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!
beetles in love
3 Dec
rss address
15 Oct
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’.
zombie rights march: my first boingboing contribution
12 Oct
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!
fountains of diet coke
9 Jul
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.
visualizing web pages as graphs
20 Jun
I’ve recently been researching different ways to portray large amounts of data visually, and found one that shows web tags in a graphical representation. It’s a fun way to compare the structures of different sites, and you can try your own site on Websites as Graphs.
coffee time
16 Jun
Wowsers. I love coffee. I don’t love Folgers, but this bizarre commercial done by Saatchi & Saatchi sums the love up pretty well. And it’s invigorating!
exploring the image and story chains
18 May
James Craig just sent me a link this morning to a fascinating Shockwave artwork in which you can navigate through images by zooming into one picture which has colors that are comprised of other pictures which in turn you can delve deeper into. It’s mesmerising, and it would take a very long time to explore it before you could see all the images.
This reminded me a lot of Chuck Close‘s paintings. I’m not sure if it was he who did the original images that were made up of smaller images and which were so popular in the early nineties, or if that was someone else.
It also reminded me of two literary works by Julio Cortázar. The first was the short story called “Blow-Up” (which inspired the 1966 film by Antonioni even though the two are very different) in which the photographer protagonist discovers a hidden story by seeing the details in a blown-up picture he casually took. The second work is his masterpiece Hopscotch which is an open-ended anti-novel that is composed of a bunch of short chapters which can be read in various orders to create a vast number of possible stories. Nifty indeed.
miniatures and food
28 Apr
Really neat photography of miniature people and scenes on food landscapes: http://mapage.noos.fr/minimiam/go.htm Love it!
browser overload
27 Feb
Can one ever have too much functionality in a browser? This person who installed 100 of the most popular Firefox extensions seems to think that one cannot. They wrote that
It was really extraordinarily stable. The work of hundreds of programmers who had no idea their code would be used together, coexisting happily in the browser.
I have fourteen extensions installed and that’s all I think I really need. I’d love to know others’ favorite extensions, so feel free to comment if there are any you can’t live without.
museum of ephemerata show at the cathedral of junk
29 Jan
I really enjoyed this very unique show tonight. I took some more pictures which are available in this flickr set. I wish I could live on the same street as the Cathedral of Junk! At least I wouldn’t call the cops for loud music at 9:30 at night.
honda civic ad
21 Jan
I dig eclectic and experimental music. It’s nice to see something in this vein used effectively in a mainstream ad. Check out a choir making the sound affects for a Honda Civic in this video.
(Thanks, James!)
my dream home
1 Jan
I found some illustrations of my dream home in some Motorola ads from the 60’s. Oh the wonders that the future holds!
brainstorming tools
21 Dec
I’m always looking for new ways to brainstorm. Occasionally when I’m strapped for ideas, I visit websites that start the wee gears spinning again. Here are a few I just thought of:
the visual thesaurus: Great tool to visualize interconnected associations of concepts
flickr: Fun to search different tags to see variations on themes, especially through the slideshow feature. This site has the potential to become fairly addictive, so beware!
css zengarden: Always inspiring how many different designs can come from the same html.
zefrank’s scribbler: Relaxing/stimulating to do a scribble which automatically develops over time.
wallpaper design zine: Design-o-rama with pics.
If you have any others that help you out of those creative blocks, feel free to share.
37th street lights
18 Dec
I just did a quick write-up about the 37th Street Christmas lights for the Austinist. I’ve enjoyed this street for several years and was glad that I could finally learn a little bit more about it for this. Lots of people have pics of the lights tagged with “37th street” on flickr.
google analytics are fun
15 Dec
I’m pretty impressed with the Google Analytics service. I was one of the first to subscribe right after they started offering the service for free, and have been very pleased with how well it performs compared with other web trend software I’ve used. I really like that it’s a flash-based interface, so I can see all the charts and stats with cool dynamic features. There’s even a little map that shows where in the world I’m getting visitors to my site from.
Unfortunately they’re not currently allowing new signups (due to the extremely large response they got), but for all those interested in site stats, I’d recommend signing up to be notified when they’re going to open it back up on the Google Analytics site.
I heart google.