“I was 15 or 16 years old at the time and can’t explain why but it felt powerful to do that, to pick up a phone and call any location on earth just to see who was there and to find out what they were doing. I also remember calling a certain phone booth on Kennedy Boulevard, near the University of Tampa. Often when I’d call that booth a drunk would answer. I don’t remember saying anything when the winos answered that phone, but my actions might sound strange: into the phone I played tapes of myself playing piano. Sometimes people listened. Other times they hung up. Today I am a concert classical pianist, but I no longer play the random phone booth concert circuit.”. (Mark A. Thomas) The Payphone Project, by Mark A. Thomas.

Above: Phone on yellow pillar, by Tanner Beck.
Picture released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

“You can’t love a crowd the same way you can love a person. And a crowd can’t love you the way a single person can love you. Intimacy doesn’t scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon. It’s not a big deal. Whether you’re writing to an audience of one, five, a thousand, a million, ten million, there’s really only one way to really connect. One way that actually works: write from the heart. There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you.”.* (Hugh MacLeod)

How to be creative, from Gapingvoid, or “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”, by Hugh MacLeod.

Above: drawing* on bristol board (Hugh Macleod, ©gapingvoid.com).

*This is a gapingvoid.com content, released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 license.

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.
Then I realized who was telling me this.”.
(Emo Phillips)

“A.Word.A.Day includes a vocabulary word, its definition, pronunciation information with audio clip, etymology, usage example, quotation, and other interesting tidbits about words to subscribers every day.

You can think of it as a word trek where we explore strange new words.
Words are usually selected around a theme every week.”.
(Anu Garg)

“Kawaii style dominated Japanese popular culture in the 1980’s. Kawaii or cute essentially means childlike.

…Cute style began as an underground literary trend amongst young people who developed the habit of writing stylised childish letters to each other and to themselves.”.
(Sharon Kinsella, Cuties in Japan)

“…Put these tones - Formalism and Cuteness - together and you get the somewhat unexpected style I call Cute Formalism.
It’s unexpected because in the west it would be an eccentric, if not forbidden, combination of signifiers.

Formalism for us is intellectual, masculine, dry, adult, hard, macho, unsentimental, avant garde.
Cute on the other hand is silly, feminine, wet, childish, soft, effete, sentimental and kitsch.
What kind of chimera is this?”.
(Nick Currie, Cute formalism)

Sharon Kinsella “has been involved in research looking at emergent social trends linking youth, the media, subculture, corporate culture and new modes of governance, based on Japanese case studies with global application.”.

Nick Currie “also known as Momus, is a songwriter, a blogger and a journalist for Wired.”.

“My name is Sam, I draw pictures from your titles. Send me a title, or anything else you want to talk to me about…”.

“This site could be thought of as a long term semi-collaborative art project. Nobody pays for anything. And when I draw a picture using someone’s title it is added to the front page for anyone who is interested to look at.”.

Explodingdog, by Sam Brown.

Don’t worry, I was born this way.

Above: Not today, shirt drawing; I am alone please leave me alone, drawing on paper, detail. (Sam Brown)