Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian compatriots! In this Monday’s Link Roundup, be sure to check out Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life. It provides some pretty interesting ways to reduce the mound of stuff squirreled away in our boxes and filing cabinets. And on a similar theme, you might want to avail yourself of the services of PeggyBank.com. You can read about them in Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age.
- Banished Words. “As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.”
- The 10 Greatest Biographical Poems (Part 1). “My work documenting lives on video always has me on the lookout for enduring biography in other formats, like great biographical poems. I can’t claim to have boiled the ocean, but here are the first five of my personal faves.”
- The Neurochemistry of Empathy, Storytelling, and the Dramatic Arc, Animated. “Paul Zak [is] director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity. In this short film on empathy, neurochemistry, and the dramatic arc, directed and edited by my friend Kirby Ferguson and animated by Henrique Barone, Zak takes us inside his lab, where he studies how people respond to stories.”
- Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age. “Lots of people have memories locked away on old, deteriorating media: home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives and slides…Now, a small company in Omaha, Neb., called PeggyBank.com, is offering a service where you send in all your old media (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online “vault,” usable from any computer with Web access.”
- Is It Worth Converting an Old Book Into an eBook? “Although ebooks are exploding in popularity, the tools we have to create them favor straight text books like novels, memoirs and literary nonfiction. With complex books that include all three kinds of content, we’re still a long way away from being able to easily and inexpensively re-launch the books of the past.”
- Fall fashion – women in veils 1880s-1930s. “Looking through the new fall fashion magazines this weekend, I noticed hats, but few veils. Women have been wearing veils since at least the 13th century B.C. in Assyria. Classical Greek & Hellenistic statues sometimes depict Greek women with both their head & face covered by a veil. Statues of Persian elite women from Persepolis show examples of some women wearing veils & some without. Here are a few from the 19th & early 20th century, which I find fascinating.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Tips, preserving, Resources, How to, storytelling, DVD, link roundup, e-books, E-book, clutter, Compact Disc, Information Age, Lake Superior State University, banished words, biographical poems, empathy, neurochemistry, Paul J. Zak, old media, PeggyBank.com, digital organization, 19th & 20th century women's veils, fashion, veils
For graphic designers, this Monday’s Link Roundup has two gems, The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED and 5 (Mostly) Vintage Children’s Books by Iconic Graphic Designers. If you’re interested in ethical wills, be sure to take a look at Things to worry about. It’s a letter by F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter. While it’s short, it’s nevertheless a wonderful example of an ethical will of sorts.
- Aging Survivors Can’t Forget. [Podcast] “Many of the estimated 200,000 living Holocaust survivors face a new trauma in their final years, as they are overwhelmed by terrible memories they’ve successfully contained for 70 years…Reporter Karen Brown introduces us to survivors and their family members .., as well as social workers and specialists working with them, to find out more about this painful last chapter in a survivor’s life, and about what can be done to help them.” [ Thanks to Stephen Albert of Lifetime Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
- Five Reasons Why Your Life Will Improve By Writing Memoir. “Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoir author, a writing teacher in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. In today’s post, Silverman presents five reasons why writing a memoir will improve our lives! Enjoy!”
- Crazy Talk: The Do-What-You-Love Guide. “I am not someone who likes to give career advice, or teach people to be online entrepreneurs. So I’m not going to do that here. I’ll just tell you this: it’s possible. Yes, it absolutely is possible. And I’ll share what I’ve learned, in small snippets of goodness, about doing what you love.”
- Determining if a sentimental item is clutter or a treasure. “If you’re storing sentimental items in cardboard boxes in your basement or attic or garage, it’s a pretty good sign the items are clutter and not treasures…Plus, you can’t see your items or appreciate them through the walls of a box in a corner of a room beneath boxes of holiday decorations…As you’re sorting through your sentimental items to determine what is a treasure and what is clutter, ask yourself:”
- The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED. [Video] “Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books. As he will tell you, his job comes down to asking: What do stories look like, and how can he give them a face, if not write a short visual haiku for them?”
- Things to worry about. “In 1933, renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about. It read as follows.”
- 5 (Mostly) Vintage Children’s Books by Iconic Graphic Designers. “As a lover of children’s books, I have a particularly soft spot for little-known gems by well-known creators. After two rounds of excavating obscure children’s books by famous authors of literature for grown-ups and icons of the art world, here are five wonderful vintage children’s books by some of history’s most celebrated graphic designers.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged book cover design, books, children, Children's literature, Chip Kidd, clutter, declutter, do-what-you-love, Ethical wills, F. Scott Fitzgerald, graphic design, graphic designers, guide, Holocaust survivors, literature, memoir, memories, Sue William Silverman, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Writing, writing a memoir
