June 27, 2009 • 2:43 pm 0
I usually don’t refer to lifehacker.com because of the simple fact that everybody has probably seen in already. However, I really liked this post on handwriting. My handwriting is kinda okay (I started using a keyboard relatively late in my life) but there is always room for improvement.
And I miss writing letters.
Filed under: Art and Stuff, Crafts and Modification , handwriting, letters, old school, work, writing
May 20, 2009 • 2:13 pm 0
Yes, nothing has old-man written all over it like dioramas, but there are some people out there who do amazing stuff with diorama scenes. I posted a link to Thomas Doyle’s diorama art a while ago and today Clementine (whose posterous blog ReflectionsOf.Me is highly recommended, by the way) posted a link to Kim Keever’s gallery page. His work is amazing, if slightly kitschy Hudson River School kind of way. Here’s a snip
Kim Keever’s large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.
Doyle’s work is equally amazing and well worth checking out. What strikes me the most is the attention to detail and, well, tininess of it all. It’s a pain in the butt to get the materals needed, but HA! – I found me a new hobby for those long and cold winter nights that will be here sooner than you’d think.
Filed under: Art and Stuff, Crafts and Modification, Photography , art, dioramas, miniatures, sculpture, water tanks
December 31, 2008 • 9:00 am 0
New Years is around the corner and, guess what, it’s time for New Years Resolutions! Yay! But before I come to that there are a number of things that happened this year that changed the way these resolutions are going to look. Lot’s of new impulses, some of them found online, some offline. The biggie this year is definitely my move to the USA. And getting my degree. And the move involved some serious decluttering (with the help of my significant other, I must add). One great thing of finally being done with school is that I can read what I want without taking mental notes all the time. Total guilt-free reading! God, I missed that. A second thing I came to love again / rediscover is NWOBHM – don’t judge me, that shit is awesome.
So the one thing that sits behind this year’s resolutions is the “Make it new!” motto. Sometimes it requires going back to the roots and start again. Rediscover things that you thought you’d not be interested in anymore, or that you stopped doing because you became too ‘adult’ for it. I know I did that. And the great thing about a) American culture (to some extent) and b) moving to a foreign country is that you get the chance to reinvent yourself. And that’s a good thing. Change is a good thing. So my online inspiration this year came from Merlin Mann’s move to change the direction and content of his website 43folders.com and explaining the reasons for doing so in his posts and in an essay called “Better” on his personal blog. I think these posts are a good example on how important it is to realize that it’s time for change and then follow up on this realization. Especially when it concerns something you’ve been doing for years and that has become routine. Make the move into the stretch zone! What are my stretch zones for the next year?
So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Aside from the obvious, like trying to be a better person/husband/friend, etc. But you know that.
Filed under: Crafts and Modification, Life , crafts, food, ideas, inspiration, New Years Resolutions, personal growth, productivity, vegan, vegetarian, wood, woodcarving
December 30, 2008 • 5:07 pm 0
Okay, okay, I’m a beer snob. I’m German, so what do you expect? It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I thought American beers were crap and the best thing in the world were German beers brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot that was established 1516. I’d always believed that this related to quality, but, guess what: it had more to do with taxation than anything else. What opened my eyes? This article by Burkhard Bilger, published in the New Yorker around Thanksgiving this year, on the Dogfish Head Brewery in New England. Here’s a snip:
Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.
This is a great article. And now excuse me while I’m browsing American beers.
Filed under: Crafts and Modification, Feed Me Food, Grumpy German , American beer, beer, German beer, History
October 17, 2008 • 2:53 pm 0
Making wiring assemblies at a junction box on the fire wall for the right engine of a B-25 bomber, North American Aviation, Inc., [Inglewood], Calif. Forward of this wall will be mounted one of the two 1,700-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engines which carry, originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.
Partly inspired by the second-latest episode of You Look Nice Today and partly inspired by a recent talk with my housemates the verdict is out: I suck at Man Talk. I have no idea why that is, but it is one of my older problems and stems back to basically two things: my lack of interest in competitive sports and my lack of knowledge about anything mechanical. So when a guy starts a conversation with: “Hey, did you watch the game yesterday?” the conversation quickly transforms into silent-working-next-to-each-other. Same thing with mechanical expertise. Bonding while fixing a car or building a shed seems like the obvious thing to do for men, but when I tried it I basically stood around and asked questions and didn’t really understand the answers I got. Because I have zero knowledge to build on. Nada. So that a V-8 engine works essentially according to the same principles as a <insert mechanical term here> pump doesn’t really make the entire thing more understandable to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I can chat with guys and hang out, I just seem to be completely retarded when it comes to classical, stereotypical Man Talk. My dealings with mechanics, construction workers, and barbers are cringe inducing. Granted, though, it is getting better, but hell, some guys seem to be born with a natural understanding of how to fix a car or hook up the wiring in your walls. I, on the other hand, am not. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never been involved in that kind of thing.
Until now! Luckily for me, America offers a lot of not-sneered-upon ways to indulge into becoming familiar with this and other projects (gladly not gender-specific) in the Arts and Crafts Movement. And, yes, I reveal my nerdiness by mentioning that I did, indeed, read one or two issues of MAKE Magazine. I just have to get started and actually do something. And that’s the hardest part, at least for me. It’s essentially about finding the thing that you want to do most and then go ahead and do it, right?
Filed under: Crafts and Modification, Grumpy German , aspirations, crafts, making stuff, Man Talk, masculinity, ylnt
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