Tripping in Surreality – 'Art Lit Feed' on tumblr

Bouncing round the Indie Art Lit Feed and grazing on hippy tripped out universes. And then the whole tumblr rabbit-hole for that matter. These images are from there but originally: 

Chrissy Angliker (via booooooom)

Pierre Botardo (via 2headedsnake)

James Dawe (via 2headedsnake)

Unknown (via whitemoonstone)

Ms. Neaux Neaux (via feru-leru)

Follow it here @ArtLitFeed

Getting with the Web Type

Researching pleasing and beautiful web design with a fingertip close to the technical necessities leads one nto the classic alice-in-wonderland spiral of muchness. Without details, I'd like to share with you some rather jolly lovely places. Those of you out there versed in web-stuff will be rolling your eyes: "DUH! We KNOW all of these!" *I shrug*

First is the personal hub of Mr. Simon Collison, A.K.A 'Colly' who is undoubtedly a web-celebrity. He showcases Times New Roman lovingly.

Which brings us to 'The Elements of Typographic Style applied to the Web' a fabulous learning resource of detail for text styling in CSS2 and CSS3, by Richard Rutter elaborating the book by Bringhurst.

The Ministry of Type from Aegir Hallmundur which shows a broad but geekishly gorgeous set of porn-spirations. Old school but within a perfectly measured template.

Lastly, I bow to the HTML5 splendour of Magazin5 on Design Made in Germany. You can smoothly scroll the transparencies on your fancy-pants iPad but then be surprised at the quality content, such as an interview with Antonio Carusone, maker of the really very helpful champion of harmony The Grid System.

Goodbye "Hardback Henid" – Hello "Life's a Journey"

What the hell did it mean anyway? A Henid is "an unclarified, sub-conscious "feeling". A vague, unformed, foggy or confused idea. A disorganized, undifferentiated thought. A proto-thought". It was coined by Otto Weininger. More here. . For me, it's like the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, or the way we all have lots of ideas but they are unformed. This was the perfect approach to begin a blog, like a kind of sketchbook of unformed ideas and links. "Hardback" was the organised covering.

Over time, this blog has grown to be more of a definite idea, not too tight or defined, but nevertheless, it does have a theme that I'm interested in, and which I'd like to explore more. "Life's a Journey" is a simple name. This blog is now a mix of links I find and personal stuff around the topic of literal and personal journeys. I'm mainly interested in the representation of places, travel, memories and change. We can move through time and life in so many different ways. The idea is still very sketchy, but I hope to use this space to keep up the sketchbook on that topic, so to speak.

Live Now – A community of happiness

www.welivenow.org via grainedit

On Raisins and Chocolate

Yesterday evening I tried an experiment whilst sitting in front of the fire. If you didn't know what I was doing, you would be excused in thinking there was a complete basket case in front of you. A raisin sat on the palm of the hand, each crease and line and wrinkle studied carefully. It was then placed between thumb and index finger and squashed and rolled a little. It was then smelled very carefully and was surprisingly similar to fresh tobacco. Finally, after rolling it around inside the mouth, it was tasted and eventually swallowed. This was 'mindfulness eating', and is a kind of meditation of sorts. I can tell you that raisins are much tastier than I previously thought. The process is time consuming, but revealing. I'd like to call this diet the 'M-Diet', you can eat anything at all, as long as you go through the whole procedure of each sense, tasting each bite as if it were the last. It's a tough one. This is a lovely little booklet showing a willy-wonka-esque chocolate bar being eaten.

www.carmenvela.com

On blogging

There are blogs and there are blogs. How many blogs are there? Of course we can't really know because there is no way of counting accurately. When asking Google to respond, it linked me to this article in the blogherald from last year which gave an out-dated number of 112.8million not including the 72.82million at least in China. I can only surmise that the vast majority of these blogs have readership levels approximate to my own. (I'm speaking to myself here!) On the other hand, there is popularity: in the range of 500,000+ readers, e.g Zen Habits. That's more than the 327,937 daily sold circulation of the Guardian. I've done a quick search to find the established list of 'Most Read Blogs in the World 2009' but there is no list I can find so far. (Anyone know?). It's a fascinating idea of course, that something so personal and immediate can, by dint of simple 'word-of-links' and consistent quality entries build to what is equivalent to a national paper.

For the rest of us however, we can be happy to use our blogettes for purposes more humble and utilitarian. The students I work with in LCC have started their own and some of them have already built up a series of great entries which has set me thinking about my own. How can I make the most use of this space? What does it do for me? What do I say? For me, it's about finding a voice by building a series of tagged and articulated 'thoughts' (entries). It's a way of remembering out loud... of not just liking or bookmarking something, but committing it to one's own space. I'm guessing here, but maybe blogs are the contemporary version of songs, jokes, doodles, photo albums and letter-writing. We don't have that direct contact with family/friends/colleagues and community as before, but we are of course the same creatures. We can get to know ourselves and each other in different ways now, and maybe blogs are one of them?