one passing moment

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JW: My whole [upholstery] shop was only three colors: yellow, white and black. I had this yellow van, and I dressed in yellow and black when I picked up the furniture, and all my tools were yellow, white and black. It was pretty cool. I got so much into the cartooniness of the business, almost to the point of it being a joke to the people who would see me, and they wouldn’t really trust me to do a good job.

BLVR: They thought you were kidding about the whole thing.

JW: Yeah. I starting trying to make an art form out of giving someone a bill for my services, like writing it with crayon on a piece of paper, or having a yellow piece of paper with black marker saying “You owe me $300.” People would be like “What the hell is this?” and I’d be like “I don’t know, I just want you to sign this and give it back to me and pay me, and that way I can have it as a… um…” People just didn’t dig it. It was two different worlds colliding. When I’d re-upholster furniture I’d take off the old fabric and I started to write poems and things inside the furniture, so if it was ever re-upholstered again one day they’d get little messages from the last person who upholstered it. I thought it’d be cool if we all wrote each other messages.

Jack White, in a Believer mag interview about his life as an upholsterer before The White Stripes. “YOUR FURNITURE’S NOT DEAD.”
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I see Kickstarter as micropatronage,” said Lewis Winter, a 27-year-old graphic designer from Melbourne, Australia, who has pledged money to five projects. “If I was rich, I’d fund whole projects, but this allows me to fund as much or as little as I can afford.
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There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.
— Matthew B. Crawford, The Case For Working With Your Hands (NYTimes.com)
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(via Kottke)

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Observations from doing data entry.

Elspeth is a cool old lady name.

Ignatius is a middle name 83% of the time (in this database): some names are just like that.

There are zero Atticuses (Attici?) in this database, which actually came as a surprise.

Approximately 2 in 3 .com.au registrations don’t have a functioning website, and many of the remainder don’t work if you leave out the www sub-domain at the start of the URL.

People’s hand writing is better than you’d expect.

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Fuck the computer. Start with a really good pen, and keep drawing until you die.
permalink I’ve started taking photos of the end of game Scrabble board. I’m currently undecided whether this is a geeky OCD indulgence with no discernable benefit, or an interesting way of capturing an ephemeral moment to see if patterns emerge with time. I’m leaning heavily toward the former.If nothing else I could use it to calculate ‘average number of rule breaking words we accept anyway’ per game (I estimate it at three).

I’ve started taking photos of the end of game Scrabble board. I’m currently undecided whether this is a geeky OCD indulgence with no discernable benefit, or an interesting way of capturing an ephemeral moment to see if patterns emerge with time. I’m leaning heavily toward the former.

If nothing else I could use it to calculate ‘average number of rule breaking words we accept anyway’ per game (I estimate it at three).

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Hello World

Do you ever wake up screaming, imagining you’re being beaten into submission by an army of website avatars each wearing your face in a 64x64 pixel format?

Creating a whole new profile on yet another web 2.0 site is the new just updating your damn blog.