the recent past
real gone
a tribute to Mr. Thomas Alan Waits.
the resolution will be televised
amidst all of our personal goals and resolutions for the new year, and as part of our continued efforts to collectively carpe the goddamn diem, my roommates and i have embarked on a new group project.
our cozy DC townhouse, affectionately nicknamed Sector Z (all you Star Fox/Super Smash Brothers fans, rejoice), has begun a digital guestbook. as wandering souls roam through the hundred-year-old threshold of our front door – in search of company, laughter, booze, or just somewhere to lay their head – we’ll temporarily blind them with a digital flash and post a photo of them for all the internet to see.
be sure to check it out, and if you’re a tumblr fiend, give it a follow! we’ve got a ton in queue from our new years party, and we’ll be adding more and more as friends new & old come over to hang out.
at any rate, may this fresh burst of optimism and motivation continue throughout the new year, and may our guestbook of beautiful friends continue to grow!
happy new years all!
ryan
adorable anthems
while listening to a guilty pleasure of mine the other day, i had the idea to make a mixtape of music that makes me want to give someone an eskimo kiss. turn down that Henry Rollins photo on your night stand and don’t tell your buddies at the skatepark.
tracks:
Laura Stevenson & the Cans – Master of Art
City & Colour – The Girl
The Avett Brothers – The Ballad of Love and Hate
Lemuria – Pants
James Taylor – You’ve Got a Friend
Justin Townes Earle – One More Night in Brooklyn
Fingers Cut Megamachine – Do You Hear Wedding Bells
Plum Paws – Tents
Josh Ritter – Wait For Love
American War – Old Love in Young Bodies
Norah Jones – Little Room
Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins – Melt Your Heart
Into It. Over It. – Augusta, GA
William Elliott Whitmore – Let’s Do Something Impossible
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download it here.
css filters for webkit browsers
heard about this on the ol’ twitters today and decided to check it out. being easily amused by cool internet tricks, i’d have to say it’s pretty gnarly. check it out!
using HTML5 and CSS we can add a ton of downright neato effects to DOM elements pretty easily.
photo with no filters applied
photo with blur & sepia applied
photo with the hue rotation effect applied
it’s currently only compatible with Chrome Canary and WebKit nightly, but download one or the other and have yourself a go! as rad features like these continue to be implemented and HTML5 becomes more standard, to quote myself every time i hear of a ‘free toppings’ list at a pizza restaurant, “the possibilities are endless.”
design champs: jon contino
i’ve been a big fan of Jon Contino’s bad-ass work for quite some time. see more of it here.
zen and the art of…eh…i’ll do it later
although i might not like to admit it – for reasons my 16th-year-old mohawked self understands all too well – i have a daily routine.
i wake up, i do some yoga or sit-ups & push-ups, i bike to work, i make a cup of tea, see whats up on the interwebs, and i get to work. when i’m finished for the day, i bike home, eat some dinner, catch up with the roommates, and i go right back at it – this time on personal or freelance projects. i’m making myself out to be a little more hardcore than i actually am, but the truth is, it isn’t always like that. for me, motivation tends to be a fickle resource, so when it’s at a reasonable market price, i lean into it and go. because of this, a recent discovery for me is the science of what stimulates my motivation, and keeping a steady grip on those catalysts.
to try and spare you rambling detail i usually delve into, i’ve found that my motivation tends to spring from a combination of two main things: a steady stream of impressive, yet personably attainable influence, mixed with an open nighttime schedule. doesn’t seem that difficult, right? now trust me – if you couldn’t tell by my first meandering post, i strongly favor the away-from-the-computer, outside-of-design experiences. i am far, far from an expert in any of the fields i claim to participate in, but to me, not all good design comes from being hunched over a drafting table at all times. life experiences, social events and other extra-computilar activities seem, to me, crucial to the process of creative growth. BUT, for every night there isn’t a secret indie show on the roof of your friend’s girlfriend’s boyfriend’s roommate’s place, or a vegan potluck at that warehouse the record store clerk told you about, hunkering down with a piece of paper and a pencil and letting your mind flow to the page has worked for me. what else would i be doing? skateboarding? HAH! like i’m ever gonna get good at that.
now, speaking from experience, just a personal disclaimer: for every night of staying up till 2am without even realizing it because you’re so deeply stoked about the project you’re working on, there’s a night of utter creative stagnation that ends in a frustrated concession to defeat, followed usually, if you’re like me, by whiskey and Tom Waits records (a wonderful yet creatively unfulfilling alternative). but it’s these nights, the ones after which you (must) hitch up your pants, lower your brow and push on through, that your best and most notably progressing work will come through. or at least that’s been the case for me thus far.
Mr. J. Dirt, a good friend of mine, once said, you’ve gotta “keep on keepin’ on.”
design champs: carolyn sewell
i recently discovered and am very much digging the design work of carolyn sewell. i was also quite stoked to find out she’s a dc local!
check out more of her work here.
twenty-first century digital boy.
a bad religion reference in my first actual post? yeah. don’t deny me my punk-rock street cred.
anyway, i’d like to use this first real post to express some of my views on the technology i surround myself with, and the personal implications therein. that’s it. no outward opinions towards anything specific, just some down-home, country-fried subjective rambling. cool? if nothing else, just so you know where i’m coming from with a lot of these posts.
as i transition from early-to-mid-twenties (ahh, seems like just yesterday i was watchin’ folks get covered in green slime on the TV box), i’ve begun to realize that mentally, i walk a thin line in my profession, and depending on the situation, i tend find myself leaning hard one way or the other.
on one side, i have this undying love for technology. i love getting my hands dirty, so to speak. learning new tricks, trying, swearing, trying again, and absorbing as much information as my college-recovering brain can handle. and just for reference, when i say technology, i mean the device on which you’re currently reading this, and the digital guts & bones within. after all – it’s amazing to see our progression as a species, and if we put ourselves back on the right track, think of all the wonderful things we can do as we expand our knowledge & technology alike!
on the other hand – and i mean quite a distant other hand – i have this existential, hippy-ish yearning for freedom from all the glowing screens and bright lights my days are saturated with. to be free from the grips of modern vice, never having to worry about another jQuery mobile update, advanced render plugin for Maya, or CSS hack for IE6. after all – were we really meant to stare at screens all day while the sun shines on the empty, cigarette-butt dotted sidewalk that used to a forrest?
on any given day, i'm either clapping my hands and waving my Bladerunner flag in welcome of the oncoming Kurzweilian technological singularity, or tuning my banjo and indexing my camping gear in preparation of the imminent societal collapse. hey, i'm not perfect.
so where does that leave me? those are two starkly opposing emotional responses. well, for one, it finally dawned on me that i need to begin honing my skills in specific areas. for too long now i’ve been spreading myself too thin – i’d rather be a seasoned expert in a couple fields than a novice in a plethora of them. to cut the wordy bullshit, i’m trying to focus more on design, in print, web, and animation. it’s where i started, and it’s my true passion. i love code, i love front-end and solving problems with it, but while these areas go endlessly outward, expanding into the ether with seemingly daily version-updates that you need to learn & apply, design, at it’s core, is endlessly simple. sure, it has it’s trends and styles, but in the end, it revolves around one principle: make this look nice. that’s it. make it make you not cringe. it stems from nature, from that ethereal, innate aestheticism within in all of us (whether you know it or not), that binds us all into that big, happy, kumbaya-singing human family.
not only do i think this return to form, “do-one-thing-well-as-opposed-to-many-things-like-shit” approach is slightly less conducive to my current computer screen tunnel vision, i think the design flow will help appease that tambourine-banging hippy in my brain’s right hemisphere. i fully intend to keep sharp with my code and maintain a relevant watch of it’s progression in my peripheral, but i think i can adequately juggle the (relatively) small amount of code i need to know to accomplish my goals against this reformed direction of design as paramount.
oh, look at the time. here i am rambling once again. anyway, thanks for reading, i hope my endless tirades find a place somewhere amongst your bi-anual bookmarks.
cheers,
ryan
inaugural photo post
portrait of me with my bicycle at meridian hill park in northwest DC, taken by my friend meghan.