June 2010
4 posts
Fail Fail →
Failing someone’s imitation of a fail? How very meta.
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Comic Sans fights back →
Awesomely hilarious. Especially love the closer: “Enough of this bullsh**, I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.” Mwa hahaha.
(slightly NSFW for language, and if you work with design-type people like I do, who will start to wonder about you if they see you reading a large block of Comic Sans MS)
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How Can You Become A BP Scientist?
I love this blog! It’s kinda like someecards, but it also plays on the bitterness we all had toward those kids in the Scott Foresman science textbooks who always did everything right on the first try. I remember many times in elementary school wanting to jump into the pages of those books, with their world of perfect physics and chemistry where the balloons never popped when they...
May 2010
11 posts
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Pillows vs. Condom Sales
Yesterday I read the New York Times “Taylor Momsen did not write this headline” column about search engine optimization, Google rankings and basically how the blog factory, aggregators and new media are boxing web headline writers into formulas and tactics that aren’t punny or appealing in a literary way like those of yore. Today I’m listening to the Stuff Mom Never Told...
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Cake pops →
I went to a wedding last night where one of the couple’s friends made these amazing cake pops that somewhat resembled the hunny pot ones linked above. How did I not know about cake in lollipop/sucker form before? They’re kind of like doughnut holes on sticks, but 10 times better. I might need to up my workout regimen just so I can feast on these on a regular basis.
Yeah, I’d be...
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WatchNothing to watch on TV? Need a break from the frustrating game overs? Check out this amazing full-length Mega Man film created by fans. With no major studio or distributor, this Eddie Lebron fellow and his troupe are somehow navigating a copyright minefield and taking this microcinematic masterpiece on tour (apparently he has done this in the past with tribute film Ghostbusters: Generation, which...
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Stan Lee optimistic on future of comics
Stan Lee recently did a Q&A session with Chris Hardwick (you might remember him as the co-host of Singled Out back in the 1990s). The podcast of it is available at Hardwick’s website The Nerdist. The whole talk is a really great listen. I knew Stan Lee has been around for several years — playing a major role shaping the comic book business and repeatedly reinventing it and revamping it —...
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My brief love affair with "Dollhouse" is over
The Joss Whedon-Eliza Dushku series recently became available on streaming Netflix, and all of the sudden I’ve finished both seasons (including paying for the second one on Amazon Video On Demand) in the span of about 8 days. I’ve been raving about this show to many people since I started chain-smoking those episodes, and unfortunately I haven’t found one person to share in my...
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8 Websites You Need To Stop Building →
Hahaha! My favorite part, speaking to a social media expert:
Oh I see, So you’re a talentless D-bag! You’re like a webmaster from the 1990s, except you can’t even code HTML.
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Clients From Hell: Actual email from a band →
You know, make it pop!
k so we want album work done,just a cover fpr a cd and of course a logo on it we are releasing an E.P that is we are pying about $2000 for and we want it to be superb.. we want it to be really super cool and epic. detailed and precise our budget.. we will discuss it. we want an angelic demon…
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Congratulations IPA winners
I got an award from the Illinois Press Association for third place in best single page design! I believe that was for this guy:
My co-worker beat me out with second place in the same category, our supervisor got himself an honorable mention for best informational graphic, and we got a whole slew of other awards this year. As soon as I heard, I went through this lengthy list of winners (PDF link...
April 2010
15 posts
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Making my Kindle social
@NiemanLab tweeted a pretty interesting PCWorld article today, announcing an update to Kindle software that will allow you to share book passages on Facebook and Twitter. I’m pretty excited. I know my little Kindle will never be the powerhouse the iPad is, but I’ll continue to stand behind it for its elegance and simplicity.
As a print designer, it’s kind of hard for me to type...
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Super Mario Crossover →
Super Mario Brothers where you can play Megaman, Simon Belmont, Bill from Contra, Link, or Samus from Metroid? Simon whips and throws axes? Bill can shoot in any direction? Samus LAYS MINES? Yup. It’s an instant addiction (and now WIRED’s got me worried it won’t be around for long.
I played a couple times last night. It doesn’t seem to have the highest replay value. Maybe...
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Lunch recipe
I feel the need to chronicle when something goes right with my kitchen experimentation. Last week we made a delicious pasta dish with butternut squash, red onion and dried chiles that I am kicking myself for being unable to find a link for right now (must have been photocopied from a library book). It calls for a cup of butternut squash, always leaving us with the rest of this huge vegetable...
Running Routes - WalkJogRun →
I have to check this thing out. My neighborhood seems to only have 3-mile runs so far, but I’m sure I can contribute more. I could see this being very helpful when you live somewhere like I do where the sidewalk drops off unexpectedly in certain areas and you’re leery of running between storm drain and curbless road!
gracey:
Looking forward to using this site all summer.
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I hate the environment(alists)
We Live In Public was entertaining from start to finish. Too bad I can’t say the same for this afternoon’s distraction. So far I think No Impact Man is PR smut (I type this as I’m zoning out through the entire portion of the documentary devoted to “why do people hate us? wah wah wah”).
I think I got off to a bad start with it once I saw what I’ll call the...
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Here goes the neighborhood
Only 26 days into living in my apartment, I am having so much trouble finding my damned way around. Every pair of gray tacks on the linked map denotes a point where I paused my run last night, and you can follow along the route by dragging your cursor along the graphs showing elevation and mph at the bottom:
Meh. Shoes untied early on.
5 miles later …. Wait, it’s dark. Where am I?...
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Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT interactive graphic →
Sharing this via a recent @10000Words post. I would never cross 4 lanes of traffic while texting, but the experience of playing this really hits the message home. Although the graphics remind me of how I originally learned to type, I don’t think this is anything Mavis Beacon ever would have signed off on!
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website, not Web site?!?!?!
Yesterday, @APStylebook made a monumentally attention-grabbing tweet:
Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website. This appears on Stylebook Online today and in the 2010 book next month.
Initially I thought I was reading @FakeAPStylebook, the often hilarious satire with the tagline “If you use this, you will get fired.” This was such a major change that I...
The Project Gutenberg Project: Holmes was sitting,... →
Flagrant drug use, Orientalist patronage, hand-rolling cigarettes. It’s early 20th Century satire at its best. Loves it! Must download this to the Kindle later.
Holmes was sitting, or, rather, sprawling in a Morris chair, wrapped in his old lavender dressing-gown, and was wearing the red Turkish slippers King George had given him for Christmas a few months before. He had his little old...
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GVP continued →
A little more on horrible vegetarian options in the above link. I must thank my boyfriend, who makes me a healthier vegetarian despite being an omnivore himself, for these links.
The other side of ill-considered veg options is the cheesy one. In a family e-mail exchange discussing where to go this Sunday for my very belated birthday outing, my mom asked if I had had enough macaroni and cheese (my...
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Identity check
I’m finding the more stuff I try online, the more I lose track. This post is more a matter of keeping notes for myself than anything else. But do feel free to check me out!
Twitter
LinkedIn
Book reviews on Facebook
Newspaper design portfolio
Runkeeper
Yelp!
Amazon — Buy my old stuff!
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Down with the GVP →
I’m more often stuck with the grilled cheese option when I find nothing vegetarian considering the eateries I frequent, but @Ezraklein is right. These tasteless “entrees” are the most insulting at the finer dining spots where there are only five or six options for the main course. When you ask about what a vegetarian would eat, the server will often say “Oh, the chef has...
Need inspiration?
Ach!!!!!! It’s so frightening. What boggles me is how very intricate it seems. Recipes, a call-out for art submissions, strange links to pages professing a love for horror and the occult — this is 10 times more than anyone could expect from a bridal shop!
clientsfromhell:
from twitter @sradick A friend recently passed along what may be the worst website I’ve ever seen...
March 2010
12 posts
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How Marvel, DC Comics move into the digital age →
I’m glad to see kiyoshimartinez followed up on my question. I was interested because I’m struggling to rid myself of physical media as much as possible, but all this streaming stuff worries me. Other than getting used to the aesthetics (a HUGE hurdle, more on that later), I wonder how much media I’ll really have on my cloud. Especially with the Netflix instant queue, I’m...
Oh, that's that guy
#missedtheboat here. Did not realize until I was looking up these lyrics that I had been listening to the kid in the wheelchair from Degrassi. Thanks, Jimmy Brooks. Now get out of my head! OK, my coworker’s replacement wasn’t that much better. Um, aside to aside: I had no idea that was Adam Lambert either! I feel out of touch.
Up in the Air is ...
the most incredibly unremarkable movie I have seen in some time. I’ve been sitting here thinking, “What movie are you?” for the last couple hours. Seriously, though, Michael Clayton? The Devil Wears Prada? Garden State? Maybe some Away We Go or Rachel Getting Married? And that’s only some of the films I can think of from the past couple years.
This is just one of those...
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I'ma let you finish wish listing
A friend of mine who celebrated his birthday last month did something I haven’t seen anyone do in a while: he created an Amazon Wish List. Even my closest friends don’t usually exchange gifts but once every several years. We’re 1. too lazy, 2. too cheap and 3. too cluttered already. It was actually fun to shop for a friend and get something more tangible than words and less...
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Serendipitous Bear McCreary blog →
You ever make up a story or connection in your head and love it so much you are in danger of really believing it? Well I do all the time. It’s sort of a wonder I work in journalism with that tendency, but I suppose it’s beneficial that I’m constantly fact-checking to make sure I’m not just telling myself something again.
Anyway, the story I told myself that got me writing...
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"The most closed-minded journalists I've met are...
Las Vegas Sun new media editor Rob Curley said the above quote at a recent college media convention (I’m picking it up from Northern Illinois Newspaper Association’s blog). Apparently he shared the same observations — a bit more fleshed out — a few years ago here.
As a youngish person working at a newspaper group myself, I have had these wise words running through my head the past few...
nytimes.com's amusing cutline mishap →
I doubt there will ever be a surefire solution to eradicate these kinds of errors. I’m just glad there’s enough oversight to take care of it and, in this case, nobody really got hurt. I might have laughed the first three times I saw this.
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This just in ... well, for me at least
Rob Lowe and Christoph Waltz are two completely different people. That was not Rob Lowe in Inglourious Basterds!
I saw that movie in September. I have been running around with the idea of Rob Lowe as a Nazi in my head for nearly half a year, and it seemed so like Tarantino do something cheesy like that! But no, it’s this German guy. And he was good!
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
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Robbers, I'm home
I’ve gone on three runs with this RunKeeper app this week and I’ve got to say I could be converting. Weather in Chicagoland isn’t quite at the level where I feel comfortable running outside on a regular basis yet, but this app is certainly a motivation. It tracks where you are using the iPhone’s GPS in real time, so you get a nice little breakdown of calories, average...
February 2010
1 post
Ach, what am I starting now?