Really cool photography featuring the color blue.
Also, 24 different ways to lace your shoes.
Something I need: How to learn from you mistakes.
And last but not least, Signs of Religion in the American South. Scroll down a bit and see the link to an interesting slide show of religious based church and business signs.
via wikipedia, Cultural generations , i.e., “Baby Boomer” and “Generation X.”
Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Demographers, historians and commentators use beginning birth dates from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Before that, it had been used for various subcultures or countercultures after the 1950s.
Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, is the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when Generation Y starts and ends. Commentators use beginning birth dates from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
Generation Z is one name used for the cohort of people born after the Millennial Generation. There is no agreement on the exact dates of the generation with some sources starting it at the mid or late 1990s or from the mid-2000s to the present day. This is the generation which is currently being born.
Martha has just wrapped up filming of her “Apprentice” reality TV show, which will probably air in the fall. That makes me really sad, actually, and I think going for this kind of a show was a bad move on her part. It will cement her image in people’s minds as a wealthy executive, and that’s a Bad Thing, because people’s negative opinion about her is already based on that image.
People’s positive images of Martha center around her design and home improvement ideas, and that’s the direction she should have gone with this show. She should have done her own version of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” or “Extreme Home Makeover” and picked people’s houses to rework with her considerable skills as a designer. It would make her more relatable on a personal level, and it would also highlight what she’s best at.
That would also tackle another major criticism of her work; that she’s out of touch with regular people’s needs and challenges. People say “sure she can do all that and have a perfect house; she has a staff of five hundred people.” If she showed people how they could accomplish what she’s able to do, on a resonable budget and within their own means, she could prove that criticism wrong.
And of course, she should start by redoing my house. Call me, Martha, I need help.
The New York Times has a slideshow of the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince around the world, and when you view it, it becomes apparent that different countries have quite different book covers for the book.
The Australian cover is the one we found online the other day at a rumor site that had a leaked copy of that same image. It actually has some plot points in it.
We were surprised at our release gathering at Barnes and Noble — there were tons of people there, and lots pf people, both children and adults, who were dressed up. I snapped some photos of people who had cool shirts or fun costumes on; eventually I’ll put a photo page together.
An interesting article at Gaping Void on How to Be Creative.
I finished reading the new Harry Potter book last night. Throughout the book I had a notion in my head of the answers to two of the mysteries; who the half-blood prince is, and who dies in the book (don’t yell at me about spoilers; the death is commonly known!). I was wrong on both counts, and regarding the half-blood prince, I shouldn’t have been at all. I should have guessed that one right away (and so should Harry and Hermione, frankly.)
I was so certain about both answers, though, that it colored my impression of the book, and I kept telling Stephanie all the way through that “this is my favorite of all of them!” Well when I found out the answers I was surprised, and it did change the way I feel. I was expecting a quite different ending.
I also thought there was way too much unresolved at the end of it; more so than in any of the others, and I hate that; it’s one of my pet peeves of sci-fi fantasy series novels, that they don’t wrap everything up from one book to the next so you’re left hanging for the release of the next book. If you’re going to do that, just write one big book, instead of chunking it up into pieces. My mind is littered with the half-way points of fantasy series that I gave up on in disgust because they insisted on dragging everything out for the cash from one more mass-market paperback. (Robert Jordan, I’m talking to you!)
In the case of Harry Potter, I’ve never felt like that with any of the rest of the books, and this series doesn’t follow any other sci-fi fantasy genre clichés, either, which makes them enjoyable to read. I know that the next book is the final one, and there’s no way I would miss it.
An article on how to create your own wind turbine — two years ago, I was searching the web to find plans to make one of these. I don’t know why; I just though it would be a cool thing to learn about. Don’t know that I’d ever actually attempt to make one myself.
I’m going to have to look at this site in more detail later — it’s a site based in New York City that holds city-wide games, such as capture the flag, and man hunt. Sounds like fun. I know there’s a site like it in San Francisco, because Ernie from Little Yellow Different particpated at one time, I think. I’d have to comb through my archives to find the link.
Bobby Neel Adams has an interesting photography project: “Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together.”
I can’t truly recreate the effect of their project for myself without a lot more work, but the idea of two different pictures from completely different ages is interesting.
2019 update: Can’t find the image I created for this. I’m curious now what I was doing. There’s a guy named Ard Gelinck doing some ‘family picture’ type portraits of celebrities with their younger selves here on Instagram.
Not only does Lewis Barrett paint cool gothic style pictures that look like Thomas Kinkade’s nighmares, he does them on commission and will paint pictures of the house of your choice. Hmmmmm.