Due to a combination of exam stress and holiday bustle, I haven’t done any link round-ups for the past two weeks…actually, I’ve barely been on Twitter, so there aren’t even that many links to catch up on. Here are the highlights: Read more →
When I got a Blackberry this past summer, the reaction of my friends were split into three distinct camps. The ones who already had a Blackberry cackled evilly to themselves as they thought about how quickly I would become obsessed with a device that was connected to the internet at all times. The ones who had an iPhone were outraged that I would betray my artsy roots and spring for the corporate phone. The ones who were staunchly clinging to their regular phones pre-emptively mourned the inevitable passing of my sanity.
There may be a war on Christmas going on, but the holiday season remains one of my favourite times of the year. Despite the short days, and despite the exams, and despite the dip in my mood from the winter weather, I love that the holiday season gives me an excuse to be cheerful, and an excuse to be even more ostentatiously affectionate than I normally am.
I’m celebrating Christmas with my family. We don’t always get along, but they’re still my family.
I hope you’re having a good holiday, too.
Few things infuriate me disproportionately more than the recent trend of social media “activism”. You know, changing your status to raise breast-cancer awareness, changing your display picture to raise childhood abuse awareness, etc. This trend has unfortunately seemed to gain traction in the recent months. Beyond breast-cancer and childhood abuse, there’s also depression, and physical disability, and a million other worthwhile causes that you should change your Facebook status or display picture for.
My personal design style is pretty minimalist; I prefer clean and streamlined over cluttered and busy. To that end I love a lot of the ads and logos I see on design blogs – modern advertisement has undoubtedly become about a single concept that grabs the customer’s attention. After all, research demonstrates how short our attention spans are: an ad needs to deliver the message in five seconds or less, experts tell us, nodding importantly.
It’s interesting to note that ads weren’t always like this.
Millennials Magazine released their second issue yesterday, this time on the theme of “Modern Love”. Because I just adore talking about myself, I’ve contributed a piece about long-distance relationships.
Warning: do not read this piece if you would like to maintain the convenient fiction of me as a angry and ruthless axe-grinder on the war path for my perceived logic of social justice. As a friend puts it, it exposes the “squishy-wishy insides”.
Yes. I was actually accused of having squishy-wishy insides.
The latest social media craze seems to be LikeALittle, which I’ve described this website to friends as a cross between Craigslist Missed Connections, Facebook, and Twitter.
No, wait, where are you going?
I’m so invested in that stupid WikiLeaks/Assange situation now that when I got an email with the subject life “WTF Google?” I was so afraid that even Google had betrayed WikiLeaks that I almost deleted the email without looking at it. So that’s been dominating my tweeted links lately. Recognizing that not everyone is as obsessed as I am, I’ve put together a separate WikiLeaks link-dump over here.
When I wrote my WikiLeaks post last week, I was on the fence regarding Assange. Since then, the reaction by various organizations around the world have placed me firmly on the side of WikiLeaks just on principle, regardless of whether or not I agree with their MO. This is the sequence of events as I’m aware of them, leading up to Saturday. I was out cold most of yesterday; if I missed anything important, my apologies. And no, the fact that Julian Assange has an OKCupid profile doesn’t count as important.
Pink Stinks is a UK-based social advocacy group that campaigns for gender neutral kids’ toys. In particular, its website points out the pernicious trend of “the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.” Of the two girls that are depicted on the banner, one of them is wearing a t-shirt that says “Future Role Model” (aw!) and the other is wearing a t-shirt that says “I’m no Princess!”