New page on the site, with loads of trivia and neat knowledge nuggets: the ABOUT page, as seen in the blog header!
Posts Tagged ‘Site Update’
Just some awesome view of the sky
2011 -
03.02
During ongoing updates to the poetics section I swapped my background image of the Milky Way to a better image I found on wikimedia commons. Here is a cropped sample with a little photoshop sauce on it. Click the image to see the giganto-ramic original version, of which this is but one tiny section
Primo Vino Art: Educated Guess
2011 -
02.12
How many times have you bought a certain wine just because the label grabbed you? If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably uncountable. I do have certain wines that I keep coming back to, but on the whole, I like to experiment and try new things, see what’s out there.
In this spirit, there’s a new series in town, and it’s called Primo Vino Art. It’s just basically wine bottles that I think look cool. We’ll kick it off with this über-nerdy label for a California vintner called Educated Guess.
Saw it at Whole Foods and just had to try it based on the bottle alone. Happily, this was one of the more intricate and tasty bottles I’ve had lately, so I think I will be returning to it. For me, a wine has got to have subtlety and nuance to make it worth giving it a second go-round, and I have already bought my second bottle of this!
Also, I’ve been trading vintage photoshop tricks with a certain mister Ryan Allen lately, and a picture I took of this bottle got the full treatment, so it seems appropriate to post it here. For those so interested, there’s vignetting, chromatic aberration added (via ‘lens correction’), a red/green color gradient layer with low opacity (makes the colors look like a faded 80′s photo, a strong light leak coming from the upper right, and a bunch of extras applied in a PS actions file Ryan sent. In the future, there might be some photoshop tutorials dished on these subjects, but for now, enjoy the retro-goodness:
Two Site Updates:
2011 -
02.05
1. New blog design
As you can see, I’ve been slaving over a hot photoshop PSD for hours and this new background is the result. It’ll probably keep evolving as I hone in on exactly what I want it to be, but I’m definitely much happier with the looks on the MC front page now. Also, I’ve improved things to look good on large displays. Small displays will suffer a bit though. I’m trying to design the site to support resolutions from 1024×768 up through 1920×1200.
2. New music section
In keeping with the tradition of using antiquated/analog technology, I’ve got a new music page up, with a theme of cassette tapes. Check out all those awesome tapes! The action is split up into 3 categories at the moment: live trumpet recordings, original productions (electronica), and mixsets of many genres. The 4th cassette tape is a blank one for now, but I’m hoping that later this year, when Spotify comes out for the US, I’ll fill that area full of playlists of music that I’m digging, as a way to foist recommendations.
Although I still have a long way to go, I eventually aim to replace the flash music player situated in the navigation bar above with a custom one. When that task is done, I should be able to have any music on the site stream-able. That is the eventual goal. Thusly I have “click a cassette to listen” but the cassettes are just images instead of links… for now!
Finding the Meaning
2011 -
01.25
So there’s going to be a new series of posts on here called “Finding the Meaning”. This whole idea originally got started when I was talking with my wonderful girlfriend about a poem on here. In my spare time I’ve been reading a small chapbook of poems by the author Heather Sellers, and although it does have some nice little gems in it, I am constantly frustrated by the inaccessible nature of her writing. Sure, maybe I’m just too dense, too much of a dolt to “get it” but then, I write poetry myself, and I’d like to think I’m at least somewhat “hip” and/or “with it” enough to grasp the meanings of some cryptic poetry–at a certain point, unless you want to explain the art (at least a little bit), it’s just meaningless to the majority of your audience. And that sorta sucks!
My girl and I were chatting about the poem “Fine Paisley Like Mandelbrot” and I sort of realized that I had fallen into the same trap–too much ambiguity.
Also, another thing that had been on my mind was the recollection of an awesome article on the video games blog Kotaku, where people were discussing their favorite memories and “experiences” playing Grand Theft Auto. I really got into that discussion, to the point where I read through hundreds of comments. And it got me thinking: I enjoy listening to people discuss the reasons why they like things.
So in that spirit I smash the proverbial champagne bottle over the hull of this new ship, christened, “Finding the Meaning”
Site Update: Hello Photos!
2011 -
01.12
Oh snap.
As of today, the Photos section on the site is what I’d call “operational.” I’d been debating how to organize it for a while, and I decided to split all the pictures into categories to keep their large number digestible. For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the categories should be. I had been thinking in genres; landscapes, people, macros, etc but that just seemed too boring. Obvious.
I came up with the idea of abstract words for the categories, which is much more flexible for content, and thought-provoking as to what could fit in where. The four categories are Outer Spaces, Organics, Inner Spaces, and the Expanded Universe. Hopefully this structure works out well for future additions. I’m using flickr slideshows to display the images, which is a nice way to view them, plus if you click the title of the image, you get sent to flickr, where you can view/download the image fullsize.
The background image is a retouched picture I took of some negatives I had sitting in the closet. Also, clicking on “All of the Above” will take you to the flickr photostream, which includes everything from the 4 main rolls plus a few extra odds and ends.
In the future, I want to add more photos, put together a wallpapers pack, and add some photoshop tutorials here on the blog which I’ll link to from the photos page. All in good time…..
Site Update: Hello words
2011 -
01.07
As of today, the “words” section of the site is what I’d call “operational”. I’d been brainstorming for neat ideas of how to organize my poetics, and finally it came to me: a periodic table. Sold. A collection of categorized building blocks that form the world around us… Yes.
As of now there are 37 “elements.” I’ll need 118 to fill it up completely, which ought to take me a while, and that’s a good thing. The plan is to use this as a device to motivate myself to write more in 2011. I’m not huge on new year’s resolutions, but if I had one, writing more would be a good one. I imagine the snapshot shown here will be awesome to look back upon, months from now when the table is more populated.
I definitely could have filled up the table right now. There’s probably around a thousand poems in my archives, but I decided that I’d rather be choosy about what goes up, and leave the rest open as a challenge to myself. If I can fill it before the end of this year, I think I will have done well. The flash for the table took a long time to make, with a mind-numbing amount of copying and pasting. About maybe 4 hours? I hope to add a few extra touches on the flash itself in the future… Stay tuned!
