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creative internets memories uncategorized

Phase One of Creative Development

Do you ever get to the last steps of the first major phase of a project, only to freeze up? Don’t get me wrong. This particular freeze will only last, at most, a couple of hours. I’ve just realized that I will be done enough to upload and try out my new WordPress theme, Big Urgent Wish, once I create a few insanely simple GIF backgrounds. The only thing left for this phase is to install plugins and create stylesheets for print and small screen formats. Which I don’t even actually need to do at all at this stage. But then comes the daunting task of backing everything up, taking a deep breath, and hitting “transfer” on my FTP client.

Maybe if I create a safety checklist it will help me to feel a little better.

But I wonder if i just don’t want the initial design phase to end? I do so love the process of creation. There’s nothing more thrilling or exhilarating than starting nearly from scratch and making something cool, whether it be a work of prose, visual art, music, or merely a little theme for your blog.

And I don’t care quite as much for the next processes: final testing, installation, distribution, etc. Imagine spending countless hours putting your heart and soul and everything you’ve learned into creating a work of visual art, and then having to drive it to the gallery and install it yourself, then standing around waiting for someone to awkwardly tell you that they liked or didn’t like it, finally having to make arrangements to send it home with someone else.*

 

*Nearly unrelated: Incidentally, I’ve never been able to let myself sell or give away any of my visual artworks, either – thank “Bob” for digital distribution channels for my other creative ventures like music and web design, thusly letting me keep the originals!

Categories
internets media memories

Album Cover War

Probably the weirdest, coolest thing ever posted on YouTube: Album Cover War

Categories
internets

cool art

Here are some extremely lifelike sculptures of gargantuan and tiny humans.

Categories
internets

Cornell Univ’s The Fantastic in Art and Fiction

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction – an amazing gallery of illustrations from rare manuscripts. Some really creepy imagery here!

Categories
current events internets

link roundup

The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château; Notes on a Strange World (Skeptical Inquirer November 2004) This is a must-read for fans of Holy Blood Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

National Geographic: The Lost Gospel of Judas Found in the 1970s, and recently pieced together and translated. Paints Judas not as a traitor, but as the best pal, handpicked by Jesus to turn him in.

And MySpacers, please read this: Hacking a MySpace Layout by Mike Davidson of Newsvine. Complete with downloadable sample CSS and a tutorial, this post is easily the best thing referencing MySpace in a long time. Here’s what i did to mine. (Note the banner up top: Latin for “this place is terrible”.)

WikiTruth: censored Wikipedia articles, retrieved from the digital void and set out in the sun again. No editing, natch.

Even Generals want to see Rummy quit.

10 Wackiest e-commerce sites, from Wired.

Great works of art, as the artists might have done them as children. (Check out the Escher!)

Nahuelito, presumably a close cousin to Nessie, recently spotted and photographed. Clever hoax, or real?

Make those cool stickers like the feed linkifiers on the sidebar.

California Department of Corrections (not the Billboard Liberation Front, as was previously stated) salutes US Military in Iraq.

Big Brother has his eyes on you, NYC.