Ninth Wave Designs

Pencil Monkey: Diastema's Flickr Photoset

I came across this picture, entitled Easily Distracted, in the highly entertaining Flickr account belonging to photographer Diastema.  Since it features a Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencil I figured it was almost close enough to being on topic to mention it here.  On topic or not, these photos are worth seeing.
 

This great image is part of a much larger (284 images and growing) photoset entitled Toys, which in standard Flickr frittering-of-time style has distracted me this morning.  This collection of photographs involves any number of small plastic animals in colorful and curious settings, and is nothing short of a visual treat.  I recommend viewing this set using the "View as Slideshow" option and leaving it to run in a continual loop in the background of your computer desktop.   That way you will have an animated wallpaper running throughout the day, with little visual treats between opening and closing programs.  It will be your own personal box of visual Good & Fruity.  Don't forget to brush afterwards!

For a smaller, more concentrated dose of visual goodness, see also her Circus Ursus Maritimus set HERE.  The plastic polar bears are mesmerizing - I could look at these photos all day long!  It is amazing to me how much emotion she is able to capture in these images of small inanimate objects.  Distema's work is one of the things that makes Flickr such a great place - there is always something new to discover when you should be doing something work related instead.

Enjoy!

The Nerdier Side of NWD: Guilded Lilies.

The Ninth Wave Design weblog has a new sister.  I recently launch a second blog, called Guilded Lilies, as an opportunity to explore some of the nerdier interests of NWD. Nerdier, you ask?  What could be nerdier than graph paper you think?  My interests run far and wide, but quite a few of them cluster around the area of computer technology and computer games. My Typepad account generously offers the possibility of up to three separate blogs, so I felt it was a good time to start blogging about these other areas that interest me.  There are many geekish topics I would enjoy exploring, and rather than make the focus of the NWD blog wider, especially since things seem to be working just fine here, I decided to try my hand at another blog.  This won't make for less posts on NWD, but it will give some of you with similar interests a little more content from outside of the Moleskine Universe - okay maybe not entirely outside the Moleskine Universe, but from a neighboring galaxy at least.

Here is an excerpt from the inaugural post on Guilded Lilies: Grown Women Playing Games:

"Guilded Lilies is my newest blog project designed to explore the unique experience of being a grown woman playing computer games. Let's face it, computer gaming is a man's world, or better yet, a boy's world.  At this stage in the development of computer games we, as grown women, are still visitors in a strange land.  Most of us like it there, like it enough to spend hours at our computer monitors every week, so this is not about complaining.  Perhaps like me though, you have found yourself wondering about these fantasy worlds created, for the most part, from an entirely male perspective."

If this sort of thing interests you then make a visit to Guilded Lilies and leave me a comment to let me know what you think.  I am looking forward to hearing from you on the other side of the NWD universe.

Blogging the Holidays

  December Blood Through My Veins 
  Originally uploaded by Elinesca .

I have been following a Flickr photo group called Christmas Advent Calendar 2005.  Each day in December members upload a picture into the discussion list, and at days end list members vote on the best image.  The chosen image is then featured on the Christmas Advent Calendar 2005 blog organized by Flickr members Elinesca ?, Infomaniac, and Magic Fly Paula.

I am constantly amazed with the Flickr photo sharing community and the number of high quality photos posted on a minute by minute basis.  It is difficult not to spend the entire afternoon browsing from one image to the next in a stream of visual discovery.  Additionally, organized groups like the Christmas Advent Calendar 2005 bring together like minded artists and photographers, constellating images into pools of particular beauty.

Visit the Christmas Advent Calendar 2005 blog daily during December when you have a few minutes, and enjoy a concentrated dose of holiday themed imagery while you are there.

Samhain: Time Outside of Time

Many of the Halloween traditions celebrated in the U.S. originate from old Celtic traditions, so Irish immigrants must have brought many of the common symbolic elements with them to this country.  One of the big ones, carving Jack-O-Lanterns, originated with the tradition in Ireland of making an effigy of a head from a turnip.  There are not so many turnip carvers around nowadays, especially since pumpkins are far better suited for the job.  The general idea is the same though, a scary face with a candle inside, and it harkens back to the ancient Celtic fascination with severed heads, the details of which I will skip here.

The one ancient Celtic tradition that is most commonly celebrated today is dressing up as otherworld creatures: ghosts, goblins and other frightening monsters. This tradition originates with the ancient festival of Samhain and how that celebration reflected the Celtic concept of time and the calendar.  Samhain was one of the four major celebrations during the Celtic year, and is the point in the annual cycle where one year ends and another begins - sort of an ancient version of our New Year's Eve.  The Celt's concept of the daily cycle provided that the old year ended at sundown on the last day in October (as it corresponds to our calendar), the New Year began at sunrise on November first.  This resulted in a gap in time between sunset and sunrise which belonged to neither the old nor the new year - a time outside of time.  This physical break in time was seen as a doorway through which beings from the otherworld could leak into the real world - similar to the concept of the Hell Mouth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Fires were lit to keep malevolent spirits at bay, and dressing as one of them would disguise your mortal aspect, preventing the terrifying possibility of being dragged into the otherworld by the evil spirits.

I find this idea very compelling, that the calendar year could have a gap in it between ending and beginning again. Our contemporary year moves with very little interruption, and even the general idea of holidays has eroded with businesses being open through all the holidays in the year:  24-7-365. That there exists this concept of a time outside of the regular cycle of time, that the year has to stop for a while before it can begin anew, is something we could do well to embrace, even in small ways.  Imagine a time outside of time; something magical that made the phone stop ringing, the internet idle, and had people staying home for some quiet contemplation; just as a reminder of the end of one important cycle, the beginning of the next. It is something almost impossible to think of today - a collectively ritualized secular experience of time - but it is an interesting concept nonetheless. Heck, even the ancient Celts had to have the frightening aspect of otherworld demons to reinforce the Samhain ritual to make them stop and pay attention.  Perhaps then what we need is a renewed belief in otherworld monsters to get us to slow down a bit, for one evening at least. 

Choose your costumes accordingly and have a great time out of time on Halloween!

Intelligent Design

This may be stretching the purpose of this blog a bit too close to political commentary, so let me explain myself first. 

I have a strong sense of self-preservation which prevents me from watching or listening to the news most of the time. I am not completely isolated from the happening outside of my quiet little existence, but primarily I get the news in tiny bite-size pieces in the form of headlines on Yahoo or MSN.  It is usually all I can stomach - but from time to time my curiosity gets the better of me and current events leak into my otherwise notebook saturated world.  It was in this way that I was introduced to the concept of "Intelligent Design."  My first thought was something along the lines of "form follows function" (or the Roger Tory Peterson version "feathers follow form") with images of beautifully designed automobiles, wine bottle openers, espresso machines, and of course, Moleskine notebooks popping into my head.  I read on to find out that was not what was meant by "Intelligent Design" at all.

All politics aside (and I really do mean that), what I found most unsettling about this new concept was the unabashed reworking of the English language for political motives, something that I learned in high school to identify as Orwellian Doublespeak. This kind of abuse of language is disturbing regardless of political motivation.   We are so much smarter than this, I know we are.

The image above is the result of reading the news.  It is my attempt to express something closer to what "intelligent design" actually means when language is used clearly and deliberately.  I hope it will be received with the same sense of humor that it was created with.  As for me, I plan to stay away from the news for a while.

Tags: Intelligent Design    Moleskine