creation by elimination

Austin Kleon is a person who writes poems out of newspapers and makes me miss my high school creative writing class. We actually might have done this once. But things like this, or the magazine collage poems we did whenever we had spare time, were some of my favorite things I did in that class. I guess maybe it's easier to write when you can pretend it's not you doing it and you're really just finding it already there?


Either way, I think I should try doing some of these with those free newspapers floating around the metro. There's also a tumblr for submitting your own poems and a book which I kind of want to buy for myself and about half of the people I know. But it would be weird to get everybody the same thing for Christmas, probably.

Related, and found through the above: A Humument, which I also want, and which is also on the internest for you to look at.

echolilia

These are such lovely pictures.

(By Timothy Archibald, via Mind Hacks)

font font font (that's the sound fonts make)

Okay, apparently it is typography week on the internet or something, or possibly it's just one of those things where the interrelatedness of the universe pounds me in the face for a while. Either way, there are letters coming at me from all directions lately. I've just started a class called "history of books and publishing" and it has me doing things like memorizing font families and comparing axes and serifs, and also my host father words at a printing press. Add in the many churches of Paris with their gift shops full of calligraphy kits that I have to resist buying (Do you know how many calligraphy kits I was given as a child? It was a lot. I guess I was just a kid that seemed like I should be writing something.) and perhaps you will understand that at the moment my brain is saturated in words.

So here are some letter-related things that I like at the moment.

Daily Drop Cap is a blog that puts up a new big illuminated letter every day. There's a link to this on here somewhere already, because sometimes I use them in blog posts, until I get overcome with minimalism and take them all out. But anyway, a lot of them are really good. (This is the person responsible for the above image too, look at those birds!)

A video, via Design*Sponge:

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

Aughh, where are all my calligraphy pens? (Short answer: in another country) Really though, those things got in my way for years but every time I wanted them they disappeared.

Also from Design*Sponge, typeface contest! I might enter this just to give myself something fun to work on during this break.

Poppytalk does Font Fridays, which are what they sound like. I keep adding these to my computer even though I know I'll never use them.

Font Generator - I haven't actually used this, because I don't have a scanner, but it's been living in my bookmarks for a million years because I feel like I should have the option at all times. You know, for the times when I might really need a font of my handwriting. It could happen.

ABC Button Font - I can't get this to work on my computer, but maybe you can. Pretty cool though.

related to rain:

Slightly related to my last post, in which I mention that I miss rain. This is maybe kind of weird, but I really do love rain. There are not a lot of climatic differences between France and the US, but the lack of proper rainstorms is one of them. And even when it does rain, the lack of grass and leaves for the rain to bounce off of, not to mention the fact that I'm four floors above the ground, leaves it a little unsatisfying.

With that in mind, here are internet noisemakers that sound like rain!

RainyMood.com (a half-hour loop, with some thunder)

Nature Sounds, which is what it sounds like - not just rain but other things ranging from the pleasant (ocean) to the slightly suspicious (children laughing) to the inexplicable (Darth Vader??), so you can combine them however you want. I recommend adding a loon, because loon sounds are just fantastic.

I've never actually seen a loon. Where do they live? I'd like to live somewhere with a loon. I hear that some people find that sound creepy, but I'm quite fond of it.

various things

Today:

- slept extremely late.

- bought my fencing glove.

- sent my resume to a dude teaching English at a private high school. I'm hoping he'll maybe give me a job as a tutor so I can be a functional member of this society I'm only vaguely part of.

- ate cheese bread in the park, watched ducks/geese/pigeons/one swan/one strange little white bird. Was caught off-guard by the progression of fall, which is indistinguishable outside of contained Nature Zones.

- was unable to remember my dreams except for frequent and vague flashes. If these are to be trusted, the dream took place partly in my quartier and partly in a metro station, involved a large crowd of people (some of whom were smiling creepily) and an avocado, and was generally unsettling.

- went through my huge unsorted bookmark file trying to decide what I actually needed in there. If you know me on facebook, you may notice me posting a lot of unrelated links in the next few days, this is because I want to get these out of my bookmarks but don't want it to go away entirely/feel I need to show it to people.

Related: here are some things.

This is something I found last year in my digital media class, and which I like a lot. You can put in places you want to go, and it will show them with a satellite image and cycle through all the places that have ever been submitted. Two of these are mine.

Also, I kind of want to do this. What do you think?

I would drive this car.

This is fantastic. Everyone, I encourage you to make your cars better.