I have had this “Trippy spinning optical illusion” (found at the always interesting kottke.org open in a browser window since I found it on Feb. 1, 2016.
From kottke.org:
Somehow, this woman seems to be spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise simultaneously. This is worse than the spinning ballerina. Anyone know who did this? Randomly found it on Facebook and couldn’t trace the source back…
The most mind-blowing of this type of animation I have seen to date. Kudos to the designer!
Playing with letters and came up with a potential logo for this site.
It’s a little bit Cthulu and a little bit the blog previously known as CaSt.
I’ve seen animated .gifs of this table for a while now. Turns out, it is real. Real expensive, like $50,000 or so. With the engineering, design, and materials DBFletcher puts into each handmade table, I’d say it’s worth it.
Dr. Drang is fun to read for a lot of reasons and should especially appeal to my fellow nerds in the world. In a recent post titled A Free Distraction about writing and the onslaught of “distraction free writing” apps, this bit about his habits hit close to home.
I’ve tried to change my writing habits. I’ve tried to turn my brain’s internal editor off and just let the words come out, trusting myself to fix them later on. It would make writing much easier, regardless of the text editor I use. But I can’t do it.
Yep. That. I am a fiddly writer and have tried the distraction-free environments. The more designers and developers try to strip away, the harder they are for me to work in. Apps like Byword provide a happy medium, but I most often find myself doing all of my writing in a full-blown text editor (Sublime Text these days, dabbling in MultiMarkdown Composer, never a word processor a la Microsoft’s Word or Apple’s Pages).
Drop Dr. Drang’s news feed in your reader of choice for a few weeks and give it a shot. I think he’ll make the cut.
Life. Work. Joy. The three shouldn't be mutually exclusive and the third should be omnipresent. Some seek a sharp divide between life and work and hope joy plays at least a small part in both.
Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.
Being an introvert does not have to mean living a hermit's life, though that is my tendency. I don't like big groups of people. Crowds don't make me nervous or scared; the din and sea of motion overwhelms my brain. Football games, concerts, and bars are great examples of places where I struggle. What may come across as shyness is probably just my flight instinct kicking in. Because I can't stop trying to focus on everything at once, I struggle to focus on anything at all. I can't understand the person talking right next to me and either nod my head wearing a goofy affirmative look on my face or wave them off with a look that says I can't hear you, which is frustrating for me and the person doing the talking.1
My hearing is fine, too fine at times. In a fairly quiet place my brain picks up the tiny sounds: bumps of someone moving around in adjacent rooms, beeps of random electronics, voices in other parts of the house. Televisions, like crowds, produce a constant flicker of motion. Even if I try to ignore it, the peripheral flashes of noise and sound are like a hynotic narcotic reducing me from creative worker to mindless consumer.
Does that mean I'm cranky when it's loud and cranky when it's nearly quiet? Mostly, yes. Am I sometimes hard to live with? Family members vote "yes." I'm glad we all love each other.
So far this sounds like a bleak existence, but I don't write off my challenges as complete flaws. Given the right environment, I can focus intently on the task at hand and churn out some great work.
My ideal work environment is quiet and flicker-free. Music helps me focus, especially when wearing headphones. I prefer something with a bit of a drone and few to no lyrics. Aphex Twin fits the bill, providing everything from atmospheric soundscapes to intricate digital beats.2 Both have their own place depending on the work I am doing. What I struggle with now is trying to figure out what work I want to do.
My life was challenging from the ages of 17 to 25, that period when people are becoming who they will be. My dad died suddenly when I was in high school. I chose to be a young dad married (the first time) at 22. A poor sense of direction in my first year of college made the remainder more challenging. I shifted from engineering to English and spent much of my time after year one digging myself out of an academic hole. I had no direction, no distinct future in mind, and was just attending college because that's where I was supposed to be. Right?
After years of part-time courses and bumming around a series of low-skill jobs (waiting tables, washing cars, warehouse work, etc.) I landed a job writing for a weekly newspaper. After about seven years of journalism, much of it focused on writing about education, a public school superintendent offered me a job. Growing as a communications specialist helped me shed aspects of newspaper work I didn't like. Covering police and courts is a depressing beat for someone with no stomach for it. In this new role, I get to focus on telling stories, writing to bring clarity and a touch of style to the world of education in spite of its jargon and acronyms. My work also opened doors to discover areas I never knew I would love. Now, happily married (third time's the charm) with four kids and equipped with the budding wisdom of middle age, I am beginning to look at my options again.
Do we ever really figure out what we want to be when we grow up?
With a broad job description, I have been able to define my role as as communications specialist with a focus on designing for print and the web. Like a twist in a fairy tale, my curse was working with the media.3. I can be happily chugging away on the web, working to build relationships through our sites, helping schools, promoting students, and tending to social media, when a discipline issue captures the media's attention and everything else screeches to a halt.
Nota bene: Like medicine and law, much of our work in education is confidential and protected by law. FERPA4 leads the charge in reasons we cannot tell all even when we want to, which leads to much frustrations on both sides of the street.
With time to focus and a renewed appreciation for clear design, I fell in love with structured text, the code underneath the spit and polish of the web that binds everything together. Code is an endless puzzle I find satisfying because it keeps me engaged as I continue to learn. I get to play5 with CSS, HTML, and a little javascript. Along the way I've picked up some perl and shell scripting skills and look forward to learning python and ruby.
I'm running out of steam on this topic, but I think it boils down to this: