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O. Sharp

@o-sharp.bsky.social

526 followers 113 following 796 posts

Gene Buckle once said, "Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies." That pretty much works as a description of me.

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O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 17h

Random photo of the day.

Brass plaque on a bench in an unnamed North London park, inscribed: "In memory of Roger Bucklesby, Who hated this park, and everyone in it." Plaque was reportedly commissioned - or, more likely, attached illegally with no permission whatsoever - by author Jamie Maslin. Or so I am told.

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O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Random photo of the day. Okay, not entirely random: today's Buster Keaton's birthday.

Publicity photo from "Sherlock Jr.", a silent starring Buster Keaton. The woman in the ticket window appears to be Christine Francis, though her role is uncredited. Keaton also co-produced and directed the movie, and did his own stunts - which is somewhat terrifying to realize when you watch that movie today.

Thanks to Wikipedia, you can watch the movie online.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherlock_Jr._(1924).webm

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O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Random photo of the day.

An official road sign standing beside an interstate highway, reading, "LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE - EXIT 12".

In case you've been looking all your life to find the Land Of Make-Believe: It's in New Jersey, just off I-80, and it's really not worth the trip.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Random photo of the day.

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O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Random photo of the day.

Large opulent dining room. Everyone there is a fencer. A huge duel is taking place: tables are being knocked over, and fencers are all in full gear havig at one another with epees. In the right foreground, one fencer has sat down and removed her mask to have a bite to eat.

Always remember to tip your wait-staff generously.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

19th century painting of Venus, by French artist Henri-Pierre Picou. Rather than providing the alt-text myself, I'll use this description I found in an internet meme:

"Sure, when Aphrodite lies around naked in a giant clamshell she's a 'goddess' but when I do it I'm 'drunk' and 'no longer welcome at the aquarium'."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Library at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago - once a decaying savings and loan building, which Chicago resident Theaster Gates bought for one dollar. Gates then set about restoring the building and creating an arts library for Chicago's South Side. "It's the kind of place that civic leaders propose and residents dream of, but for a thousand reasons it never seems to materialize," one journalist wrote of it. "And yet here it is."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

A tray of cupcakes, chocolate, with green icing, tentacles, and sinister faces. A small sign beside them is labeled: "Mint Chocolate Cthulhu".

Now you have a chance to devour him before he devours you, I guess.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Random photo of the day. Feel free to follow up with photos you like. I shouldn't have all the fun. :)

Protesters outside the U.S. Embassy in London mark the 100th day of Donald Trump's first so-called "presidency". Bad as it was, that first term feels like a light pleasantry compared to the hell he's putting us all through this time around.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Team Liquid lift the Aegis of Champions after winning the 2017 Dota 2 International. One of the many cool things about Dota is the truly international nature of its teams: Miracle-, on the left, is from Jordan, Matumbaman from Finland, Kuroky from Germany, Mind_Control from Bulgaria, and GH from Lebanon; their coach Heen (not in the photo) is from South Korea.

Dota 2 (short for "Defense Of The Ancients") is a brilliant, unspeakably complex, team-based video game, which has been holding annual tournaments with multimillion-dollar prize pools for close to two decades now.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Painted on a concrete wall: "GRAFFITI REMOVAL HOTLINE", followed by a phone number. Half the phone number has been painted over by a graffiti artist. To add insult to injury, the graffiti artist has painted a stick figure of himself holding a paintbrush next to the painted-over phone number.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Department store signs in Osaka, Japan. I'm told there's a certain Japanese penchant for using English words as decoration in their ads, but I'm not at all sure whether this one demonstrates a lack of linguistic nuance or simply a good sense of humor.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

"Washington Crossing The Street", by Gary Larson.

Once the Revolutionary War had ended Washington resigned his commission as Commander-In-Chief and headed back to Mount Vernon in hopes of resuming his civilian life. On the return trip, every town he passed through insisted on giving him a hero's reception and making speeches about his heroism and firing thirteen cannon in his honor and raising thirteen glasses in toast and so on. Once he finally reached Mount Vernon he faced an unending series of visitors making pilgrimages to his home to meet His Excellency The General. His personal correspondence indicates he got sick of the adulation pretty fast. With this in mind, I'd like to think the troops above were hired to guard General Washington from autograph seekers.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

"Washington Crossing The Delaware", by Emanuel Leutze.

After beating a desperate retreat from the British invasion of New York, George Washington and his demoralized troops were pushed all the way to Pennsylvania by Hessian regiments hired by the British. To the Hessians' disbelief Washington then proceeded to launch an offensive against his pursuers, leading his men back across the frozen Delaware in a daring (and hugely successful) set of attacks at Trenton and Princeton. The Trenton attack captured nearly 900 Hessian mercenaries, along with a huge store of muskets, cannon and rum, while Washington's losses were limited to seven deaths and his troops becoming massively drunk afterwards on the rum.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Memorial statue for the passenger ferry Cornelius G. Kloff, dragged beneath the waves by a gigantic octopus in November of 1963. Of course this never actually happened, but that fact didn't stop artist Joe Reginella from creating the statue, the story, a website and a set of flyers advertising a fictitious Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum at a fake address in Snug Harbor. Reginella has called his work "part practical joke, part multimedia art project, part social experiment."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

A small(!) part of the Vigeland sculpture installation at Frogner Park, Oslo, Norway. The park has 212 sculptures - some in bronze, some in granite - all designed by one artist, Gustaf Vigeland, and is the largest sculpture park created by a single artist. I think we may have to visit some day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

The entrance to Dismaland, Banksy's "family theme park unsuitable for children". The unique art show/social protest was built on the grounds of a shuttered outdoor swimming pool in Weston-super-Mare, and ran for five weeks.

"This event contains adult themes, distressing imagery, extended use of strobe lighting, smoke effects and swearing. The following items are strictly prohibited: knives, spraycans, illegal drugs, and lawyers from the Walt Disney corporation."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

A rare moment when Bernie Sanders was upstaged: he pauses during a campaign speech in Portland, Oregon when a small bird decides to share his podium.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Winter. A man, a sled, and a dog team. The dog team, however, is made up entirely of dachsunds, and seem completely uninterested in pulling the sled, or indeed in even attempting it. The man with the sled has his arms outstretched in a gesture which could roughly be described as: "What the hell? Why aren't we moving?"

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

A preservationist, with gloved hands, grasps one of the tiny books inside the library of Queen Mary's dollhouse, built for the Royal Family in 1924. Incredibly the hundreds of volumes are all actual books, made specifically for this library. Along with tiny Bibles, reference volumes and the complete works of Shakespeare, there are original titles as well. For example there's a book of Kipling's poems, hand-illustrated by Kipling himself. Another example is an original Sherlock Holmes story, "How Watson Learned The Trick", written by hand by A. Conan Doyle.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

The "Tunnel Of Love", somewhere outside the Ukraine town of Klevan. Back when this photo was taken, I heard it described as an idyllic place to visit as long as you avoided the freight trains which passed by three times a day. I have no idea if it still looks like now, after years of war launched by a deranged Russia, but I hope it can return to being this place of beauty again soon.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

(Not so) random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, during her days as an auto mechanic and ambulance driver during World War Two. It took great persistence on her part to persuade her father the King, and his advisors, to let her take up the potentially dangerous work. She took great pride in it, and it just goes to remind us that the United Kingdom had an amazing, willful, kick-ass Queen.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Bit of graffiti by Banksy: an arched rat-hole, stenciled onto the side of a building. Two rats, both formally dressed, stand beside the opening, one holding a clipboard and the other poised to greet arriving guests. As an added touch, a "red carpet" has been painted in front of the opening. I don't know if Banksy has given this work any official title, but one description online has named it "Red Carpet Dinner Service".

In this particular photo, a (real) woman is walking by the rat-hole. She doesn't appear to be planning to dine there.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Our dog Lungripper, a.k.a. The Dog Without Fear, the day he ate a mailman.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

A little tricky to describe, but... Photo of a pickup truck in the woods. Three pleased figures in the cab with bottles of beer, and a carcass strapped to the roof after a successful hunt. What makes it a more interesting photo is that the figures inside are moose (or possibly elk), and the carcass is that of a hunter who presumably thought things would go differently.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Marauder the Wonder Dog disrupts a Scrabble game.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Image from Ben Edlund's farcical superhero comic, "The Tick". A hugely-muscled supervillain bearing a hammer and sickle (in fact a paid, and carefully scripted, provocateur) prepares to destroy a park dedicated to "that decadent and imperialist American, Melville Dewey, hated originator of the Dewey Decimal System!" He concludes: "I, The Red Scare, will ruin this place for EVERYONE!!"

It was meant as satire of overwrought comic books, but now it feels like satire of overwrought conservatives.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Full solar eclipse of 20 May 2012. A nearly-closed crescent of light, all that remains of the moon-blocked sun, surrounds the silhouette of what appears to be a kid holding a basketball. Photo taken by Colleen Pinski with a telephoto lens, one and a half miles away from the ridge the kid is standing on. She had no idea who the person was who walked onto the ridge and framed themselves perfectly into her shot.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Random photo of the day.

Ridiculously tiny toolbox, filled with remarkably detailed miniature tools. A miniature wood plane, roughly 5 centimeters long, is a working plane and has taken shavings off a (normal-sized) pencil in the foreground.

(Before you assume AI fakery, I've had a copy of this photo for at least twelve years. There are some amazing miniaturists out there.)

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

Mickey Rooney hunting the wild Rainier, in a 1970s-era beer ad.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Just sayin'.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

The beautiful but abandoned City Hall Station of New York's subway system. Originally meant to be the showpiece of New York's subway stations, it was designed by Rafael Guastavino with tiled Roman arches, elegant chandeliers and skylights. It's now a ghost station, though I'm told it can be viewed in passing by taking the Number 6 train southbound from the Brooklyn Bridge - City Hall station.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

J.W. Waterhouse's painting "The Tempest", inspired by the Shakespeare play. Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, looks on at a shipwreck caused by her father's magic. The ship being wrecked carries Prospero's traitorous brother Antonio, King Alonso of Naples who aided in the brother's treachery, Ferdinand the Prince of Naples who will later fall in love with Miranda, Gonzalo the King's courtier who aided Prospero as he was exiled... well, you get the idea; it's a full shipment of plot complications about to wash ashore. But, hey, what a great painting.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

At last, some people are starting to get it.

Quote from Sarah Longwell, a onetime Republican strategist who has become a Democratic strategist:

"Democratic voters want their leaders to stop acting like peacetime diplomats, recognize the Republican Party for the threat it is and mount an effective counteroffensive. They are deeply frustrated by years of their politicians saying that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, but not acting like democracy is truly at stake."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Tariffs! We're not just shooting ourselves in the foot. We're not just electing a madman who will cripple the country. We're going to make sure our country doesn't have a leg to stand on!

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

A beach at night, stars overhead, much brighter points of light in the surf. This is the "Sea of Stars", on Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives. The "stars" are bioluminescent phytoplankton living in the surf. Beautiful as it is, it must be noted that rising sea levels may completely submerge the entire Maldives republic in less than a decade. The Sea of Stars is on the ever-growing list of beautiful things we'll lose unless we get our carbon usage under control.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

In 1989, after two months of protests for democracy in China's Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government sent out the military to crush the protests. One of the better-known videos taken by Western journalists shows a single protestor standing in the way of three or four Chinese tanks. A wider-angle photo taken that day by Stuart Franklin, however, reveals how much more of the Chinese military machine that lone protestor was blocking. This photo shows the man blocking a line of at least NINETEEN tanks, with at least fifteen more waiting in a distant lot to join the line.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Random photo of the day. (Okay, technically a cartoon. But still one of my personal favorites.)

Three frames from a "Superman" newspaper cartoon, 1939. Banker's office. The banker and Superman are in conversation, and a third man stands nearby. In the first frame, Superman asks the banker: "This gentleman wishes to borrow a measly $5000 for a deserving purpose - but you won't cooperate". The banker replies: "He - - he's financially unstable. To give him such a loan would be unbusinesslike."

In the second frame Superman is lifting a huge heavy steel safe up in the air with one hand, saying: "Nice bank you've got here... it would be a pity if anything HAPPENED to it."

In the third and final frame, the banker says to the third man: "On - - on second thought, we will advance you the sum."

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

Chittorgarh Fort, Rajasthan, India: ancient battlements rising over an immense walled moat/swimming pool, whose outer walls themselves overlook a sheer cliff. Built in the seventh century, multiple battles and sieges were fought here over the next nine hundred years. Now that it stands in peace, Wikipedia says Chittorgarh represents a "tribute to the nationalism, courage, medieval chivalry and sacrifice exhibited by the Mewar rulers of Sisodia and their kinsmen and women and children". Oddly enough, it does not say anything about Chittorgarh's inexplicably cool architecture.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

Women in Chicago being arrested for the heinous crime of wearing one-piece bathing suits without covering their legs, 1922. One woman is being forcibly lifted into a paddy wagon by a burly man who may or may not be a police officer, while a uniformed officer stands by. Another woman, similarly dressed, is being hauled out of an adjacent building and onto the street. A crowd of men stand on the sidewalk, rubbernecking.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

He could _be_ Goldfinger if he were, oh, considerably smarter.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Random photo of the day.

Table for the pinball game "Medieval Madness", made by Williams Electronics. It's great good fun.

O. Sharp @o-sharp.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Random photo of the day.