Purifying Water (in a more awesome way)

This is pretty cool. It's a big piece of coal that you can put inside of a bottle of water. The coal filters out the chlorine, and adds other minerals to it in the process. You don't have to stick something on your faucet or have a huge (ugly) pitcher sitting in your fridge. 

I suppose some people would find having a huge piece of tubular coal in their water bottle offensive. These people are irrelevant and have gotten off the Awesome Train many stops ago. Choo Choo.

I also like the idea of using coal to make our lives better. I think coal's gotten a bad rep lately (and rightfully so, as when it's burned it causes quite a mess and doesn't help our global situation much). Here's a positive way of using it that utilizes cheap materials to facilitate a necessity of human survival (clean water). Now, the link below is selling this for 60-something dollars. Am I going to buy this for 60 dollars? Fuck no. I'm fine with tap. However, maybe someone could figure out a way of putting a piece of coal into a nalgene-like bottle, producing them en masse, and distributing them in countries and locales that have difficulty purifying water. Small investment, huge impact. 

I believe that something of this nature has been suggested and perhaps implemented in a limited capacity (and alternatives to this idea have certainly been proposed) but let's face it, we really need to address a lot of the problems happening domestically and globally in a more aggressive way. I hope the innovation from this novelty will trickle down and help the people who need it. There's a long history of this "novelty to practicality" transition and perhaps this will be yet another example.

http://shop.sortofcoal.com/products/bottle_kishu_binchotan

Baked Potato Bar Luncheon

I don't know why, but I am obsessed with the Baked Potato Bar Luncheon that I am invited to every year. The invitations always feature the highest quality clip art and it always pushes the envelope with it's edgy and contemporary design.

I have never been to the Baked Potato Bar luncheon but I think someone needs to go through the archives of the invitations and flyers made regarding this spectacular event and publish some kind of book, because it would be awesome and I would be first in line to buy one.

Food that looks like marbles

So I actually hate Dippin' Dots but I really like the idea of experiencing something in pellet or spherical form. Small things are way more fun than big things. And experiencing something 1,000 times over on a small scale is way better than experiencing something once on a large scale.

Here are examples of things that are awesome that also consume things in tiny circley form:

Look at how cute this bloodhound is. He eats kibble. Maybe we would all be cuter if we ate human food in small spheres.

 

This guinea pig eats food in pellets. Couldn't you just eat him up? Well maybe you could do that after you wake up, smell the coffee, and eat some food shaped like orbs.

 

 

Pacman ate those little yellow dots. God knows what they were made of, but Pacman is fucking awesome, so if it works for him, it works for me. 

In conclusion, all foods should be made into small spheres and eaten from bowls. Imagine your typical salad looking like a big bowl of Trix, and your corn on the cob looking like a big bowl of Kix. Trix and Kix, people. You loved them when you were little, and now you can love your corn and salad the same way. Total no-brainer.

The work of John Dilnot

I first came across John Dilnot's work two or three years ago. The day I saw it, I made one of his prints my desktop background and never looked back. At this point I own a print, I'm saving up for another, and he's by far one of my favorite artists around. Besides that, he's an incredibly awesome, nice person. And that counts for a lot.

Some of my favorite works of John's are his prints of everyday weeds, vegetables, fruits and trees. His examinations of similar varieties of potatoes, for example, is as witty as it is graphically striking. It's pretty awesome how he can take something as boring as a potato (sorry, passionate potato people [PPP's])  and make something as fun and interesting as the print below. 

"Potato Prints", John Dilnot.

A more tongue-in-cheek example of John's work is "Bad Apples", which features rotten specimens of many archaic and forgotten species of the fruit indigenous to England. In contrast to the potatoes above, the colors and differences between the apples become a silly yet engrossing journey into the many ways that an apple can go bad. There's even a worm or two in there.

"Bad Apples", John Dilnot. 

As cool as these images are on a computer screen, the experience of seeing John's work in person is one that should not be missed. I own the print above, and it is rich, incredibly detailed, and highlight his craft far more than any JPG on a computer screen can convey. So I highly recommend checking out his work if you're lucky enough to be in England near his studio, or able to see his work in one of the many venues he's shown his work in in recent years.

As if his talent in printmaking weren't enough, Dilnot also makes spectacular handmade boxes, many of which use his beautiful drawings in conjunction with maps of England to illustrate the migratory patterns of certain birds. Others examine multiple species of birds and owls perched on trees that run up and down the box.

"Mouth of the Thames", John Dilnot.

One of the things I respect most about John's work is his craft. These boxes and his prints are obviously the result of meticulous handiwork and years of skilled craftmanship. He respects his subjects but at the same time is able to see the whimsy and humor in them, and I think this balance is where Dilnot's work becomes wonderful. 

"To The Forest", John Dilnot.

Whether it be capturing the beautiful sweeping movement of a flock of birds across a channel, or a survey of common garden weeds typically found in your front yard, Dilnot succeeds in engaging our imaginations, he makes us smile, and always leaves us wanting more. And as far as awesome things go, you can't get better than that.

John Dilnot is an artist living in the UK, and if you liked anything above, you should check out all of his work at www.johndilnot.com. 

Space is the Place

NASA released a bunch of new images from the WISE mission a few days ago. Basically they're scanning the whole entire sky and taking infrared photographs of everything, capturing details they've never seen before. Some of the first images to come out are absolutely incredible!

This is a comet in the Oort Cloud (this huge sphere-shaped area where tons of comets live at the very outer reaches of our solar system). Can you even believe that? So cool. 

And this is our galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy! So awesome.  


They've got tens of thousands of images they've yet to process, and this project has only just begun... Which kind of makes me wish I was processing those files. Working at NASA would be so badass.


Here are more super cool pictures!


http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html

Cupcakes Cupcakes Cupcakes

Here are some of the most awesome cupcakes ever made by people. Most of these use fondant. I don't really understand fondant or what it is but I know it lets you make awesome cupcakes. I need to learn how to do that so I can make people awesome cupcakes that look like things. Imagine all of Saturn's moons, as cupcakes! Or a bunch of cupcake diatoms swimming around in a sea of icing. So many possibilities. 

You may be thinking "Oh, all cupcakes are awesome". Well, they are not. See, for example, these cupcakes that are supposed to look like Stonehenge.

Moral of the story: Craft is important, otherwise your cupcakes will look like shit. 

Tsilli Pines

Anyone who's met me knows that I'm kind of a mathy guy. I love numbers, and I'll pretty much find any excuse to find reason and order in everything going on around me.

Tsilli Pines' series, "The Figures",  touches on that in an incredibly eloquent and subtle way, incorporating the printed page, delicate stitching, and pigment (red and black). The stitching serves as a path that allows us to traverse through the jungle of numbers and obstacles that face us on a daily basis. Choosing which path to follow, sifting through jumbled, complex information, and eventually conquering and moving past adversity are all things we, as humans, but more specifically (in this work, at least) as consumers and citizens of a wealth-based society, see throughout our lives.

Annual Report, Tsilli Pines (2007)

The question is: are we cognizant of this journey? Yes, we all hate being on hold with the bank, paying mostly interest on our mortgage payments, and fighting tooth and nail to make a living while barely getting by. All of these have to do with numbers, rates, formulae, etc., and we associate these different experiences with corresponding emotions (getting a check for +$1,000 makes Zach happy, getting a cable bill for -$120 makes Zach grumpy).

If I were to ask you what your financial picture was, maybe you'd say something like "it's okay", or perhaps you'd rattle off a list of positive and negative numbers that add up to something that you've decided is indicative of "where you are right now". But do we really know where we are, or how we got here? This is the challenge of "The Figures".

While I usually find that numbers guide me and help me find my way, in this work they served in opposition to the route I sought, something I find simultaneously frustrating and delightful. The phrases and concepts we routinely consider (which serve as her titles:  "Risk Tolerance", "Bad Credit", "Balloon Payments", etc.) are visually represented by the charts, plotted graphs, familiar shapes and symbols of financial culture which we are constantly bombarded with. The circles are analogous to both the cyclic nature of finance and the possibility sets of our decisions, while the use of red and black alludes to our favorite fiscal euphemism (I've always found it fascinating how being "in the red" has become a substitute for "we're totally fucked").

Cutting Losses, Tsilli Pines (2007)

In their literal form, they make up our financial identity. But when reduced, arranged, and presented in this form, these numbers tell a story far more confusing and convoluted than I previously imagined anyone's "financial picture" could be, blurring the lines between our true financial reality and the two-dimensional world that Pines has created in this series.

After looking at and thinking about Tsilli Pine's work, I'm left wondering if all of the numbers I surround myself with are compliments or impediments to my daily life. The $2.44 (-$2.44) coffee I had this morning could have been saved, and if I repeated that on a daily basis over the course of a year, I could have almost $900 (+$890.60)  saved up, which I could use to pay off a credit card (-$643.26) that I'm paying a ridiculous interest rate on (19.99% APR) when I should be putting those finance charges into my savings account (+1.4% APY) to save for retirement (~40 years away).

Thoughts like this used to give me joy, knowing that if I played the numbers right I could navigate through all of these figures and end out "on top". Work like Pines' challenges this notion, taking the numbers out of the forms we are familiar with and creating a structure which we are vaguely familiar with but inexplicably unable to escape.

So I'm left stalled in one of these drawings, looking at the numbers, and not knowing what to do with them or where to go. And for the first time in a while, I'm comforted by that discomfort, and curious how far not going anywhere will take me. And that's a pretty awesome place to be.

Tsilli Pines is a designer and artist based in Portland, Oregon.

And on the 8th Day, God created Awesome.

So I've been throwing around the idea of a blog for a while. See, I'm a bit forgetful, and kind of a scatterbrain, so this will be a good way of keeping track of some of the random stuff I come across on a daily basis, in addition to highlighting the work of the good and kind people I cross paths with. Plus, I've kind of been using Facebook as a place to collect my thoughts (I actually post my grocery lists to my "About Me" section sometimes [it's handy!]) so now I won't annoy people as much with spontaneous thoughts about dinosaurs, lasers, space travel, or any combination of the former.

I'm approaching this as a long list of things that I like, that maybe (hopefully) you'll like, so I can look back 10 years from now when I'm taking a sick day from work (if I've still got it) and kill 5 or 6 hours looking at cool stuff while in my jammy-jams (palm trees in summer, robots in fall and spring, reindeer when it's snowing). If you know about something cool, let me know, because I think that we should all enjoy cool things together. Maybe you can learn something from me, and I can learn something from you, and then we can high five each other and all will be swell.

I'm 27, I work in photography, I live in Boston, and I get to be around some pretty terrific people every day. The world is an amazing place, it totally boggles the mind how much cool shit is going on, and life is so, so good.

Let's do this.