This blog (and my shop) will be on hiatus for a few weeks while I’m on holiday in Japan. I’ll return in May with all sorts of images and inspiration!
posted 3 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 6 hours, 8 minutes ago 
Notes (0)
If I had to pick one goal for 2010 it would be this: Consume less, Create more.
So what does that mean?
We are window shoppers in a world full of windows. There is more out there to look at, read and watch than ever before. Most would say this is a boon, a tidal wave of creativity now available for easy consumption whenever, however, and by whomever. And I would agree, to some extent that it is. But this ease of consumption, this easy availability of stuff and things wherever we turn has made for a noisy, distracted existence. More and more we feel like we need to be watching or reading or participating in things in order to keep up and stay on top of what is happening out there with our friends, for our jobs, or because we think we might miss something important.
This cacophony takes up a lot of time. How much time each day is spent on Facebook? On Twitter? Surfing Flickr or Ffffound? Once started it’s easy to spend hours engaged in jumping from one place to the other. We build up an giant mound of stuff that we feel required to consume because it will make us more informed or more inspired. We open tabs upon tabs of interesting stuff with the intent of consuming it but because there is always something new to look at we never make it through everything and inevitably, the browser crashes and all that supposed knowledge gets lost, unconsumed. We mourn, then we breathe a sigh of relief and start the hoarding process again.
This act of mass and constant consumption reflects negatively on the act of doing. We go searching for inspiration and then once inspired can’t draw ourselves away. There’s always something else out there to look at. So we look and we look and the doing gets put off until later because we need more inspiration or it’s too late to start. We window shop without actually doing any buying.
Join the doers. Create noise, don’t just consume it. It sounds easy but it’s often hard to break away from the hypnotic lull of consumption. We need to learn how to limit our consumption so it doesn’t overwhelm us. So we can use it as it should be used to make us think and inspire us.
The first step, is admitting we have a problem. Once we acknowledge that what should be inspiring us is instead preventing us from doing the things we intend it gets easier to break away. By limiting our consumption we are free to spend time thinking on our own. Digesting the information we’ve consumed and interpreting it in our own ways. By taking a step back, giving ourselves time and space to think about what we have seen, heard, and read we allow ourselves to form our own opinions, go off on our own paths and find something to create or talk about that wasn’t there before.
By freeing ourselves from consuming all the time, we allow ourselves to be more creative.
posted 6 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 3 hours, 13 minutes ago Notes (0)
New blogging software, streamlined design, probably a bug or two. I’m still testing and adding things but I wanted to turn my “broked it” page off, so here we are.
I’ve transitioned away from textpattern and onto expression engine. Textpattern has been great to work with over the past 6 years or so but it hasn’t evolved much lately. I was looking for a bit more customization ability and ee seems to provide that. Hopefully I won’t regret the decision.
The main rss feed should pick up again, so there shouldn’t be a reason to change your links unless you want to subscribe to one of the new feeds which will be up sometime in the future.
Things I know don’t work (and will fix as soon as I have time): Preview on comments. Nav highlight on the about page.
Things I plan on adding as I have time:
So here we go. Late November refresh. Apparently I need to do this at least once a year. Let’s see if we can keep this one for awhile. I’ve purposely stripped away most of the “design” of the site so that it can accomodate whatever I happen to be fixated on at any moment.
If you happen to spot anything that I haven’t mentioned, let me know.
illustrations
sketchbook
monsters
inspiration
shop updates