#so taking things by increments can keep art fun while still learning 'something' :>

[bonsiii-art]

hello I’d like to know how did u find ur art style. I am not really satisfied my current one and want to improve it, but idk where to start. Tyyy <3

Hiii! I think the simplest way I can explain how I formed my present style is I looked at the work of the artists I admire, I took note of what I liked about their process, and I try to implement that to my own drawings, adjusting it to my own tastes. :>

Because art style is all about aesthetics and experimentation, which is why some artists completely change up their style, even if, to us, they already had a 'perfect' look to their art. Like me specifically, I enjoy manga-style art, black lines, no colors so I focus on doing my lineart like that the most! I'm not like my inspos one-to-one, but my attempts to do so make my work unique in that way. I even have a whole moodboard on pinterest dedicated to my 'dream' artstyle so I can look at it to hype myself up and learn from! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I am genuinely so proud of my wife for becoming a crafts person over the last few years.

Like, I was always a crafts person. I was an arts and crafts kid. My parents sent me to classes or summer camps or after-school clubs pretty much continuously from when I was about 5 years old, and over the years I did metalsmithing, stained glass, polymer clay sculpting, loom weaving, oil painting, charcoal drawing, clothes-making & tailoring, carpentry, woodcarving, macrame, miniatures, beading, jewelry-making, basket weaving, leatherworking, paper-making, bookbinding, papier mache, decoupage, sand sculpting, and probably more that I'm forgetting. There was never a day in my life while I was growing up when my entire bedroom floor wasn't taken up by 2-5 different ongoing art projects. As an adult, it's given me the firm confidence that I can walk up to pretty much any crafting skill, and get the hang of it, and enjoy doing it.

My wife never had that. She wrote, but that was really her only artistic outlet. Art & craftsmanship were just not any of her business. She always expressed admiration for my gumption when it came to making things with my hands, usually with a "bigger idiots than me have done it" attitude, but she was certain she'd be bad at it if she tried it, and that she wouldn't have fun. As evidence, she would offer every time in her life when she had attempted to learn a craft, and didn't have fun, and all the Arts And Crafts kids picked it up a lot faster than her.

Which like - yeah! Learning how to do a new craft is a skill all on its own! Fine motor control is a skill developed over time! So is spatial reasoning, and materials intuition! She wasn't just 'trying to learn wreath-making,' or whatever, she was trying to learn how to learn how to make something with her hands AND wreath-making, at the same time, so of course it would take her longer than the kids who already had the first part, and of course it would be more frustrating for her. I knew she wasn't uniquely bad at crafts: she just didn't know how to approach picking them up, because she was never encouraged to learn.

And then the pandemic hit.

And while we were all trapped inside and going insane in new and exciting ways to all of us, she tentatively decided to pick up embroidery. She probably wouldn't stick with it, she explained: she'd probably be bad at it. It probably wouldn't be fun. But she thought embroidery was pretty, and literally what else did she have going on?

And then she did stick with it. For over a year. And she got pretty good at it! She embellished a baseball hat for her sister with cactuses and wildflowers from where they grew up which came out adorable. She made an embroidered portrait of one of our friends' cat that they still have displayed in their entryway. And she discovered - and remarked on it often, with mild surprise - that she was having fun. She'd say a lot of stuff like "this stitch was so frustrating at first, but now that I get it I really like doing it," or "I kept getting this tangled but I've figured it out now. I just needed to relax."

Then she took up pottery. We did that as a couple for about a year, too. Now she's a knitter.

And it's just been so great, to see her eyes light up when she sees a sweater she likes, and hear her say, "I could make that!" She's slowly let go of the perfectionism that I think holds a lot of people back from doing crafts: that dismay when you make a mistake which leads to discarding a whole project, or starting something over. More and more she's taking on the veteran crafter attitude of "oops lol, whatever I'll just keep going." She's picking things up faster. She's taking pleasure in learning incremental steps. She's started to see crafting as something that relaxes and engages her, instead of as something inherently frustrating. I've gotten to watch her learn to find joy in making something with her hands. I always knew she was creative and artistic and capable of learning how to do anything. It's been so much fun to watch her start to take that on as part of how she sees herself.

We have this running joke about how she will prematurely declare herself to be in an era. Like, she'll go swimming twice and announce that she's now in her "swimming era," and then never go swimming again. Or she'll make one smoothie, buy a bunch of fruit, and declare that we are now in a "smoothie era," and then a week later we have to throw out a bunch of fruit that's gone bad.

The other day (while she was knitting, and I was sitting on the couch next to her doing crochet), she went, "I feel like I've gotten - like, I'm a bit crafty these days, I think. Like, I've done a couple of different crafts, and gotten pretty good at them. I think this is now, kind of, you know...something that I can say that I do."

I supplied that I would even go so far as to say that she was in her "crafting era."

Her eyes widened. "It's an era?"

I pointed out that it was something she'd been doing pretty much continuously for the last three and a half years. That feels like the start of an era to me.

"Yes," she decided. "It's an era. This is my crafts era. I'm a crafts person now."

She's planning to make me a sweater with a duck on it for fall.

[lambment]

Hello! I love your art so much! Your cult of the lamb stuff has really inspired me and has pumped me up and I’m trying to basically re learn how to draw again! Do you have any advice for a fellow artist and how to approach story telling? :D

anon its been like a good while since this message has been sent (I think? based off all the homophobic crown asks this was wedged btwn) and WAHHH im so happy for you, I hope youre enjoying your reentry into art C:

first and foremost, try to enjoy the process rather than the end result. a much wordier explanation in this post (X)

theres also the discipline aspect of it, you need to be pretty concious of balancing learning with enjoyment (and you can absolutley have that balance without thinking about it). but I find a lot of new/learning artists get easily discouraged when a piece doesnt pop out exactly how they imagined it. I have a secret, lets be realistic, none of my pieces do lol. expectation is the killer of art imo, just go with the flow of enjoyment and learn what you can to become better at it. get used to adapting often.

even if you arent always studying (dont make it boring for yourself now), just you constantly drawing will improve your art, but dont expect to notice an improvment with every piece, its an incremental process and youll have bad days. just focus on the journey not the destination is what im getting at.

REFERENCE!!! its a beautiful, beautiful thing, anyone telling you its cheating is a silly billy who needs to learn. look up artists you admire, try to figure out how they tackle a piece, examine photos that you think are beautiful. just collect different pieces of reference, and try making a piece based off of them, a fun excercise. it'll improve your art.

as for the story aspect of this, im ngl, Im still learning myself. my main rule of thumb is "if i want to see this, someone else out there will too." so dont get discouraged by thinking no one will want to see your story idea.

I'm constantly adding story ideas to my notes to save for later, idk bout you, but I WILL forget the idea if I dont write it down immediatley (built worse), and if you have a mental image of it make sure to add very vague stage direction to supplement it, dont get too detailed tho, youll be changing alot. if youre anything like me -pepaw brained- try to keep in the habit of that. some storyboarding tips for staging tips and reference (X)

from there, I'll take a key moment -money shot or emotional moment- of the story, and base the rest of the comic around that image -> how I tackle formatting and making a comic (X).

the best way to learn is by doing, and failing and learning from that. so dont sike yourself out when you get there and it doesnt turn out as expected, it might be something so much better, thats the fun of it (:

I hope this helped, sorry im a yapper!

[tiwaztyrsfist]

I think the real secret to the difference between youth culture and 'grown-up' culture actually has to do with the amount of novel information we absorb each day.

Think about it, young people from around 6 until at least 18 in the US, and longer if they go to college, spend the majority of their waking hours being bombarded with new or relatively new information. Yes we repeat a lot of stuff to reinforce, yes we review, but each day of school tries to incrementally advance at least a bit more knowledge.

Meanwhile 'Grown-ups' in the work force very quickly reach a point of stagnation. When was the last time you had something novel and new happen at work? I bet it's the same answer you'll give for 'When was the last time something got really fucked up royally at work'. A good noteworthy day at work is when the radio DJ plays a lot of songs you like and haven't heard for a while.

So here's my thought. Time perception is fluid. And if you're experiencing a lot of new and novel things, even if you don't enjoy or care about them, you're filling your brain. If you're doing a job that's essentially the same thing and you can do it by rote, you're not filling your brain.

And when you throw something new and fun/silly in there, how old you consider it is based on how far down the brain stack it is.

So if you're in school, you learn a new silly dance, like Flossing. It's now, it's cool, it's fun.

Your dad also picks it up from you.

You have Algebra, you have History, you have French II, you have Band, you have Chemistry, you have Drama. Next semester you have French III with a focus on Culture and Art, Biology 1, Sex Ed, Writting, Debate & Forensics, and Civics. And you're expected to retain as much of this as possible.

Meanwhile, over the last 9 months you Dad has had "Run the file, check the output, run the file, check the output, run the file, check the output" or possibly "Go to jobsite, nail shit when they tail me, go to the jobsite, pour the concrete, go to the jobsite, nail shit up where they tell me" or even "Go to the Hospital, check patients vitals, prescribe pills, check patients vitals, prescribe pills, check patients vitals, Don't prescribe pills, check patients vitals, take out appendix which i've done 20 times before but it's still the highlight of my month because it's the most interesting non-stress thing I'll do". And as long as you retain the skills you need to keep doing the exact same thing, you aren't really expected to retain anything new.

So a year later, in the brain file, you've piled 12 textbooks on top of the sheet of paper that was "Doing the Floss".

And your Dad/Mom/Uncle/Aunt/Whoever has had a year of getting little instruction sheets, doing what's on them, then immediately wadding them up and throwing them away. So what's on top in their brain file, is the last novel thing. The Floss is still at or near the top with only a synopsis of the one or two movies that really got them interested.

5 years from now young people won't remember the things, and when reminded they'll associate them with the time they learned them.

5 years from now, people in the work force will just randomly bust that stuff out because they live in a timeless fugue state and for them everything that's happened since they left school is essentially MORE recent that what happened to people IN SCHOOL last semester.

[rotzaprachim]

i realised i probably will never get here in in painter’s light so enjoy this my favorite fandom crossover/easter egg i’ve ever written:

(It’s from an au where declan stayed with his mother ergo canon + dialect differences)

6. Washington DC 

Age twenty, he gets a business call from a woman who has a statue to sell. Normally he doesn’t take these kinds of calls anymore, the ones that are meant to go straight to his mother’s number, but this woman sounds desperate in the way that has him thinking it’s better if he handles it than one of his mother’s hands in the city, so he buys two Amtrack tickets, and north he goes. Matthew gets sick after eating a microwaveable, foil-wrapped train burger from the snack car.  

He installs Matthew in the Met while he meets his contact. An old school deli, one of the kind that’s apparently disappearing fast, an endangered species, and she’s probably a local so it’ll be annoying or pretentious anyway, but she refused any of his options for fancier, more expensive wine-and-dine locations anyway so deli it is. He gets a lox bagel and a coffee and two black-and-whites in a bag to split with Matthew later while he sizes her up. She keeps looking at her hands but she’s calm with the person she called in from Boudicca, has something steely about her, like she’s dealt with bigger fish before and isn’t scared. There’s something about her that’s like him, he knows, thought they don’t say the magic word at all. He thinks she’s maybe thirty. 

“In the interest of not beating around the bush further, as it’s clear that’s what neither of us is here to do, let’s move on to the real action item.” 

“I have a statue to sell.” 

She shows him photos. The camera resolution isn’t quite what he needs to appraise it seriously, but he can see how shockingly life-like it is already. 

“How much d’you want for it?” 

“Fifty thousand.” 

He almost coughs up his coffee. 

“You haven’t been playing this game for long.” 

She doesn't’ say anything. 

“Fifty thousand, take it or leave it.” 

“What’s the material?” 

“Marble.” 

He considers. If it’s good up close he could probably resell it for four or five times that to some collector interested in neo-hellenic stuff. Not many people making original marble statuary these days compared to the market of the super-rich looking for shit to decorate their back gardens. 

“Can you show me?” 

Declan calls Matthew to tell him to go back to the hotel and get takeaway without him and follows the woman uptown on the bus. They get off in Spanish Harlem, a world away from the shiny robot skyscrapers downtown. She lives on the fourth floor of her building, in a narrow apartment somewhat rank with the smell of body odour and spilled beer, although she throws the windows open and has loads of potted plants about, like she’s trying very hard to get rid of the smell. 

“There.” 

The sculpture is unmissable. Life size and astonishingly, terribly ugly. Truly incredible in it’s attention to awful detail. A middle aged, balding, short man with a fan of cards in one hand and a beer swinging from the other, positioned exactly as if he’s just got up from sitting. Mouth opened, soundlessly screaming his head off. Declan sees it and flinches without even meaning too. His mother’s not had many men, but she had a few, when she was younger. But it’s just a statue. Just a statue. 

Still one of the weirdest goddamn things he’s ever fucking seen, and that’s saying something. 

Authentic marble though. 

“Formal education? Apprenticed to someone?” 

“Take it or leave it. Fifty thousand.” 

No more information. He knows exactly why she called him. He’s the kind of man you call when you don’t have information about the life-sized sculpture of a man in your sitting room and no information to give about how you made it, in the same year you report your husband missing to the police. When to the untrained eye, the two look identical. He’s that kind of man. 

He gets her three million USD for it. 

It’s all through an official channel so it’s harder to launder, get it looking legal. A million upfront, the rest leaked in increments over the next ten years. All shiny, all legal, all IRS-signed off. He personally takes out fifty thousand and puts it in a manila  envelope for when he meets her a few blocks off central station, an hour before his train’s scheduled to leave. He gives her the envelope. She gives him a white paper bag containing only blue sweets. It looks like a proper pick-n-mix haul, something he didn’t even think the States had. Whoppers, sour strings, taffy, gum, gummy sharks. He eats a sweet and sour wind-up before being able to stop himself, the sweet-sour crystals on his fingers like being a kid again. 

“You’re so young,” she says finally, like this didn’t occur to her the entire time he was selling what was probably her husband’s dead body. 

He shrugs, but he’s smiling. “But I got your done.” She can’t be more than ten years older than him, anyway, and most of her jobs have been harder. You don’t tell art world undergrounders your personal life, anyway, but he noticed all of the accoutrements of a maybe secondary-school aged kid lurking around her flat, Lucky Charms, mud scuffs on the floor in strange places, football jerseys in the hamper. She’d tried to hide the obvious things, no photos on the fridge or skateboard leaning against the door frame, but he had an eye for those kinds of details like other people had a head for figures, and he recognised the detritus of a teenager well, because he’d been one recently and he had one. 

She appraises him for a second. Her eyes are large and very dark brown, and they don’t let anything go. “Zeus?” she finally says, like she’s been thinking it for a long time, testing the waters. “Hera?” 

“Like the Greek gods?” 

He went through his greek mythology phase, for sure. Half of decoding what posh people write seems to be about knowing the ins and outs of the soap operatic turns of events people told each other for fun two thousand years ago, which is then called Classics. 

She looks at him longer, considers him. 

“Lugh, then? Bridgid?” 

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” 

She nods. “Sorry if- nevermind. Thank you for selling my statue.” 

“I hope you do well with it. With your… artistic career. Now, and I don’t fucking care if you blow throught he money in a year, never call me again. Never call this number again. Never call any number related to it. If your money never comes through do fine with a million and don’t go looking. Never.” They shake hands and part ways, and he never sees her again, but he does think about her a lot afterwards anyway, parsing their conversation out. No gods and no God either, as far as he knows. Strange fucking thing to ask. 

He’s learned enough by how Matthew is on trains - and on ferries, it transpires, and in strange taxis, and he doesn’t want to fucking think about the transatlantic flight he’s planning at some point - not to let him eat much before the train back to DC, for which he feels bad. While they were in New York he let Matthew choose a show and dutifully got some last minute Dear Evan Hansen tickets off a third party seller, got the good seats and the playbill they got signed after by the cast, Declan knows who to talk to for these kinds of things.

[pastelsandpining]

Santa Baby (Christmas List)

The second prompt in 12 Days of Christmas by @zelink-prompts​

Prompt List

**Note: For the stories actually involving Christmas, I and a few other authors changed the holiday to Hylia’s Day (credit to @fatefulfaerie​ for this) so that it’s more relevant to Hyrule

Cover Art: @neezlebums​ be sure to show some love to the original here!

Words: 2264

Summary: For their first Hylia’s Day together after everything that happened, Link just wanted to gift Zelda something special.

**If I don’t have explicit warnings, read with caution. It simply means there’s nothing I could think of that could be potentially triggering, but I could’ve just missed something. In that case, please let me know and I’ll be more than happy to put a warning!**

BotW, post-calamity with angry child Eggbert because I said so

Zelink-mas 2020  l  Masterlist

Relearning everything about his past and about Hyrule was no easy feat. A world that was so familiar yet so foreign still left him unsettled at times, because he was a young adult trying to understand the things that nearly everyone else grew up with. It was fascinating to learn about traditions and holidays and how they came to be, and he did genuinely want to know everything he once knew and more.

It was how he’d ended up awake until the break of dawn, listening to Zelda tell stories of Hyrule’s past. She was in her element when she got to research or explore or teach. Watching her was something he felt incredibly lucky to do, much less sit so close to her on the bed while they poured over books. He wanted to be as prepared as possible.

He’d heard of Hylia’s Day before, but it would be his first time experiencing it (that he could remember). Zelda explained it as a celebration of love and giving, of friendship and of victory. She told him of the festivals they used to hold, and the balls they’d been forced to attend, and of the parties they used to have. She told him of the traditions of gift giving and of family gathering.

And when they finally settled down to sleep, Link asked her what she wanted for Hylia’s Day. She replied just as she always did—that she already had all she could ever want.

It didn’t stop him from trying, though. He brought it up at the most nonchalant of times, during breakfast or trips across the kingdom. He would listen intently every time she spoke, more so than usual, and tried to pick up on any instance of an “I want”. Only once did she give a direct answer, saying she wanted a Silent Princess. 

Link was not satisfied with that. It wasn’t special enough, so he took it upon himself to fill Zelda’s nonexistent Hylia’s Day List.

He didn’t expect to feel as nervous as he did when the day actually came around.

“How does this look?” came the voice of Zelda from behind him. Link paused the stirring of his soup to turn around and answer her question. She’d been adjusting the decorations all morning, no matter how many times he’d promised her they looked fine.

“It looks perfect,” he replied. “Just like everything else.”

“Well, good, because I want this to be perfect,” she said, making her way to his side. “It’s the first Hylia’s Day we’ve had since—the first I’ve had outside of a castle. Getting to decorate and set everything up however you want is incredibly stressful. I want our friends to be comfortable and happy.”

“You worry too much,” stated Link in return, bumping her with his shoulder.

“I happen to worry a perfectly healthy amount, for your information.”

He chuckled and turned back to his task at hand: finishing up their dishes for the celebration. The traditions called for a family gathering, and their family was large in both number and size. A little extra wouldn’t hurt, even if their friends were all bringing their own dishes.

“You look beautiful, by the way,” he continued. Zelda’s cheeks flushed, even after a hundred years, and it made him want to smile. He loved when she wore things that were too big for her, including the white sweater that she had to keep pulling the sleeves up on because they were too long. The golden linings made it look fancier than it really was, but she called it comfortable on more than one occasion and it was soft to the touch, so it was one of his favorites too. 

“Thank you,” she replied, hugging his arm. “I dressed myself and everything.”

“Wow, impressive,” he stated, pulling his arm free so that he could take the bread out of the oven. He didn’t miss the roll of her eyes before she turned back to the tree tucked into the corner. 

“I can’t help thinking something’s missing,” she said. Link placed the pan on a rack before turning to face her again, reaching for one of her hands.

“It’s perfect,” he repeated, spinning her to face him. “The only thing missing is a star at the top, but I don’t think you’d fit.”

She gave his hand a gentle swat and huffed.

“You’re ridiculous.” But she was smiling anyway, and that was enough of a gift for him. He considered pulling her closer, spinning her around and trying to get her to laugh, but there was a knock on the door before he could. Link let go of her hand so she could answer it, and he was unsurprised to see Purah bouncing on her feet at the door, with Symin behind her carrying a far too large bag, probably full of presents. 

“Check it!” she exclaimed--her form of a greeting, apparently. “Happy Hylia’s Day, you rascals! I’ve been looking forward to this all year!”

“Purah,” Zelda greeted. “It’s lovely to see you again!”

“You can put the bag down here,” Link told Symin, gesturing to the area under the stairs after shutting the door, keeping the cold outside. Now that Purah had stolen Zelda away for some excited conversation about Sheikah technology, Link had an opening. “Did Robbie manage to.. do the thing?”

“Fix it up? Yeah, I heard he and Purah talking last night. He was able to restore it, but I don’t know if it’ll have all the same functions as before,” Symin answered, his voice lowered to keep anyone from hearing. Some tension in Link’s shoulders relaxed. That was one thing checked off the list—the one thing he was really nervous about.

“I’m gonna owe Robbie an entire decayed guardian for this.”

“He’ll take payments in increments.”

Link snorted and shook his head. As eccentric as Robbie was, he was positive the Sheikah would try and refuse payment. But Link didn’t exactly need his permission to haul a decayed guardian up to Akkala’s Tech Lab, so it would turn out either way. He just hoped, with a glance towards Zelda, that it was the right gift.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Symin asked. 

“You could take coats by the door,” Link joked as another knock echoed through their house. 

He was pleased to see Sidon, Impa, and Paya were the next to arrive. But he didn’t get much of a greeting out before Sidon, crouching to get through the door, lifted him from the floor in a crushing hug.

“Happy Hylia’s Day, Link! Lovely to see you!” 

All Link could really do was pat Sidon’s shoulder in return until his feet were returned to the ground. 

The arrivals began increasing faster than he expected, with Teba and his family arriving next—with Kass in tow, of course.

“I’m worried we won’t have enough space,” Zelda stated suddenly, scaring the living daylights out of him. “We could move it outside, but we’d need a fire. I’m sure the Rito are fine with the cold, but we could give everyone else some blankets and coats. Do Zora get cold?”

“I don’t think so,” Link replied, furrowing his eyebrows. “The water in East Reservoir Lake wasn’t exactly warm, and Ruta hurling ice blocks at us didn’t make it any better.” He was still bitter that he didn’t think to use Cryonsis until he’d already been knocked off of Sidon twice. 

“But the Zora are used to water, so perhaps they’re used to the cold as well.”

“Why don’t we just ask?” Link pointed out, bumping her with his shoulder. “We have a Zora.”

“You say that like Sidon is a pet,” Zelda scolded, crossing her arms. 

“He’s basically a huge Hylian Retriever, yes.”

“Besides, would it be rude?”

Link grinned and ruffled her hair as he said, “Nothing is rude in the name of science.”

“Except eating a frog, apparently,” Zelda bit back, swatting at his hand.

“Oh, let it go,” he laughed. “I ate tons of frogs.”

“And?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow with a smug smile.

“You were right.”

“What are you two love birds talking about?” Sidon asked, and Link jumped for the second time that day. How could someone so large sneak up on him so easy, even if there was a good bit of noise in the house?

“Sidon!” Zelda said quickly, her cheeks flushed with pink. “We were just discussing moving everything outside.”

“Brilliant idea! Do you need help moving anything?” 

Link thought of assuring Sidon he was a guest and didn’t need to lift a finger, but apparently those gears in Zelda’s head were turning.

“No, but we have a few extra strings of fairy lights,” she replied, tapping her chin. “We could put lights on the tree outside!”

“You,” Sidon said as he picked her up. “are a little genius, Princess! Everyone, outside!”

Link hardly got a word in before they were out the door. All he could do was laugh at them with a warm smile. This was more than he ever could’ve wanted.

“It’s good to see you happy.”

Kass was smiling at him, just in that way where he looked like he knew all he was thinking. 

“Holiday cheer,” Link replied with a shrug, but Kass hummed.

“Ah, yes. Holiday cheer and nothing to do with dear Zelda.”

“Well,” Link sputtered, glancing towards the door everyone else had gone out of. “She helps. How’s, uh, how’s your song coming?”

“Rather well, actually. I think she’ll be pleased with it. Come, we’re missing all the fun.”

And Kass was right. Riju and Teba’s son were chasing each other around the pond, occasionally being joined by other village children, and Yunobo was being used as a rock pile to climb over in the process—not that he looked to mind it much. Buliara was observing carefully from her perch on the ramp, discussing something with Teba and Saki, and he was pleased to see they were all smiling. 

Impa was busy scolding Purah for something, and Robbie was coming to her defense, and whatever Symin had interrupted with made them all laugh. 

And then, to his (pleasant) horror, he found Zelda and Paya up in the tree, wrapping strings of lights around the bare branches. Sidon was underneath, wrapping another string around the trunk. They were having far too much fun with it.

Zelda spotted him from her perch and waved, and he had no choice but to join them in the decorating.

A little later into the evening, they sat around a campfire that turned out to be a joint effort and swapped various stories while they ate—stories about the Champions, who were there in spirit, about troubles they’ve solved, and other funny recalls of their lives. Link tried to listen, but his attention shifted every time he saw Zelda next to him with a smile on her face.

A gathering so wonderful wasn’t complete without swapping gifts. They’d given and received so many things, but Link chose to wait until everyone was finished to approach Zelda with his gift. Upon seeing the big box, she lifted an eyebrow.

“Alright. I know a Silent Princess isn’t this big, so what could you have possibly gotten me?” she asked, sitting in front of the crate. Link only shrugged and gestured for her to open it up. 

Her careful fingers pulled the ribbon apart and she took the lid with both hands. He watched her closely, nervous for what her reaction would be. 

Zelda was quiet for a moment, her eyes locked on the contents of the box. When she lifted her head to look at him at last, there were tears glistening in the firelight. 

“Where did you find him?” she asked, her voice shaking.

“He was in that same crate on a shelf in your study. I brought it to Robbie and he was able to restore it,” he explained as he pressed the Sheikah Slate into her hands. Zelda tapped the screen with trembling fingers, and he bit back the urge to take her hand. 

A soft beep filled the air and a blue light burst from the crate. A metal claw gripped the edge of the box, then a blue eye appeared and flipped its lid in greeting. 

Zelda pressed a hand over her mouth and reached the other out towards the little guardian they’d found and studied all those years ago. It beeped again, pleased with her recognition, then scuttled out from the crate.

“It’s in near perfect condition. How did it get..?” But she decided she didn’t care and instead wrapped her arms tightly around Link, whispering out a million thank you’s. All he could do was press a kiss to her head and hold her close.

There were so many things he’d wanted to give her. There were so many things he wanted to say. But he knew of her love for the ancient technology, and he knew of her love for him. 

Even if her list hadn’t truly existed, he wanted to give her something special. He wanted to give her everything and more, but for now, he was okay just giving her comfort that he remembered. 

He remembered her, and he remembered their adventures, and he remembered her interests.

He remembered.

And by the kiss she’d given him, to the delight and cheering of the others, he thought it turned out to be the perfect gift after all.

Well, until the little guardian butted in with its opinion in not so polite beeps, but some things simply couldn’t be helped. 

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks. 

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way. 

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally. 

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology. 

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable. 

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today. 

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently. 

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity. 

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there. 

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding. 

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me. 

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her. 

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY. 

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings. 

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids. 

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986. 

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour. 

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great. 

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this. 

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER. 

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge. 

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew. 

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability. 

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders. 

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth. 

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story. 

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought. 

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein. 

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you. 

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto. 

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end. 

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War. 

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part. 

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context. 

FICTON: 17     NONFICTION: 23

[jarrettfuller]

Put a bird on it

Prologue The most challenging design projects, they say, are the ones you do for yourself. Without parameters and constraints, timelines and clients, you miss the checks and balances that can often guide the process. The markers that tell you you're on the right track, moving in the right direction, are absent. When I was an undergraduate, I had a class where we had to design personal logos we could use on letterhead, stationery, and business cards in preparation for our impending job searches. It was honestly the hardest project of my college years.

Part 1: A Love Story On January 8, 2017, I proposed to my girlfriend, Eurry. It was three years to the day since our first date. We had met over a video conference when we both were working at Facebook; I was in San Francisco and she was in New York. I was a designer and she was a data researcher. One day in the middle of December, my team's project manager asked if I had some time to work on a small data visualization project for someone on the data team in New York. I reluctantly agreed. 'Small projects' always seemed to turn into 'big projects' and this was a team we hadn't worked with before. But a meeting was scheduled and I walked in knowing nothing. I was caught off guard when a cute girl wearing a black and white striped sweater from the New York office popped up on the video screen. I vaguely remember saying something to my project manager when we left the meeting about how cool Eurry seemed. I immediately sent her a Facebook friend request.

A few weeks later she was in the California office and we met in person to go over updates on the project. The meeting quickly turned into friendly conversation about our lives, discovering all sorts of shared interests. I didn't want the meeting to end. The next time she was in town, we went out for drinks and we have talked every day since, beginning what became a multi-year, bicoastal long distance relationship. We became best friends and fell in love.

We both eventually left Facebook — I went to graduate school and she went to work on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. We traveled, tried countless new restaurants, met each other's families, watched a lot of movies, and laughed a lot. We started talking about marriage, about moving in together, about our future. And then on a freezing, snowy morning last January after I pulled a ring from my pocket, I asked her to marry me. Through tears she said 'duh'.

But the story I'm writing here is not one of our relationship or of planning a wedding or even our wedding day. That's a story we want to save for our friends and family. Our married friends told us how all-consuming wedding planning can be so we decided early on that we'd share the planning responsibilities and take ownership over the parts we respectively cared more about. Eurry has stronger opinions about drinks, for example, so she'd handle the bar menu while I cared more about music and was tasked with choosing songs for our first dance and processional. You probably see where this is going: I was in charge of the visual design. And the visual design, it turned out, would be a special kind of challenge. This is a story about that process.

Part 2: Location, Location, Location Designing for our wedding became the hardest design project I've ever completed; certainly more challenging than those personal logos I did in college. It wasn't just about how I could represent our wedding visually but how to represent our entire relationship visually. We knew we wanted it to feel different — we wanted something casual and fun, informal and nontraditional. And we both desperately wanted to avoid the cliche calligraphy so dominant in wedding design these days. Almost immediately after we got engaged, I created a massive Illustrator file where I began setting our names in nearly every typeface I own in search of an interesting lockup or style that might emerge (perhaps something interesting with the double R's in both our names? Nope, too obvious), but for a long time it felt like I was going in circles, unable to figure out what our wedding should look like.

The biggest decision we had to make, however, was where we wanted to get married. One weekend last spring, we were sitting on the couch with our laptops looking at potential venues when Eurry found the John James Audubon House, located right outside Philadelphia and just forty-five minutes from where I grew up. We immediately knew this was where we wanted to get married. Audubon was a naturalist and a painter, most known for his paintings of birds. In an ambitious quest, he set out to paint every bird in North America, discovering at least twenty-five new species in the process. These paintings are collected in his famous book, The Birds of North America, which is considered the best ornithological work ever completed. This was Audubon's first home in North America and has since been converted to a public park, bird conservatory, and museum in his honor. We scheduled a visit a few weeks later and fell in love with the property — there was a beautiful apple orchard where we planned to hold the ceremony and an old barn perfect for a party. We picked a date and booked it.

It feels like cheating, but the venue helped clarify the visual design. The Audubon Society has made most of Audubon's paintings available in the public domain and offers high resolution reproductions as free downloads. I could use these images in the design! We both have love of birds and have a secret ambitions to get into birding. In fact, very early in our relationship, we laughed in amazement at how both of us had similar framed images of birds hanging in our apartments. Add the owl references from our favorite show and our love of Portlandia, a bird-themed wedding seemed perfect.

Part 3: Put a Bird On It With the venue booked and a library of high-resolution bird paintings on my hard drive, the design started to take shape. I went through countless typefaces — some were too formal and others too playful. I settled on ITC Serif Gothic for the logotype and Pitch for the accent typography. Serif Gothic is a typeface I've always admired but had yet to find an appropriate use for and Pitch has become a favorite monospace. Paired together, they immediately gave the design something that felt unique — blending the classic with the casual, the fun with the traditional.

I knew this would have to be treated like a brand — as it would be applied to everything from save the dates to name tags, invitations to menus — and needed to be flexible enough to work across mediums and scales. I decided we could allow design system to slowly reveal itself — using the incremental mailings, save the dates, invites, and RSVPs, to allow the entire aesthetic to unfold, each piece to increase in complexity and vibrancy as we got closer to the wedding day. The Save the Date cards that went out to our guests six months before the wedding were a simple black and white card, printed on a crisp white 130lb paper. A small vector bird perched atop an 'r' in Eurry's name hinted at the larger theme, the forest green envelopes previewed the color palette.

We directed guests to visit our website — eurryandjarrett.com — for travel and hotel details, links to our gift registry, and more information about the day itself. We used the website to introduce the venue and Audubon's paintings. The colors — forest green, a silvery-blue, and light pink — were pulled from a few of our favorite birds.

Three months later, the official invitations went out. Packaged in light blue envelopes, the invitations first appear to be black and white: the nameplate we introduced on the Save the Dates is on the front and opens for more information and RSVP details. But the invitation folds out one more time to reveal a large poster featuring a collage of Audubon's paintings, including the birds from which we pulled our colors as well as the state birds of California (where Eurry was born and where we met), Indiana (where I was born), New York (where we live now), and Pennsylvania (where I grew up and where we were getting married). We wanted something memorable — something that might not just be hung up on the refrigerator or thrown away after the wedding, but a piece of art our guests could remember our wedding by.

Part 4: The Day The design came together in a 20-page booklet I designed in place of a traditional program that included not only details about the day but also family photographs, a few of our favorite recipes, fun facts, and thank yous. Again, we wanted something people would want to keep — a scrapbook of sorts that our guests would feel invested in as they found photos of themselves and learn more about us and our story. The cover of the book expanded the collage from the invitation to include images of some of our favorite things and memorable moments in our relationship: the flowers from Eurry's bouquet, Twin Peaks and Portlandia, doughnuts, succulents, the Facebook sign, gummy bears, and ice cream.

Collage has become a go-to visual style of mine and is central to my own design process. For our wedding, I realized it could once again allow me to include everything we love instead of trying to find a color or style that somehow represented all of us. A key in the back of the book gave descriptions of everything hidden in the collage. This gave us variety in the design system while retaining a clear, distinct style; at once simple and diverse.

The venue offered their own signage, menus, and table numbers but we swapped them out for custom designs to match our design system. For dinner, three dishes were offered — chicken, fish, and vegetarian — and we asked our guests to select their preference on the RSVP cards. Their selections were noted on the name tags with small iconography to help the servers. (One of my favorite details: one couple brought their young child, who was served chicken fingers, and we noted his selection with a baby chick!). The florist decorated the tables forest green table clothes, navy napkins, and natural arrangements of ferns, succulents, and monstera. I designed table numbers that had Audubon's birds wrapped around each number, set in Serif Gothic that were placed in each arrangement. A small box with custom labels of black cherry gummy bears were set at each guest's plate as a small gift of thanks.

Beverages were offered before the ceremony started and were labeled with matching signage and drinks menus were displayed at the bar giving details on the wine and beer offerings. For the visitors who came in from out of town, a small gift bag was left in their hotel room with a few of our favorite things and a small postcard detailing the event (including the school bus that brought guests from the hotel to the venue!) and thanking them for coming into town. As if designing a brand system, every interaction our guests had at the wedding had been customized to match our design, from arriving at the hotel to the thank you notes sent out after. Each piece was fully branded and could stay on its own yet when brought together, created a narrative of our relationship.

It was fun to see it all come together and I enjoyed watching people read the booklets before the ceremony began. We couldn't have done it without the amazing team at Audubon and Jeffrey Miller Catering, who put it all together exactly like we wanted it. You can see more images of the design here.

Epilogue At the beginning of the summer, we got married in a barn in front of the people we love the most just as it began to rain. As we were pronounced husband and wife, Carly Rae Jepson's I Really Like You started playing. We moved to the pavilion where speeches brought us to tears; we ate and drank and thanked every guest for being there and being a part of our lives; we danced into the night as the rain poured outside.

The entire day feels like a blur to me. It was hard to take it all in. All the planning, all the designing, all the celebrating felt like a whirlwind. You know you've been to a good party, I think, when you have no pictures to remember it by. You were so in the moment you forgot to stop and document it. When we talked to our families the next day, none of us had any photos. So when we got our wedding photos back last week, we poured through every single one, reliving the day as spectators, piecing together the memories we had made. The same is true of the design. Designing for my own wedding was easily the hardest design project of my life because this wasn't another design or branding project but a scrapbook of our lives so far and a commemoration of our new life together. This was how we'd remember the day. Working on these pieces consumed our lives for the few months leading up the wedding and though it was just a small part of a day filled with friends and family and laughing and dancing and eating and drinking and birds and love. They serve as markers in time, totems for ourselves and our family and friends. Another way to remember a perfect day. It was the best day of my life. The next day, my face hurt from smiling so much.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SOMEONE

I'd prefer it. But broadcasting isn't publishing: you're not selling a copy of something.1 In almost every domain there are advantages to serendipity too, especially early in life. I was writing this article.2 In fact, faces seem to have felt the same before they started Yahoo. Instead start with the problem you're solving, and the reason most don't is that they probably will, one day.3 There's no concept of office hours in most startups. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. If you start a startup with no idea at all. Words that occur disproportionately rarely in spam like though or tonight or apparently contribute as much to decreasing the probability as bad words like unsubscribe and opt-in do to increasing it.4

How formidable you seem isn't a constant. That may sound like a bizarre idea, but they are still missing a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years before starting their own. Airbed team-Are you still in NYC? Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this—the nastiness. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was being very clever, but I found that the Bayesian filter did the same thing, setting up a separate place to hold the accumulator; it's just a whirl of names and dates. Some of the greatest masters go on to start a startup, you have to get up from your computer and go find some. Don't believe what you're supposed to. Which is a problem if you don't find it.5 The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.6 And it's not fun for a smart person to work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general.7

The challenge is whether we can keep things this way.8 They would make an investor's money go a long way.9 This is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization. Smack! The url is in such cases practically enough by itself to determine whether the email is spam. But that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. In fact, let's make it an RFS. So by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing it, also protecting them from rewards. But most companies do more mundane stuff where the decisive factor is effort, not brains. Each one is progressively more like Lisp.10

So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users. It always seemed to me an important point, and I said to him, ho, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing.11 01 graham 0. The success rate would be 90%. The especially observant will notice that while I consider each corpus to be a good writer, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. It's unlikely you could make great things. I changed that part? We've funded two single founders, but in different enough words that no one could tell. If you start with a promising question and get nowhere. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar.

It may also be ready to start that startup. But you can do whatever you want, you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can also get into Foobar State. Certainly some rejected Google. So let me tell you what to focus on just two goals: a explain what you're doing, and b explain why users will want it. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. Don't talk and drive. More often than not it makes it harder. Second order issues like competitors or resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the end, after you've made it clear what you've built. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.

Even if you could count on investors being interested even if you're producing it unknowingly.12 But they weren't, and it's unclear whether anyone could be. In fact, it doesn't matter if you paint at all. But in text that's not the problem you're solving, and then advertised this as a checklist to examine their own feelings. When you first try skiing and you want to build great things, you find a lot that began with someone pounding out a prototype in a week or two of nonstop work.13 That's incremented by, not plus. It won't stop patent trolls, for example. The success rate would be 90%. Surprises are things that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then simply tell investors so.

Notes

There are situations in which case immediate problem solved, or grow slowly tend not to say Hey, that's the situation you find known boring ideas intolerable. In practice you can help in that water a while we have to admit there's no other word that came to mind was one cause of poverty are only pretending to in order to avoid variable capture and multiple evaluation; Hart's examples are subject to both.

I think the company is common, to take math classes intended for math majors. Perhaps it would have started there. The reason is that they've already decided what they're building takes so long to send them the final version that by the government. There is one of the breach with Rome, his zeal in crushing the Pilgrimage of Grace, and owns significant equity in it, by encouraging them to be recognized as an expert—which is as straightforward as building a new business designed for us to see artifacts from it.

On the other people in return for something they get for free. 27 with the amount—maybe around 10 people.

There are fields now in which practicing talks makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, overcomplicated agreements, and there didn't seem to be like a month grew at 1.

Now many tech companies don't want to learn more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator. Internally most companies are also exempt. Is what we need to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go talk to an investor, the average startup.

But that turned out to be able to hire a lot better. In a country, the less educated parents seem closer to what used to hear about the idea.

And in any case, not bogus. When I was there when it converts you get, the partners discriminate against deals that come to them rather than giving grants.

Of the two, I'd appreciate hearing from you. But it's dangerous to have fun in this they're perfect. The reason Y Combinator was a kid was an assiduous courtier of the things Julian gave us. I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, will be near-spams that you could build products as good ones, and partly simple ignorance.

I asked some founders who'd taken series A from a company's revenues as the little jars in supermarkets. Beware too of the randomness is concealed by the surface similarities. You owe them such updates on your cap table, and all the mistakes you made. A scientist isn't committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

Median may be overpaid. One YC founder told me: One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who would never come back; Apple probably wouldn't even cover the extra cost. Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother.

Maybe it would be critical to.

I read most things I remember the eyes of phone companies gleaming in the latter without also slowing the former. Again, hard work. If big companies can even be conscious of this policy may be a niche within a niche within a few of the word procrastination to describe what they built, they very often come back. So starting as a motive, and that most three letter words are independent, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality to turn Buffalo into a big deal.

Com. While certain famous Internet stocks were almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it will probably not do this with prices too, of course, that good art is brand, and this is to imagine how an investor derives mostly from looking for something they wanted, so had a big deal. It will require more than serving as examples of how you spent all your time working on Viaweb. There is a down round, no one would have turned out to be careful.

[recentanimenews]

Bookshelf Briefs 1/25/20

Again!!, Vol. 12 | By Mitsurou Kubo | Kodansha Comics – For better or worse, Again!! has always been unpredictable. I appreciate that it didn’t always follow the expected story beats, but at the same time, the inconsistency has been frustrating. For example, Imamura’s fluctuating dedication to the Ouendan had him proclaim at one point how much he wanted his grandma to see him cheering, and had that occurred it would’ve been a heart-tugging moment. But it didn’t happen. Instead, Imamura returns from another do-over (this time, flashing to a future in which his death inspired the other characters) with an apathetic attitude that eventually prompts him to return to 2014—a future where his grandmother is dead—without apparently a single pang about it. The ending is also kind of abrupt and ambiguous. In the end, I find myself wishing this had been more predictable, ‘cos at least it would’ve been more satisfying. – Michelle Smith

Chihayafuru, Vol. 18 | By Yuki Suetsugu | Kodansha Comics (digital only) – This volume is full of choices for Chihaya. It’s time to complete another career survey, and this time she fills in a more realistic goal than becoming Queen. It’s also less ambitious, however, and thus her karuta advisor comes to see her play at the Yoshino Club Tournament to ask someone with more experience whether Chihaya really has the potential to become Queen. Happily, she’s playing with more precision and focus than ever, but her next opponent is Haruka Inokuma, a 4-time former Queen, so her chances really hinge on how she fares in that match. (I suspect Taichi vs. Arata is in the offing, as well.) Too, the school trip conflicts with the Master/Queen qualifiers, and Chihaya must choose which side of herself she wants to cultivate more. I seriously love this series and am eagerly anticipating the next volume! – Michelle Smith

Dr. STONE, Vol. 9 | By Riichiro Inagaki and Boichi | Viz Media – Perhaps being interesting was too much to ask, but Taiju and Yuzuriha are at least contributing now that they’ve been added to Senku’s team—Taiju by being a literal tank soaking up damage, and Yuzuriha by apparently taking all the statues that Tsukasa smashed and sewing them together, presumably so they can be revived. If this seems farfetched, it’s no more so than finding the hospital where Tsukasa’s terminally ill little sister was located and unstoning her, which apparently also cures her illness. That said, Tsukasa may not be the end boss, as there’s another who’s been waiting for the moment to make his debut as a Big Bad. This continues to be ridiculous but also cool. – Sean Gaffney

Hatsu*Haru, Vol. 10 | By Shizuki Fujisawa | Yen Press – Best Couple get the cover, and I continue to be more interested in them than I am Riko and Kai, who are cute and all but also somewhat predictable. The four of them go to the hot springs, mostly as Riko is too nervous to be alone with Kai, and Takaya learns that Ayumi leaves herself wide open. After a cute but slight Valentine’s chocolate chapter, the best part comes when Ayumi gets a bad cold and Takaya visits, meeting her parents and finding out she’s actually pretty rich and her family are famous film creators. Ayumi is not yet ready to reciprocate Takaya’s feelings, but she does open up to him about wanting to seek her own path. It’s great to see, and we have three volumes left after this, so I’m sure it will work out. – Sean Gaffney

ROADQUEEN: Eternal Roadtrip to Love | By Mira Ong Chua | Seven Seas – While not technically manga, ROADQUEEN will likely still appeal both stylistically and thematically to readers who enjoy Japanese comics. In particular, the volume makes an excellent addition to Seven Seas’ catalog of yuri titles. ROADQUEEN originated as a short online comic, followed up by a much longer multi-chapter sequel. Both of these stories and an additional bonus comic are collected in this volume. Leo, the prince of Princess Andromeda Academy, only has eyes for Bethany—her motorcycle. At least until Vega arrives on the scene and steals Bethany away. Vega promises she’ll give the bike back, but only after Leo proves that she can be a decent lesbian (not to mention human being). ROADQUEEN is deliberately over-the-top, Chua obviously having a lot of fun playing with tropes, but it can actually be very touching, too. With an abundance of humor and a ton of heart, ROADQUEEN is an absolute delight. – Ash Brown

Saki the Succubus Hungers Tonight, Vol. 1 | By Mikokuno Homare and studio HIP-CATs | Ghost Ship – I will admit that for a title that’s coming out via the Ghost Ship label, which means “borderline porn,” this is pretty cute. Saki is a fairly new, still virginal succubus who has been thrown out of her family home as she’s old enough to be finding men to “feed” on, but she’s honestly a bit too shy for all that. She is thus near starvation when found by Renta, an adult salaryman who is also a virgin. They clearly fall for each other pretty fast, but are also both innocent and clueless, so nothing happens… well, OK, something happens, she manages to “feed,” but the plot is still “will they ever actually do anything” and the answer is likely “no.” Still, for tease, this is relatively cute and sweet. – Sean Gaffney

Snow White with the Red Hair, Vol. 5 | By Sorata Akiduki | Viz Media – Welp, despite what I thought, the series does not end just because the main couple confessed. Indeed, most of the volume involves separating the two—not by design, but simply as Shirayuki has been invited to another country for a get together… her old country, where Prince Raj is. Indeed, after having it out with her a couple of volumes ago, Raj is seemingly turning over a new leaf, but that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable around her at all—he never expected she’d accept the invitation. Her bodyguard for this journey is Obi, and I note that this series is very good at having a bunch of guys in it who are not immediately in love with the heroine. Whether that’s true of the new villain introduced here, who knows? – Sean Gaffney

Teasing Master Takagi-san, Vol. 7 | By Soichiro Yamamoto | Yen Press – Having established that our leads will end up married with a child in the future, the series can now slowly move forward in increments, culminating in the final chapter here, where Nishikata, of his own volition, asks Takagi to the summer festival. But we’re also looking back, as we get to see how the two of them first met, and how Nishikata’s two basic qualities—a nice guy with great faces when he’s embarrassed or upset—inspire Takagi almost immediately. I’m not sure this is exactly when she falls for him, but she certainly has by the end of this book, which gives us another nice blushing reaction from her. Oh yes, and there’s still plenty of teasing. You expected something else? – Sean Gaffney

The Way of the Househusband, Vol. 2 | By Kousuke Oono | VIZ Media – This was another fun volume of The Way of the Househusband, in which Tatsu tries aerobics and yoga, intimidates a yakuza by offering him kitchen gadgets, eradicates stubborn stains in Masa’s laundry, plays volleyball with housewives, and more. I really appreciate that we saw more of Miku, his wife, this time around, and probably my favorite chapter is the final one, in which her parents drop by for a visit. Even though the fish-out-of-water setup in this series reminds me of the premise of Saint Young Men, The Way of the Househusband is not only visually superior (better art, great pacing to jokes), but has more heart, especially the bonus chapter in which we see Miku’s dad practicing for the moment when he asks Tatsu if he wants to go outside and play catch. I stop short of calling the manga sweet, but it’s wholly endearing. Highly recommended. – Michelle Smith

Yowamushi Pedal, Vol. 13 | By Wataru Watanabe | Yen Press – Yowamushi Pedal, Vol. 13 | By Wataru Watanabe | Yen Press – OK, I was probably foolish to think the race would end in this volume. We’re gonna have to wait for fourteen. But in return, we get so much shonen sports at its best. Midousuji does his best, but then crashes and burns. Instead, it’s Manami who gets the bulk of this book, where we discover that he enjoys shifting gears higher when he should be doing the opposite, just to make things even more fun. That said, he shouldn’t dismiss our hero, Onoda, who has his pedaling and his Pretty Princess song to keep him going forever. (Oh yes, and his mother shows up—apparently at rando, as he never told her about the race? This was the funniest part of the book.) Things should end next volume… well, at least this race. – Sean Gaffney

By: Ash Brown

[dork-empress]

Town Hall

part of my ‘modern tdp oneshots’ au collection

Read on Ao3

Ezran is forced to go to his father's town hall meeting, but meets a friend while he's there.

Ezran was bored. Like, out of his skull bored. And he had to keep quiet, which made him antsy and fidgety and all the more bored.

Harrow usually left them home while he was doing campaign work, Callum experienced enough with using the microwave for minute-meals, and Ezran was in middle school now anyway. If they really needed to go somewhere, Claudia had her drivers license and could take them.

But this time, Amaya’s people had wanted to include his kids in a photo opp for the local paper. The photo opp was going to be at the end of the night, so they had to sit through and listen as Harrow answered questions from the community, mostly older folks and people with local government jobs who actually had a stake in local elections.

Callum had brought his art pad and was carefully sketching things out one after the other. Ezran had brought a book with him, but his mind wouldn’t focus on the words, so he just sat there staring at the pages, and then inevitably started fidgeting again.

“Hey,” A voice said beside him, and Ezran looked up to see Aanya had come up and sat beside him. Callum looked up, but quickly re-focused.

Ezran scooted away from his brother, “Hey! What are you doing here?”

“My dad brought me. I like going to local political events.” she sat and watched Harrow giving an answer on...some interstate taxes or something, while Ezran stared at her. “Adopted dad,” she clarified, “Technically my uncle.”

Ezran nodded. “So this is….fun for you?”

Aanya tilted her head, “It’s interesting,” she said, “I’m going to be President someday. So I want to form opinions about things.” She sighed, “Also, I want to see if I can get movement on lowering the voting age.”

Ezran blinked, “You can do that?”

Aanya tore her attention to look at him, and as always, Ezran felt just a bit stupid being around her. “There’s precedent with the 26th amendment, which was put into place because people thought they shouldn’t be made to fight in a war if they couldn’t vote. But these days, 18 is usually the time when people are going to college, and they’re often not in the same state as their residence. Besides, plenty of laws apply to younger people, like motor vehicle laws for 16 year olds. Why do we trust kids to drive 2-ton cars, but not vote?”

Ezran blinked thinking about it. Yeah, it made sense. “But...how do you just...lower it?”

“It would have to be incremental,” Aanya said, “and on a state level first. That’s why I want to bring it up to your dad, I think Maryland would be a perfect starting place.”

Ezran nodded, “Well, I’m sure he’d help you.”

Aanya fixed him with another stare, “I’m asking all the candidates, you know,” she said, “Your father doesn’t rank very high in the polls right now.”

Ezran frowned, “There’s still time,” He said, “He registered late. And besides, he just has to get enough votes for the primaries.” Ezran….didn’t really know what he was talking about. But thats what Amaya had told him.

Aanya hummed. “I didn’t mean to insult him. I’m just trying to be practical.” She sighs, “If it helps, I’d vote for him if I was old enough.”

Ezran bit his lip, watching his dad laugh at some witty response he’d made. He was tired, Ezran could tell. “Can you,” he asked, “Can you...teach me? About these kinds of political things?”

Aanya raised an eyebrow at him, “You want to learn about politics?”

“Well,” he said, “I mean...I don’t really want to be a politician. I wanna be a zookeeper, or a forest ranger, something with animals.” he said, brightly, “But...I want to be able to help Dad. And I don’t know how.”

Aanya nodded, “Alright,” she said, “I can help you with that.”

[tiwaztyrsfist]

I posted 3,791 times in 2021

59 posts created (2%)

3732 posts reblogged (98%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 63.3 posts.

I added 18 tags in 2021

#miraculous ladybug - 3 posts

#do i get sir humphry applegate as my cabinet secretary as well? - 2 posts

#shit man i can't do a worse job than the last three - 2 posts

#wooooo! i'm prime minister of great britain! - 2 posts

#d&d - 2 posts

#stormlight archive - 2 posts

#it's brian henson - 2 posts

#ticket to ride is a game about riding trains and putting little trains on a map - 1 posts

#when they found her she had checked into a hotel under her husband's mistresses name - 1 posts

#but i mostly use dark balls - 1 posts

Longest Tag: 123 characters

#efnysien however was a cruel and jealous troublemaker who always sought to foment conflict where there had been none before

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

I think the real secret to the difference between youth culture and 'grown-up' culture actually has to do with the amount of novel information we absorb each day.

Think about it, young people from around 6 until at least 18 in the US, and longer if they go to college, spend the majority of their waking hours being bombarded with new or relatively new information. Yes we repeat a lot of stuff to reinforce, yes we review, but each day of school tries to incrementally advance at least a bit more knowledge.

Meanwhile 'Grown-ups' in the work force very quickly reach a point of stagnation. When was the last time you had something novel and new happen at work? I bet it's the same answer you'll give for 'When was the last time something got really fucked up royally at work'. A good noteworthy day at work is when the radio DJ plays a lot of songs you like and haven't heard for a while.

So here's my thought. Time perception is fluid. And if you're experiencing a lot of new and novel things, even if you don't enjoy or care about them, you're filling your brain. If you're doing a job that's essentially the same thing and you can do it by rote, you're not filling your brain.

And when you throw something new and fun/silly in there, how old you consider it is based on how far down the brain stack it is.

So if you're in school, you learn a new silly dance, like Flossing. It's now, it's cool, it's fun.

Your dad also picks it up from you.

You have Algebra, you have History, you have French II, you have Band, you have Chemistry, you have Drama. Next semester you have French III with a focus on Culture and Art, Biology 1, Sex Ed, Writting, Debate & Forensics, and Civics. And you're expected to retain as much of this as possible.

Meanwhile, over the last 9 months you Dad has had "Run the file, check the output, run the file, check the output, run the file, check the output" or possibly "Go to jobsite, nail shit when they tail me, go to the jobsite, pour the concrete, go to the jobsite, nail shit up where they tell me" or even "Go to the Hospital, check patients vitals, prescribe pills, check patients vitals, prescribe pills, check patients vitals, Don't prescribe pills, check patients vitals, take out appendix which i've done 20 times before but it's still the highlight of my month because it's the most interesting non-stress thing I'll do". And as long as you retain the skills you need to keep doing the exact same thing, you aren't really expected to retain anything new.

So a year later, in the brain file, you've piled 12 textbooks on top of the sheet of paper that was "Doing the Floss".

And your Dad/Mom/Uncle/Aunt/Whoever has had a year of getting little instruction sheets, doing what's on them, then immediately wadding them up and throwing them away. So what's on top in their brain file, is the last novel thing. The Floss is still at or near the top with only a synopsis of the one or two movies that really got them interested.

5 years from now young people won't remember the things, and when reminded they'll associate them with the time they learned them.

5 years from now, people in the work force will just randomly bust that stuff out because they live in a timeless fugue state and for them everything that's happened since they left school is essentially MORE recent that what happened to people IN SCHOOL last semester.

11 notes • Posted 2021-09-04 14:43:16 GMT

#4

The Humans have Red Blood

Parshendi have Orange Blood

Aimians have Violet Blood

Really looking forward to book 5 when Brandon introduces the Yellow, Green, Blue, and Indigo blooded races, and reveals that the Stormlight Archive was actually a REALLY opaque Homestuck AU all along

12 notes • Posted 2021-02-11 05:36:23 GMT

#3

Weird hypothetical legal question: Let's say magic suddenly became real. If one person murdered someone, and another person resurrected the victim, the first person would still be guilty of murder right?

If a person steals a valuable painting, and a second person stumbles upon its hiding place and returns it to the rightful owners/ authorities, the first person is still guilty of theft; would the same logic apply?

So if someone were to say, destroy all of Paris in some sort of hellish cataclysm, killing everyone, and someone else magically reverted everything undoing it, the first person would still be responsible for mass murder.

13 notes • Posted 2021-07-25 15:24:08 GMT

#2

I want to write a series of children's books like the Maisy, Miffy, or Clifford books, but on subjects that are incongruous.

If possible, stealing the character Ethel the Aardvark from an old Monty Python sketch.

Ethel The Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying

Ethel The Aardvark Commits Tax Fraud (with guest collaborator Jimmy Carr)

Ethel The Aardvark Decommissions Trawsfynyndd Nuclear Power Station

Ethel The Aardvark and the £4.8 million Golden Toilet

Ethel The Aardvark Immanentizes the Eschaton

Ethel The Aardvark De-Metricizes Great Britain.

etc.

14 notes • Posted 2021-09-20 01:57:24 GMT

#1

More authors need to get on Agatha Christie's level.

She, a well known author of mystery books, introduced a character in her books, one Ariadne Oliver, who is a well known mystery novelist who writes about an older male detective.

Ariadne Oliver is a BLATANT self insert.

She shows up in 6 Poirot novels (and one solo novel) and, here's what's important, She annoys the EVER LIVING SHIT out of Poirot. Poirot cannot STAND her and only his extreme reserve and pathological politeness stop him from being very rude or outright hostile to her.

Agatha Christie said "I'm gonna put myself into my super popular novel series, and my protagonist is gonna absolutely HATE me! I'm gonna just PISS HIM the FUCK off!"

Also, Ariadne's ability to guess/deduce what was going to happen was right on par with Captain Arthur "Sharp as a sack of wet sausages" Hastings.

AC said, "I'm gonna put myself into my own mystery stories, but I'm gonna be INCAPABLE of solving my own puzzles. I'm just going to ping pong from taking everything at face value to making up the most complex and convoluted bullshit explanations at lightning speed. I will make Hercule CRY"

30 notes • Posted 2021-08-18 02:40:27 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[twelvebyseventyfive]

Communicating climate change: the role of the wine industry in changing people’s minds

Facts don’t change people’s minds. It’s really annoying, but it’s true. We like to think that if we marshal enough evidence, that eventually the weight of evidence will prove irresistible to people. Sadly, this isn’t the case.

Facts don’t change people’s minds, but stories do. Narratives are how we understand our place in the world. Throughout history, different cultures have accumulated a collection of myths and stories that help them organize their thinking and understanding, and many of the themes are in common across different cultures. There are certain story archetypes that we seem drawn to. This is something we need to embrace in communicating ideas such as climate change. Simply presenting the facts is surprisingly ineffective.

This brings me round to the concept of change. Is change gradual or punctuated? Does it occur in small increments, or does it occur in bursts followed by periods of stasis? When I was a second year biology student I remember learning about conflicting evolutionary theories. The existing one was the gradualist position, where small changes accumulated. But there was a competing idea, the new theory, proposed by Gould and Eldridge – Punctuated Equilibria. It’s an idea that has been transferred from evolutionary theory to societal change more generally. Things stay more-or-less the same, then there is a sudden change.

An example of this sudden change is the way in the last couple of years there has been a massive societal backlash against plastics. What caused it? I think there was a general sentiment simmering below the surface that the way we were using plastics, which take centuries to degrade, was irresponsible. But the catalyst came with an episose of the BBC series Blue Planet II, where the powerful imagery showing the toll plastics were taking on marine life acted as the tipping point.

Another example would be societal attitudes towards smoking. Evidence about the harm of smoking accumulated over many decades, but still people used to smoke in restaurants, bars, workplaces and even on planes. Suddenly, this public smoking in enclosed spaces became unacceptable, and legislation was swiftly adopted in many countries.

One of the problems we face in communication is that we live in the age of the filter bubble, a term coined as recently as 2011. Our consumption of media has changed. In the past, we had a very limited number of media outlets – in the UK, three television channels, then four, then five – and this was fairly recently. Just a few radio stations, and a few national newspapers. We consumed more-or-less the same media, and it was push rather than pull. Now there are many, many media outlets, and we choose what we want to consume. It’s pull not push. And the algorithms on social media give us what we want. They feed us content in line with our self-expressed preferences.

The result is that our worldview is confined by existing beliefs. Our confirmation bias has been set free to rule us.

As a result, we have to find new routes to reach people. Our messages just aren’t getting through to the people who need to hear them. We are preaching to the converted.

It’s also worth thinking about who is the best person to communicate a message like that of climate change. I’d argue that the activists aren’t always the best advocates. The strongest believers can end up putting people off. For non-believers, activists are easy to filter out. Even powerful messages can become noise. These days people have turned denial and confirmation bias into an art form.

What about language? I know that climate ‘chaos’ refers to the sort of disastrous destabilization of climate that could occur if we don’t keep the rise in average temperature below a certain level, but might climate ‘destabilization’ or ‘chaos’ be better terms to use than just change? It communicates that this is a problem, and also that the problem isn’t just the average rise. If we were dealing with, say, a 2 C rise, this could be planned for. But the evidence seems to be that while the distribution of temperatures has moved, the distribution has also broadened: we are seeing heightened variation, as well as a rise.

Wine highly susceptible to climate, and so this is a particular problem for wine. Climate an average – the vine sees the weather of the year. Gradual change would be easier to plan for, with normal vintage tolerances. But we are seeing more chaotic weather patterns, and it is very hard to adapt to climate chaos. The consequence is that viticulturists must hedge their bets, resulting in increasing production costs, which means more expensive wine, thus reducing market size.

I think we all have a lot to than Al Gore for with his film An Inconvenient Truth. This had a big impact on the way people saw climate change, although in the USA it might have been better if a Republican rather than a Democrat had made the film (the fact that it was Gore made it easy for Republicans to reject the message). Could powerful, big-splash messages like this be vital, and more important than many smaller, less impactful communications?

One recent positive has been than educating the next generation seems to be working. In the UK we have seen school strikes about climate change. This is a powerful statement to all.

Not being carbon neutral has to become socially unacceptable, for individuals, and for businesses. Large companies behaving badly need to be called out: they often hide behind seemingly good intentions, to distract journalists from probing too far.

When it comes to leading the conversation about climate change, the wine trade is in an ideal place to take a role. Wine is fun, and its consumption is joyous. People like wine. Rich folk buy wineries. Because of this, the stories around wine can be powerful, and can get through the confirmation bias defences of climate change deniers.

Perhaps more significantly, wine is – to use Richard Smart’s metaphor – the canary in the coalmine of agriculture. The sensitivity of wine grapes to even small changes in climate mean that it’s an early indicator of significant changes.

We are in an ideal place to bring stories that can effect change. Stories change behavior. Let’s choose the right stories to tell, and concentrate less on presenting facts, more on giving examples. The rules of a good narrative – engrained deep in human consciousness – are worth following as we start to share.

from Jamie Goode's wine blog http://www.wineanorak.com:/wineblog/wine-science/communicating-climate-change-the-role-of-the-wine-industry-in-changing-peoples-minds For Fine Wine Investment opportunities check out Twelve by Seventy Five: http://www.twelve-by-seventy-five.com/

[dawnajaynes32]

Future Fonts on the Future of Fonts

As a type designer, what if you had an idea for a typeface, and had begun experimenting with its design, but didn’t have the resources to continue the work? Future Fonts could help with that. Or as a graphic designer, you were looking for “fresh fonts” that haven’t been used over and over again—wanting something new and exciting, perhaps getting it even before it’s been released? Future Fonts could also help with that. Future Fonts is a new endeavor brought to life by Lizy Gershenzon & Travis Kochel of Scribble Tone, with OH no Type Co.’s James Edmondson working as an advisor who’s focused on education and helping to build the community.

Gershenzon sees their platform built for type designers to raise funds, get early feedback, and sell typefaces in progress. Edmondson says Future Fonts has elements of Kickstarter, Patreon and Github. Gershenzon, Kochel and Edmondson shared their insights about typography, their thoughts on starting Future Fonts, and what the future of type and type design could look like.

Q. Future Fonts is not only a smart idea, but it also fills a gap—and fills it well. There’s a lot of interest in type design, with people jumping into the game constantly. Why haven’t we seen something like Future Fonts before, especially since type design has been blowing up, with new fonts constantly coming out?

Travis: I think we haven’t seen something similar because it’s terrifying to put something out there that’s unfinished or imperfect. We can’t take all the credit though. Various foundries have experimented with releasing fonts that don’t have a full family of weights or limited character set. Production Type’s Lab, and David Jonathan Ross’ Font of the Month Club come to mind. Some designers have used Kickstarter to fund the process. OpenSource fonts use this model. I think we’re the first font retailer that has made it a core part of the platform though.

James: Swiss Typefaces also had the “Lab” thing maybe even before Production Type.

Lizy: It’s a new idea for typeface design, and it could be hard for a small independent team to take on a bigger project like this. You need to be tied in to what’s needed in the type scene, have the skills to design and build a custom digital product, and get designers behind it. I think the three of us have unique talents that complement each other well for this sort of project.

Q. What about the name, Future Fonts? Why not Font Starter or Fontstarter? Or is that too similar to Kickstarter? Actually, it is too similar to Kickstarter. Bad question … anyhow, what other names were you thinking about, and why did you stick with Future Fonts?

Travis: We went through a lot of names in the early days. AlphaBetaType, clever, but there are a lot of similar names out there. Incremental, a little too serious. We almost went with ‘Not Defined’, which is the name of the glyph that gets swapped in when a font is missing that specific glyph. We were worried it was a little too hard to get if you aren’t a type designer. Future Fonts is a little too obvious, but it’s fun to say. People seem to have an easier time remembering it and are quicker to understand what we’re doing.

James: At first, I hated the name Future Fonts because I thought it was corny. A few days after I had described it to my partner, she asked, “What’s up with that Future Fonts thing?” I realized she remembered it after I had mentioned it once, so that despite being maybe a little obvious, it was memorable and straightforward.

Future Fonts shares reverse contrast principles at their blog in a post by James Edmondson.

Q. James, you wrote a nifty post on the blog all about reverse contrast, and it’s a very educational piece. Do you worry that you’re giving too much away? Would sharing too much of your secret sauce, or any of the ingredients that go into a Future Fonts creation, harm the growth of Future Fonts in the long run? Or are you counting on people creating, designing and building, and then sharing those typefaces on the Future Fonts platform?

James: I don’t worry about giving too much away. From my experience learning in school and teaching, I know how difficult it is to impart a meaningful understanding of type design on students. I am completely happy to teach people because there are many benefits. First of all, people realize how difficult it is, which lets them understand why fonts cost money. Secondly, I think it would be wonderful if designers were more able to treat type like a raw material, rather than simply clip-art. There is an understandable fear of editing/ customizing/ tweaking type. Maybe with a little education in this area, designers will have the confidence to insert more of their own voice to get the type working better for the project and produce unique work. These ideas are more important to me than hoarding information in the name of shortsighted financial success.

Lizy: We are also hoping to grow Future Fonts out more as an educational typeface design resource. First, we were thinking about how to dissect the progress of a typeface to help people better understand what they were getting and learn more about the process. A blog was a nice addition to help designers teach about making typefaces and designing with them. We hope to build out more educational tools for Future Fonts.

Q. James, you occupy a special place at Future Fonts as an advisor, and when it comes to things like that blog post, you’re also an educator, writing about and teaching people about type on the Future Fonts site. For all that you’ve put into Future Fonts up until now, and what you will put into it in years to come, what’s the big payoff for you and why?

James: Education is important to me because of how many great teachers I had. Angie Wang was my first typography teacher, and taking her class was a huge awakening. In that one semester, I learned so many things I still think about daily; in fact undergrad through grad school was one awesome learning experience after another. I hope I can be that teacher for others, and selfishly, being around students allows me to maintain enthusiasm in my own job. After I left grad school, it became annoying to hear my teacher’s voices echo in my head as I was working. Now I’m hearing my own voice echo in my head as I’m working, which is way more annoying, but it keeps me practicing what I preach.

Q. At your site, your FAQ section states that you “don’t require that every typeface is eventually finished,” which makes me wonder, what would you consider to be a successful year or quarter? If 80% of the typefaces get finished, or more like 20%? Or do you not worry so much about the numbers, but perhaps, you define success another way?

James: Forgive me if my opinions don’t reflect those of my colleagues, but on Future Fonts, I define success by the catalog we offer. This is as much about pushing type design forward with interesting contributions as it is about offering a new model for sales. If we were primarily concerned with the numbers, that would lead to a library that was considerably more boring.

Travis: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think finished is something we’re using as a measure of success. The idea of what qualifies as “finished” is very subjective. Even well-polished “finished” fonts usually have room for expansion of character set, weights and widths. The three goals I’m most interested in are: 1) providing a safe place for type designers to experiment and grow their ideas, 2) offering a great library of typefaces, and 3) trying to close the gap between type designers and type users. They’re not really quantifiable, but just things to help guide decision making. However, I definitely hope to see the typefaces progress, and will be sad if they get abandoned. We’re trying to pick designers that are serious about their work, so I hope the number of abandoned projects will be fairly low.

Q. Future Fonts looks and feels inclusive, as if you won’t say “No” to any submission—and I think that’s really cool. But, where would you draw the line? What won’t you accept into your catalog, and why?

Travis: We have turned down quite a few submissions actually. In the early going, we feel it’s important to set expectations for both the designers and customers. While the typefaces are in-progress, what is present should be usable, of high quality and creatively interesting. In the long term, we would love to create a more open environment, but it would probably be a bit separate from the Future Fonts brand. We’ve also floated the idea of making a critique section where anyone could post work to get feedback and help.

Q. A critique, education and feedback area would be wonderful. Would it be similar to, different from, or the same as Type Drawers? Do you see something like what you’re envisioning being a replacement for Type Drawers, or adding to what Type Drawers already has in place?

James: We want to have designers feel comfortable giving any feedback related to using the type. Other communities of type designers can offer critiques to make it be the best expression of it as a typeface, but we feel that feedback that comes from a user, or an actual paying customer might be more useful.

Travis: It’s not something we’ve given a whole lot of thought about yet. Growing and maintaining the current library and feature set has been keeping us pretty busy. But, I think we’ll probably want to take it a little further than Type Drawers if we do it. The forum format works, but it would be nice to create a more helpful interface for critiquing, with type design in mind. Again though, this is probably pretty far off in the future, and separate from the licensing side.

Q. Lizy, your bio at Scribble Tone says that you have “a gift for connecting with people and making a project come alive.” What are some of the ways you hope that contributors’ typefaces will come alive when they work with Future Fonts, and how will you be a part of that coming alive?

Lizy: We created Future Fonts as a way for typeface designers to get their projects out sooner, so others can use their useful designs. Hopefully this early feedback loop will encourage designers to keep working on it, get fresh designs out there quicker, and help them make some money along the way. It has also been fun to see typeface designers on the platform and from the design community support each other with feedback, advice, and helping spread the word on new typeface releases. Throughout this project, I’ve tried to take Travis’ initial prototype of releasing typefaces in versions and push the vision so it’s more exciting to a larger design community. Figuring out things like how will type designers upload and sell their work, what’s a nice way to browse and show-off typefaces, and how do we make it feel like a community that’s supporting each other. Lately, I’ve been focusing on getting more designers to check out Future Fonts, and how to help make the product better.

Travis Kochel’s FF Chartwell is a unique typeface that goes far beyond letters, numbers, and symbols.

Q. Travis, you have experience with type design and technology, such as pushing the envelope with FF Chartwell and its OpenType capabilities, creating a font that calls on typography, mathematics, programming, color and graphics. That font appears to be the perfect blend of your experience and interest in typography, graphic design and backend development. How has that experience, and your other experiences with type design and technology—as well as your entrepreneurial spirit—factored into your vision for Future Fonts, and where you want to take it five, 10, 20 years from now?

Travis: I’m always looking for ways to bring together all of my separate interests. I’m not the best at any one thing I do, but my strength is in bringing different perspectives to fields or technologies that don’t usually talk to each other. It’s been really important for me to explore new technologies and ways of thinking, and to be OK with spending a lot of time learning something that may not directly relate to what I’m working on at the moment. With Future Fonts, I hope to keep that same spirit of learning and exploration going. We have a good backlog of useful and necessary features for the site, but I think it’s important that we follow our curiosity and mix in some things that are more satisfying on a personal level. As a platform, I hope we can help encourage this in the designers as well. I’m so glad James is involved in this project. He’s done an amazing job of curating and encouraging exactly that in the library.

Q. With a name like Future Fonts, people might presume you have an eye on what’s next in the type world, for type designers and also for graphic designers and everyone else who uses type. What do you see happening next in the world of type design, specifically for the type designers making type, how they work, their distribution model(s), and also the way people use their type?

James: We are in the golden age of type design. The education, tools, and communities around it have never been stronger, so the only trend I can count on is that quality will stay high. For type designers, I hope they can realize the importance of owning their work. With the internet, the importance of huge foundries goes down. Everyone can process credit cards, and everyone has international reach. That will hopefully allow for more designers to stay independent, and not be a part of the Monotype ecosystem that is continually swallowing up the entire business. Monotype has the tendency to buy foundries up and forget about what made them cool in the first place. My hope is that by keeping the decisions about what type gets made out of the hands of huge companies, it will allow for more progressive and boundary-pushing work.

Lizy: I agree, Future Fonts is a new tool to give type designers more control over their work, which is really needed in today’s type industry. I also see it as a place where designers across disciplines can discover interesting new typefaces and support independent creative work happening today.

Control, discovery, support and creativity—sounds like a bright future for type designers and also graphic designers. You can see more of Future Fonts on Instagram & Twitter.

Edited from a series of electronic interviews.

The post Future Fonts on the Future of Fonts appeared first on HOW Design.

Future Fonts on the Future of Fonts syndicated post

[lamangozalova-blog]

Q&A: Will Wright, creator of Sims

Will Wright is one of the biggest names in gaming: the man behind Sim City and the world's most popular game, The Sims. His next title, Spore, is due out next year. This week Wright was admitted into the fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Bafta, and we caught up with him in London.

We've just started a government review in the UK into the affect of games on children. Do you think attitudes are starting to be a shift?

I think there's always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don't. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids.

In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology.

As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that's the slow, inevitable process going on here.

It goes in fits and starts over time – if there's a school shooting, it's a case of 'did they play games or not': you don't really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that's exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand.

So when games become fully accepted, what takes their place in that cycle?

Who knows. At some point we're going to have direct neural connections, where you plug the thing into your brain, and the first people who do that are going to be seen as social outcasts: how dare you do that to your body, it will be almost like tattoos or body piercing and parents will all be up in arms about it. Thirty years later those people will be the parents and it will be totally accepted.

Are you going to be one of those early adopters?

Oh, not right off the bat, no. But they actually have some interesting devices available commercially right now that involve reading your brainwaves and controlling software.

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Was it a conscious decision you took to build games that appeal to a very broad range of people?

As a creator, yes – although I don't begrudge the other games: I love playing shoot em up games, I really enjoy them - but it feels like that area is so overpopulated that as a game designer I'd rather work in an area that is under-represented. I've tended to work in areas that I feel it would be interesting for more people to go in.

My first game was a shoot 'em up, but when I designed it I found that creating the world I was going to blow up was more interesting than blowing it up – that's where I came to Sim City.

And what about the educational aspects? Many of the people who are worried about the affect of, say, Grand Theft Auto probably think that you make the 'right' sorts of games.

I think we culturally disconnect the concepts of play and education, when play really is education and that's how we developed it evolutionarily.

Education was always known as the kiss of death in the software industry. But I think you want to focus on getting the player interested and emotionally involved.

There's an old quote that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. If we can find ways to get people really motivated, that's how you get them pulling information off the web, reading books, learning.

There's a strong scientific element to many of your games. Why is that?

I'm very broadly interested in science as a lay person, and I read a lot of science that gets me interested in particular subjects.

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I think the game industry could use spokespeople that try to represent the potential of gaming. The industry hasn't even begun to realise its potential – we're getting there very slowly – but in the meantime we need to be educating the public as to what this can eventually become. If we have more discussion about what games could be versus what they are right now, we might get there sooner.

From a kid's point of view gaming feels somewhat subversive. If the parents don't like it, it must be cool. If the parents also liked it, it wouldn't be cool and they'd try something else. So in some sense the games industry has a vested interest in keeping games culturally edgy – and there's an element of truth there.

What games do you play? And do you play for fun or research?

I try to play innovative games that are coming out – I really love Guitar Hero, I play my Nintendo DS a lot, check out things on the Wii. With the exception of Advance Wars on my DS, there's no one game that I spend a huge amount of time playing. I love Advance Wars – I used to play all these strategy games as a kid… Panzer Blitz, and all these old Avalon Hill games.

Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. Bu tht eWii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.

So what set-up do you have at home?

We've got an Xbox 360 collecting dust in the background, a Wii hooked up that we use quite a bit. I don't have a PS3. I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer – to me the mouse is the best input device ever.

Every generation it's like "the PC's dead! The PC's dead!". But it carries on growing when consoles are flat for five years. At the moment I can get better graphics on my PC than I can on the PS3.

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We're doing Spore on the Wii, and we did MySims. It takes signifcant re-thinking to work out how you're going to do it. PS3 and Xbox 360 are similar enough that you can basically use the same system for both. So it comes down to what the interesting major platforms are and which markets we want to hit.

So you're now approaching the finishing stages for Spore. Is this the toughest section, or the easiest?

In some ways this is the most difficult part of the process, because for so long you've been dealing with potential. It depends on how it's ending up, and Spore is ending up very nicely – in some sense we've exceeded a lot of what we thought we would get. But there are minor differences in polishing that make a major difference in how people will perceive it.

There are a lot of little things that we've achieved that I didn't think we would – things like procedural music, with computers composing music on the fly. In general it's about how seamless we could make these different genres. Making it feel like a cohesive experience that the fairly average player could enjoy.

The most difficult thing we've experienced is hard to say. There are a lot of areas you could expand forever, but then you'd never ship it. It's really trying to find the sweet spot between what you can do and what you want to do.

[herkingmentality-shesunbreakable]

All Signs Saturn takes 30 years to go through all 12 signs. It is finally moving into Capricorn to stay until the end of 2020. (This last occurred 1989-1990 and 1959- 961.) Saturn is the Great Teacher. It encourages self discipline. It makes us accept responsibility for ourselves. It teaches conservation, preparation and the benefits of playing by the rules. Because Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn, it will be "at home" in that sign, which is why it will restore order! It hates waste and excess. It removes what we no longer need. It rewards hard work and perseverance with long-lasting benefits. Saturn is also authentic. It hates phonies. Therefore, be sincere. Be truthful. Leslie Nielsen was right. "Truth hurts ...maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with the seat missing ... but it hurts." Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)       As Saturn moves into Capricorn, it indicates that in the next two years, there is a strong possibility you will have a change of residence or a change of jobs or both. This roller coaster element to your life will be introduced because you are now putting the final touches to the process of redefining the "new you" - a process that began in 2012. In order to do this, Saturn will sometimes plunge you into a totally different milieu thereby forcing you to really hear, really see and really communicate with fresh energy to everyone around you. Let's see what happens! Aries (March 21-April 19) Saturn's move into Capricorn is super big news for your sign because it means that you are finally entering your time of harvest. This means you will be reaping the benefits of the seeds you planted since 2010 (and really, since 2003). Traditionally, harvest is when you reap your rewards. Be proud of your hard-earned achievements! It might mean a time of graduation; it could mean a huge promotion or a chance to be self-employed. For some it means marriage or the birth of a longed for baby. Whatever takes place will be important for you and it's something that will make you proud. It will also be something that others will see is happening in your life. Life won't be just a bowl of cherries because this is also a time of heavy responsibilities. But you will be kinda pleased and smug. Taurus (April 20-May 20) The fact that Saturn is moving into Capricorn is good news for your sign because Saturn is will be in your fellow Earth sign giving you support. (Like fixing the third leg on your three-legged stool.) As mentioned above in All Signs, Saturn rewards hard work with long-lasting benefits for the future. In your case, your time of harvest will begin in 2020. This means that until then, you must prepare as well as you possibly can to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities that you will have then. Ideally, you can prepare by getting further training or education. Or perhaps you can travel to get a more sophisticated understanding of the world? Map out a plan. Get performance ready! Gemini (May 21-June 20) Saturn isn't nebulous like Neptune. Saturn defines things. It's about construction, definition, limitation, restriction and responsibilities. For example, Saturn rules time - the notion that we can measure "time" in increments like minutes and hours. (Think what it must have been like to meet a friend for lunch in the Bronze Age. "Let's get together before it gets really cold.") Saturn's journey through Capricorn in the next two years means you must rely more on yourself and less on others for financial support. This does not mean you will earn less. It means you have to rely on yourself. It's tough love. You will emerge from this process ready to meet your time of harvest with grit and confidence. "Think fast, Pilgrim!" Cancer (June 21-July 22) You are entering a significant time in your life because Saturn will oppose you now for the first time since around 1989-1990. This represents a culmination in your life of the last 14 years. Since around 2003, you reinvented yourself and figured out who you were and what you wanted. But this was a more personal, internal development. Starting this year, you will become more public - more "out there." You will be empowered because you're going to go for the brass ring with focus and direction. However, this new "empowered you" might be threatening to others. Hence, the next two years will be a testing time for relationships. Fear not - those that are meant to last will endure. Leo (July 23-Aug. 22) As Saturn changes signs, it's an indication you are entering a two-year window where you will bust your buns because it's time to show the world what you can really do. You might even feel that your effectiveness as a human being is being tested. Conserve your energy. Treat your body like a tool because you will need it. Whatever work you accomplish in the next two years will lead to your debut in 2020. "Look Ma, no hands!" No more excuses. If you don't accomplish what you want to - it's either because you don't know how or you won't finish. Scary when you realize that it all comes down to that, isn't it? Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Like Taurus, you will benefit by Saturn in Capricorn because you are also fellow Earth sign. This means that you will be strengthened and more focused in the next two years. You will more easily achieve your objectives. However, you might have increased responsibilities with children. You might also choose to downplay a lot of "fun stuff" because you feel you should be more responsible and "take care of business." If you work in the arts, you'll find it easy to practice technique and hone your skills in the next two years because you will have self-discipline. Many of you might be involved in a romance with someone older or of an age difference. "Oh hi, Mrs. Robinson." Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) Around 2010, whether you were aware of it or not, you began a journey of reinventing yourself with respect to how you define yourself with family, friends, your career and the world in general. Now, that job is done. You know who you are. You certainly know who you aren't. This means it's time to focus on home and your private life because you want to secure a refuge you can count on. This is why some of you might move. It is also why most of you will fix up where you live so that you have a stable anchor for yourself and your family. "Tote that barge! Lift that bale!" Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) More than any other sign, you are future oriented. You wonder what's coming around the next bend. But in order to make intelligent decisions about a fast-changing future - you have to know what your values are. You have to know what really matters to you. If you don't know what matters, how can you make a wise choice? In the next two years, this is what you will learn. You're going to get a better understanding of your values so that you will know how to make future moves in a nanosecond. "Work in an underground parking lot? Sorry - not my thing. I need blue sky overhead!" Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Saturn is in your sign for the first time since Nov.1988-Feb. 1991. This is an eventful time in your life. You have been downsizing and letting go of anything that is no longer relevant. (Some of you are still in this process.) But in the bigger picture, it means that you are now about to set off on a new 30 year journey. This is big stuff! Did this happen to you around 1991-92? In the first seven years of this journey, you will reinvent yourself. And so it begins. Think about what you want to take on this journey and what you want to leave behind. Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) People are finally realizing how talented and capable you are! And while you will enjoy great press this year and people will admire your accomplishments, you will start mulling over decisions about what is really worth keeping and what is not. It will begin in small ways. You will start going through closets, cupboards, garages and storage spaces getting rid of what you no longer need. You will sell it, recycle it or give it away. You have the sense that you want to be more in control of your life in practical terms. Good for you! (Are you keeping those golf clubs?) Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) You are pleased with how things are going in your life. You have a lot of responsibilities but you are also reaping the rewards of past efforts. One of the challenges you will face in the next few years is learning how to balance the demands that others make on your time with the demands that you would personally like to make on your own time. In other words, you have to put yourself in the equation as well! You can't just be a people pleaser. After all, you count, too! So your challenge is to find that subtle balance between your obligations and your own integrity. Are you up for it?

Georgia Nicols Weekly Sunday 12-10-2017