Bob Ross's Strange Afterlife

nytimes.com

87 points·mhb··9 comments

I wasn't raised in the states, so the first time I watched Bob Ross was when twitch hosted the marathon. The painting process felt so surreal - I was witnessing an act of creation, the birth of a painting from blank canvas, yet at the same time I was the painter, deconstructing the painting in to mechanical techniques. I guess there is something unique about Bob Ross.

On a side note, in some sense coding is like painting, other than the fact that mistakes in programs are certainly not happy.

The craziest thing about his work is that it looks like nonsense for a few strokes and then suddenly pop it turns into a mountain or river or something.

My understanding is he was self taught, and his technique is mostly his, it's fantastic that he decided to teach it to anybody willing to tune in.

The technique isn't mostly his, the article explains this

I think I'm going to try to think of Bob Ross when I have a program error. "Well there's a happy little uncaught exception..."

I think you might enjoy this! https://twitter.com/BobRossGameDev

"There are no mistakes when coding, just happy little opportunities to learn and improve."

Here's the final episode after the initial run on twitch.tv, along with chat reaction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pHNhQGcXxs

Another great posthumous reference to Ross is the character based on him in this episode / scene from Boondocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhn_TAbvSH8

NYT and/or Wired and/or HuffPo writes an article about every retro Internet fad. This is how the Internet works. Since its globally connected, fads get much larger much faster than fads of the pre-Internet age.

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