Procrastinating in 2024 (like it is the end of the World)

Procrastination can be linked to a variety of reasons, and understanding these is crucial for overcoming this behavior. Here are some common emotions behind procrastination:

1. Fear of Failure: The fear of not meeting one's own or others' expectations can lead to procrastination. The anxiety associated with the potential failure of a task might make an individual postpone getting started.

2. Perfectionism: A desire for perfection can be paralyzing. If a person feels that they must accomplish a task flawlessly, they might delay starting it due to the fear of making mistakes or not meeting exceptionally high standards.

3. Lack of Motivation: Procrastination often occurs when there is a lack of intrinsic motivation for a task. If the task lacks personal significance or if the rewards are not immediately apparent, it becomes easier to delay. This one is a big one nowadays, as we can see the World slowly turning into a dystopia and global warming getting more and more noticeable...

4. Low Self-Esteem: Individuals with low self-esteem may doubt their ability to successfully complete a task. This lack of self-confidence can lead to avoidance, escapism and procrastination.

5.Task Aversion: Certain tasks may evoke negative emotions or discomfort, leading to avoidance. This aversion might be due to boredom, dislike of the task, or a lack of interest in the subject matter. I mean was is the point anyway, since we are all going to die?!

Understanding these emotional factors can help individuals develop strategies to address the root causes of procrastination and build healthier habits for task management.

Various way to mimic painting with Gimp

Gimp is this open source application that is a pseudo Photoshop - and it has many features, from photo editing to image retouching, or even painting

Here are a few of the filters available that would turn a photo in a fake painting
Distort Filters : Value Propagate
Filters/Artistic/Oilify
Filters/GMIC/Artistic/Painting
Filters/GMIC/Artistic/Kuwahara
FX-Foundry/Artistic/Water Paint Effect

Here is the forum explaining a few tricks and some tutorials
http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/discuss/72157619108510544/

A proper tutorial to emulate smudged painting
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/smudge-painting-technique

And last but not least the online website to test some filters
https://gmicol.greyc.fr/

A social media that pays you : tsu.co

Talk about coincidence just a few days after I posted "Why an alternative to facebook is needed" mentioning ello.ch as the hot new facebook alternative... tsu.co was launched.

tsu.co

As ello.co motto was about counteracting facebook tendency to sell his users information to marketers - tsu.co goes for the revenue aspect.

Basically tsu.co rises the question to facebook users who are "content creators" (such as artists and celebrities) and ask them this simple question :

"How much money do you directly make by having x followers on your facebook page?"

Because the answer is most certainly : none

You can be a cosplayer like Jessica Nigri and have made nearly 3 Millions Followers and receive nothing from facebook advertising money.

Which is to be fair, a bit like working in an office where all your visitors are buying stuffs from your landlord while they are in the building and you don't make any money (you just don't pay rent).

Or like a radio station that would use many songs and never give any money back to the song artists...

tsu.co is here to mend a fundamental issue on the internet related to content creator and their lack of revenue, they want to distribute some money back to them : the "content creator" - because let's face it, we don't go to facebook to look at an empty website with ads, we are going for the posts of people we follow, or our friend's timeline and to post cool links.

Some facts

Basically what you are doing on facebook, you can do on tsu.co (except they don't have an IRC, or groups, or pages, just tags, and messages) ; the big change is that tsu.co pays you back (and they provide some analytics for the visits).

Best of 2 worlds

Now the smart way to play the social media game is to setup your tsu.co account so it will be used as a proxy to post on facebook - and your twitter account.

The feeling you will have after a while browsing tsu.co is like walking through a shopping mall with people you don't really know. Many people are there to make money, and will send you friend requests, but they mean nothing, the only thing they want is a follow-back, visit their profile and that you will share their posts (because that's more or less how they make money).

Searching on tsu.co sucks, you are not supposed to look back for an old post, but to keep posting and posting (until you have filled your quotas).

24h comics

24-Hour Comics Day is an event held around the world which challenges writers and artists to create a full 24-page comic in 24 consecutive hours.

This dare was introduced by Scott Mc Cloud in 1990


More information at 24hourcomicsday

Of course you can do this dare any day you want - but every year (usually in October) there are organized challenges over the World - check twitter.com/24hcdgr  

This Year 2012, it's October, 20th.

Note this dare will push you to the limit (both physically and  mentally) - after you get the topic you'll have to invent a story, write the dialogs, then draw 24 pages continuously -  and to tell the truth in the end, you will feel very shaky, delirious and probably hungry. But the feeling of having made a full 24 pages comics is overwhelming.

Some 24h comics samples :
http://www.sarahgasser.ch/index.php?/comic/24h-comic/
http://herebemongoose.blogspot.com/2010/03/happy-easter-bunnies-story.html
http://letsgetadditives.blogspot.com/2011/10/curse-of-24h-comics.html
http://24hcomicinstudiokamsterdam.blogspot.com/
http://12forever.blogspot.com/2010/03/24h-comics.html
http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=24-Hour%20Comics

A special mention for this guy (Alec Longstreth) - who has made it 10 times!
http://www.lulu.com/shop/alec-longstreth/24x7-a-decade-of-24-hour-comics/paperback/product-6515737.html

Impressive!

Final note it seems that the French have done better ... http://23hbd.com/

More comics resources

Textures :
Plain-Textures.Free textures and backgroud pictures..
CGTextures

Learning Books (PDF)
Drawing Books - Open books for Creative Minds!
Save Loomis!

Inkscape tutorials and SVG download
2D Game Art for Programmers

Fonts
Font Squirrel 

Stock
Public domain and Free Stock photos


DeviantArt resources
youresources.deviantart.com

Tutorials
40-cartoon-character-illustration-tutorials

Comics Generator
Stripgenerator
Bitstrips
Pixton


Inspiration
Vintage Illustration Posters

Inkscape Live Path Effect goodies

Inkscape Live Path effects (LPEs) are neat, but unfortunately not well known and therefor underused.


Lately I found this video and the end results are very pleasant, but because of the lack of explanations and the speed of the video - it's hard to follow

I'll try to decompose it -- Basically you follow 3 steps

1. you draw a shape with the Path tools

2. You open the Path Effect Editor, and add "Spiro-spline" to this shape, this effect will smooth the nodes position and creates nice curves, easy on the eyes.

3. Then You add "Pattern Along Path" and click on the first symbol next to Pattern source (the one in orange)

This will generate a little node on the top left corner of the canvas and will allow new transformation on the current shape.

The next steps are up to you, because it's just a matter of finding the right shape - then duplicate it,  transform it (Object to Path) and resize, change the orientation, duplicate some more, change the color, etc ... until you find the right shape you like.

Blogging like it's the end of the world

Blogging it's a way of life, the more you blog the better you get at blogging.

Now that St Patrick is over, Spring is coming and everybody is starting to make plan to go picnic and hiking outside, but some bloggers are still in front of their computer trying to find content for their beloved blog.

That's what blogging is ... writing post, here and there - and building something that will last.

I can easily picture any blogger as the "Doom guy" on top of a mountain trying to survive, being attacked by procrastination, laziness, auto-critics, etc ... but he will prevails and his blog will be awesome.


5 Ways Blogging Can Save Your Sanity : "Once you start blogging, you begin to pay closer attention to the world around you. You notice the details, live in the present moment, and relish the life lessons, because these become the themes you will write about. You stop going through the motions, living your life on auto-pilot, and instead fully engage in everything that happens. This simple shift in your approach improves the quality of your life in unimaginable ways."

What is "BlogThis!" (a great bookmarklet)

Today I'll share a little secret on how I write my blog.

In the past I used to bookmark links I wanted to post about using delicious.com and then came back later and start posting about it... the main problem was that usually when I had some spare time to write a post I completely forgot many links and or couldn't find them back in my delicious account (which tend to be a mess) and when I finally found or remembered it the "hot news" wasn't hot anymore ...

Now, Thanks to a bookmarklet found on the "blogger help" I can basically bookmark link directly to a blogger draft, and therefor the first step of hot-linking to a "hot news" or a typing a few word on the spot is done. And that ... really makes my blogging experience a lot more efficient.

What is BlogThis! ?

Gimp in only 1 dock

As you may know by default GIMP has two default docks:

• The Toolbox with "The Brushes, Patterns and Gradients dock".
• The LayerBox with "The Layers, Channels and Paths dock".

Which can be a real pain on small display (like 1024x768) -  because basically one third of the display is gone for the docks.

But you can actually merge the 2 docks into the Toolbox, the lower part then contains the brushes, etc .. and the Layers - I've worked this way a couple of days and it's very convenient, (before that settings I had always issue with the LayerBox getting in the way).

Now I just press CTRL+L to access the Layers and CTRL+B to access the ToolBox.

The smaller theme I'm using is the official Small theme from the Gimp package but with this line uncommented (search for the keyword "smaller" in the gtkrc file

# Uncommenting this line allows to set a different (smaller) font for GIMP.
#font_name = "sans 8"
font_name = "DroidSans 8"

Also Here's the content of the gimprc file

# GIMP gimprc
#
# This is your personal gimprc file. Any variable defined in this file takes
# precedence over the value defined in the system-wide gimprc:
# /etc/gimp/2.0/gimprc
# Most values can be set within GIMP by changing some options in the
# Preferences dialog.
(default-image
(width 1024)
(height 768)
(unit pixels)
(xresolution 72.000000)
(yresolution 72.000000)
(resolution-unit inches)
(image-type rgb)
(fill-type background-fill)
(comment "Created with GIMP"))
(monitor-xresolution 86.000000)
(monitor-yresolution 86.000000)
(save-tool-options yes)
(save-accels no)
(toolbox-wilber no)
(theme "Smaller")
(help-browser web-browser)
(toolbox-window-hint normal)
(dock-window-hint normal)
# end of gimprc

By adding "(toolbox-wilber no)" you can save a little extra space at the top of the Toolbox by removing the probing eyes.

Below are extracts from the Gimp's online manual

Dialogs and Docking: "GIMP has great flexibility for arranging dialog windows on your screen. Instead of placing each dialog in its own window, you can group dialogs using docks. A 'dock' is a container window that can hold a collection of persistent dialogs, such as the Tool Options dialog, Brushes dialog, Palette dialog, etc. Docks cannot, however, hold non-persistent dialogs such as the Preferences dialog or an Image window.