We've said it before: having a body -- whether tall or short, cis or transgender, ostomized, hirsute, voluptuous, small-boned or whichever adjective feels most apt -- is the only prerequisite for having a "beach body."

Still, baring more skin than you're used to come June can make some feel less than confident. To help, we gathered 28 instances of many-bodied babes in paintings that illustrate the beauty in the human form, regardless of how you happen to take up space in this world.

For centuries, art students have studied faces and bare bodies as practice for understanding proportion and human form, so what better place to look for beachy celebrations of our buck-naked selves?

Of course, this is just the tip of the (mostly Western, male-oriented) art canon iceberg. For more on how contemporary art is embracing diverse bodies of all genders and races, see projects here, here, here, here, here and here.

Every so often, HuffPost Arts & Culture attempts to bring to light a few forgotten gems with our light-hearted look back at art history. For past examples see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. 

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Becoming a parent changes everything, but it doesn't have to hinder your ability to dance! These twirling dads know that better than anyone.

In this video from GroovaRoo Dance -- a San Diego dance studio specializing in parent-baby classes -- some baby carrier-clad fathers do a choreographed routine to Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music." As they carry their infants, the dads boogie away and bond with their families.

The video has racked up over a million views on Facebook. As the caption notes, "For a bunch of dads that claim they don't dance, they were 'dancin' and singin' and movin' to groove' just to show these mamas how much they appreciate them. And that's the greatest love of all!"

Too cute!

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Two recreational divers in Israel unexpectedly found a trove of old relics dating back at least 1,600 years, authorities announced Monday.

Ran Feinstein and Ofer Ra‘anan, both from the city of Ra'anana, were exploring a shipwreck near the ancient port of Caesarea in western Israel last month when they made the discovery. They left the first artifact they found on the seabed, but after unearthing more, they decided to search the area and report their discovery to the Israel Antiquities Authority.

"It took us a couple of seconds to understand what was going on," Ra'anan told The Associated Press.

Divers dispatched to the scene by the IAA for follow-up excavations recovered many other items, including a bronze lamp depicting the sun god Sol, a figurine of the moon goddess Luna, a bronze faucet shaped like a wild boar and the remains of an old merchant ship. They also unearthed thousands of coins lumped together in the shape of the container in which they were kept, weighing some 44 pounds.

This was the largest underwater discovery of ancient artifacts in Israel in 30 years, the IAA noted.

The items likely came from a large merchant ship caught in a storm that drifted at sea before smashing into the seawall and rocks sometime during the Late Roman period, some 1,600 years ago, said Jacob Sharvit and Dror Planer, directors of the IAA's marine archaeology unit. The condition of some of the vessel's broken anchors suggests that people onboard the ship had unsuccessfully tried to keep it from drifting ashore, Sharvit and Planer added.

Archaeologists discovered that a large amount of sand had shifted in the seabed, exposing the treasures to the divers. Because the sand covered and protected the artifacts for hundreds of years, they have remained in surprisingly good condition.

The relics "are in an amazing state of preservation -- as though they were cast yesterday rather than 1,600 years ago," said Sharvit and Planer.

The last year and a half has been an exciting time for Israeli archaeologists. In February 2015, divers in Caesarea discovered 2,000 gold coins dating back some 1,000 years -- the largest cache of gold coins ever found in the country. In March, an American hiking in the Galilee mountains discovered a rare coin depicting Augustus, the Roman emperor who ruled from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14. It is one of two such coins known to exist in the world.

Finding the treasures was "amazing," Ra'anan told the AP. "I dive here [at Caesarea] every other weekend and I’ve never found anything like that, ever," he said.

The two divers will receive a certificate of appreciation and a personal tour of IAA storerooms for alerting the antiquities authority about their findings, the Times of Israel reported.

Read more:

Hiker Accidentally Unearths Extremely Rare Gold Coin In Israel

‘Priceless’ Trove Of Ancient Gold Coins Discovered Off Coast Of Israel

Cavers In Israel Discover Rare Artifacts From Era Of Alexander The Great

Man In Norway Finds 1,265-Year-Old Viking Sword While Hiking

Images Show ISIS Didn’t Completely Destroy Palmyra

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Misty Copeland made history in June 2015 when she became the first black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. The Brown Girls Do Ballet Instagram has almost 90,000 followers, spawning both a book and a movement. Slowly but surely, the dance world is becoming a more diverse place. 

And yet, as with many other corners of the clothing and beauty industry, there is still a lack of inclusivity when it comes to options for dancers whose skin tones aren't white. Although some companies do offer dancewear in multiple skin-tone shades, options for darker tones are few and far between.

Mahogany Blues, a dance apparel company started by swimsuit designer Whitney Bracey, hopes to change that. She learned of the narrow offerings in nude leotards following the success of Brown Girls Do Ballet, which was started by Bracey's friend Takiyah Wallace. Bracey told The Huffington Post she decided to do something about it back in March of 2015.

"I began to research and found that many dancers have to dye their leotards in various ways, from using makeup all the way to using tea to dye them so that the leotards would match their skin tones," she said. "I felt like dancers whose skin isn't considered the nude norm shouldn't have to go through these extreme measures just to be up to par with other dancers. This should be something that is readily available to them."

With her swimwear background in tow, Bracey set out to make an inclusive line of leotards. A company that started out quite small -- Bracey was creating and sewing all the garments herself -- has grown to a team of two thanks to Elizabeth Law, who Bracey calls "the other half of my team." The line will soon grow again to include menswear, and the current offerings will grow from four shades to six: another dark option, and one paler shade -- the result of Bracey learning that, as she put it, "not only dancers of color have this problem of finding the right nude."

Bracey, a Dallas native, told The Huffington Post she believes it has taken so long for more nude shades to be introduced is because until now, "the typical nude ... matches the skin tones of the majority of ballerinas that you see in the spotlight." But based on the sheer volume of business Mahogany Blues has done in the past year alone, clearly the demand for a more inclusive range exists.

"The most rewarding aspect is just being able to read testimonials and hear stories from people who have purchased from us or that have heard about us, or how our products have impacted their daughter's lives in such a positive way. Something as simple as offering these leotards in different shades of nude makes them feel like they matter and that they are important, because our company intentionally created products with them in mind," she said. 

For those of us who are not actually dancers but, you know, want to keep the dream alive, we suggest wearing these leotards (which retail for $45 and are named after Disney princesses) with a pair of those inclusive Christian Louboutin nude ballerina flats.

Head to Mahogany Blues to learn more. 

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Inmates have the opportunity to erase symbols of their pasts with the help of one compassionate initiative. 

A program offered by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department helps remove tattoos from inmates in exchange for their enrollment in vocational or educational courses. What's more, the procedure, which can cost upward of $75 a session, is free for the inmate.

Since the incentivized program's launch back in 2012, about 2,500 inmates under the custody of the sheriff's department have received tattoo removals.

Cynthia K. Murphy, custody assistant of the Education Based Incarceration unit, who helps run the program, told The Huffington Post that it's about helping those incarcerated turn over a new leaf. 

"They just want to start over -- one way or another it leads to that," she explained.  

Those who have participated in the program, which is funded by the inmate welfare fund, had their tattoos removed for a myriad of reasons.

According to Murphy, some inmates had gang-affiliated ink and wished to leave that chapter behind. Others had tattoos in conspicuous areas, which could potentially hurt their chances of future employment in a professional environment. A few inmates, who were involved in prostitution, wanted to erase tattoos that acted as a brand from their pimps. 

In order to get involved in the program, which is a combined effort between the LASD’s Inmate Services Bureau and the Medical Services Bureau, inmates must demonstrate that they are willing to make a positive change through academic or other types of courses, which can include parenting, life skills, bicycle repair or welding, among others.

They're then placed on a waitlist and screened for certain medical "disqualifiers." Once approved, participants visit a clinic where they begin the tattoo removal treatments. They're given as many treatments as needed to remove the tattoo -- as long as the participants are still incarcerated and continue their schooling or vocational courses. 

Tattoo removal is certainly no easy process. But the pain, Murphy says, is worth it to those involved. 

"I have never seen a group of people so grateful to have a procedure that's considered so painful. They're just elated," she said. "When they come out of the clinic area -- you've never see a smile so big." 

H/T Reddit

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Feeling stressed? You may want to add coloring to your to-do list. The practice has a ton of benefits when it comes to your mental health.

In the video above, Marygrace Berberian, a clinical assistant professor of art therapy at New York University, and Dr. Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist, explain how adult coloring can relax your mind. This simple activity is no longer just for kids.

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Adrien Brody always looks poised to duck into the shadows while sporting a trench coat, and in the new movie "Manhattan Night," he pretty much does just that. Brody plays a New York tabloid writer whose picture-perfect family life is upended when an alluring woman (Yvonne Strahovski) asks him to investigate her husband's mysterious murder. So begins a seedy rabbit hole based on Colin Harrison's 1996 novel Manhattan Nocturne.

The Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL, have an exclusive "Manhattan Night" clip, in which Brody's character first finds himself pulled into this widow's web. The movie -- also starring Jennifer Beals, Campbell Scott and Linda Lavin -- opens in theaters and premieres on-demand May 20.

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As a dedicated contrarian -- someone whose few attempts at trend-chasing have culminated in baroque, Wile E. Coyote-esque failure -- little makes me feel more alien in my own skin than finding myself accidental avatar of a cultural fad. Which is to say, I’m not really the zeitgeist type. And yet it seems I’ve written a book with “girl” in the title. First prize: Free ride on the bandwagon, like it or not.

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Lucia Love describes her characters as "mixtures of flesh and pudding." Indeed, the New York-based multidisciplinary artist has a penchant for creations of questionable consistency, whose eyelids droop like jellyfish and ears erode into infinite chasms. 

Love's work was recently on view with Albertz Benda Gallery at the NADA art fair in New York. Many of the exhibited works revolve around the tale of a telepathic cactus. According to Love, the malicious plant brainwashed women with the hopes of changing Earth's atmosphere to a brutal desert climate -- one more suitable for cacti. The possessed ladies then organized a satanic ritual involving the caging of innocent, young boys dangled above a tire fire. Eventually a deer, one who could resist the cacti's brainwashing methods, rescued the young boys.

If the concept sounds like a deliciously strange stew of violence, power dynamics and perversion, you're not far off. "I wanted to have all of these characters from different parts of my practice meet each other and see what would happen," Love explained to The Huffington Post. 

Love was born in 1988 in New York. Her father worked as a photographer, her mother owned and designed for a women's clothing store. "I had a lot of art around me growing up," Love recalled. "My parents really liked going to museums and they prided themselves on being creative at life. They were really supportive, always telling me I should just go out there and make whatever I need to make. You know, do your thing."

As a kid, Love remembers being perplexed by so much of the "grown up" art she encountered, finding it, in her words, super boring. "There were some things I would look at and ask, 'Why would adults like this stuff? There are no animals in it!'"

One work, however, stood out: a painting in Love's family home that seemed to her as "old as time." It was called "Satyr and Nymph," made by Walter Shirlaw around 1860. "It was this tiny painting that had this even tinier flesh blob strewn on a rock in the middle," Love said. "It looked like a pair of dirty socks. It took me years to realize they were lovers. I'd just look into this blob forever and wonder if it was guts of murdered people nicely laying in the woods."

As a kid, Love mostly hung out with the chess club and enjoyed playing Magic: The Gathering. She mentioned feeling isolated by classmates whose topics of discussion seemed only to revolve around the latest episode of "Friends." Love herself did watch some television, namely the warped and kinky cartoons that graced the '90s with their awesome weirdness.

"When I was growing up," she said, "I had this magical experience -- I had a TV and I could put it on when nobody was watching and I could watch Adult Swim cartoons. It felt so deviant. It was basically video art."

The cartoon thing stuck. Love enrolled in New York's School of Visual Arts to study animation, to create characters she could breathe stories into. In school, she studied "The Ren & Stimpy Show" frame by frame. "They have this special way of moving characters and splatting them against stuff and adding those really close-up, nasty frames. It was such a cool time to be studying cartoons because people were finally allowed to make gnarly ones."

However, Love soon grew disappointed with the animation program's emphasis on marketability, which often came at the expense of personal style. She knew she wouldn't be happy drawing the background of a random film she knew nothing about. In other words: "I don’t want to make stupid shit! When you’re a kid you know what sucks even more than adults do. I don’t want to do something my 12-year-old self would kick me in the nuts for."

And so Love dragged her passion for animated strangeness into the fine art realm, painting unorthodox narrative scenes that combine the crispness of comics with the melting temperatures of surrealist and Cubist art. 

Pioneered by artists like Peter Saul, Saul Steinberg and Philip Guston, the sweet melding of art and animation is having a moment. Dana Schutz, Jamian Juliano Villani, Eric Yahnker and recent MacArthur Grant winner Nicole Eisenman all usher the gross-out tactics of late-night cartoons into the pristine walls of the gallery space. Love is quite aware of animation's relevance, though not quite elated about it. "It’s kind of weird. A lot of people are talking about cartoons now," she said.

"Everybody wants to have that conversation of high art and low art clashing, bringing populist consumables into a more particular market," Love added. "To me it just feels so played out. Were German Expressionists doing their thing in response to Disney? No, that’s just how they saw people, as disgusting pigs. It was more of a political thing and less, 'Oh, we’re trying to do a little mashup and keep it fresh.'"

There is something palpably erotic, almost appallingly so, about Love's work, even if sex isn't explicitly depicted. Maybe it's all the tangling and oozing and blurring of boundaries, or perhaps it's the ecstatic emphasis on the body in all its animal glory, spitting and spewing and screaming and generally acting outside of established norms. 

Love recalled reading Susan Sontag's lecture "On Classical Pornography," in which she compares comedy to pornographic texts like Marquis de Sade's Justine. Both, Sontag argues, require a certain emotional distance to be successful. We, as viewer and reader, do not enter the interior landscape of the characters on paper or on screen. 

"The flayed, abused, pierced and violated victims of Sade don’t really suffer," Siri Hustvedt wrote in a piece on Sontag's lecture. "They are creatures of endless repetition -- more machine than human. The form creates a democratization of the text’s landscape, in which human beings and things mingle without defined borders in an abstract, unfeeling world."

Love recognizes this emotional distancing at work in her images as well. Just as when Sylvester the Cat, as the butt of the joke, is tortured mercilessly despite remaining obliviously calm. In both comedy and pornography, actions don't have the same consequences, physically and emotionally. People and things bump against each other with plastic resilience. 

"Makes sense," Love commented. "There are only a few ways to release. One is to laugh, one is to come."

Although Love's artwork leaps wildly back and forth in style and subject matter like a cartoon character on a frantic and bumbling mission, her themes generally revolve around ideas of innocence, boundaries, power dynamics, and historical perverts. She's also repeatedly drawn to literary female characters like the aforementioned Justine, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Milan Kundera's Tereza and Sabina, who embody such topics. 

When attempting to describe her process, Love again veers into to erotic territory. "Process is such a weird thing. It’s like masturbating. When am I turned on? When do I want to do this? When do I have to do this? What do I want to watch while I’m doing this? Then you get hooked on a thing -- being vanilla or sadistic. It can come from anywhere, it’s just life."

With a wonderfully unhinged practice that drops telepathic cacti and Cubist nudes and exploding faces into the same, flattened world, Love has certainly achieved at least one goal. Her 12-year-old self would surely be proud. 

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Good news, dads! There will soon be a brand-new item to add to your pile of redundant gadgets. It’s not a universal remote, or a cord to connect all of your other cords. It’s something much rarer, a coveted object that only surfaces every so often, unlike those quotidian iPhone updates.

Dan Brown, the author of Angels & Demons, Inferno and The Da Vinci Code, has a book forthcoming this fall. 

The globe-trotting thriller might sound familiar to fans, however: it’s not a new story, but a rewrite of The Da Vinci Code, targeted toward Young Adult readers. Changes to the original, Publishers Weekly reports, will “feature a new cover design and be abridged in length from the original.” Otherwise, it will “maintain Brown’s original plot."

Never mind that the YA-ified whodunnit sounds like someone slapped an attractive cover on a print-out of The Da Vinci Code Sparknotes summary and declared it new. Dan Brown hopes that the update “sparks in young adults the same thrill of discovery” he feels while writing.

Regardless of whether the book is a marketing decision or a genuine misunderstanding of teen readers, it’s uncomfortably patronizing. Retelling a story aimed for adults so that it’s suitable for younger audiences isn’t unheard of; Malala Yousafzai shared her story with kids and adults alike, in separate books for decidedly separate audiences, and YA “crossover” is an established genre meant to appeal to a swath of readers, age notwithstanding. But The Da Vinci Code already falls into a genre with broad appeal across age groups. To say otherwise undermines the smarts and maturity of avid young readers.

As popular detective fiction, the book is a close cousin to Arthur Conan Doyle’s classics or Agatha Christie’s rich, page-turning mysteries. The language of the story is buoyant. It serves the purpose of keeping the engaging plot afloat. It’s not particularly labyrinthine, it’s not meant to play tricks on the reader. This isn’t Borges or Calvino, writers of mysterious stories that are decidedly not mystery stories and who are better read once critical reading chops have been strengthened.

This is why Doyle and Christie are so often devoured by young readers. Their writing grabs your hand and pulls you into an expertly paced story, one that makes your heart race as though you were there. The book critic Michael Dirda wrote of his fifth grade obsession with Sherlock Holmes, making his introduction to detective novels sound harrowing in itself. "The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle, was the first grown-up book I ever read -- and it changed my life,” he wrote. “In the lowering darkness I turned page after page, more than a little scared, gradually learning the origin of the dreaded curse of the Baskervilles.”

The original The Da Vinci Code has the power to inspire similar passions, with its clean prose, break-neck scenes, witty dialogue and creative insights into historical events. It needn’t be amended to appeal to kids; it’s well-suited for adventure-loving readers of all ages as it is.

Writers and readers have already spoken out about Brown’s YA adaptation. “Cainsville” and “Otherworld” author Kelley Armstrong tweeted, “Dan Brown to release YA Da Vinci Code. And by 'YA' he means 'abridged' so they can, you know, read it. Doesn't know any actual teens, huh?”

It’s worth noting, too, how the distinction between YA and adult literature is defined. According to The Young Adult Library Services Association, a young adult reader is between the ages or 12 and 18. Most are already watching PG-13 movies, which is the rating “The Da Vinci Code” movie adaptation received. Many have received some kind of sex education, whether school-sanctioned or through peers, and are therefore prepared for the type of sexual content in the original book’s pages.

The scene most likely to be interpreted as gratuitous involves a fertility ritual not unlike the soma-fueled party in Brave New World, a book that’s often found on high school curriculums. In both books, the sexual content serves a thematic purpose, and is judged as unsettling by the book’s characters. To exclude them in order to make the story “more appropriate” would be a needless, if not noxious scrubbing, one that would benefit protective parents more than budding bookworms, for whom adulthood is fast-approaching. 

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It seems like Tamara McNeil is on an impossible mission whenever she searches for books about black characters for her son, MJ, who recently turned one.

Visiting various bookstores and libraries to find books with main characters resembling her son became frustrating, McNeil told The Huffington Post. That's when she realized if she was having this problem in Atlanta with a mostly black population, then others probably were, too.

McNeil decided to create a solution to this problem. Using her own money and resources, she bought roughly 1000 books and created Just Like Me!, a monthly subscription book box, which launched on Monday. 

"I just found a void in the market and I know that I’m not the only parent that feels this way and who’d like for their children to have a diverse library, and that’s really important to me," she told HuffPost. "My goal is essentially for children to be able to see themselves in literature. It really makes a world of difference and it’s really disturbing to me that our books and our stories are so hard to find."

In the Just Like Me! box, customers get two to three age-appropriate children's books for $25 each month. Every box features books that tell the stories of black characters, supplemental learning tools and an additional gift for parents like bookmarks and backpacks.

Many of the books are authored by black people, whom McNeil said don't get enough spotlight in the publishing world. McNeil admitted that finding these authors was difficult at first.

Upon further research, McNeil found out why. Of the 3,400 books received by the Cooperative Children's Book Center last year, only three percent were authored by black writers and eight percent were about black characters. Overall, there were less than 15 percent of kids' books published by major companies in the country last year.

"It is essential that we introduce our children to a diverse style of books [and] diverse characters, because it’s really important that our kids understand the world that we live in," McNeil said. "We’re not all just black, we’re not all just white, my child reads Dr. Suess, he reads all sorts of books, but I especially want him to see powerful images of himself."

McNeil said if children are reading stories that reflect their experiences, it can empower them to dream big, all while helping to close the literacy gap.

"Once our kids see that we can be superheroes in our own right, we can be Barack Obama, we can be anything that we want to be. I think that starts with books."

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One of the super fun (and by "fun," we mean terrible) things about anxiety is that your brain and body have a tendency to go into overdrive.

Anxiety disorders affect an estimated 40 million American adults and come with a host of issues. The physical symptoms can be next-level awful and your thoughts can feel like they're out of control. But comprehending how anxiety can cripple your life may be difficult for those who don't experience the condition, no matter how many times we wax poetic about its effects.

Enter these cheeky comics by Marzi Wilson, the creator behind the series Introvert Doodles, which perfectly explain just what it's like to deal with the mental health disorder.

"I would like those who have anxiety to know that they aren't alone, so there's no reason to feel embarrassed," Wilson told The Huffington Post. "I believe that the greatest tools for erasing stigma are education and conversation, so I hope that these comics will be a starting point for a more open dialogue about anxiety."

Wilson started experiencing anxiety as a teen and has since learned to deal with it through her artwork. While the illustrations are meant to be a hyperbolic and (somewhat) humorous way of explaining anxiety, there's some real truth to them. People with anxiety have a tendency to ruminate on the worst-possible scenario, get panic-stricken at any given moment or overthink even the smallest of situations. But that doesn't mean all hope is lost, Wilson says.

"It's a challenge to live with anxiety, and it can make everyday tasks more difficult, but having anxiety doesn't mean you're broken or weak," she said. "It takes immense inner strength to repeatedly confront your fears, as those with anxiety do on a daily basis. You're stronger than you realize."

Ain't that the truth.

Take a look at some of Wilson's comics below to get an idea of what it's really like dealing with anxiety:

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In the midst of an unprecedented wave of adults turning to coloring to ease their anxiety, artist Shantell Martin finds mindfulness in black and white.

Of course, those are two aesthetic opposites that can complement each other perfectly, as illustrated by Martin's latest project: a stunning coloring book, Wave, made up of just one of her unbroken panel line drawings folded into an accordion. 

Martin began working on accordion-style notebooks shortly after she finished her graphic design degree, when she got a Moleskine accordion sketchbook. After she graduated, she moved to Japan to teach in a rural town, ultimately ending up in Tokyo where she carved out a life as a working artist. In the introduction to Wave, Martin describes using her illustrations in an accordion-style sketchbook to keep a visual diary of her time there: "I could happily jump between pages, joining everything up at the end versus working from front to back as one would in a traditional sketchbook."

That diary became Wave. In an email to The Huffington Post, Martin describes how the stream-of-consciousness art captures "a mixture of conversations, things I saw and things I imagined. When I look back at them, I am reminded of various moments, times, places and people ... I discover new things each time I look at them."

This sort of contiguous, limitless sketching is the foundation of Martin's art. As a young girl, living in the Thamesmead estate public housing complex in London, she drew cartoon figures all over hidden spots below furniture.

A New York Times Home & Garden profile in 2012 pictured her room in a friend's brownstone, where she'd covered not just the walls but the ceiling and the white bed frame with line drawings. She sketches in black all over her white shirts. 

And coloring books aside, Martin has also found more than one avenue for remaining financially stable while pursuing her artistic urges; she's drawn all over spaces for Maybelline and Warby Parker, shown in galleries and museums, and of course sells her drawings to private collectors.

Martin has flourished as an artist in the years since she created the visual diary that led to Wave, but looking through the coloring book shows a crucial moment in her evolution as a young creative. "When I look back at these pieces of work, I see that I was on a journey and that I was changing at that time. That's why it's diary-like in a way," she told HuffPost. "And you can also see that over time the lines become more confident and patient."

So why publish this personal memoir-esque work of art as a coloring book? "People bring the color to my work, and this way I get to see my journey told in numerous new ways and from an untold amount of perspectives," Martin explained. 

If colorists are inspired by the innovative artist's boundary-free approach to visual creativity, the back of the book suggests using "the reverse side to create your own unfolding illustration." Martin pointed out, "If you have a single page, it’s very intimidating and very final. But when you have an accordion, you have the flexibility and freedom to jump between pages"

"One of the most exciting things is that you can mix pages up and get an entirely new perspective of the drawing," she said.

Maybe accordion-style sketchbooks will be the next new mindfulness trend -- for Martin, something about the form is undeniably liberating.

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Sending a text on an iPhone is an intuitive experience -- so intuitive that users take the ease of communication it allows for granted. We use our thumbprints to unlock a password-protected screen, click on a green button and type away. The action has become so ingrained in our daily habits that 8.3 trillion texts were sent in 2015 alone.

But long before the iPhone, and before Steve Jobs founded Apple, rising to success with his rounded, sleek personal technologies, computers weren’t so easy to interact with, let alone carry around. There were knobs and tubes, tangled wires and big screens. Certainly the average person couldn’t walk up to a '60s-era computer and make sense of how to use it. But that doesn’t mean the technology wasn’t revolutionary at the time and a cutting-edge step towards the devices we use today.

Paying homage to the computers of yore, photographer James Ball (aka “Docubyte”) teamed up with production company INK to take stylized “portraits” of machines throughout history, granting the clunky computers a poppy, consumerist sheen, as though they were the subjects of glossy ads.

The series reintroduces us to the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, Control Data 6600, which is regarded as the first-ever supercomputer, and the EAI Pace, considered a desktop computer in the 60s, but big and cumbersome by today’s standards. Photographed in this vibrant context, the vintage computers are given due reverence as the forebears of our beloved laptops.

See what Ball had to say about the series below:

Why do you think it’s important to preserve the designs of old computers?

It’s only really now, in the era of high-tech pocketable technology that the significance of early computers is being so fondly realized. We carry machines in our pockets today with hundreds of times more power than those depicted in the series, replete with shiny screens and touch-based input -- we're not really familiar with the input characteristics of the machines from yesteryear. I love knobs and dials and buttons and wanted to celebrate that visually.

You chose bright, glossy compositions for these photos -- why did you choose to juxtapose the composition with the outdated designs?

I work as a photographer and art director and retoucher. The look is really a culmination of the time I've spent in visual commercial advertising, alongside a fondness for the original marketing imagery that accompanied some of these machines. It wasn't enough to just photograph them as is. A lot of the machines were in very poor condition and felt very much like antiquated museum pieces. I wanted to restore them to their former glory and recreate a timeless aesthetic akin to the advertising from the past while keeping the images clean, modern and supposedly, studio-based.

What interested you most about the design of outdated computers?

Well, the machines are huge, for one thing! All those knobs and dials cannot be ignored. Some designs are very [of their] period with vacuum tube upon vacuum tube, while others have a very retro, pop charm. It’s the vintage, analog knobs, dials and switches that really excite me. I want to play with them all.

What mood or theme do you hope viewers will experience when they see these photos? 

A sense of nostalgic wonder, perhaps? That’s certainly the effect the machines have on me. I'm amazed by the things my iPhone can do, but I like to know how we got here.

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Warning: This post contains nudity and may not be appropriate for work.

If you go to photographer Viktória Kollerová’s blog, the tagline reads "A Girl Who Tried to Disappear." Yet, in an email to The Huffington Post, Kollerová clarified that she changes the title every now and again, depending on her vision and mood. It's a fitting caveat considering that Kollerová's photographs themselves seem to exist in a perpetual state of change, flickering in and out of view like a candle always about to go out. 

Kollerová takes abstract yet intensely personal self-portraits, black-and-white photographs that transform the body into a soft puzzle of lines and curves, sometimes but not always mimicking the human form. Amidst the landscapes of Slovakia and Portugal, her images morph to resemble an animal, a ghost, an alien life form, a girl. 

The artist came to photography eight years ago, originally as a subject, not an artist. However, she felt unsatisfied with just being in the photographs. She wanted to make them. "I somehow become hooked on it," she explained. "Self-exploration is crucial."

Over time, photography has grown to become more than just a hobby, or even a practice, but a lifelong compulsion. "I'm afraid, this is not what you'd typically call a photography project, or if it is, it is lifelong and therefore unfinished," Kollerová said. "The inspiration comes form the emotional side of my life, combined with the environment and people I happen to encounter."

Kollerová's photographs are reminiscent of Francesca Woodman's diaphonous images, yet while Woodman's were taken primarily inside of the home, trapped in domestic space, Kollerová's branch out into the surrounding landscape, incorporating friends and animals into the frame.

"I do it mostly for myself," she said. "When others find parts of themselves in it too, it is a bonus. Many people write me [and tell me] that my work is extremely inspiring to them, but I don´t know what exactly they mean. Maybe it urges them to start their own self-exploration process, hopefully with a healing effect."

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Somewhere, in an unnamed seaside town once home to a "Jaws"-esque film franchise, lives a humble -- and very fictional -- family of five: Bob and Linda Belcher, and their three children Tina, Gene and Louise.

Together, they run a restaurant plainly known as Bob's Burgers. Bob, a dedicated but perpetually unlucky small business owner, is hardly the star of this animated show on Fox deep tale of familial love, though. What with Tina writing erotic and zombie-related fiction, and Linda maniacally collecting porcelain baby figurines, and Gene forging unlikely relationships with toilets, and Louise infiltrating the neighborhood's Girl Scouts (read: Thunder Girls) chapters, they typically share the spotlight.

So when it comes to the fan art, namesake and permanently mustachioed Bob might make a few more appearances than the rest of the brood. But Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda deserve to be memorialized in ink, as well. Case in point:

The art above and below comes to us courtesy of Gallery 1988, which I wish I could say temporarily occupied the empty storefront beside Bob's Burgers, with a tagline like "Art You Going To Come In?" But, alas, Gallery 1988 is a very real gallery in Los Angeles that caters to the pop culture crowd, with art shows devoted to "Ghostbusters," "Clue," the life and times of Tom Hanks, and "Seinfeld."

The gallery recently brought artistically inclined fans of "Bob's Burgers" together to toast the only working class family that's let a cow live with them, made enemies with an entire community of magicians, and started an underground casino ring, all within its three levels of living and working space. Here's a taste of the "Bob's Burgers" fan art of your dreams.

(We can only hope other artists are paying rightful homage to the B-team characters like Regular-Sized Rudy, Mr. Fischoeder and the Equestranauts. #Butts.)

To see more Belcher tributes at Gallery 1988, check them out here.

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"My story has always been bound to your prayer to have two boys," artist Vivek Shraya writes in an essay titled "Trisha."

"Maybe it was because of the ways you felt weighed down as a young girl, or the ways you felt you weighed down your mother by being a girl," Shraya continues. "Maybe it was because of the ways being a wife changed you. Maybe it was all the above, and also just being a girl in a world that is intent on crushing women. So you prayed to a god you can’t remember for two sons and you got me."

Shraya wrote the essay to accompany her photography project, also dubbed "Trisha," a nod to her mother's affection for the name. If she'd had a girl, Shraya notes, her mother would have named her Tricia. 

In the photos, the transgender artist recreates old images of her mother with herself as the subject, wearing clothing and occupying spaces similar to the wardrobe and settings featured in her mom's vintage shots. "While I have been transitioning, I see so much of my mother in my face," Shraya explained to The Huffington Post. "The idea for this project came from wanting to capture this similarity."

To create the images, Toronto-based Shraya worked with a team of creative people including photographer Karen Campos Castillo, makeup artist Alanna Chelmick, hair stylist Fabio Persico, designer Mickelli Orbe, and set and wardrobe assistants Shemeena Shraya and Adam Holman. Together they recreated the scenes featured in Shraya's mother's portraits -- 1970s images that the artist discovered three years ago, which showcase her mother before she moved to Canada, married and became a mother.

"One of the things that struck me the most about the photos when I first saw them was how different she seemed to be then compared to now," Shraya said. "Her demeanor in the photos has a carefree quality and I have only ever known her to be burdened with worry, which is perhaps the nature of being a mother."

One of Shraya's favorite photos shows her mother in front of a train with a tissue tucked into her hand.

"Even to this day, she always has a tissue tucked into her sleeve," Shraya added. "Selfishly, I am grateful for this symbol of endurance, if only because I feel guilty for partly being responsible for how she has changed." 

According to Shraya, the project began as a way of capturing their likeness, the ways in which the artist appears and acts like her mother. But upon seeing the images side by side, Shraya said the project forced her to grapple with the ways they don't look or act alike. She recalls it being hard to see the photos at first, new and old, because all she could see were their differences. With time to digest the photos, though, Shraya has come to realize that their differences are just as important as their similarities.

"Despite our closeness, my mother will always be a mystery to me," Shraya said. "As I was engaging with these photos, I often tried to uncover this mystery a little: What is she thinking about, being a new bride and a new immigrant in Canada, as she glances up at her own wedding photo? Why is she holding that stuffed animal? Did she make that birthday cake for herself? And yet, placing myself in her shoes, I don't feel like I understand her more or better. But I do feel like I see myself differently."

Shraya told BuzzFeed that she has yet to show her mother the new images, but she hopes she will one day. "I adore my mother, and there is so much of her in me," she concluded, "but I am not her. And I don't have to be! I get to be something new."

Below is the full essay and more photos from "Trisha," courtesy of Shraya. See more of her work on her Instagram.

TRISHA
By Vivek Shraya

My story has always been bound to your prayer to have two boys. Maybe it was because of the ways you felt weighed down as a young girl, or the ways you felt you weighed down your mother by being a girl. Maybe it was because of the ways being a wife changed you. Maybe it was all the above, and also just being a girl in a world that is intent on crushing women. So you prayed to a god you can’t remember for two sons and you got me. I was your first and I was soft. Did this ever disappoint you?

You had also prayed for me to look like Dad, but you forgot to pray for the rest of me. It is strange that you would overlook this, as you have always said “Be careful what you pray for.” When I take off my clothes and look in the mirror, I see Dad’s body, as you wished. But the rest of me has always wished to be you.

I modeled myself -- my gestures, my futures, how I love and rage -- all after you. Did this worry you and Dad? Did you have the kinds of conversations in bed that parents of genderqueer children on TV have, where the Dad scolds the Mom -- ”This is your fault”? No one is to blame. Not you, not the god you prayed to. I was right to worship you. You worked full-time, went to school part-time, managed a home, raised two children who complained about frozen food and made fun of your accent, and cared for your family in India. Most days in my adult life, I can barely care for myself.

I remember finding these photos of you three years ago and being astonished, even hurt, by your joyfulness, your playfulness. I wish I had known this side of you, before Canada, marriage and motherhood stripped it from you, and us.

I learned to pray too. My earliest prayers were to be released from my body, believing that this desire was devotion, this was about wanting to be closer to god. I don’t believe in god anymore, but sometimes I still have the same prayer. Then I remind myself that the discomfort I feel is less about my body and more about what it means to be feminine in a world that is intent on crushing femininity in any form. Maybe I got my wish to be you after all.

You used to say that if you had a girl, you would have named her Trisha.

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One of the summer's best movies is "Don't Think Twice," the story of a tight-knit New York improv troupe that must figure out how to move forward when one member is cast on a "Saturday Night Live" analog. Mike Birbiglia's directorial follow-up to "Sleepwalk with Me," the movie premiered at South by Southwest in March, where it won over audiences with rapid-fire laughter that evolves into a bittersweet look at navigating unexpected loss. 

The Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL, have the movie's exclusive first trailer. Birbiglia, Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher and Kate Micucci star as the six-member troupe. "Don't Think Twice" opens July 22, following a 20-city bus tour that Birbiglia will do to promote the film.

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NEW YORK -- The Paley Center for Media hosted a first of its kind tribute to Hispanic achievement on television Wednesday night, bringing together the biggest Latino stars in Spanish and English-language television at the Cipriani Wall Street. 

The event honored Hispanic contributions in telenovelas, comedy, news, drama and televised sports and music events with video supercuts from the Paley archive's Hispanic collection. 

"It’s really hard to believe that this type of tribute has never happened until tonight," Gloria Estefan said on stage, after she and husband Emilio took the stage at the beginning of the night. "I don’t know what took so long, but the important thing is that... [the] Paley Center is stepping up big time and paying respect to a community that has been changing the television art for decades. We’re finally getting our dues."

Other notable guests and presenters included America Ferrera, Don Francisco, George Lopez, Lana Parilla, Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits. Lucie Arnaz, daughter of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball ("I Love Lucy"), also took the stage in a special moment honoring her father's legendary career on television.

"Many other talented people were making strides in television when [Lucille and Desi] both started, but mixed with her divinely inspiring comedic knowhow and some of the best writers on the planet was dad's heritage, which actually was one of the magic bullets that set this show apart," Lucie Arnaz said in a speech honoring her father. "Like most [Latinos] he was inventive, intuitive, tenacious, courageous and, really, really funny." 

America Ferrera and comedian George Lopez offered the biggest laughs of the night when the two got on stage to introduce Hispanic contributions to comedy. Lopez went off-script to say, "we must all prevent Donald Trump from becoming president of the United States," a comment which received enthusiastic cheers and applause from the audience. 

And after a slew of off-hand jokes, Lopez did take a moment to celebrate Arnaz's contributions to comedy with a personal anecdote. 

"Bob Hope once told me that Desi Arnaz was the most underrated, underestimated, most brilliant person that he had ever met in show business," Lopez told the audience. "But because he had an accent they thought he was intelligent. But Bob Hope told me that Desi Arnaz changed TV back then and is still changing TV today." 

On the red carpet, Cuban singer Gloria Estefan had shared a similar sentiment when discussing Arnaz's work on "I Love Lucy."

"For me it’s always going to be Desi Arnaz and the 'Lucy' show because I came here when I was 2 years old from Cuba, and I remember it was a perfectly natural thing to hear Desi Arnaz singing in Spanish music from my land." Estefan said. "It wasn’t a weirdness, it was like everybody was tuning in, everybody was loving the show, and I saw myself reflected. So that was a wonderful thing to see early on. I didn’t realize at the time how unique that was and how it was going to be a long time before we saw anything like that again, if ever."

Another big moment of the night was a small tribute to Mario “Don Francisco” Kreutzberger, who hosted the Saturday variety show "Sabádo Gigante" for 53 years. The Chilean TV legend received two standing ovations and shared a story of the first time he saw a television set after moving to New York City to study to become a men's clothing designer. 

"When I put it on, I was amazed," Kreutzberger, who is set to host Telemundo's "Don Francisco Te Invita," said. "You were able to listen and to watch at the same time. That was my first contact with television. And I said my father is wrong, the future is not the men's clothing designer, I think the future is being on television."

The Paley Center announced it would repeat a similar tribute to Hispanic contributions in television on Oct. 24, at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. 

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Beautiful. Breathtaking. Ethereal. 

Those are just some words we'd use to describe Will B. Bell's latest choreography to Adele's "Love In The Dark." Bell shared the stunning video, featuring dancers DJ Smart and Zola Williams and shot by cinematographer Jose Omar Hernandez, earlier this week.   

"My inspirations were my dancers DJ Smart and Zola Williams," Bell told The Huffington Post. "As a choreographer, there is nothing better then a feeling of working with dancers who you can pull and learn from. From a creative perspective, I knew these two dancers were perfect for pushing my boundaries."

Bell also has great appreciation for Hernandez, who he says is "brilliant." 

"I learned so much from him during the creative process about intentions, purpose, and feeling behind each shot."

The video comes just months after Bell's piece with Smart and Williams dancing to Adele's "All I Ask" went viral after it was released in January.  It's no surprise that he continues to choose the singer's powerhouse songs to choreograph to.

"I chose Adele because there is something so pure, honest and genuine about her music that has captivated me for years," he told HuffPost. "Her music is poetry and I wanted to reflect that poetry through movement."

We're sure Adele would be blown away. 

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