ceci n’est pas un blog

From this NPR article, here are six tips for being happy, from Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor of positive psychology:

1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions — such as fear, sadness, or anxiety — as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness.

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account. Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on (the full or the empty part of the glass) and by our interpretation of external events. For example, do we view failure as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?

4. Simplify! We are, generally, too busy, trying to squeeze in more and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too much.

5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do — or don’t do — with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. We too often take our lives for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.

It’s crazy that it can be so simple.

Here’s a list of all the podcasts I subscribe to:

• Radio Oh La La: The only music podcast I subscribe to, this exceptional one is dedicated to French pop music from the 50s and 60s. High camp, classics and fun.
• The Sound of Young America. Just the tongue in cheek description of it being a “Public Radio Show About Things That Are Awesome” and the fact that the host and producer Jesse Thorn calls himself “America’s radio sweetheart” delight me. The show features intelligent interviews with authors, film makers, comedians, artists and more. True to its jingle, this is “maximum fun!”
• Boing boing boing. A very seldom podcast from the makers of boingboing.
• The Onion Radio News. You can get the Onion in pod form!
• Yoga Today. This video podcast is the only reason I’ve kept up with my yoga regularly, and I highly recommend it for those who need direction in yoga and don’t have time or motivation to go out of the house to do it. They do a different hour session of yoga everyday, and it’s great to be able to pause to look at certain poses in detail. You can fast forward through the ads at the beginning.

With this steady diet, I have enough entertainment to last a lifetime!

Wikipedia lists Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

and notes that “Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that the greatest American short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.”

Well, since I’m off on a major flickr kick today, I might as well let it keep rolling. I just saw that there is a site called flickrvision.com which shows all the recent flickr photos that also have geographical information. It places them on a map, and flips through them as they’re added all over the world. What an addictive way to get a visual snapshot of what’s going on all over, right now. It makes the world feel smaller and yet still very diverse.

I love the feature in flickr where you can map all your photos to different places on a map. Here’s my personal flickr map of San Francisco memories. It’s really handy to be able to situate different images to associate memories with locations when you look back at them later.

Just when I had finally gotten refocused back on work and torn myself away from the distractions of the incredible views of the city, the bridges, the ocean and Coit tower (which are all visible from various rooms in the flat where we’re staying in this week on Telegraph Hill), a big group of squawking wild green parrots passed by my window. Thanks a lot, guys!

I thought that this was a very charming part of a letter from our landlady since she’s going to be out of town:

I hope that the cat will not be too needy in our absence. I do have someone stopping over to feed him. The only other thing is Salvatore the box turtle. He lives in the pond and wanders around the garden. Occasionally he falls down the stairs and ends up on your patio. If you see him there please put him back in the pond. He can’t climb back up the stairs by himself. He doesn’t bite.

Adorable.

I’ve had a very difficult time for the last several months with a font issue in Firefox. Any time there was bolding, italics or a link on a page, there would be a large space before and after these or they would run into and overlap the regular text. After searching online for endless hours, calling Apple, posting the issue to Mozilla forums, and even asking the Firefox representatives at the SXSW trade show today, I had no luck. Then, tonight on a whim, I just deleted and reinstalled Arial, and that miraculously solved the problem. I am so relieved to have finally found the solution!

I’ve gotten obsessed with Pop Surrealism over the past year, and just realized that most of the coolest artists have websites, so I figured I might as well do a compilation of some great ones for those wandering souls who are trying to find such a list on the internet. Here she be:

• Mark Ryden
• Marion Peck
• Gary Baseman
• Tim Biskup
• Ray Caesar
• Ana Bagayan
• Scott Musgrove

As this is not at all a comprehensive list, feel free to add your own favorites.

There are also quite a few really interesting and weird artists on the Beinart International Surreal Art Collective site, but it’s not strictly pop surrealism by any means.

I am fascinated by Guy Maddin’s films which look like they were made in the dawn of the silent film period, but which have modern and bizarrely surreal themes. My favorite is his short film called “The Heart of the World“.

Today I discovered a photographer whose style is reminiscent of Maddin’s: Stephen Berkman. Just gotta love those anachronistic mash ups!

There’s a really neat flash-based site called musicovery that allows you to discover all kinds of music and visually navigate through musicians based on how they’re linked through musical style, time period, or even mood. Although it doesn’t include movies like liveplasma, the fact that it automatically plays music from the selected musician as you navigate makes it a really cool browseable jukebox.

At Okay Mountain during the East Austin Studio Tour a few weeks back, I saw the works of Peat Duggins for the first time and fell in love with his illustration style. Fortunately, they had a work of his in my price range that I can’t wait to hang up. This adorable artwork from his website (38andahalf.com): is similar in theme and style to the smaller one that I bought: 
So cute!

In case anyone wants to have an RSS feed of my blog, you can just put
http://shannou.com/blog/?feed=rss2 in as the URL. It didn’t look like there’s anywhere on this page that allows you to do that , so I’m just sayin’.

I’ve recently learned that the best way to increase traffic to your site is to feature pictures of zombies and/or pirates and then have boingboing.net link to it. I didn’t even think when I submitted my flickr photoset to them that they would post it since the title “Zombie Rights March Protested by Pirates” seemed too ludicrous to be featured on any site. I laughed wildly to myself as I typed up this absurd (but true) description of it:

Here’s a flickr set of pictures documenting the zombie rights march to Austin’s City Hall last Friday. The zombies’ signs in the march included badly spelled slogans such as “Mairage = 1 Zombie + 1 Zombie”, “More Binifits for Zombie Vets in Our Necronomoconomy”, “Brains…The Other White Meat”, “We’re here, we’re dead, get used to it!” and “Zombies Was People Too.” The zombies, shouting “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!” was unhindered by a group of pirates protesting the undead’s demands for their rights.

In the day or two that followed, I was very glad that I hadn’t posted the images on my own server since the photoset ended up getting over 20,000 visits. Ah, the excitement of being boingboinged. And the silliness that I can use that or “google” as a verb and have so many people know what I mean!

zefrank syndicated this lovely video which elaborates the artistic fountain possibilities inherent in the combination of 101 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke with 523 Mentos.