Prettifying is a word, firstly. It’s the act of making prettier, especially in a superficial way.
Prettifying photos is also a tech trend these days, apparently. Big enough it’s helped Snapchat and other apps grow exponentially, according to Wired magazine. While it’s great to have nice photos of yourself that look better than the real life you, the problem is people don’t meet your photos in person. They meet you.
The real you.
The real you that’s less than the prettified picture of you.
A friend reminded me of something I used to do before big races (for me), which I thought other runners might enjoy trying. That was to trim my laces so each racing step would be just a tad lighter than the step you made during training when the shoe had the full lace weight. It’d technically be lighter already because with each step, you’d wear down your shoe a bit more. That’s as long as you make sure you don’t pick up gravel and rocks in your shoes!
Shorthand is an incredible, and incredibly EASY to use online platform that lets you create multiple web page stories in one vertically sliding web page (URL), full of pictures, videos, text and other objects capable of being embedded online!
If you look at a sample gallery of what news sites, bloggers and others have created with Shorthand, you’ll see why I’m calling it the new gold standard for online news. You can use it for longer stories, or for developing stories you can add to as time goes by, like live coverage of a hurricane, for example, to show changes over time and/or document “progress”. The BBC and Guardian have recently created some stories I’ve loved using Shorthand, which is why I gave it a try myself!
Recently, I thought about how great it’d be if the sewing machines with electronics these days came with a stitch count feature. And maybe ten different counters, at that, while they’re putting in the counting features. A few for different needles, say, and the rest for different garments, as many of us who sew, don’t sew one garment or item all the way through before starting on another.
Whenever I’ve traveled outside of Canada, I find that Nova Scotia is still relatively unknown to the world. I have to tell people where Nova Scotia is after I tell them I’m from there, because the name is mostly meaningless to them. Then comes the assortment of scouting questions as to what it’s like there, what people do there, anyone famous they might know from there, what people are like there, and so on. On the matter of people, since I’m not a sufficient sample on my own, possibly because I’m Asian because Nova Scotians aren’t mostly Asian, from now on, I’ll tell them about Sidney, as in Crosby, and Maudie, as in (Maud) Lewis.
Sidney Crosby has been the greatest hockey player in the world for a decade or so now. Nova Scotians suddenly get a lot of credibility with the mention of Sidney. However, Maud, is still as quaint as the rest of us is to the rest of the world. If you don’t know Maud, I can’t say I blame you. I didn’t even know much about Maud, and her life, though I did know a bit about her art, and I’m from Nova Scotia.
But if you don’t know much about Maud, may I highly recommend this film that is still out in the US as I write this in early September 2017. You can see it via other means after this. SO beautiful and inspiring, though tragic in many ways, too.
And a fuller summary of Maud Lewis rather than just a movie trailer…
And an oldie but goodie…
A painting of hers that was recently found sold for more than $125K!
Digital Citizen 