Gratuitous Linkage

I keep meaning to fit my del.icio.us feed in here somewhere but I haven't gotten around to it yet, so here are some sites I've found lately, now that I don't have school to eat up my time.

My sister and I used to follow a blog called Threadbared, where two snarky women used made fun of the photos in old craft patterns and catalogues in a generally merciless and hilarious way. We were sad when they shut it down just under a year ago, but now we have something to fill the void: The Museum of Kitschy Stitches.

I really like Benjamin Goss' Urban strangeness set on Flickr. It's dark and high contrast and a little gritty in the way that only film can be. Makes me want to actually learn how to use my camera and get a backbone so that I could go out and find characters like that too. They seem to be a dying breed these days.

I also like Hope Gangloff's style of drawing - sketchy, limited palette of colours. The detail of patterns sometimes overwhelms the pictures and makes them flat, which kind of reminds me of Klimt. May not be completely safe for work (some bare breasts) just so you know.

Spearheaded by Nancy Pearl Wannabe, a group of bloggers created a Choose Your Own Blogventure. Remember those books? I used to love them so this is fun.

Learning to Love You More is a series of art projects and creative assignments and a collaborative gallery of peoples' results. I think that any of them would make for some interesting blog posts. Same goes for Keri Smith's 100 ideas (of which there are only slightly less than 100).

I read this article on using reading to be better at writing and downloaded Dark Room, a word processor that is text only, and nothing else. It blacks out your entire screen so that nothing distracts you and I like it already. If you're cooler than me, you'd be using Writeroom for Macs instead. Same program, pretty much.

And through all of this I've been getting some reading done through LibriVox, a volunteer-run site that seeks to provide free audiobooks of all works in the public domain. I'm listening to Balzac in daily podcasts right now, which is really cool and gives me hands for knitting.

Oh, and before this post ends, Elephants crossing the great divide made me giggle. Hard.