The page below comes from the highly recommended Days of War, Nights of Love.
You may also remember the xkcd strip on the same meme.
Anyway, along those lines, one of the other things that really struck me about my most recent trip to the zoo, is that a great majority of people would approach an enclosure with their cellphone, snap a photo, and immediately walk away. Their entire experience of the zoo was the act of taking a low resolution photo — no experience of actually observing the animals or living the environment around them seemed to be desired.
I was thinking that what I was watching was the act of “reverse tagging”. That is, rather than tagging a location (as in scribbling your name on something to show you were there), this was the reverse — using a cellphone camera, the location scribbled its signature onto the viewer’s Facebook page to show it had been visited by them. The photos were cheap, blurry, and too small to actually go back and even appreciate the image of the animals, and had no value other than to show the person had been there… although in the absence of the individual in the photo, one could argue it didn’t really even do that.
Since the new owner of my old servers decided to pull the plug on all my remaining sites, I figured that instead of just moving them, I’d take the opportunity to redesign them. These are my first two from scratch WordPress themes (this site is based on VeryPlainTxt, one of my favorite themes), along with another theme that’s for a different CMS that I’m fiddling with.
Anyway, this is my rough work for the relaunches of my kitcar site and the winter swimming site. Both put an emphasis on simplicity and clean design. I know some might find them sparse, but I’m not a fan of how busy sites are these days, and I really like seeing just the content and not much else.
Update: Price of His Toys is running.
So one of the things I noticed going to the zoo yesterday, as well as in plenty of time at the park, is that I see tons of fat kids at the zoo, but I almost never see them at the park. About a year ago, I read an article that said that the “secret to slim kids” is just fifteen minutes of running a day… It’s sad because I think that making a child grow up obese and out of shape is one of the worst forms of child abuse because of how hard it makes them to be a healthy adult.
On that note, today’s park adventure (the photo above are the roots of one of the many maple trees that grow there) continues after the break.
(Continued)
