Design Pack Rat

COOKIE MONSTER

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 15:02:12 -0400

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Mon, 11 May 2015 06:57:57 -0400

I have been trying to write for a while now. I have all these amazing ideas, but its really hard getting my thoughts onto paper. Thus, my ideas never really come to fruition. Do you have any advice?

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 14:27:26 -0500

Write the ideas down. If they are going to be stories, try and tell the stories you would like to read. Finish the things you start to write. Do it a lot and you will be a writer. The only way to do it is to do it.

I’m just kidding. There are much easier ways of doing it. For example: On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden.

At the moment the five berries become golden, five white crows, who have been waiting on the mountain, and which you will have mistaken for snow, will swoop down on the tree, greedily stripping it of all its berries, and will fly off, laughing.

You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry (the crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them far across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden, to drop, one by one, into the mouth of his daughter, who will wake from her enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her). When you have obtained the golden berry, you must place it under your tongue, and return directly to your home.

For the next week, you must speak to no-one, not even your loved ones or a highway patrol officer stopping you for speeding. Say nothing. Do not sleep. Let the berry sit beneath your tongue.

At midnight on the seventh day you must go to the highest place in your town (it is common to climb on roofs for this step) and, with the berry safely beneath your tongue, recite the whole of Fox in Socks. Do not let the berry slip from your tongue. Do not miss out any of the poem, or skip any of the bits of the Muddle Puddle Tweetle Poodle Beetle Noodle Bottle Paddle Battle.

Then, and only then, can you swallow the berry. You must return home as quickly as you can, for you have only half an hour at most before you fall into a deep sleep.

When you wake in the morning, you will be able to get your thoughts and ideas down onto the paper, and you will be a writer.

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Fri, 03 Oct 2014 07:01:16 -0400

There is no lone creative genius

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 06:20:25 -0400

There is no lone creative genius:

creativesomething:

There’s an iconic photograph of Steve Jobs, taken during the very early, successful days of the company he helped start: Apple.

In the photo you can see Steve sitting in his home, only a lamp, a sitting pad, a few vinyl records, a record player, and a notebook sitting in the room with him….

explore-blog: Maya Angelou on courage and facing evil

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 10:10:01 -0400

explore-blog:

Maya Angelou on courage and facing evil

"1. Take a quarterly vacation 2. Hold a “retrospective” after projects 3. Write every day 4. Create..."

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 12:44:04 -0400

“1. Take a quarterly vacation
2. Hold a “retrospective” after projects
3. Write every day
4. Create an “interesting people fund”
5. Keep “tear sheets” to get inspired
6. Nap every day
7. Envision what you will be remembered for
8. Brainstorm at the bar
9. Get out of the building
10. Engage in “morphological synthesis””

- 99U culls 10 creative habits you should steal from worthy models like Cheryl Strayed, James Victore, and Ze Frank – details on each at the link.

Pair with the daily routines of famous writers and 99U’s field guide to honing your creative routine, then revisit William James on the importance of habit.

(via explore-blog)

"Let me be blunt: Stock photography needs to die. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English..."

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 10:55:08 -0400

“

Let me be blunt: Stock photography needs to die. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argued that clichéd language produces clichéd thinking. Using a stale image, as he’d put it, “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Stock photography imprisons us in the same cognitive jail. Its intentionally bland images are designed to be usable in many vaguely defined situations. This produces wretched photography for the same reason Hallmark cards produce wretched poetry. We live in a visual world, communicating and thinking in pictures. When we use stock photos, we think in clichés.

[…]

The true cure for stock photography is inside your camera phone.

”

- Clive Thompson’s spot-on, important Wired article on ending the tyranny of stock photos, which could be said to hold for visual culture that aphorisms do for intellectual culture.

Thompson is the author of the excellent Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

(via explore-blog)

"Creative people are confident in only one thing: their own doubt. I think there’s a huge lack of..."

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:03:54 -0400

“Creative people are confident in only one thing: their own doubt. I think there’s a huge lack of self-confidence in a creative person because, by nature, the definition of a creative person is someone who is trying to make something new. They know, if they are professional creatives, that the likelihood of doing that—making something new and significant—is hugely unlikely, so they build within that city of doubt. From doubt, they get to iterate and work extremely hard, hoping to find something new; it’s all about hope. I’ve never met anyone who is good at what they do creatively and is super-confident. Maybe they pretend to be confident in front of their agent or the media, but I’ve never been confident in that way.”

- A conversation with the inimitable John Maeda. Complement with Seth Godin on dancing with self-doubt and Anna Deavere Smith’s advice to artists on what self-esteem really means. (via explore-blog)

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:13:19 -0400

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:12:46 -0400

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

M (via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:11:54 -0400

M (via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:11:40 -0400

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 08:10:46 -0400

(via It’s okay to be dumb. — Medium)

<[ TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS / MORE INFO:...

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 08:33:38 -0400

<[ TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS / MORE INFO: http://projectnaptha.com/process/ (IDX:0:9&0:9&0:9&424&482:XDI) / ELAPSED 0.01SEC / DATE Wed, 11 Jun 2014 12:33:27 GMT / TEXT RECOGNITION IN PROGRESS ]> (via The Future of Cereal Box Art - Boing Boing)

literaryjukebox: Money has no value; it’s just the way you...

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 10:08:55 -0400

literaryjukebox:

Money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.

William Faulkner in The Sound & the Fury, published on October 7, 1929

Song: “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits

iTunes :: Amazon :: Back to Brain Pickings

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Sat, 24 May 2014 21:02:09 -0400

"This celebration of youth, coupled with technology, has distorted our perception of time — the world..."

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:08:33 -0400

“This celebration of youth, coupled with technology, has distorted our perception of time — the world moves faster, and so do our expectations. Today, we want success in seventeen levels, or seventeen minutes, seventeen seconds — and when the promise of something new and better is just a click away, who wants to wait seventeen years? But that’s the thing that connects all of these great people — they played the long game.”

- The Long Game – brilliant visual essays exploring the only real secret to success, from Leonardo to Marie Curie.

Also see the science of why “grit” is a greater predictor of success than intelligence.

(via explore-blog)

explore-blog: Amazing art by kids and artists on the autism...

Fri, 16 May 2014 09:50:30 -0400

explore-blog:

Amazing art by kids and artists on the autism spectrum. Pictured here, one of artist Gregory Blackstock’s obsessive visual lists.

(via LEGO Starcraft - Imgur)

Tue, 06 May 2014 11:35:34 -0400

(via LEGO Starcraft - Imgur)