Ballookey

I’ve had this one craft tutorial in my reader’s “Starred Items” for a while now, and so without much fanfare, I’ll get this off my chest and out of my starred items.

JSIM shares a tutorial on a nice little craft project to work on with the younglings. Or frankly, for me to work on all by myself because I want penny necklaces too. This was a project for a bunch of girls in a church group (no, my problem wasn’t with the church this time!) in the age range of 12-14. On other weekends the girls sewed and baked, and this time they made themselves some jewelry while the boys group went off and did boy things, presumably. Part of the project would require drilling holes in the pennies, which the author did at home beforehand. From there, all there was to the project was selecting an image, cutting it out, gluing and enameling them.

OK, I’ve got nothing against cooking and sewing. I do both of those things. But another thing I do is wield a drill. I don’t want to be too hard on this post because I know that conducting a group session with a bunch of tweens can’t be easy. But I know a teaching moment when I see one, and I want to teach anyone who might read my blog: Don’t shield your girls from using power tools. This was a perfect opportunity to let the girls get their hands on a drill. Maybe all of them wouldn’t have a chance due to time constraints, but a few could have tried it and the rest could have been inspired and reassured of their own abilities by watching. Even if time didn’t allow any of them to do it, a demonstration wouldn’t be out of order.

I only mean to point out that an opportunity might have been lost here. And when is it going to be made up? Not all parents are into crafts and making things. And getting into mom & dad’s power tools is probably not a good idea unsupervised. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing where a tutorial in a group setting can break the ice, build confidence, and open up minds to new ideas of what’s possible.

Is age 12-14 too young? Around that age my mother sent me from our suburban home into downtown Denver on public transportation to pay utility bills. Around this time, my parents tossed me into a plane and sent me to Albuquerque to visit some friends they’d only met once who lived in the middle of semi-arid nowhere. I rode a goat, built a fort with scrap fire wood, watched a chicken be slaughtered, helped candle its skin to remove the feathered bits, and all this is after I was stuck in the airport for five hours because no one was there to pick me up and I caught a ride to where I was supposed to be going with a total stranger. My grandmother sent my cousin and I to hoe weeds out of her soybean fields when we visited for summer vacation. My dad and grandfather were the types who not only encouraged us to try out horribly dangerous equipment, they practically required it.

The result of this is that as an adult, I was able to rip out the closet in our bedroom and redo the crumbling plaster walls. I could  have paid someone hundreds of dollars to do it, but the whole thing only cost about $30 and some sweat. What a waste if I never learned my way around a drill.

So make the penny necklaces, but let your kid drill the hole. It’s a freakin’ penny. I’m pretty sure you have a spare. Another great project to introduce kids to the drill is this carpenter bee house. Don’t worry. Unprovoked, carpenter bees are slow and unlikely to attack. Also they rarely nest in groups. They’re pretty solitary, so don’t worry about drilling them a house. Paint it, and put some flowering plants at the base and it’ll be a cute garden feature even if the bee housing market remains depressed in your area.

I was just browsing feeds in Google Reader when I came across this post on Steve’s go flying turtle!:

In fact, as much as I liked reading some of the nice comments at my blog, I have now discovered closing the comments to be somewhat liberating. How, you ask? Well, according to blogger etiquette, when a person leaves a comment at your blog, it is proper to “return the favor” and leave a comment at their blog, to show some kind of support. I read this in a book last year (can’t recall what book it was) and I’ve always made an effort to reciprocate in the past.

I don’t blame him for leaving comments off – some very sensible bloggers do so.

But what’s this about returning the favor to someone who leaves a comment on your blog? You guys, this nonsense has to stop. I don’t care if it’s in a book. There should never, ever, be any burden of responsibility placed on someone when you comment on their blog. The nice thing would be if the blog owner would address your comment, if suitable, or acknowledge a compliment, but on busier blogs this is understandably cumbersome. I never expect a blog owner to respond directly in any way if I comment on their blog or even e-mail them. And I certainly wouldn’t expect them to come visit my blog and leave a comment – that’s totally inappropriate!

Insisting that this is proper Internet ettiquette is taking something normal and natural (contributing to an online discussion) and turning it into a weird borderline-stalker thing. It’s like buying someone in the office a cup of coffee uninvited and for the sole purpose of making it so they have to buy you a cup of coffee in return. That’s manipulative, and it’s a stalker’s trick of forcing an artificial intimacy where no relationship exists.

This sounds like an extension of that whole tit-for-tat bullshit with friending people. Well it’s tits only for me. I’m not going to automatically accept your friend request on Facebook if we don’t actually know each other or if we haven’t actually met. I’m not going to follow you on Twitter just because you follow me. I’m not going to add you as a contact on Flickr just because you added me. And I’m sure as heck not going to be forced by bullshit rules of ettiquite that some lame Internet douchebags* made up to leave a comment somewhere that I don’t feel naturally inspired to.

If I say it, I probably mean it. I’m slightly dysfunctional that way. I don’t tell people they have cute babies because all babies look the same to me, and not particularly cute. I may come across as uncritically positive sometimes (hard to believe if you read this blog!) but I don’t say something’s cool, awesome, or swell if I don’t mean it. Sometimes I do intend to be generally positive and support the team even if someone’s specific effort has gone slightly awry. In those cases, I find something specific to be positive about without making a false and dishonest statement that’s just broadly laudatory. If one is, however, pressured into commenting out of a duty to reciprocity, then those comments are pointless. How can I trust them if they’re not freely made? Does this mean that anyone whose ever said anything nice about my stuff was just doing it to get a comment on their blog in return?

Shit. I don’t need that. I’ll keep doing my little thing regardless of whether people like it or not. So I’d appreciate it if the Internet would stop being such little children about these things. If you want comments on your blog, create or write something cool, don’t run around like that “precocious” little kid at the party that always tries to insinuate themselves into the adults’ conversation for a little attention. Because I don’t care how many people told those parents that kid was cute, they’re annoying as fuck.

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*Because you KNOW that rule was made up by people who didn’t get any comments on their blogs and couldn’t stand the silence.

naked lady lilies, originally uploaded by ballookey.

OK, blog still not moved, site still not updated. I spent this weekend tearing out plaster and lath – more on that later. In the mean time, please enjoy these lovely blooms from our garden.

These bulbs are at least 30 years old, and this year I got them to bloom again.

I’m the artist spotlight at go flying turtle!

It was very nice of Steve to ask me to be July’s spotlight since there are a lot more skilled people out there, but I think the nice takeaway from that article is that people shouldn’t feel too bad about their skill level as long as they enjoy what they do, and to keep at it anyway.

Now, stop bothering me. I’m trying to update this website, and the whole damn Internet’s added bells and whistles while I wasn’t paying attention. Font face? Text shadow? Box shadow? Yes please!

I have about a half-dozen things starred in my Google Reader to blog about, comment on, or create something inspired by, but I’m increasingly finding myself not wanting to put it here because this is the main page of my website.

I have a new website design ready to go, but I’ve been waiting to go live with it because I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to keep this blog active, but shift it off the main page.  I’m going to find out in the next couple of days. So if everything disappears, that’s what happened. And if everything disappears, don’t count on me putting it all back like it was. I might just say, fine, start new with post number one!

Once things are changed, my homepage should feature my art and design work more prominently, along with a summary of where my prints and things can be bought. (because, oh yes, I’d like to totally and completely sell out. Eventually)

I know not posting is a terrible thing. I don’t mind if people post rarely or frequently, but I do think the good form is to find the rhythm and regularity that works for you and stick with it to give the whole blog thing an air of NOT being a total half-assed afterthought. I’m not even sure if I care if people read or follow me regularly, as long as I’m represented on the web. Ultimately, I guess I’m a bad, bad blogger – which is why I don’t want it to be the first thing people see, but I still want it to exist so I can yell ineffectually about the stuff that bothers me, and was psuedo-poetic about the things I love, and there. It’s documented.

I think a lot of bloggers go through the same thing. It’s not just about finding one’s voice, it’s also about finding exactly that room in which you feel comfortable speaking without having to think TOO much about how scandalized the Mormon friends will be if they stumble in, the poor dears.

I’m calling it done, originally uploaded by ballookey.

I think I’m finished with my first official iPad drawing. I’ve been playing around with the iPad for several weeks and I finally thought I ought to finish some things and call them done.

One drawback is the lack of resolution in the drawing apps I’ve tried so far. This image is full size at 768 x 1024—fine for an iPad wallpaper and looking at onscreen, and maybe small cards. But I expect apps to update this capacity eventually, at least somewhat. The iPad isn’t high-powered computing after all.

After reading this article by Joe Clark regarding the Wired magazine iPad app, I’ve come to realize that existing magazines aren’t going to bring us the first awesome iPad magazines.

I’ve downloaded and tried a few, and essentially they all have the same problem. They’re trying to show us, more or less, the same magazine in something resembling the original format on a totally new device.

The Wired app is literally pictures of the pages of the print magazine.

Many people have already pointed out the blinkard pig-headedness of this: You can’t copy/paste text. You can’t highlight a word to get a dictionary definition. You can’t change the size or contrast of the text to meet your readability issues. ALL OF WHICH are reasons to read on the iPad in the first place! (although, I think it doesn’t actually have a dictionary, but it could get one)

I got furious with a co-worker last week because he designed a billboard using his favorite font. Which was utterly unreadable.

We’re DESIGNERS. The implication of that word is that we apply intelligence and problem-solving skills to challenges and come up with something better than random chance.

And I realized Wired came up with this atrocity because to really make use of the strengths of the iPad, they’d have to ditch about 99% of structure, design, and organization of their magazine. Things that work in print, don’t necessarily work on a little touch pad. Little bullet-point boxes with super-short factoids in them might be fine as graphic relief in your printed page layout. But it’s bullshit on the iPad.

Wired doesn’t want to design their magazine twice every month. They want to do it once, and press a button. Monkey-like. No major publisher is going to want to create two versions of their issues each month – especially in the infancy of this new technology.

But someone with things to say and a resource of material to share, WILL want to make a digital ‘zine for the iPad. They’ll make it damn close to right. Articles laid out so as not to insult your attention span. Text that’s selectable. Images that are zoomable (and more than just a token, vestigal zoom!) They may not be anyone we’ve heard of yet, but they’re going to get the ball rolling. Then all the kids will be making their own iPad ‘zines.

Will major publishers ever figure it out and make it work?

I don’t even remember what this blog post by Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, is about anymore. I just got livid with one of the first sentences:

I don’t agree with everything therein; you can’t judge a site by its ads, for one thing.

You better fucking believe I’m judging every site I visit by their ads. Just like the rest of the content, the site owner made a decision about what ad network or web advertising company they were going to work with to put things on their web pages.

I buy tons of magazines in all different categories for my job and rarely, RARELY, do ads cross over from fashion magazines to lifestyle, tattoo, music, art, etc… Each genre of magazine has it’s lineup of usual suspects, but I’ll never see the same ads found in urban hip-hop lifestyle magazines in automobile magazines. I’m never going to see the same ads in Vanity Fair and Inked.

And there’s a reason for that! The people reading one magazine have different interests from those reading another. Readers of certain magazines would be offended by some of the ads in magazines targeting different lifestyles. Even if the ad itself isn’t offensive, the very look and feel would make the readers pause and say “who do you think I AM?”

That’s why I’m entirely justified in judging a site by its ads. The site owner thinks I want to see this. Or they’ve hooked their cart up to an ad network that thinks I want to see this. If their judgment is poor in that regard, that taints my evaluation of their judgement as applied to any topic they’re covering.

THEY MADE A CHOICE. No one put a knife to their throat and said, run this ad or else! Sure, you don’t get fine-grained control over each individual ad in a network, but if it’s the wrong network for your site, then all the ads are going to stick out like a sore thumb and be annoying to your audience. If it’s the right network and one ad just happens to be a little off-topic for your audience, the worst that will happen is they don’t notice.

I wish people would take web advertising more seriously. The fact that site owners and chief contributors seem not to give a shit what appears under their masthead and alongside their name goes a long way in justifying potential advertisers’ perception of web advertising as not valuable.

A while back I saw a blog post about the prop money made for the TV show Firefly, and ever since then I’ve wanted to try making my own fanciful currency.

These were printed on 16 lb vellum with a color laser printer, so the front and back don’t line up as perfectly as I’d like. I think a slightly heavier vellum would make that less noticeable, but I like the way these feel.

Overall, I’m very happy with my first effort, but can’t wait to explore and experiment on other denominations.

One thing I’ll have to decide is how to size them. I made the Sagan 50 the same size as US currency for it’s familiar feel, but other countries have different sizes. In fact, the very clever thing done in many places is to make different denominations different sizes to aid blind people. I think that’s extremely important, and I’m dismayed we haven’t implemented that in the US. Imagine being blind and having to rely on someone else to sort your cash for you before you can hit the store? Ugh! So I think my challenge is to explore different sizes and proportions on my later editions. I just have to get over my life-long conditioning that all bills are the same size.

drunking-urine, originally uploaded by Aya Rosen.

One of my Moleskine Exchange mates Aya Rosen just posted several great pieces to Flickr. I love the theme—the quotations sound like sex ed questions from Cosmo—juxtaposed with her trademark female illustrations. The compositions are fantastic and I love her restrained use of color.