Oddity Central

Body Marbling Turns Your Arms into Temporary Psychedelic Works of Art
Singapore Woman Has Spent the Last 8 Years Living in an Airport While Renting Out Her Own Apartment
Man Has Spent the Last 40 Years Living Alone in Colorado Ghost Town Recording All Kinds of Useful Data

Body Marbling Turns Your Arms into Temporary Psychedelic Works of Art

Posted: 09 Jan 2017 05:34 AM PST

Body Marbling stations have been popping up at festivals across the United States and people are already calling it the future of body art. It’s based on a centuries-old technique called marbling, which involves applying colors to the surface of water and imprinting the designs on various surfaces, from paper and fabric to metal. But one company has figured out a way to make it work on human skin, and the results are visually stunning.

Body Marbling is the brainchild of College for Creative Studies (CCS) alumni Brad Lawrence. Diagnosed with chronic tendonitis in his wrists at the age of 23, he could no longer practice his biggest passions, drawing and sculpting, but he didn’t let that stop him from expressing his artistic talent. Motivated by his friend and Purple Heart Marine, Michael Zach, Brad got into abstract painting as a form of therapy, and started experimenting with marbling. Together, they started Black Light Visuals, a company that relies on marbling to create all kinds of “trippy” looking products, from hats and shirts to bags and backpacks. In 2013, they introduced body marbling at the Electric Forest Festival, which allowed people to turn their arms into psychedelic artworks for a few hours. Everybody loved it, and since then Body Light Visuals marbling stations have become popular at festivals all across the U.S..

body-marbling3

Posted: 09 Jan 2017 03:54 AM PST

A 50-year-old woman has apparently been living in Changi Airport, Singapore, for the last eight years, despite owning her own three-room apartment, which she rents out for about $1,000 a month.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Singapore newspaper Lianhe Wanbao that she moved into Changi Airport in 2008, after being hit hard by the global financial crisis. “At the time, I was stuck in a rut and had no other choice,” she said, adding that in the beginning she was terrified by the idea of living in an airport, and only planned to do it for a short period of time, until she got back on her feet. She rented out her three-room apartment and leaned to survive in an environment that she quickly learned provides a person with pretty much everything they need. She apparently became quite comfortable with her new home, as those few nights she originally planned for turned into eight years.

airport-tenant

Posted: 09 Jan 2017 02:31 AM PST

For the past four decades, billy barr – he insists his name be written with lower case letters only – has been living by himself in Gothic, Colorado, a ghost town deserted since the 1920s, passing the time by recording all sorts of data, from daily snowfalls, temperatures, snow melting, animal sightings, etc.. He never imagined that the results of his 40-year hobby would one day help scientists better understand global warming and earn him a cool superhero name – The Snow Guardian.

billy bar first came to Gothic in 1972 as a Rutgers University environmental science student doing water chemistry research. He liked the quiet life here so much that he completed his semester to get his degree and became a permanent resident of the mountainous ghost town. He had grown up in New Jersey, but never really liked being surrounded by so many people, so moving to this secluded ghost town was a chance to get away from social pressure. “I grew up in the city. It was too much for me,” he says.

barr began the winter of 1974 camping in a tent, which is not exactly ideal in a place where snow reaches twenty-five feet a year. Luckily, the owner of an abandoned mining shack was kind enough to let billy move in, to keep him from freezing to death. It became his home for the next eight years, and also the place where he started his impressive database on snow. The modern-day hermit claims that the sole goal behind his epic journal was to fight boredom. There’s not a lot to do in a ghost town in winter time, so he just started monitoring things like daily snowfalls, snow density, temperature, and anything else he could measure. “I didn't have anything else to do. It was simple curiosity,” billy says.

billy-barr-snow