Boy as Sheep, Sheep as Boy
Happy Halloween!
Sheep costume made by Nani, boy costume compiled by Mommy.
Updates from October, 2006 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Brian Sawyer
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Brian Sawyer
WorldChanging: Hack the Publishing System
The folks over at WorldChanging have an interesting strategy to help promote their new book:
Since we’re already doing extraordinarily well on Amazon just through word of mouth, we are actually in a position to quite conceivably make Worldchanging the number one book in the nation on the largest online bookseller, if just for one day. In that one day, however, every other bookseller, reviewer, producer and store manager will hear about Worldchanging, and our odds of getting the traction we need to bring worldchanging ideas into the public debate will dramatically increase.The day they’ve scheduled is November 1, eleven minutes after eleven o’clock a.m. (11/1, 11:11), PT. Remember, for those of us on the right coast, it’s the somewhat less interesting or memorable 2:11 p.m. I’ve had this book in my Amazon wish list for the last couple weeks, and this was just the push I needed to get me to hit that “Buy now with 1-Click” button. It looks like a great book, so I recommend you do the same. It will be interesting to see what happens.
UPDATE
Thought I’d post the chapter breakdown for the book here, since it isn’t available on Amazon (more about the book here):
- Stuff (which covers topics like green design, reducing one’s ecological footprint, biomimicry, sustainable agriculture, clothing, cars and emerging technologies)
- Shelter (covering topics like green building and landscaping, bright green home decor, clean energy, sustainable water systems, disaster relief and humanitarian design)
- Cities (topics like smart growth, sustainable communities, transportation, greening infrastructure, product-service systems, leapfrogging and megacity challenges)
- Communities (topics like education, women’s rights, public health, holistic approaches to community development, copyleft, South-South science, social entrepreneurship and micro-lending, and philanthropy);
- Business (topics like socially responsible investment, worldchanging start-ups, ecological economics, corporate social responsibility and green business)
- Politics (topics like networked politics, new media, transparency, human rights, non-violent revolution and peacemaking)
- Planet (the big picture–everything from placing oneself in a bioregion to climate foresight to environmental history to green space exploration)
UPDATE: NOVEMBER 1, 2006
- 10:00 A.M.
- Amazon rank: 112.
- 1:30 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 88.
- 2:11 P.M.: Ordered book
- Amazon rank: 72.
- 3:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 59.
- 4:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 13.
- 5:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 13.
- 6:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 13.
- 7:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 13.
- 8:00 P.M.
- Amazon rank: 14.
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Joe
This book looks great. However, I wish that they had left Gore out of it. I would give this book as a Christmas present to conservative family members, but when they saw his name on the cover, they’d scoff and think I was trying to convert them to tree-hugging liberalism. They should’ve had Howard Zinn write the foreword. Most righties don’t know him, but he still has big cache with lefties.
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Brian Sawyer
they’d scoff and think I was trying to convert them to tree-hugging liberalism.
And you’re not?
Seriously, though. I don’t think WorldChanging is going to get significant traction with the righties anyway. To me, it makes sense to list your key ingredients on the front of the box, and Gore’s name will tell the key audience for the book that this is for them (another detail on how publishing works). No use shying away from your primary demographic to open up a much smaller market (conservatives who would be interested in the content in this book if Gore weren’t associated with it).
Now, what we need is a book called PeopleChanging. Who could we get to write the foreword for that?
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Joe
Brian, it’s all about building bridges. Righties like the idea of buying local–they’re proud of their hometowns and their country–and they’re mad about outsourcing, so why not broaden the appeal of the book a little? Don’t give up on conservatives. We’re somewhat to blame for their antipathy towards us.
No doubt I would make a very bad book pubishing executive.
I think PeopleChanging is a great idea for a book. Get Jon Stewart to write the foreword for that one. He knows how to criticize the left as well as the right. Zinn and George Lakoff could be contributors to the book; maybe Barack Obama and Errol Morris, too. And on the right side, maybe you could get George F. Will, Colin Powell and John McCain, people like that. We all need to change, and we could start by resisting the urge to blame and stigmatize the other side.
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Brian Sawyer
Good points all, Joe, as always. Thanks for keeping me honest.
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Brian Sawyer
Craft: Needlepoint Bracelets on TV
Yesterday, Craft magazine’s associate editor Natalie Zee Drieu was on San Francisco’s local ABC show The View From the Bay. Check out Kristina’s needlepoint bracelets, displayed in the first minute of the segment!
As I mentioned in a previous post, Kristina’s how-to for these projects is in the premiere issue of the magazine:
Again, here are a few pictures that weren’t used in the article:
Check out some more of her projects here, and be on the lookout for more of her work to grace the pages of upcoming issues of Craft.
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Brian Sawyer
Another Photorealistic Quilt
With recognition and thanks to everyone who stopped by to leave such kind comments on my recent post about one of my mother’s photorealistic quilts, here’s another one:
This quilt is a little older than the one in my previous post (my mother gave this piece to me this past Fathers’ Day), and it represents her first attempt at painting a photographic image on fabric. Again, the subject of this piece is my favorite, which I know biases me, but I think the work is pretty spectacular.
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Bezzie
Bias or no bias, she is truly talented!!
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Brian Sawyer
Flickr “Feature” Frustrates
Flickr recently snuck in a “feature” that I first appreciated in spirit but now have a fairly significant problem with in practice.
I have 2,709 pictures in my Flickr library, almost half of which are marked as Private (viewable to Friends and Family only). Until recently, my ~1,400 Public photos simply bore the CC symbol, identifying the Creative Commons license I’ve assigned to them. This license grants anyone the freedom to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, as well as make derivative works based on them, with the following conditions:
- Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
- Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
I’m happy to post almost all of my Public photos with this license (unless they specifically allow me to, I don’t post pictures others have given me permission to post with this open license), because I believe in the spirit of creative sharing behind it, so I found helpful the recent addition of the logos for each of these three conditions below each photo in my main photostream and on each photo page itself (previously, viewing these conditions required clicking through the “Some rights reserved” link to the Creative Commons page):
Though this is the default license I have set for all photos I upload, my Private photos showed up previously as “Only Friends & Family see this” and left it at that (no copyright or licensing details were displayed at all), which makes sense to me. But now, even all of my restricted-access photos bear the same CC licensing logos as my Public photos, which makes no sense at all to me:
I made those photos Private for a reason. Why would anyone choose to give such an open license to photos they want to share with friends and family only? While I don’t mind people reposting or altering images I’ve decided to share with the world, I don’t want to authorize this liberal use for all of my photos, even by people I’ve decided to let look at them.
I sent a complaint to the Flickr folks in the form of a bug report (surely, this was just an error in how the new feature was rolled out?) but discovered that this new licensing scheme is by design. The response to my query avoided the philosophical issues I had with the feature and simply suggested how to troubleshoot what I saw as a problem:
Setting a default CC license applies the license automatically to all your photos. You will need to change the license of all your private photos. You can do this in the Organizr. Drag the photos to the batch edit area, click “Permissions”, then select “Change licensing”.
I have a problem with this for two reasons. First, because the Organizr doesn’t allow me to search by privacy level, this batch change would be far from convenient under any circumstances. Thankfully, most of my Private photos share one common tag, so I can at least search for them that way. But I found that the Organizr chokes on ~1,300 pictures, hanging on this screen forever:
Second, even if the batch change worked, this new “feature” also means I’ll have to change my default license every time I upload a Private photo, which is a huge hassle. Ugh.
So, I’ll close with the same simple question used to end my email exchange with Flickr tech support. Might I suggest allowing different default licenses for different privacy levels?
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Brian Sawyer
Cousins, a Quilted Photo
Based on a photograph she took of my son and his cousin this past August at the Richmond Metro Zoo, my mother created this quilted work of art, as beautiful as it is touching:
And the back is almost just as beautiful:
Not knowing the process very well myself, I’ll let her describe the details:
Machine applique, fabric painting on cotton, and photo-transfer using Printed Treasures’ cotton fabric sheets; machine quilted with Mountain Mist White Rose cotton batting and Mettler 50/3 cotton threads … lots of threads!
Here are a few close-ups, to give you an idea of the intricacy of the piece:
Thanks, Mom. I love this in too many ways to enumerate.
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Céline
Absolutely stunning! And effectively, very touching.
Congratulations to your Mom
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turtlegirl76
I can’t even begin to pretend I know how to quilt but it’s easy to see how amazingly beautiful and complicated that quilt is. Wow.
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bezzie
That’s breathtaking.
My mother’s a quilter (and a Barb as well!) so I can appreciate the work that went into that.
An heirloom indeed.
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Zonda
Wow, that is fabulous! I quilt but could never imagine all that work! The stitching is amazing!! Congratulations to your Mom!
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Georgia
Looks really great. The work is marvelous.
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Joe are discussing. 
Georgia, 
Brian Sawyer
Instructables Project Contest Winner
I just learned that my DIY Bookbinding tutorial–originally published in Make magazine, then gaining a little more attention in expanded form as a wiki (which nobody actually contributed to before I decided to consolidate it here with my blog), and finally made available as an Instructable–was just selected as one of the winners of the Instructables September Project Contest.
Considering I wasn’t even aware of such a contest when I posted the project to the site, this came as surprisingly splendid news indeed, and I’m honored to have my project selected as one of the five First Prize winners. Thanks to the folks at Instructables for creating such a great community for people to share their how-to ingenuity with others. Now that I know people are watching there, I’ll have to get on the stick and post some more projects there.
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oldladypenpal
Ok, that does it. Now I have ot add your link to my blogroll, because I love all of this creative goodness!
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Brian Jepson
That’s awesome–what a nice way to be surprised. Congratulations!
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Brian Sawyer
Thanks, Brian. Since the prize is a Windows-only toy I probably wouldn’t be too interested in anyway, the coolest part of winning (aside from the flattery) is inclusion in the super-secret beta version of the Instructables site. Wheee!
Brian Sawyer
ASCII Me
ASCII-O-Matic is a neat little Flash application that will turn any photo (as long as it’s a 60 X 50-pixel JPEG) into an ASCII text representation.
Here’s what I look like in ASCII, in both color and black-and-white (the smaller versions look more like me, but you can click on either for the larger image, which better illustrates the characters):
yaba, 
Tom and 3 others are discussing. 
roxy
What a cool blog. I’m friends with Cristi (turtlegirl76) and we now have 6 degrees of separation. Or something like that LOL
Keep up the fabulousness. Talk to you soon!
*hugs*
Anne
sanjeet
I just wanted to know the way to produce ascii characters in any text field
Tom
Hi,
Are you the same Brian that did a book w/Paul Harmon?
Cheers..Tom
Brian Sawyer
Are you the same Brian that did a book w/Paul Harmon?
Nope, different Brian.
yaba
Just couldn’t make the image 50 x 60
Brian Sawyer
Productivity and the Postmaster
Following up on Merlin Mann’s knee-slapping anecdote of Productivity and the “Perfect Apostrophy,” he recently alerted me to an interview he gave for the National Post, which contains this related nugget of a story about his ill-fated book on productivity:
One of my favourite stories about that is I’m on my cellphone, walking down the street, talking to my co-author and we are saying, ‘The book! The book! This is terrible!’ And in my hand I’ve got a Netflix [mail-delivered DVD] and a copy of the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I’m going to the library and the mailbox,” he recalls, speaking even faster now. “I’m having this heated conversation and I drop my Netflix in the mailbox but then I realize it isn’t my Netflix I’ve put in the mailbox but the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is funny if you know that not only is Benjamin Franklin the philosophical godfather of the life-hacks movement, but he was the first postmaster of the United States. So, I threw my library book in the mailbox. That is how my mind works.
God, I love Merlin. And I’m happy to see the story of the book being used in the service of productivity lessons. Though I’d rather have seen the book itself actually teaching productivity techniques, at least it’s getting some mileage as a cautionary tale.
Brian Sawyer
Make/Craft Logo Mashups
The recent post to the Make Flickr pool of this great mashup of the Make: logo reminded me of others I’ve seen floating around on the web but have since lost track of:
Here are a few more I’ve since dug up:
The Craft magazine Flickr group also has its logo mashers, inspired largely by a recent contest:
I myself was inspired to mash up a couple of my favorite publishing logos into a single fantasy book:
And I’d love to see more of these collected in one place. If you’ve found a creative use or tweak to the Make or Craft logos, why not share it in the comments here or on the thread I started in the Make Flickr group?
Beacherry 12:28 am on December 11, 2006 Permalink |
So very very cute, how to make such cute costume?
Brian Sawyer 8:20 am on December 11, 2006 Permalink |
Thanks. I think so to0. Sorry, but I didn’t make it myself (my mother-in-law did), and I wouldn’t even know where to begin.