Roman philosophy, contemporary literature, folktales, and salacious gossip. This heady mix is on display from the beginning — his first wonder is the Devil himself –> https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/histoires-prodigieuses/

See These Eerie Behind the Scenes Photos From TWIN PEAKS –> https://cvltnation.com/see-these-eerie-behind-the-scenes-photos-f...

Discover the First Horror & Fantasy Magazine, Der Orchideengarten, and Its Bizarre Artwork (1919–1921) –> https://www.openculture.com/2026/04/discover-the-first-horror-fan...

Science Fiction and Readers Guide (The Children's Hour, vol 16) 1954 –> https://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2026/03/science-fiction-and-re...

What Are Psychedelic Entities? – The beings people often meet while using psychedelics resist tidy explanations. – ‘Why Did You Eat Us?’ –> https://www.noemamag.com/what-are-psychedelic-entities/

Modern Eden Gallery Presents ‘Restless Garden’ & Rhea O’Neill’s ‘Dreamlands’ –> https://beautifulbizarre.net/modern-eden-gallery-rhea-oneill/

'We play it way too safe': 5 questions with Raissa Pardini – The designer and creative director discuss the value of slowing down and the trap of creative safety. – We play it safe. Way too safe. There is not enough trust from clients, not enough budget, and no space for risk. That combination kills creativity. Safe work gets approved, but it is rarely memorable. We all end up playing this game and it is exhausting. I get it, we all need to make a living, but I have worked really hard to push against that. –> https://www.creativebloq.com/professional-development/creative-ca...

Man from Utopia – A page from Man from Utopia by Rick Griffin, San Francisco Comic Book Company, 1972. –> https://biblioklept.org/2026/03/22/sunday-comix-45/

Boomers in Baby Gas Masks… Vintage Photos of GAS MASKS –> https://cvltnation.com/vintage-photos-of-gas-masks/

Banking beyond the law – A centuries-old network of secret codes and shadowy brokers continues to outpace financial systems controlled by the state – There are, in fact, entirely separate payment networks that operate outside the confines of state-regulated information assembly lines. The Chinese refer to them as feiqian (‘flying money’). Arabic speakers prefer the term hawala, whereas the Indian diaspora operates through a practice called hundi. In English, we have developed an ominous phrase to capture these various informal networks: underground banking. – The truth is that there is nothing inherently suspect about underground banking. It is simply another method of transferring money. So why are they controversial? The real answer is not so much about financial crime. It is, instead, about power. Underground banks represent a challenge to states’ control of the global financial system, one that undermines their capacity to surveil our each and every transaction. As a result, those states seek to eliminate informal networks by subjecting them to regulation. It hasn’t worked. On the contrary, evidence suggests hawala, feiqian and other informal payment networks are alive and well – Nobody knows the true scale of this ‘hidden’ financial system. But there is reason to believe that it can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. –> https://aeon.co/essays/the-underground-bankers-who-reshape-the-fl...

Το κινητό σου σε παρακολουθεί ακόμα κι όταν δεν το χρησιμοποιείς - Να πώς το σταματάς (εντελώς δωρεάν) –> https://www.dwrean.net/2026/04/apenergopoiisi-parakolouthisis-app...

The Gloucester Sea Serpent – In the summer of 1817, a mysterious creature was seen swimming in the harbor of Gloucester and along the coast of Cape Ann. Eyewitnesses described it as a gigantic, serpent-like animal, its long body marked by a series of humps rising and falling above the water. Throughout that summer and into the following year, numerous fishermen and other credible locals reported sightings of the creature, capturing the imagination of scientists, newspapers, and the public alike. The Gloucester Sea Serpent quickly became a legend and remains one of the most well-documented cryptid sightings ever recorded. –> https://www.amusingplanet.com/2026/03/the-gloucester-sea-serpent.html

Catastrophe markets – Americans love to gamble. But placing bets on wildfires, floods and storms comes with serious moral and social costs – After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, The New York Times published an article entitled ‘Catastrophe Markets’ that discussed the short-lived impact of the disaster on stock prices. Today’s online catastrophe markets are markets literally in disaster. People bet on whether disasters will happen and how bad they will be. These catastrophe markets raise some questions, including what, besides money, is at stake? What kind of thinking about risk in society do they promote and preclude? – Capitalism turned the uncertainty of the weather into a calculable risk and source of profit – If the disaster happens, investors can lose everything, but if it doesn’t, they walk away with double-digit returns –> https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-the-real-cost-of-betting-on-weathe...

Check Out These 1923 Photos of a Woman Seducing a Skeleton –> https://cvltnation.com/check-out-these-1923-photos-of-a-woman-sed...

Mugshots of Child Criminals And Their Crimes from Early 20th Century England – Stories behind the pictures of prisoners brought before the North Shields Police Court, England, between 1902 and 1916. –> https://flashbak.com/mugshots-of-child-criminals-and-their-crimes...

Ken Barr -- Ten Years Gone – Ken was a proud scion of Scotland. He was born there and he died there. However, in between, he crossed the pond to the USA in search of his fortune. He found success and a wife. Along the way, he created some of the most 'pulpish' post-pulp art of anybody--and that includes Frank Frazetta. Barr's paintings were like Frank McCarthy or Earl Norem on Technicolor steroids: dynamic, over-the-top and blazing with color. –> https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2026/3/26/ken-barr-ten-years-gone

Unknown Cellar Discovered Beneath the Howard House – It is believed the cellar predates the Howard’s puchase of hte house since there is no mention of the cellar in any Robert’s or his father’s existing correspondence, something John Bullard has confirmed. It is believed the previous owner sealed the cellar just before selling the house. – The cellar was mostly empty except for a few broken pieces of pottery and an iron chest approximately three feet by two feet and one foot thick . What the pottery might have held is unknown. The chest was locked. Jeff used bolt cutters on the padlock, which was of an unusually intricate design. The chest contained a strange grey dust about four inches thick and a manuscript on parchment. The writing on the parchment was in some type of heiroglyphics. Translation has already begun. –> https://adventuresfantastic.com/unknown-cellar-discovered-beneath...

Ambiguity Reigns in Olaf Hajek’s Mysterious Illustrations –> https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/olaf-hajek-surreal-illustr...

RS Sherriffs’ Rubáiyát – The 1947 edition illustrated by Scottish artist Robert Stewart Sherriffs is more serious than these, with an introduction by Laurence Housman, the texts of three different 19th-century translations, together with supplementary material about Edward Fitzgerald. Sherriffs worked for a number of years as a caricaturist for Punch magazine and other publications but prior to this he was also a book illustrator. Most of his drawings are black-and-white ink renderings; the Rubáiyát is a rare example of him working in colour throughout. –> https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2026/03/25/rs-sherriffs-...

An Invitation to The Rats Wedding And Vietnam’s Ðông Hồ Folk Paintings – Often used to illustrate Vietnamese New Year, Ðông Hồ paintings are bright, witty riffs on society and human desire. – The traditional themes of Đông Hồ painting and woodblock prints are good luck signs, historical figures, folk allegories, popular stories, and social commentaries. In a similar way to Mexican calaveras, Ðông Hồ painting lampoon the mighty and celebrate the everyday. –> https://flashbak.com/rats-wedding-dong-ho-paintings-vietnam-482309/

“The Resurrection Morning,” an Easter story by Winifred Holtby –> https://biblioklept.org/2026/04/05/the-resurrection-morning-an-ea...

You Grew Up With This (40 photos) – The 90s and early 2000s gave us Saturday morning cartoons, anime afternoons, arcade icons, blockbuster sci-fi, and characters that still live rent-free in our heads. From Pikachu and Bart to TMNT, Terminator, Totoro, Tetris, Mario, and The Matrix, these artists turn pure nostalgia into public spectacle. –> https://streetartutopia.com/2026/04/04/street-art-pieces-inspired...

Tadami Yamada’s weird covers –> https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2026/03/30/tadami-yamada...

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count – Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us, they never close a door without opening a window, and so on. But in the particular case of the Christian God, we’ve all heard that he both giveth and taketh away, even if we’ve never so much as opened the Bible, Old Testament or New. That line comes from the Book of Job, which belongs to the Old, a text whose depiction of God may surprise first-time readers — especially in his willingness to cause death, the subject of the Hochelaga video above on “God’s Biblical Kill Count.” –> https://www.openculture.com/2026/03/how-many-lives-does-god-take-...

Las Médulas: The Wrecking of Mountains – In the rugged hills of north western Spain, amid green forests of chestnut and oak, rises an otherworldly landscape of jagged red cliffs, hollowed hills, and labyrinthine cavities. This surreal terrain called Las Médulas is not the work of natural erosion but the result of a complex hydraulic engineering works used by the Romans to extract gold from the bowels of the mountain. –> https://www.amusingplanet.com/2026/03/las-medulas-wrecking-of-mou...

A Pictorial History of Horror Stories 200 Years of Spine Chilling Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines Peter Haining (1985, Treasure Press) –> https://archive.org/details/A_Pictorial_History_of_Horror_Stories...

Arch Enemy Arts Presents Mike Gamble, Graham Yarrington & Brian Serway –> https://beautifulbizarre.net/arch-enemy-arts-presents-march-shows/

Space Trash and Future Junkyards –> https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/space-trash-and-future-junkyards/

Sea Monsters –> https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/sea-monsters/

Matej Kollár art –> https://www.matejkollar.com/

Bitch: a history – The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next? – Bitch has been used to label women as promiscuous, unpleasant, disagreeable, despicable, treacherous, nagging, spiteful, mean, malicious, manipulative, annoying – Curiously, bitch has been aimed at men for almost as long as it has been aimed at women. Like dog, the term crosses gender lines, though it does very different work on either side. We’ve seen how bitch can acquire positive connotations when reclaimed by women. When applied to men, however, it is rarely a compliment. – Son of a bitch had become such an all-American phrase that it was even acceptable for a president to use –> https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-evolution-of-bitch-says-about-gen...

La Femme Fatale – And other stories – Paris Magazine – This first image features the instantly recognizable Marie Magdalene “Marlene” Dietrich (1901–1992), a German-American actress and singer, whose career almost spanned seven decades –> https://secretoranges.substack.com/p/la-femme-fatale

Antonio Rubino’s Versi e Disegni – Italian artist Antonio Rubino (1880–1964) – Wikipedia describes Rubino as an illustrator, cartoonist, animation director, screenwriter, playwright, author and poet who was also the most prolific comics illustrator in Italy before the First World War –> https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2026/03/16/antonio-rubin...