I usually don’t refer you to main-stream magazines (I figure you can find those on your own), but do make a point to see the January 16, 2006, issue of TIME magazine with the cover: How to Sharpen Your Mind.
Articles:
– The Perils of Multi-Tasking
– The Power of the Midlife Brain
– The Magic of Meditation
– Ways to Keep Alzheimer’s at Bay
– How Coffee Perks Up Your IQ
Preview: TIME.com: How to Tune Up Your Brain — Jan. 16, 2006
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Here’s a wonderful site: 50 Ways to be More Creative | PigPog. Has tips including: ways to be more creative with Art, with Craft, with Writing, with Music, with Photography, and more. Notice you can subscribe to their RSS feeds as well.
Thanks to my pal Douglas E. Welch for turning us on to this one.
Here’s another kooky one that you’ll enjoy, especially if you ever wondered what your drawings would look like if you could spin them around to take them from 2-D to 3-D.
One Free Minute is a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous public speech. When you call the cellphone inside One Free Minute, you get connected for exactly
a minute to a 200 watt amplifier and speaker. The speech produced by the speaker can be
heard clearly more than 150 feet away from the sculpture.” — from the website.
In other words, you can make a toll-free call, talk for one minute about whatever you’d like, and have it go out to those who want to listen in. You can also hear what others have said…
Another wacky one, but again, it’s just for fun. Enjoy!
SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. — from the website.
In other words, you can make a little design and then see what happens when other people add to it over time…
Yes, it’s a bit wacky, but enjoy!
Instructables.com is a venue for showing what you make and how others can make it.
Making things is part of being human. Whether you make bikes, kites, food, clothing, protocols for biology research, or hack consumer electronics, good instructions are critical.
Instructables is a step-by-step collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. … from the website.
Every now and then a site comes along that I just have to pass along to you,
like this one… San Francisco in Jello. See all 6 slides.
If nothing else, you have to say, “Now, THAT’s creative!”
Thanks to my good friend, Ruth Rivin, for forwarding ImaginationCubed.com. Explore your drawing skills (by using your mouse instead of pencils), change ink colors and backgrounds, add text, etc. You never know when a doodle can turn into a masterpiece! Kids will love this one too.
Enjoy!
All these years, I never stopped to ponder my collecting of stuff … almost all of it seems to be art related, though I consider myself more of a writer.
The Practically Creative Quarterly discusses all aspects of creativity and is currently featuring a theme: Collections.
Look around you … your carefully-placed favorite ink pens, your collection of poetry (yours and other poets’), beautifully-crafted hand-made papers, beads, photos, fabric, postcards (blank or used), newspaper clippings, CDs, Doonesbury cartoons, etc.
The site discusses various aspects (with images) of how we like to gather and put things in order so that we make our art/writing/music, etc., in a much more productive way … including those of us who just toss things in a pile.
Enjoy!
What is NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.
Participants begin writing November 1. [Agh!]
The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel.
Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and — when the thing is done — the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2004, we had over 42,000 participants. Nearly 6000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists… continue: National Novel Writing Month.