#every good picture ends up super pixelated somehow

[3416]

1634 sun card tapestry (9/7/23-11/9/23)

here she is!! this is my individual attempt to manifest the toronto maple leafs the success and happiness they deserve this year. last year, mitch marner tying the franchise's longest point streak on november 30th was maybe the most fun i had watching a hockey game (except for the playoff series win, of course), but i wanted to memorialize my favorite picture of my favorite boys celebrating that day (thank you kevin sousa for this beauty). instead of doing that by itself, i also wanted to include the rider waite sun card somehow, as it represents positive outcomes for current struggles and general success, abundance, happiness, etc. shoutout to every wonderful person here that helped encourage me and commented on my stuff and just <3

for my fellow crocheters/anyone curious/future self, i've included some of my process below.... took months but was SO worth it. (still not technically done bc i need to block/iron and want to add a backing and a way to hang it, but one step at a time... HAD TO SHARE asap)

step one was playing around in photoshop/procreate and combining the images i wanted to use... there's what i came up with.

the most helpful tool throughout the whole process was a website called stitchfiddle which lets you convert images to pixels for graphgans/whatever you want to make in fiber art honestly. you can change the amount of colors and pixels.. size up and down until you get a look you like. it will also convert your specific chart into colors available in certain brands of yarn which was REALLY helpful to me too. my chart ended up shifting color because of what was available in the yarn brands near me, but i loved the changes so... my chart looked like this.

as for specifics, i used a 4mm hook and did just basic single crochets per square on the chart... the final product ended up being about 55 inches by 36.5 inches. this was my first real attempt at something super intricate, and i kind of just jumped in despite only learning crochet a few months ago, but!!!! i am super happy and proud and hope all the good vibes are felt by the leafies. really just wanna get everyone else into crochet too... feels so rewarding to make something with your hands like this <3 ANYWAY THANK YOU FOR CARING AND SUPPORTING IF YOU HAVE. LOVE YOU ❣️

[rivaltagonist]

Alien man.

[next-lvl]

Finally forcing myself to talk about the elephant in the room.

Wakfu, the fandom, my and Ake’s ocs, everything that didn’t happen around this February, when I did a month-long countdown, hyping up something big that then never came to be.

I worked on this enormous (20 or so characters, 6k+ pixels resolution - larger than I’d ever drawn) tribute, directly nodding towards the famous Wakfu poster by Xa, but with my and Ake’s babies.

I started around December, remade the base sketch several times, this kind of a group pic’s way outside my comfort zone so I had to put extra effort in. Around the end of January I started doing the lines, remade them two times (and probably will again), the pressure of the deadline + my own style not quite matching the old vibes anymore turned this into quite a challenge, but I was willing to brace through it, for the love of these characters and the fandom itself, place I’ve spent 10+ years in.

It was February, the countdown pics already trickled in one after another. I didn’t have the luxury of being fresh and able to draw every day, I’m in a perpetual fight with insomnia on top of other mental and physical issues, so I’d jump at the opportunity to draw every few days or so. I work in bursts. I also had this growing distraction of another passion fighting for my art energy, you know, those catboys and long elves. Balancing everything was nightmarish, but I WAS managing.

Until the very end of February, when, instead of the 10th Wakfu anniversary, there was war.

I live in Russia, regrettably and unfortunately. Won’t go into details, those who need it already have read my posts from back then, in short my livelihood got under a major, although not quite physical, threat overnight. Companies started cutting their services en masse, Paypal included - I’m a self-employed artist fully depending on it to survive - there was so much to deal with, for me alone, not backed up by anyone irl, panicking, jumping from one hastily made plan to another.. It was living hell. Running a bit ahead: it still is.

Since I’m talking about this big picture that hasn’t quite gone anywhere, I’ll try to retain my focus on it. Somehow the accumulated stress from the challenge itself, plus the emotional devastation from war and how it affected my already miserable life, devastation from failing what felt like the most important deadline, something the 10 years and the month-long hype countdown led up to, resulted in me completely crumbling and being unable to continue working on this. For months.

It’s May. Almost June. Real life shit’s still bad, in fact I’m going through another horrible episode, the war caused ripples that still reach and mess up my life in the most physical way. I talked about it recently on my personal twitter if you wanna know details.

And yet, to an outside observer it looks like I’m super productive, I’ve been doodling away on my new FFXIV blog. This’s already quite an essay, I won’t hide it under the cut since it’s THAT important to me, but I can’t well explain the workings of my tired brain, stressed and pushed past the limits. I’ve fixated on this new obsession for good because it’s my only escape since the beginning of the year. My life and my sanity are hanging on one fraying thread, and that thread’s wolgraha that I’ve been drawing to comfort myself nearly every day.

They’re my will to live and love, externalized. This’s how I’m coping.

If I isolate from everything bad in my life, then, bizarrely, it’s the happiest I’ve been in almost a decade. I feel alive, in love on behalf of my new oc, I work on his story, processing his feelings does wonderful things to me. It still does nothing to improve my real life, yet, I’m content with living in my head like this for a while if it means surviving.

What about Wakfu art, ocs and the picture itself? I’m not giving up. I WILL finish it, just don’t know when. The deadline’s failed, the stress and guilt associated with that are a lot. Sorry. Everything’s too much for me alone nowadays. My state’s disastrous, in nearly constant fight or flight mode at one hand, reaching for the comfort of my current obsession and being utterly fullfilled by it, on the other hand.

I’m still standing. I made the wolgraha obsession my everything, I’ve even found decent success and a cozy niche in the new fandom during this year, I wake up, check my platforms and there’s something sweet about my dorks, something that keeps me going. It’ll stay this way for a while. They’re my only strength currently, but I’m lucky to have them at all. Some of my fellow russian artist friends have it much worse nowadays. I’m holding on.

This isn’t the end: of my real life, of my Wakfu life, of everything. I’ll keep going. Just need time to sort this mess out. Thanks for reading and sticking with me.

[tessatechaitea]

Justice League Annual #1 (1987)

Martian Manhunter has five thousand different super powers compared with the one super power of the rest of the team (Black Canary's sonic scream. The other "super powers" are just technological accessory based).

If this comic book isn't about Martian Manhunter's addiction to Oreo cookies then what am I even doing with my life? The only reason I love Martian Manhunter is that he loves Oreo cookies and I view him as the father I never had. Whenever I had a problem growing up, I would think, "What advice would Martian Manhunter give me?" And that's why I was so fat in Junior High School because the answer was always "Eat more Oreos." I know Martian Manhunter's eventual addiction is to "Choco's" but fuck Choco's. Fuck them like every other off-brand Oreo cookie. They fucking suck. Speaking of things that suck, this dick isn't going to suck itself. Now picture me pointing at the comic book because I need to read it. That's how I begin reading all of my comic books. And I say it loudly so the neighbors will think, "Oh boy! That guy next door isn't a nerd at all! Total sex maniac!" The "Hunting the Manhunter" blurb on this cover reminds me that Millennium is coming up and I think I hated that? No, no. I'm sure I loved it! There are two things I couldn't get enough of in my teen years and comic books was the second one of them. Kord Industries has bought some property in the middle of Ultra-Nowhere, South America, and some of its employees have gone off to scout the location.

Wasn't that the episode with the shape-changing hottie who loves sucking the salt out of men? You know what I'm talking about. Also she was probably a male monster posing as a female monster. Proof of that theory is that every single episode of the first season of the original Star Trek could also have been the name of a gay bar.

Inside the abandoned research facility, the Kord employees encounter pretty much the same thing Kirk, Spock, and the other one encountered:

Vampire John Travolta! It's possible I'm misremembering the Star Trek episode.

While on monitor duty, Guy Gardner discovers that large groups of people on four different continents seem to be under the control of a single will and Batman asks Martian Manhunter, "Do you think this is League business?" What the fuck else would be, Bat-Turd?! A new Internet fad like planking or the Harlem Shuffle? I mean, it totally could be that except that the Internet doesn't really exist during this story. I mean if you want to be a pedant about it, I suppose the teenage Internet across college campuses. But nobody likes a pedant so just shut the fuck up and live in my reality while you're reading my stupid comic book review. Just take the fucking Red Pill and relax! Except don't do that because the idea of The Matrix Red Pill has been co-opted by the worst of humanity who think they're somehow the most logical and philosophical people on the planet when they're really just awful monsters rationalizing all of their mean desires.

How did people come away from reading this comic book hating Guy Gardner and not also despising Batman?

The Justice League splits up into teams of two to cover the mass hypnosis issues in Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, and Los Angeles. I'm not sure Batman knows how to balance teams because he sends Doctor Fate and Martian Manhunter together while leaving Mister Miracle with Blue Beetle. Here are my teams: Guy Gardner with Blue Beetle because Blue Beetle is effectively worthless and Guy Gardner has the most powerful weapon in the universe. Batman would go with Black Canary because her sonic scream is sort of like a bat's echo location. Martian Manhunter would go with Scott Free because they're both aliens. And Booster Gold would team up with Doctor Fate because their outfits match. Blue Beetle and Mister Miracle head to L.A. with some, um, problematic dialogue? I think?

This is an "anal sex/everybody in Hollywood is gay" joke, right?

With newer comic books, a scan of 620 pixels (basically the width of the main column of the blog (although I think the width changed when I added the Goodreads app. I should probably fix it so the 620 pixel pictures stop bleeding off into the right-hand frame (if you're reading this on Tumblr, just ignore it. Just ignore everything since Tumblr fucked up their code and now I can't even center pictures or get the captions to sit snugly right up underneath the scans))) was usually enough to read the dialogue clearly. But with these old comics on newsprint, they're fuzzier and the font seems much smaller. Sorry about that but I won't betray my artistic integrity by scanning less than the full panel! At least not in this case is my defense against the pedants who can easily find many examples of me doing exactly that. First Black Canary is treated like shit by Batman and now she teams up with Booster Gold who can't stop hitting on her until she reminds him she's a competent limb-breaker. This must be the kind of comics Comicsgaters wish we could return to! "Remember when women were treated as sexual objects and not one member of the Justice League was Black and constantly said, 'Booyah!'? What great times!" Black Canary and Booster Gold become John Travolta Vampire slaves almost immediately because Batman chose the improper team pairings. It's bad enough that Batman would fail at making proper pairings but it's extra bad when Batman is being written by a writer and the writer made that choice. I mean, how do you pass up the opportunity to team Booster Gold with Doctor Fate?! They would look so fucking good together! Batman and Guy Gardner (you know how you can tell Hal Jordan is the real Green Lantern? Because people will say "Green Lantern" when discussing him instead of "Hal Jordan") wind up in Tokyo where Doctor Light is all, "Hello, boys! I'm a vampire now!" Then she blinds the fuck out of them because Batman forgot to put on his Bat-sunglasses.

Batman steals this move from Doctor Light in the next regular issue.

Doctor Light kisses Batman and he's all, "Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I get it. Being a vampire is pretty awesome. No wonder writers write vampire versions of me every other year or so."

I don't think the editors briefed Willingham on what Beetle's Bug can and can't do.

Beetle lands at Kord West and is immediately swamped by John Travolta Vampire's thralls. So he does the thing he does in nearly every comic book except the one where Maxwell Lord shoots him in the head: he runs away. But he doesn't run fast enough and winds up possessed aboard the Bug with Mister Miracle. The story hints that Miracle gets possessed just after the scene changes but he's Scott Free, the world's greatest escape artist! I would guess he'd be the one to save everybody else but judging from the cover, it's Martian Manhunter who keeps from getting possessed. In Australia, Doctor Fate wades into a group of infected people because he's a gigantic arrogant prick. He's all, "I'm a frickin' Lord of Order, assholes! I know a spell that can get to the root of this problem!" And then the Vampire John Travolta is all, "I'll kill Kent Nelson if you don't leave his body." And Doctor Fate is all, "Well, J'onn, I've gotta go! Nice hanging out with you! Ta ta!" Which leaves Martian Manhunter as the only person left on Earth who isn't infected (or at least the only person left who is in this story). I bet that's pretty lonely. But Martian Manhunter is used to being lonely. I wonder if he's capable of making his right hand into a female martian so he can fuck it? Martian Manhunter has no idea what he's dealing with so he puts on Doctor Fate's helmet to gain all of the other powers that he didn't already have without it. But only for a few seconds because Superman would never be able to get an erection again if he found out Martian Manhunter had all of his powers and could also do magic. J'onn wears the helmet just long enough to learn what Doctor Fate learned about the contagion: it's a sentient cell! It's smart cancer! And I guess Vampire John Travolta was Patient Zero. Now J'onn just has to figure out how to fight Smart Cancer. I don't even know how he'll defeat it because I just looked up Smart Cancer in the Who's Who to read about its weaknesses and wouldn't you know it? There's no entry for Smart Cancer! Maybe it was in an update that I don't own. Like that version of Who's Who that was just loose pages to stick in a binder! I have that one too but it's possible I just didn't buy all of the expansion packs. Martian Manhunter heads to the source of the contagion to meet Smart Cancer head on. What he finds is a boss from Castlevania.

When you have thousands of people at your disposal, is the most effective way to use them shoving them together into one giant person?

The first thing Smart Cancer's Granfaloon does is try to smash J'onn with its people fist. In effect, it's smashing a dozen people head first into the ground so that dirt sprays up all over the place. So I guess a dozen or so people are now dead, right? It's not like Smart Cancer gave them invulnerability to massive head wounds.

I think this panel is the one where all the Justice League editors through their hands up in resignation and sighed, "I guess the Justice League is ridiculous now."

Martian Manhunter realizes, like me, how fucking stupid Smart Cancer is to put all of its people in one gigantic people-shaped basket. Since all the minds are linked, he realizes he can throw the Fate helmet on one of the people and Doctor Fate can possess Smart Cancer. It works but only for a limited amount of time. Doctor Fate can't hold that many people under his sway. But Doctor Fate does know who can control Smart Cancer: the martian! He can shapeshift his cells into some kind of prison or something. I don't know. It was explained in the most basic medical and scientific terms but they were still beyond my attention span. In the end, Martian Manhunter contained the Smart Cancer in him and that's where it lives now? Oh, and speaking of "the end," check out this clever and titillating final panel:

"Why's it gotta be the ass of the only woman on the team?" I say while pulling my pants down.

Justice League Annual #1 Rating: What?! I don't rate annuals! I mean, maybe sometimes I rate annuals. This one was okay. It was sort of interesting but I was disappointed that Vampire John Travolta wasn't the actual enemy. I hope Smart Cancer fights its way out of J'onn and makes another appearance later.

[sierrabinondo]

woodland creatures tour - day 8 (falls church)

finally got around to starting the final journal. life picks back up so quickly for me when i return from going anywhere, really, so it’s hard to stick to little projects like this. but i probably could have benefited from writing this sooner after the actual last day of tour haha. it’s funny how we only leave for a week or so but it feels like our lives shift so drastically during that time. it really does take time to snap back into reality and accept normalcy.

after a good night of bullshitting until super late (we tried to put on hot ones around 2:00 am but all passed out shortly after) we grabbed coffee and breakfast at coffeeology (i THINK that’s the name) in greensboro. we stopped at a shop literally across the street from the venue we played last year, new york pizza. seeing that place again reminded us of playing to literally our tourmates destination dimension and maybe like 3 other people in the room, versus the couple dozen we played to last night. the main band that played the gig that night literally sat outside the entire show with their friends and only came inside for when they had to play. it was disheartening, to say the least. this time, we didn’t play to a crowd that was there for us, but we played to so many more people who actually stayed inside to watch us. 

i wish i could remember this drive, i didn’t have any work to do so i think this was the day i bought untitled goose game and i was playing it a little bit haha. we listened to some music and just enjoyed the trek to our last gig on this run. of course, we started to hit traffic as we approached falls church, which is in the DC area for anyone not familiar. however, we were still making okay time. we could make a detour to drop our bags at the hotel in vienna, get food, and then run our dual band cover of uneasy hearts with pulses. forgot to mention this in the jacksonville journal lmao, i approached kevin with this idea for the last show of tour super casually and we did end up deciding as a whole to go through with it! 

the hotel in vienna was such a strange spot, but it was kind of cool? we stayed at the vienna wolf trap hotel hahaha. all of the decor was SO DATED but it was still pretty okay. the guy at the desk was nice, we somehow got on the topic that we were a band on tour rand he gave us late check-in for free! ended up not needing it. but it’s the thought that counts haha. we arrive to the venue and jaime’s girlfriend rebecca is there to greet us :’) poor girl drove their RV all the way down to virginia alone, and that thing drives slowly. but then that meant jaime could ride back up to jersey with her which was good. 

it is insane how at home we feel at falls church. i guess everyone south of maryland is just way fucking cooler than the northeast lmao, but it’s like pulling up to play somewhere at home in jersey and running into old friends. i can’t get over that we have that in a state hundreds of miles from home. it was good to see familiar faces and be back at the vfw. our friends’ band to michigan, with love was also on the gig, and our newer friends in science penguin joined us on the show as well! it was an all-around homie fest. i rolled up to the venue with the remainder of the trulys i purchased the night before, and shoved the box in the fridge haha. i was ready to just chillll. 

because we have played here a handful of times, it is also now tradition to walk across the parking lot and go get korean fried chicken at the restaurant next door. it fucking sucks, we always arrive just in time to eat before doors and i normally can’t eat jack shit because of fried/spicy food being horrible for my voice. i ordered bibimbap and then 12 wings to go, for after the show lmao. or a snack after we play!! but i ended up forgetting to FUCKING eat them AND they just sat out overnight in the van so they were toast. goddamnit. i think the restaurant is literally just called bbq fried chicken, the way they fry their chicken is just perfect. the sauces are all delicious and everything besides that on the menu is also tasty. 

i wanted so badly to break my last set of tour curse. it’s definitely a self-imposed, silly, superstitious thing, but my last set of tour iS ALWAYS HOT GARBAGE. i always for sure mess up. and this was probably the best last set of tour i’ve had but still not my best performance all of tour haha. i got lost the bridge of murder mountain and couldn’t hear my bandmates for some reason? fucking embarrassing but!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i cannot stress enough how much fun it was. it truly was. fucking, we’re about to play pixelated and i’m trying to give my SHPIEL about not being a JERK musician and i hear the sounds of “smooth” by carlos santana featuring rob thomas faintly playing through my in-ears. i rip them off and i’m like, what the fuck is going on LMAO. surprise, the pulses. gang were behind it, and tyler, taylor and kevin come dancing up to the stage. i was DEAD. we never do last day of tour pranks so we were fuuuully unprepared hahaha. it was so funny. my meme now takes on a whole new meaning!! 

most importantly this show felt like such a fun celebration of tour. pulses., as they did all tour, hyped us up during almost every song and went off for synapse fires. we are too fucking lucky to have them as friends. they really helped make every set and every show feel worth the hours of travel and sometimes stress. to look out and see their faces in the crowd and singing the words uplifted us each night. it’s unfair that we live so far apart. it’s like how they say your soulmate could be literally anywhere in the world but you won’t know until you go look??? it’s like that but with finding supportive friends. i’m not sure if we’ve stressed this enough but this tour gave us strength to keep going as musicians, due in part to their friendship. we always joked like how the fuck we’re supposed to just go on not playing shows together or seeing each other all the time but it really does suck lmao. i was in my feelings in both a good and bad way, soooo i immediately scurried off the stage to go grab a truly the second we were done HAHA

it’s always so sad to watch your friends play their last set of tour, too. well moreso bittersweet! but you know that it’ll be your last time seeing them play for a while. i enjoyed every single minute. i love watching them play hometown shows, too. halfway through we jumped on stage to do the uneasy hearts cover, completely unrehearsed, and i’d say we did a pretty damn good job. such a fun way to send off the woodland creatures tour. i had always wanted to do something like this, where two bands play on stage at once (holla me versus i nd the artwork of). the energy the whole song was so infectious, it was fun to see people in the crowd go off too. also, fucking KRIS KHUNACHAK shot this video with TWO ANGLES holding both his cameras at the same time. i still can’t get over that.

i love that pulses. played you already know as their closer, it was the perfect way to wrap up their set and the best bookend to the setlist they chose. kevin would get on the mic every night and speak to the crowd, dude is just really good at being a performer and resonating with people. in jacksonville he sat down and everyone followed his lead haha. it was fun to dance one last time with everyone as we watched pulses. kill it before the tour came to an official end. we then gathered outside to take group pictures. it’s the part you don’t wanna get to, because it signals farewells in the near future, but we took some really great ones. 

post-gig taco bell plans were foiled, but someone recommended the silver dollar diner nearby. diners outside of jersey are normally horrifying but i trusted the people we were with. we piled back in our vehicles and rolled 20 heads deep to the diner. it was actually a really sick diner with tons of vegan dishes and pretty tasty food. i got chicken noodle soup, red wine and an ice cream sundae because i am a freak of nature. we ate up like 3 tables and sat altogether, just bitching about having to return to real life the following monday. but also, trying to plan the next time we would see each other. already!! and!! talking about doing more shows together. we try to work with different people all the time but there are a select few bands we would tour with or gig with again and again and again and pulses. are one of them. after how much fun this run was it’s pretty hard to imagine not doing this again. it just... makes sense. so much sense. and it feels wrong to not do it again lmao.  

goodbyes were bittersweet. we huddled in the parking lot by our van to say goodnight and see ya later, one by one. fuckin, tyler is moving to nashville very soon so we all probably won’t see him for a hot minute :’----------( thankfully everyone else really isn’t that far if we planned a weekend trip to meet halfway or if we wanted to make the trip out to each other, thank god!!! i don’t know what i would do if i couldn’t always have a part of this tour with me, somehow or some way.

afterword

was thinking of adding a lengthy epilogue but it’s essentially just me openly sobbing in the van the entire ride home hahaha. you’d think that every single time it would get easier to come home but it doesn’t. i know why touring impacts me as much as it does emotionally, but when the bittersweet acceptance of coming home pours over into tears like it does, i feel kinda silly. i’m sure that there are musicians who are constantly gigging that would love nothing more than to be home more, and i know that if i was in their shoes i would come to dread touring, too. 

i really, truly wish i was in a place, or that my bandmates and i, were in a place to tour more often, but for now we have what we have. and that’s okay. i want to share something beautiful our friend charlene posted today that deeply moved me: 

This is the moment. I’ve made it.

People always ask me “what are you gonna do when you’ve made it?” I need you to understand something; I’ve already made it. I am living out my dreams. It’s not easy and obviously I would only hope that’s I will continue to grow, to reach bigger goals, to push the limits. But I’ve already made it. This is the moment. I won’t let myself miss out on the beauty of life that’s right in front of me because I’m too worried about something that may or may not come tomorrow. This is the moment.

[jackleveledup]

Game of the Year 2016: My Top Three

It's been a long road for Game of the Year and 2016 in general, but we finally made it to the top three! In case you missed it, there were a ton of other games I loved this year that I wrote about in a post I called "Very Good Games".

And one last thing before we close this out: thanks for reading!

#3. Hyper Light Drifter

This year, no single moment compared to the rush I got from my first chain-dash in Hyper Light Drifter. There's a primal satisfaction to the accelerating timing it demands, as each flash of pink and teal raises the pressure of the impending button press. Eventually I learned that it's not that good in combat and it's only one of many means of survival, yet it was at that precise moment that the game won me over.

I say this without exaggeration: Hyper Light Drifter is a visual masterpiece. Fans and Kickstarter backers have been drooling over screens for years now, and the reality seems to have even exceeded expectations. Environments overflow with lightly muted colors and all kinds of mystery, like enormous Evangelion-inspired beasts, esoteric symbols, and ruins of a civilization long since past. Animation is beautifully handled frame-by-frame, highlighting the tension in each action and closing off with a shimmer of vibrant neon.

It's not an easy game by any means, but success becomes its own reward. Every battle is a fury of bullets and blades with far more dead bodies than dead air. I found myself often getting lost in the chaos, only realizing a room was clear when my darting eyes couldn't find anything new to shoot at. What's unusual, though, is that I didn't find the boss fights to deliver the same sense of exhilaration as the average encounter along the way, but as a capstone to a difficult journey, they work well enough. Maybe I should just be grateful I was never tempted to chuck a controller.

Hyper Light Drifter is enthralling, both in its hectic gameplay and its unwordly atmosphere. I know without a doubt that I'll be back for another shot at deciphering what the hell happened to this world.

#2. Kirby: Planet Robobot

If you've ever daydreamed about what you'd do with your own giant super robot, Kirby: Planet Robobot is a game you need to play. I mean this in the best way possible: it seems like the game was designed by a 6 year old with complete creative authority.

"Give it a giant drill! No, saw blades! Give it flamethrowers! Make it transform into a car! AND a jet!"

Yep, those are all things you can do, and it owns!

The heart of Kirby games has always lied in their diverse power-ups: fire, ice, spark, hammer, bomb, and dozens of others. This time, the sizable set of abilities is doubled by applying not just to Kirby, but his huge, face-shaped armor suit. If Kirby gets a sword, his mech gets two massive beam-sabers. If Kirby gets a jetpack, his mech transforms into a jet! Discovering all of the ways these forms could be used was a joy that lasted me the entire length of the game.

With so many power-ups there's a staggering number of game mechanics at play, which HAL Laboratories take full advantage of in the level design. Whether its a puzzle requiring a certain power-up, a rare boss or ability, or simple visual flair, each stage has some kind of "gimmick" to separate it from the last. Ideas reappear only seldomly, and not without being somehow altered and built upon. Sometimes the game even pretends to be something else entirely, like the shmup style stages that utilize the "Jet" version of the robot armor, or the auto-scrolling stages in the "Wheel" armor. All of this leads to a collection of stages that feel memorable and worth revisiting.

Between its game design and its vast possibility-space, Planet Robobot executes on its concept almost as perfectly as I can imagine. I know Kirby isn't the top Nintendo franchise for most people, but given the run the series is having right now, I'm starting to seriously question how long my little pink creampuff will go underappreciated!

#1. VA-11 HALL-A

VA-11 HALL-A is a visual novel that sounds extremely good in theory - just read its tagline: "cyberpunk bartender action." You play as Jill, who works at a bar called Valhalla in a futuristic city of perpetual darkness, poor people, robots, androids, and most of all, strife. It operates pretty differently as a video game, though. It's often assumed that gameplay exists for the sole purpose of fun, but even for a visual novel, VA-11 HALL-A's simple mechanics took me more than a few drinks to warm up to. Kinda' like in real life, the process of mixing "Brandtinis" and "Bleeding Janes" isn't especially exciting after the first few times, and almost everyone visiting the bar seems to have way more going on in life than you. I just wasn't seeing how it came together. It took some time and careful thought, but by the end of the game it had shaped into something incredible.

It's all thanks to the bar's atmosphere that I stuck around at all, and man, did they nail it. First and foremost, this soundtrack is phenomenal. What woud otherwise be your average cyberpunk setting becomes a wondrous dystopia thanks to Garoad's deft, moody composition. Its implementation is sharp, too. Instead of having music set to match each scene, you're handed complete control over the playlist while on duty. There's a palpable realism to incidentally having serious talks over loud, upbeat music, or joking during an ominous buildup. It helps to give Jill some believable agency as a bartender, too. You can always decide what drink to serve, how strong to mix it, or what music you want to play, but not who comes in that night or what to talk about. Details matter, and the developers at Sukeban Games were paying careful attention.

While Jill herself doesn't seem to bring much nuance to the story (...at first), the rest of the cast handily pick up the slack. The pixel-based character portraits are surprisingly expressive and go a long way in realizing the game's zany, reference-loaded dialog. Dorothy is a definitive fan favorite - she's an android that was specifically engineered to have weaker emotional responses to things that humans often find traumatizing. This trait colors every one of her conversations with typical humans, especially once you figure out that she's a sex-worker. Her career is almost completely inconsequential to her and she LOVES to tease people about it, so the scenes that ensue whenever she meets someone new at Valhalla are pretty entertaining, to say the least. In general, though, Sukeban Games have a firm grasp on how to both play into tropes and subvert them, which allows them to hit their punchlines without compromising any drama during more serious scenes.

My favorite part about VA-11 HALL-A is how much of the narrative the player is trusted to piece together. For a visual novel there's suprisingly little exposition - almost none, actually! It's basically all conversations, and not even ones explicitly about current events. Your only glimpse at what's happening outside of the bar is limited to what you happen to hear, what you choose to read in the news or on shitty forums, and most importantly, what connections you can draw between them. It's amusing to talk to some of the bar's customers, for sure, but your impression might completely change when you realize what they're up to before they stop in or finish their last drink.

The way in which VA-11 HALL-A dismantled my first impression continues to impress me. As the credits rolled it made perfect sense that the bartender would feel less interesting than the guests she serviced. Maybe it shouldn't feel "fun" to Jill when she mixes a drink for a grumpy customer. Maybe it makes sense that a struggling bartender wouldn't have the clearest picture of the "what's" and "why's" of her city's politics. None of that is crucial to finding happiness anyway. VA-11 HALL-A highlighted aspects of life that I don't usually give a second thought to, in a way that feels uncommonly literary for a video game. It's probably not going to be a game for everyone, but to those that seek it out, the narrative at work is nothing short of intoxicating.

[hangonimevolving]

Sewing Table Refurb Part #2: The “F*&k This S#!t” phase

I’m back to continue my saga of the sewing table refurb!

So every DIY initiative I’ve ever undertaken, every decor overhaul, sewing project, furniture makeover, ANYTHING of the kind, has invariably involved a step in the journey toward completion that I endearingly refer to as the “F*&k This S#!t” phase.  This is the phase of a project where the initial enthusiasm and excitement bubble back down to normal levels, the complications and problems of a project start popping up, and then usually, life just starts getting in the way.  A kid (or two) gets sick, and requires a ton of attention and care.  The car breaks down.  The weather stinks, for days on end.  The family gets weary of the behemoth piece of unfinished furniture blocking the hall.  A friend or family member unexpectedly needs assistance and support with something, and you feel pulled more towards assisting with that, than sanding wood for the 11th day in a row.  You find yourself looking at the exciting, adorable project idea that once got you jazzed, and thinking “F*&K THIS S#!T.  I just want it over with already!”

Yeah, so - - confession.  For the last week I’ve been in this place.

And its so frustrating and disheartening, because invariably, I am ALWAYS surprised to find myself feeling this way in a project.  Every idea I’ve ever had was born out of TRUE and genuine excitement, and a feeling that it would somehow improve my life, or give me a humongous adrenaline surge and tidal wave of pride and accomplishment, and flowers would rain down from the heavens and firecrackers would spontaneously burst in air upon its completion. So I’m always flabbergasted to find myself looking at the thing I once loved, and feeling like kicking it to the curb, running away from it, QUITTING.  But I always have this feeling.

Happily, I am a stubborn-ass donkey who has almost never quit anything in my life.  This personality characteristic is actually sort of a problem for me, because it means I often put up with crap I really ought not to, or I continue certain activities or pursuits WAAAAAY longer and more seriously than I really should, for the satisfaction and self-worth they bring me in return..... but I digress.  In this case, with the sewing table - - today I’ll talk about how my stubbornness is going to bring me to triumph, in the end.

So where we left off:  with GREAT pains, I had singlehandedly carried the table into my house, into the guest room, and parked it there so I could stain and seal it indoors (THIS WAS A MISTAKE THAT I’D END UP REGRETTING).  I was so excited, because I presumed that the “hard part” of my project - the woodworking and engineering portions - were behind me, and everything left - the staining, painting, use of pretty patterned paper to decorate the table - were all merely cosmetic from this point onwards and therefore “easy.”  Ohhh, how wrong I was......

There was a day where I had to attend to a broken plastic drawer guide on the bottom-most drawer.  Seemed like an easy enough fix.  Except...GEESOME PETE WTF kind of fasteners did they use to attach these things?  IT was some kind of weird nail that when shot through the holes of the drawer guide, flanged out like a rocket ship and therefore were impossible to pry out with a hammer.  I had to deploy all kinds of tools....

I had to use needle nose pliers to bend back those flanged-out pieces into a straight/tapered shape so they’d actually be able to travel through the nail hole to come out.  I even had to take a hack saw to some of the tiny flanges and just saw them off.  Then, in the end, I took to hitting the reverse side of the nails with a long flathead nail and my hammer, like a caveman with hammer and chisel, until the nail traveled BACKWARDS and out.  It was a GIANT pain in the ass, and extremely boring/unrewarding work.

But at last.... I got the little jerks out.

And within moments, my new drawer glide was screwed into place.

PHEW.  I was all chuckling to myself, thinking “wow, so that was hard!  I guess that was the one stumbling block in this otherwise smooth-sailing project!!!”

Oh, how dumb I was.....

Later that day, I prepped the table with blue painter’s tape and a good wipe-down with tack cloths, then  got two coats of Kilz 2 Water-Based Primer on the drawer faces and some of the side/back panels (because I had nearly a full can of it left over in my garage for some reason).   

After that, I decided that it was time to begin the staining process!!!!

Now, to backtrack a second - - I had put DEEP, DEEP, DEEP-ASS thought into how I wanted this table stained.  In the end, I was hoping to go with a grayish, modern-meets-rustic-meets-midcentury modern weathered wood look.  Something like this:

I did painstaking research on what kind of stain to use - would I go with traditional oil-based stain, or the more newfangled, novice-friendly gel stain?  I decided in the end to try traditional stain for a few reasons: it was more readily available in my area in the gray color I wanted, and I was also interested in having my table’s natural wood grain show through, and I worried that gel stain would be too opaque for my tastes.  

Spoiler alert:  

yeah.  I.  CHOSE. POORLY.  (sidebar #2:  anyone who got that Indiana Jones reference right away wins a gold star from me!!!)

Anyway.  So here I was, all excited and peppy, ready to apply my TRADITIONAL STAIN on my painstakingly sanded and prepped table. (you FRIGGING IDIOT, you).  Here I went, applying Varathane wood conditioner, because “look how thoroughly I’ve researched everything, and look how awesome I’m gonna be when my perfect shade of perfect wood stain goes on perfectly the first time and I’m gonna be perfectly happy!!!”  (eye roll)

It’s SOOOO painful to look at this picture now.  LOOK HOW AMAZING the table looked after the wood conditioner.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  The wood grain looked AMAZING, and I was soooooo happy and proud of myself.  

God, I feel sick to my stomach looking at that, knowing that only a short 30 minutes later, I’d be f*&cking it all up completely :(  Also, it was right about this point where I realized I was literally smoking my family out of the house.  The wood conditioner had a VERY noxious smell, that little by little, floated into the air and completely filled nearly every corner of the house.  It was super powerful, and we all couldn’t stand it.  Dr. Spouse helped me (carefully) carry the table back out to the garage, where we opened the door quickly to let out the fumes, and then we ran back inside, set all the A/C fans to circulate for a few hours, then grabbed the kids and went out to dinner to escape the worst of it.  (we shut Pixel in the office room with food, water, and litterbox and the fan running - there was hardly any smell in there, thank goodness).

I popped open my can of REGRET AND SALTY TEARS Minwax Classic Gray wood stain, and had at it. Then we went out to dinner.  About an hour and a half later....

So these pics don’t look all that bad - but let me tell you, in real life, what I saw was DEEPLY CONCERNING.  The stain hardly seemed to take at all on the tabletop, except to dull the gorgeous natural appearance of the wood in most places, and in some places - worse - - there was this white, patchy, ashy kind of residue look all over.  IT was almost as if the table looked like it was covered in decades of dust and game.  

On the drawer fronts, the stain had taken differently, and the wood trim appeared a more true gray.  

The legs of the table took the stain differently still.  

The whole thing was blotchy, ashy, and uneven. A minor little buzz of panic started buzzing in my gut... . and there it would remain, getting worse and worse over the next few days.I painted one, then two coats, of blue paint on the drawer fronts, while I contemplated what to do next.

I suppose I ought to mention here that at some point, after painting the drawer panels blue and while contemplating the whole stain situation, I decided to try removing some of the painters tape, and to my horror - saw that I was peeling off the entire blue latex paint layer adjacent to it.  I even followed all the advice and adages online of not letting the paint dry all the way before removing tape.  But alas, my paint job needed serious retouching, to add to the worry and work of the stain disaster.  F*&K.

After a few days of confusion, frustration, stalling, researching, and grieving the fact that I might have ruined my table with this horrible stain - - I decided I needed to find a way to move forward.  The F*&k This S#!t phase had sent me into a tailspin, and the only way to get out of it would be to come up with a plan, try it out, and see what would happen.  I was pretty sure I couldn’t really make matters worse, but who knew?!

I decided it would be worth my time, effort, and money to track down a supplier in my area that carried a gray gel stain.  I knew right away where I ought to try - a shop that the previous summer, I had visited to put in a new custom-built barn door in our master bedroom suite to close off the bathroom area from the bedroom.  I dialed up Sheridan Lumber and asked about their current stock of gray and espresso-tinted gel stains.  To my delight, they had a few on hand - so I raced to their store one morning, and purchased a small 8 oz. can of Old Masters Gel Stain in Weathered Wood.

I found a few hours to spare later that day, and I decided to go for it and give it a whirl.

The gel stain had a delightful, pudding-like consistency that made working it over the wood really easy, especially on vertical surfaces and other awkward spots where the traditional oil-base stain just went dripping and running in difficult-to-control directions.  I’d heard that you could apply the gel, leave it on a few minutes, and wipe it off, or apply and wipe off immediately for less color penetration.  I chose to apply and wipe off immediately, working in small sections of the table till it was all done.

Here is a great picture showing the results after one coat of gel stain.  The drawer front on the desk features the traditional oil-base stain, after two coats.  The drawer sitting on the floor, in front of the table, shows the results after one coat of gel stain.

The gel stain certainly provided more opacity, which I initially didn’t necessarily “want” with this table for fear that it would occlude the beautiful wood grain.  But I realized that I really did care for a true gray tone, and the only way to do that with this table, with the wood its made of (walnut wood), would be to bump up the opacity a little.  The interesting thing about gel stain is that, to an extent, you can control how opaque the stain is going to be on your wood.  The apply-and-wipe-immediately method renders the most opacity, for obvious reasons (the pigment doesn’t penetrate as thoroughly with less time on the surface).  But one could apply and leave for anywhere from 5-15 minutes, in order to let the dye penetrate more, then wipe off, if you wanted more opacity.  And if you want a LOT of opacity, you could actually paint the gel stain on, and leave it on - - just like a paint.

Happily, I feel like some of the natural wood grain still does come through, as I wanted it to, with the way I applied it.  It’s nice to have on the drawer fronts - but its more meaningful to me on the table top.  I ended up doing two coats of gel stain in total, applying and wiping off immediately in small sections about 24 hours after Coat #1 was done and dry.  And..... here is the result, for now!

I am not sure if this is TRULY the look I was going for, when I imagined it all in my mind’s eye.  But it is definitely WAY closer to my intended look than where the original oil-based stain had left me about a week ago.  Phew!  I’m so relieved that the “F*&ck This S#!t” phase, painful as it was, ended with me feeling a little less disappointed and a little more happy, even if it entailed a ton more work and worry than I’d expected. Moving on!  I *believe* (oh god, please let it be so) that my next update will be a very happy one indeed, for it *should* in theory be the BIG REVEAL, where the project is done and I am standing back, thoroughly basking in the sense of accomplishment and the exciting possibilities of my sewing table having a new, more ergonomically-satisfactory home.

Here is a little teaser for what’s to come..... my final product will involve this adorable geometric retro-print paper :)

Toodles for now!

[rajinedgeofdarkness]

Skyfyre's Last Fight

Skyfyre lost her mind somehow. Something in her mind snapped during this very moment. She got on Blaze’s saddle and flew off away from everyone else and not listening to her fellow allies not even Eldoron who kept yelling at her to stop. Sky took a straight shot towards the enemy’s weapons that were aimed directly towards her. She didn’t change course despite the arrows that flung past her. She tried to concentrate her magic and both her and Blaze began to glow brightly with a fire elemental based aura. The aura grew until the two almost appeared as a big fireball shooting towards the group. The enemy continued to shoot at them but the fire burned all the projectiles to ashes before it even got close to both of them. Skyfyre let out a scream as she re absorbed Blaze’s soul and completely bonded with his magic as well before touching down the cliff side with an explosion. The blast was powerful enough to destroy the majority of the weapons and set fire to most of the enemies who tried to dodge her magic as she continue to blast the area with fire balls. She made her way slowly past the line of charred ballistas and cannons that were melting due to the extreme heat. Her hair and eyes were bright red with anger and power as they met with that of Acheron who stood in fazed by the destruction around him. He smiled and showed his fangs that glistened amongst the flames. “You have learned a lot since the last time I met you.” A tear could be seen running down Skyfyre’s cheek as she clenched her teeth and gave him a menacing look. “You were the one who killed my parents!!!” Skyfyre began to charge a fireball and shoot one straight towards him only for it to dissipate before it reaches him. “Nice try……is that the best you got?” Suddenly a dark purple aura became visible as a force field surround him and he began to laugh to himself as he reached his hand out. A snap of his fingers caused the earth to shatter under Sky’s feet and she barely jumps out of the way. Grabbing onto the side of the newly formed chasm as she tries to re summon Blaze, she begins to feel a piercing pain within her mind that prevents her from channeling her magic and no longer have the mental connection with her draconian ally. Acheron walks towards the side only to grab her arm and pull her up forcefully. His purple eyes met with her red ones that were slowly turning back to brown as the magic leaves her body. “Nooooooooo!!!!” 

 A gunshot could be heard from behind and a bullet shatters upon contact with his force field, but not without exploding that forces the two apart. Skyfyre readies herself for a fight when Eldoron grabs her and tries to get her under control. “Let go of me!!!!.” “Sky, you can’t beat him, he’s going to kill you!!!” Pixel flies past the two as Orion and Jessie can be heard not far behind with the copter ready. “We need to go…..now!!!” Jessie notices Acheron from a distance getting back onto his feet, his aura glowing brighter than ever as he eyes Skyfyre with malicious intentions. Eldoron continues to try to snap Sky out of it, but she only struggles more. “I will not let him leave alive, not after what he did to my family!!!” Eldoron is forced to let go as Sky super heats her skin getting him to let go. “Yes,….come closer and see what you can do against me.” Acheron prepares another magical attack as he summons the dark spirits around him. The spirits lunge forward with a crackling sound as a trail of black fire follows close behind. Sky jumps to the side to dodge the first attack and she ducks under the second. As the spiritual emblems fade behind her, the burn mark on her chest begins to glow. “Sky…..he’s too strong, you can’t beat him.” She can hear Blaze as he breaks her mental wall to force her out of her current mental state. No response…….”Please Sky, you’re going to get hurt, if not killed entirely”…no response still. “Ahhhhhhhh!!!.....Urg!” Sky clenches her chest with her fist as she can feel Blaze’s soul forcing himself out and materialize before her. Blaze’s large body blocks Sky from going further as he slams his tail on the ground making her stop in her tracks. The others have time to catch up. Sky stands still clenching her chest in pain from the forced summoning. When Blaze materialized, she lost a lot of her magic and physical energy, but she was still filled with rage and a lust for revenge. Blaze immediately turns his head to face Acheron, smoke blaring from his flared nostrils. He bares his teeth letting out a low pitched grumbling roar as Acheron walks towards the group. He spreads out his wings to cover the entire group from any further danger. “Hmmmmm, now I have you all right where I need you.” Acheron grins and laughs as he thinks on his next move. Skyfyre felt hands on her shoulder as she sat crouched down with a tear coming down her cheek. She looks over to see Eldoron hovering over her and Jessie and Orion standing close to by to the sides of her.

 A subtle glowing can be felt as Pixel hovers close by. Everyone was here…..the people that came to her despite everything. Her muscles relax as she lets herself fall to her knees and hands trying to catch her breath. The red in her eyes and hair fade to a dull version and her skin returns to a normal temperature allowing Eldoron to wrap his arms around as he tries to get her back on her feet. “Duck!!!” Orion yells as a huge purple fireball barely grazes over everyone’s head as Blaze’s wing extends over the entire group like a tent with his head and neck wrapped around everyone. An explosion could be heard and a cracking sound as the earth below their feet becomes unstable. Looking behind they can see a newly formed chasm. They are trapped and their only hope is to take Blaze back to the airship. “Blaze, we have to go now, before Sky loses her magic altogether.” As the group begin to mount his neck, Sky suddenly curls her body in pain. Ughhhhhh!!!!, Blaze lets out an awful sound as he gaps his jaw and whips his head upward forcing everyone off. He falls to the ground and begins to dematerialize as Sky reabsorbs his soul. Once Blaze is out of the picture Acheron can be seen with his fists clenched upward with a black flame charging in one hand as he continues to slowly walk towards everyone. “You’re not leaving that easily, not until I get finished with her…..” He points at Sky curled up in pain on the ground still. Eldoron refuses to leave her side as Jessie and Orion take their place in front. Orion begins to use his telekinesis to bring up loose rocks shielding the group. The rock wall doesn't last for long as they explode and scatter. Orion continues to form a new wall and keep it standing for as long as possible until it gets destroyed again. “Running out of time….” Eldoron tries to lift Skyfyre up and carries her as far from Acheron as possible before placing her down where Jessie and Pixel can try to help ease the pain and get her back on her feet.

 Eldoron runs back to where Orion is struggling and prepares to fire his newest invention as he waits for the wall to explode to have an opening. A loud buzzing sound can be heard as the gun charges. Eldoron reaches into his trench coat to reach out for a white gem and stick it into a slot on the top of the contraption. A large laser is emitted blasting the ground before Acheron before blasting him. The force of the beam pushes him back and away from everyone. Buying them a little time, they run back to the other side of the cliff.. “Sky!!!!......Skyfyre?.....can you still hear me.” Jessie could see something was terribly wrong and it wasn’t just a simple case of fatigue from the fight. Continuing to get her attention, but she remains unresponsive almost with a blank stare as if she is unable to move. Sky’s vision begins to blur as she feels faint and almost powerless. “What’s happening to me?” She tries to touch Blaze’s mind with hers only to hear him groaning in pain. “Blaze………bla……?” Contact becomes lost as she continues to become disoriented feeling the rumbling and hearing the sounds of weapons and magic going off on both ends, she feels helpless. The others continue to fight keeping Acheron away from them as they try to make their way back to the ship. Darkness takes over in Sky’s mind as she begins to hear an almost familiar voice. “Sky…….you are more powerful than you know,…….you will be more use to me than you are to those pathetic allies of yours.” Sky clenches her eyes as she fights the dark presence in your head “With you by my side, we can rule the universe and destroy those that resist us.” “Noooo,…..noooooo, you can’t…..you WON’T!!!” “Too bad, you are already mine.” 

 Everything suddenly becomes quiet and still, she opens up her eyes to see everyone in a frozen pose. She can see Jessie with glazed eyes looking down on her as she tries to get out of her now limp grasp. She looks around to see everyone else stopped in their tracks as Eldoron and Orion are seen running away. Rocks and debris floating in mid-air. She can barely move herself every motion now becomes a struggle, but she still remains aware of everything as she. She tries to stand up only to fall back down. “No use fighting your fate.” She looks around only to suddenly feel a hand clenching down on her shoulder with great force. Acheron stands over her keeping her in her place. “You know, you and me aren’t that different…..”. Heavy breathing and frustration can be seen as Sky fights his hold on her. “I’m nothing like you!!!!” “What makes you say that?” Before Sky can utter another word, his other hand comes over and and covers her mouth……”mmmmph”. “We are both powerful magic users, very powerful indeed and you seem to grow in power every day. I mean you think you are using your powers for good, but I assure you, you are not. Those powers are still those meant for destruction, whether you believe otherwise, you are still hurting more than aiding…”. He takes his hand off her mouth and releases his hold on her. Sky tries to get up and face him. “You’re wrong, I’ve used my powers to save lives, to help people, you want to kill everything and destroy planets with your dark magic.” This part will continue to be about Acheron using his dark forces to prove to Skyfyre otherwise that she is better off coming to his side as he threatens to kill everyone in the most brutal way possible if she still doesn’t abide to his wishes. 

 Acheron lets time continue, but him and Sky are long gone once everyone realizes what’s happened. “She’s gone…..”. Eldoron desperately searches for her. “Acheron must of taken her while she was in that weakened state, but how? I don’t even recall him coming anywhere near us.” Jessie remains skeptical and confused. Orion looks up to the sky “we’ve underestimated him.” “We have to find her, before it’s too late, who knows what he will do to her. I could never forgive myself if something bad was to happen to her….” Eldoron, frustrated, pounds the side of the ship with his fist. “We need to head back to Rajin and regroup there, our navigation systems will help us track her down, but in the meantime, we have to heal up.” Pixel remarks as she notices major cuts and bruises on everyone. Orion and Jessie board the ship as Pixel follows. Eldoron stalls for a moment before going in as well while whispering under his breath. “I can’t imagine my life without her by my side.”

[nerdwiththehat]

Stately Design - OR - How a Terrible Administration Seems to Have No Idea How to Use iMovie, or Photoshop, or Anything Really.

Content Warning: I will be embedding some content in this post from the “official” (whatever the hell “official” means anymore) social channels of the United States Government, and some pictures. The tweets and posts included here may contain tracking, cookies, or other unknown metrics that may not obey DNT rules on my blog. So, if you’re reading this part, you’ve been warned.

get ready for some really dumb stuff from this guy who calls himself president I’m sorry

How are they going to design the TrumpCare website? You put in your SSN and get told to fuck off?

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity)

May 5, 2017

I’ve made it no uncertain secret that I’m against basically every single thing the new administration has done in the last **checks watch** jesus christ, not even 7 months yet? My policy complaints on the administration could fill, have filled entire posts on my blog, my Twitter... It’s going to be a whole year worth of fighting policy.

What I’ve seen less often is the fact that this administration has just about no idea what design is. Graphic design, cohesive design, consistent design, anything, anything to do with design, at all.

This all started back in May, when, in response to DNI James Clapper providing testimony implicating Russia in interfering in the 2016 election, Donald Trump tweeted some junk, as usual, but then did something odd - changed his Twitter banner to include a weird, non-standard Twitter embedded image form of the tweet, and Twitter got super confused.

Nothing says "completely innocent" like changing your Twitter banner photo to say "'no evidence' of collusion" pic.twitter.com/NKYbylOGrK

— Aeth Sbramson (@thetomzone)

May 9, 2017

If there's one thing I can scream in agony about the Cheeto-in-Chief's twitter, it's that it has NO CONSISTENT DESIGN AT ALL. pic.twitter.com/BkiQPtYxU6

— Liam Hefferman (@Nerdwiththehat)

May 9, 2017

Like, we didn’t really understand what to do about this. Did some intern get pushed onto “please Photoshop this tweet onto this picture somehow or something we’re not telling you why”, or did the idiot in charge just do this on his iPhone or something? Nothing about this image works. It’s

Ignoring the image rules for use of the Twitter logo set out in their image terms and brand resources

Ignoring the standard formatting for tweets over an image, or embedded tweets

It’s tiny - the original image is barely 600 wide (Twitter generally recommends at least 1500 by 500, and a bare minimum of 1263 x 421)

The font’s atrocious too - I’ll get to his broad choices on fonts and colours next, but I’ll be precise here - Tweets are only ever displayed in Helvetica Neue Bold, or composite system sans serif (on all my devices, this is Noto standard, because I’m a pedantic prick) if your device doesn’t support displaying the tweet natively. For images - It’s Helvetica Neue Bold. Always.

Don’t forget, he’s set this as his Twitter banner!

It seems that the administration now has quite possibly no idea how to design anything, or has any comprehensive design documentation... or had any - all of this horrible designing has been a hallmark of the Trump campaign... or don’t we remember their attempted rebranding about halfway through the general election, and the logo choice that came with that?

The President & The Web

Barack Obama, George Bush, and Bill Clinton set a standard for presidents and the internet. However much I may have disagreed with George Bush politically, his  team produced a cohesive design across web communication, the White House website, press releases, etc - an impressive accomplishment before the advent of social media.

I’ve yet to find complete documentation on the design, or even a design bible (I wish!) for the Bush White House, but I’m comfortable calling this “Puma Presidential”, after the Mac OS X 10.1 “Aqua” variant. Lighter drop shadows, bezeling of columns and boxes, subtle edge gradients, friendly links, but not aggressively friendly, skeuomorphic, or simplified. It’s very similar to the BBC’s design at the time, like a lot of official sites, or strangely reminiscent of early OS X/Windows XP. If anything, the White House’s site is the most friendly of the official sites I saw at the time.

Next, the Obama White House updated the site to be a bit more modern in the 2010s - shadows disappeared, corners sharpened, pages become responsive and a little more simplified. Search bars disappeared into the top bar, and then the topbar got a hamburger menu. Buttons finally appeared, instead of bare links, the site looked much better. It’s one of the most impressive redesigns since NASA’s proposed redesign in the 70s (which remains one of my most favourite designs, and design bibles, in modern history), and it’s stuck, too - Even the Trump White House has kept the basic underlying design of whitehouse.gov from the Obama administration, instead of working on their own site - but that’s where the similarities end.

Obviously, well-thought-out messaging has never come out of this administration. Pages on whitehouse.gov now range from screeds about fake news filled with typos, seemingly written by an angry middle-schooler, to proclamations from the desk of the President that cannot possibly be written by him. Aggressively spell-checked and edited, sanitised statements about things the President contradicts a few hours later on Twitter.

Images from the Trump whitehouse.gov seem to have no consistency, using different transparent effects, coming out in horrible resolutions, not being websafe (Today - someone embedded a bitmap graphic in the page that made my computer flip out so hard I thought someone had hacked the whitehouse.gov website), using horrible non-palette colours... the list goes on and on. And, this isn't even mentioning the hell that Trump's team is doing on the backend, tearing apart the slugs that the Obama web team created, when they're deleting old policy pages willy-nilly, like environmental protections, global climate change, LGBTQAI+ protections, statements on healthcare, immigration... It's a huge mess. A total developer's nightmare.

But whitehouse.gov isn't the preferred communication style of the President - it's all about them tweets. 

Trump & Twitter

Trump uses Twitter more than any other politician in recent memory, and far worse than any other politician in recent memory. Remember my tweet above? There really is never a consistent tone or design to anything he ever posts, besides bat-shit crazy.

Like... Did you spend any time on this text? The @Twitter logo asset? This text isn't even centered! Where did this 🇺🇸 come from!? pic.twitter.com/sub32Qu6uU

— Liam Hefferman (@Nerdwiththehat)

May 9, 2017

Like, we're talking more of these shoddy graphics, mismatched fonts - now the tiny font rant! Trump has chosen some of the worst fonts I've ever seen. So many slab serif fonts when all his communication is in even modern sans-serif - and weird futuristic style fonts too WHY buddy no one cares you’ve suddenly found the font palette we ALL had that time back when were super into geocities but it’s 2017 get with the programme it’s not all

anymore, my god, so many misaligned graphics, and things getting all pixelated from compression. Poor lighting, poor planning...

Like, these two examples really set me off. One, Melania, apparently abandoning her anti-bullying campaign after recognising that her husband was the catalyst for more bullying in schools than ever before, has taken up the anti-drug crusade. She kicked it off, however, with a staggeringly awful graphic:

Opioids are destroying our youth/people. Mtg w @Potus & @SecPriceMD today to give my support to #STOPDRUGADDICTION pic.twitter.com/aAjNNnu98n

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS)

August 8, 2017

...Or, my number two annoyance, the default iMovie titles that seem to show up in every video he posts on Twitter nowadays

Like, forget the message itself now, because it's a message that stands for everything wrong in politics, and in general, but the way he's delivering it feels like some crappy start-up that needs to hire me or CPRM to improve their messaging, or to hire them a designer. I've worked on branding for companies like road flagging companies, for technology companies - I was head of brand for two of my own companies, for crying out loud!

(In case it wasn’t obvious, I think every company’s logo should be a nice LIME GREEN.)

And I've never before seen someone with so many resources behind him (and so much fucking cash), and so many idiot people happy to back him up, floundering with some of the worst brand messaging I've ever seen! How did this even happen?!

Like, even before she would have made it to office, Hillary Clinton's team had a cohesive design document. My issues with her policies aside, her design was AWESOME. It was functional, clean, and above all else, consistent. It was also called Pantsuit I still think that's awesome.

And like, they hard-core kept to it! They had mock-ups of what whitehouse.gov would looks like with Pantsuit as a design guide! It made up the content of her statements, and the design of the paper that they came on! It was a cohesive design system that obeyed the rules of good design, while still allowing some exceptions, exception allowances built in to how the design worked! I love when people make decisions like this that unify the design of anything!

And, to make it even better, it had clear accessibility guidelines, something that really gets my designer motor running.

While I may have some reservations about Hillary Clinton in the White House, I can say with certainty that her website and Twitter would have been indefinitly easier to look at, easier to use, and easier to understand.

Ugh.

So what’s the takeaway here? I don’t really know what to make of this whole situation. But I think it’s a great example of one of my favourite axiom of this whole insane political mess: Never attribute to malice that which can already be explained by incompetence. I honestly can’t tell at this point which things Trump is doing are part of his grand scheme of evil, but I can 100% see all the things he’s doing because he’s lazy, bored, irrational, and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And I honestly can’t tell which of these is worse.

It’s going to be a long rest of the year.

[endlessarchite]

Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway)

My new corner garden of hydrangeas is blooming! But before I get to lots of photos of pretty flowers, I need to tell you a family story.

When I was a kid, my Dad would plant lots of varieties of flowers. But because he was also a penny pincher (and a little more talented at growing flowers than I), he preferred to grow gardens from seed. There was just one little catch…

He wouldn’t mark, label, or pay any attention to what flowers were growing where. Dad would buy packets of seeds whenever they went on sale and just sort of scatter them in various places around the house. No real color scheme, or height planning, or knowing what grows best with what. It would always be a sort of surprise each spring and summer (much to the chagrin of my mom) to see what would suddenly pop up or completely take over. But many times, the results would also turn out beautifully:

Gorgeous, right? But then again… why am I bringing this up?

Even though Dad was clearly pretty good at this little gamble, I have spent years struggling to figure out how best to grow things in my own gardens. I like to think that I’ve gotten far more confident about knowing what will thrive these days, but if I’m spending cold hard cash on a flower or shrub, I tend to be more of a planner (however, I’m still my father’s daughter at being a “Frugal Fogle” as I’ve proven with some of my plant hacks before).

So you can imagine my surprise when I spent some time and effort planting my new hydrangea garden in the corner of the back yard… mulching… putting down fertilizer… and watching things suddenly start to bloom… to realize that some of my plants were blooming… a little different than how I expected.

When I originally looked at the tag and bought my new BloomStruck® hydrangeas, I expected to see them coming in like the way I’ve known my other Endless Summer hydrangeas to come in: big, “mophead” clusters of little flowers varying in color from pink to deep blue. And since these were specifically supposed to be the BloomStruck® variety and I’ve seen lots of pictures on the Endless Summer® website gallery, I knew that the color would probably be even more vibrant. But as I inspected some of the shrubs closer, I realized that some of my plants were showing more delicate centers that looked like they weren’t blooming all the way. Hmm…

As you guys have seen from the disclosure I’m required to post (FTC rules being what they are and such), my new corner garden is unique in that it is sponsored this year directly by the Endless Summer® folks. I have planted their Original variety in my yard over the years and fell in love with how easy and pretty their hydrangeas are to care for, especially since they bloom and re-bloom from spring to fall. So, it was a no-brainer when they reached out to partner for my new corner garden idea. Just as the flowers started to bloom and I published the first blog post about my plans, one of their reps contacted me and solved my curious little flower puzzle: some of these flowers were not, in fact, the BloomStruck® variety!

I went back to looking at all of the signature blue pots that Endless Summer hydrangeas come in and all of their labels. Was I nuts? Had I picked up the wrong plant? I had only just started cleaning up the garden so I still had all the labels the pots came with. What the heck???

A little back and forth with the ES folks and we got down to the bottom of it: when the local nursery put out the plants, they’re also the ones who put the pricing labels on the tags (I had Photoshopped the price out of this original image I took at the nursery, but pictured is the label I’m talking about). Somehow, when they did that, they must have taken off the tags and then stuck them back in each pot, mixing up the pots and labels and sold a different variety — called Twist n Shout, which is a “lacecap” bloom style — as BloomStruck! 

As you can imagine, I was kind of embarrassed over the whole thing — when you promote something for a brand, you not only want to be accurate for the sake of professionalism, but I also don’t want to accidentally tell you guys something wrong either. Not to mention pretty irritated at the nursery for the mixup, since it meant I’d have to dig up the ones that were wrong and replant (I could have kept them, but it’s merely a preference thing that I specifically wanted all the plants to match). Luckily the nursery (like most these days) have a refund policy so it was easy to return… and then I went and picked up BloomStruck pots at a competitor location.

But just to double check (since now I was super concerned about how little I knew of identifying these plants beyond what the blooms look like, ha!), I also learned that the BloomStruck variety can be identified by their reddish stems (the Original has a similar bloom look but green stems):

Anyway, the point of this story is just that unbeknownst to me, I wound up carrying on my dad’s tradition after all. So instead of making me fuming angry at the nitwits at the local nursery for almost making my garden look like it was having an identity crisis (well, ONLY angry at them, that is), I can look back and once again have a crazy story about this house to tell my friends, and a nice little funny family memory thrown in every time I go back out there to see how my “new” new hydrangeas are doing (as if I need more funny stories, right? This house, I swear!).

Where were we? Oh right: Hydrangea Care and Maintenance!

Color and fertilizing: Like I mentioned, one of the reasons why I agreed to work with the Endless Summer folks in the first place was that I already knew how easy their plants were to care for; so even though I had to sort of “catch up” the new plants to the ones I planted back in the spring, they all started growing in nicely once I added some slow-release fertilizer (I prefer Osmocote as a good catch-all fertilizer, but if you specifically want to change the color of the blooms, you can also use a pink or blue fertilizer that changes the pH balance in the soil for the color you want).

Watering: To keep things coming in nice and healthy, I took the swapping out of the wrong plants as an opportunity to add a soaker hose, but wound up turning it off about halfway through the summer since we’ve had a little extra rain over the last couple of months and this garden area is close to the roof downspout (too much water can lead to producing less flowers, and the hard Georgia clay already holds more water than sandy soil).

(FYI — for more care tips and reminders, you can text ENDLESSSUMMER to 73095 for timely care tips (this is not for marketing purposes… it just provides care instructions throughout the season). Furthermore, Endless Summer® Hydrangea has teamed up with Pandora to create a playlist. To find it, open Pandora and search for Artists Rebloomed. Happy Gardening!)

Sun and wind: My number 1 tip about hydrangeas is to pick a place where it is protected by the wind, which is why I plant them near fences and under the shade of larger trees; I’ve found that when they’re protected enough from the sun and wind, they can grow like crazy and pop up blooms before I know it. The southern heat can lead the leaves to wilt in midday, but they perk up in the evening again once the temps cool down a little (usually by the time Charlie is due for her evening walks).

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

Once things were corrected, they started blooming and showing off their beautiful range of summer colors. I’m going to let them get better established before I do cuttings, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look in the fall too. I just love how deeply purple they have been coming in with all of the recent rain we’ve had in Georgia:

The lighter hues aren’t half bad, either :

So, enough of that crazy tale… how about another awesome outdoor giveaway?? Here are all the details!

Endless Summer® Bloomstruck Giveaway – Experience Life in Full Bloom™

Prize:

One (1) set of Edison String Lights

One (1) Notch Wood Server

One (1) Beverage Dispenser, and

One (1) pair of Endless Summer® branded gardening gloves

Number of winners: one

Giveaway ends: Friday, August 11th at 11:59pm

Geographical restrictions: U.S. only

To enter: Leave a comment on this post answering the giveaway question below. Yes, you have to leave a comment. Or don’t, but if you don’t, you probably won’t win. I check them because I’d much rather reward a regular reader (usually giveaway jumpers don’t stop to leave a comment, so that seems to help your chances!).

Please update the Rafflecopter widget to confirm you’ve left a comment. Winner will be chosen at random via the widget auto-generator.

Giveaway question to answer (many of you know how this goes): Have you ever found something cool or unexpected growing in your garden?

Ready, and… GO! Good luck! (And if you want to share your own hydrangea photos on IG, be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #LifeinFullBloom so I can see them!)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Endless Summer® Hydrangeas. The opinions and text are all mine.

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The post Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

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Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) published first on http://ift.tt/2qxZz2j

[darensmurray]

Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway)

My new corner garden of hydrangeas is blooming! But before I get to lots of photos of pretty flowers, I need to tell you a family story.

When I was a kid, my Dad would plant lots of varieties of flowers. But because he was also a penny pincher (and a little more talented at growing flowers than I), he preferred to grow gardens from seed. There was just one little catch…

He wouldn’t mark, label, or pay any attention to what flowers were growing where. Dad would buy packets of seeds whenever they went on sale and just sort of scatter them in various places around the house. No real color scheme, or height planning, or knowing what grows best with what. It would always be a sort of surprise each spring and summer (much to the chagrin of my mom) to see what would suddenly pop up or completely take over. But many times, the results would also turn out beautifully:

Gorgeous, right? But then again… why am I bringing this up?

Even though Dad was clearly pretty good at this little gamble, I have spent years struggling to figure out how best to grow things in my own gardens. I like to think that I’ve gotten far more confident about knowing what will thrive these days, but if I’m spending cold hard cash on a flower or shrub, I tend to be more of a planner (however, I’m still my father’s daughter at being a “Frugal Fogle” as I’ve proven with some of my plant hacks before).

So you can imagine my surprise when I spent some time and effort planting my new hydrangea garden in the corner of the back yard… mulching… putting down fertilizer… and watching things suddenly start to bloom… to realize that some of my plants were blooming… a little different than how I expected.

When I originally looked at the tag and bought my new BloomStruck® hydrangeas, I expected to see them coming in like the way I’ve known my other Endless Summer hydrangeas to come in: big, “mophead” clusters of little flowers varying in color from pink to deep blue. And since these were specifically supposed to be the BloomStruck® variety and I’ve seen lots of pictures on the Endless Summer® website gallery, I knew that the color would probably be even more vibrant. But as I inspected some of the shrubs closer, I realized that some of my plants were showing more delicate centers that looked like they weren’t blooming all the way. Hmm…

As you guys have seen from the disclosure I’m required to post (FTC rules being what they are and such), my new corner garden is unique in that it is sponsored this year directly by the Endless Summer® folks. I have planted their Original variety in my yard over the years and fell in love with how easy and pretty their hydrangeas are to care for, especially since they bloom and re-bloom from spring to fall. So, it was a no-brainer when they reached out to partner for my new corner garden idea. Just as the flowers started to bloom and I published the first blog post about my plans, one of their reps contacted me and solved my curious little flower puzzle: some of these flowers were not, in fact, the BloomStruck® variety!

I went back to looking at all of the signature blue pots that Endless Summer hydrangeas come in and all of their labels. Was I nuts? Had I picked up the wrong plant? I had only just started cleaning up the garden so I still had all the labels the pots came with. What the heck???

A little back and forth with the ES folks and we got down to the bottom of it: when the local nursery put out the plants, they’re also the ones who put the pricing labels on the tags (I had Photoshopped the price out of this original image I took at the nursery, but pictured is the label I’m talking about). Somehow, when they did that, they must have taken off the tags and then stuck them back in each pot, mixing up the pots and labels and sold a different variety — called Twist n Shout, which is a “lacecap” bloom style — as BloomStruck! 

As you can imagine, I was kind of embarrassed over the whole thing — when you promote something for a brand, you not only want to be accurate for the sake of professionalism, but I also don’t want to accidentally tell you guys something wrong either. Not to mention pretty irritated at the nursery for the mixup, since it meant I’d have to dig up the ones that were wrong and replant (I could have kept them, but it’s merely a preference thing that I specifically wanted all the plants to match). Luckily the nursery (like most these days) have a refund policy so it was easy to return… and then I went and picked up BloomStruck pots at a competitor location.

But just to double check (since now I was super concerned about how little I knew of identifying these plants beyond what the blooms look like, ha!), I also learned that the BloomStruck variety can be identified by their reddish stems (the Original has a similar bloom look but green stems):

Anyway, the point of this story is just that unbeknownst to me, I wound up carrying on my dad’s tradition after all. So instead of making me fuming angry at the nitwits at the local nursery for almost making my garden look like it was having an identity crisis (well, ONLY angry at them, that is), I can look back and once again have a crazy story about this house to tell my friends, and a nice little funny family memory thrown in every time I go back out there to see how my “new” new hydrangeas are doing (as if I need more funny stories, right? This house, I swear!).

Where were we? Oh right: Hydrangea Care and Maintenance!

Color and fertilizing: Like I mentioned, one of the reasons why I agreed to work with the Endless Summer folks in the first place was that I already knew how easy their plants were to care for; so even though I had to sort of “catch up” the new plants to the ones I planted back in the spring, they all started growing in nicely once I added some slow-release fertilizer (I prefer Osmocote as a good catch-all fertilizer, but if you specifically want to change the color of the blooms, you can also use a pink or blue fertilizer that changes the pH balance in the soil for the color you want).

Watering: To keep things coming in nice and healthy, I took the swapping out of the wrong plants as an opportunity to add a soaker hose, but wound up turning it off about halfway through the summer since we’ve had a little extra rain over the last couple of months and this garden area is close to the roof downspout (too much water can lead to producing less flowers, and the hard Georgia clay already holds more water than sandy soil).

(FYI — for more care tips and reminders, you can text ENDLESSSUMMER to 73095 for timely care tips (this is not for marketing purposes… it just provides care instructions throughout the season). Furthermore, Endless Summer® Hydrangea has teamed up with Pandora to create a playlist. To find it, open Pandora and search for Artists Rebloomed. Happy Gardening!)

Sun and wind: My number 1 tip about hydrangeas is to pick a place where it is protected by the wind, which is why I plant them near fences and under the shade of larger trees; I’ve found that when they’re protected enough from the sun and wind, they can grow like crazy and pop up blooms before I know it. The southern heat can lead the leaves to wilt in midday, but they perk up in the evening again once the temps cool down a little (usually by the time Charlie is due for her evening walks).

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

Once things were corrected, they started blooming and showing off their beautiful range of summer colors. I’m going to let them get better established before I do cuttings, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look in the fall too. I just love how deeply purple they have been coming in with all of the recent rain we’ve had in Georgia:

The lighter hues aren’t half bad, either :

So, enough of that crazy tale… how about another awesome outdoor giveaway?? Here are all the details!

Endless Summer® Bloomstruck Giveaway – Experience Life in Full Bloom™

Prize:

One (1) set of Edison String Lights

One (1) Notch Wood Server

One (1) Beverage Dispenser, and

One (1) pair of Endless Summer® branded gardening gloves

Number of winners: one

Giveaway ends: Friday, August 11th at 11:59pm

Geographical restrictions: U.S. only

To enter: Leave a comment on this post answering the giveaway question below. Yes, you have to leave a comment. Or don’t, but if you don’t, you probably won’t win. I check them because I’d much rather reward a regular reader (usually giveaway jumpers don’t stop to leave a comment, so that seems to help your chances!).

Please update the Rafflecopter widget to confirm you’ve left a comment. Winner will be chosen at random via the widget auto-generator.

Giveaway question to answer (many of you know how this goes): Have you ever found something cool or unexpected growing in your garden?

Ready, and… GO! Good luck! (And if you want to share your own hydrangea photos on IG, be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #LifeinFullBloom so I can see them!)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Endless Summer® Hydrangeas. The opinions and text are all mine.

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The post Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

[petraself]

Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway)

My new corner garden of hydrangeas is blooming! But before I get to lots of photos of pretty flowers, I need to tell you a family story.

When I was a kid, my Dad would plant lots of varieties of flowers. But because he was also a penny pincher (and a little more talented at growing flowers than I), he preferred to grow gardens from seed. There was just one little catch…

He wouldn’t mark, label, or pay any attention to what flowers were growing where. Dad would buy packets of seeds whenever they went on sale and just sort of scatter them in various places around the house. No real color scheme, or height planning, or knowing what grows best with what. It would always be a sort of surprise each spring and summer (much to the chagrin of my mom) to see what would suddenly pop up or completely take over. But many times, the results would also turn out beautifully:

Gorgeous, right? But then again… why am I bringing this up?

Even though Dad was clearly pretty good at this little gamble, I have spent years struggling to figure out how best to grow things in my own gardens. I like to think that I’ve gotten far more confident about knowing what will thrive these days, but if I’m spending cold hard cash on a flower or shrub, I tend to be more of a planner (however, I’m still my father’s daughter at being a “Frugal Fogle” as I’ve proven with some of my plant hacks before).

So you can imagine my surprise when I spent some time and effort planting my new hydrangea garden in the corner of the back yard… mulching… putting down fertilizer… and watching things suddenly start to bloom… to realize that some of my plants were blooming… a little different than how I expected.

When I originally looked at the tag and bought my new BloomStruck® hydrangeas, I expected to see them coming in like the way I’ve known my other Endless Summer hydrangeas to come in: big, “mophead” clusters of little flowers varying in color from pink to deep blue. And since these were specifically supposed to be the BloomStruck® variety and I’ve seen lots of pictures on the Endless Summer® website gallery, I knew that the color would probably be even more vibrant. But as I inspected some of the shrubs closer, I realized that some of my plants were showing more delicate centers that looked like they weren’t blooming all the way. Hmm…

As you guys have seen from the disclosure I’m required to post (FTC rules being what they are and such), my new corner garden is unique in that it is sponsored this year directly by the Endless Summer® folks. I have planted their Original variety in my yard over the years and fell in love with how easy and pretty their hydrangeas are to care for, especially since they bloom and re-bloom from spring to fall. So, it was a no-brainer when they reached out to partner for my new corner garden idea. Just as the flowers started to bloom and I published the first blog post about my plans, one of their reps contacted me and solved my curious little flower puzzle: some of these flowers were not, in fact, the BloomStruck® variety!

I went back to looking at all of the signature blue pots that Endless Summer hydrangeas come in and all of their labels. Was I nuts? Had I picked up the wrong plant? I had only just started cleaning up the garden so I still had all the labels the pots came with. What the heck???

A little back and forth with the ES folks and we got down to the bottom of it: when the local nursery put out the plants, they’re also the ones who put the pricing labels on the tags (I had Photoshopped the price out of this original image I took at the nursery, but pictured is the label I’m talking about). Somehow, when they did that, they must have taken off the tags and then stuck them back in each pot, mixing up the pots and labels and sold a different variety — called Twist n Shout, which is a “lacecap” bloom style — as BloomStruck! 

As you can imagine, I was kind of embarrassed over the whole thing — when you promote something for a brand, you not only want to be accurate for the sake of professionalism, but I also don’t want to accidentally tell you guys something wrong either. Not to mention pretty irritated at the nursery for the mixup, since it meant I’d have to dig up the ones that were wrong and replant (I could have kept them, but it’s merely a preference thing that I specifically wanted all the plants to match). Luckily the nursery (like most these days) have a refund policy so it was easy to return… and then I went and picked up BloomStruck pots at a competitor location.

But just to double check (since now I was super concerned about how little I knew of identifying these plants beyond what the blooms look like, ha!), I also learned that the BloomStruck variety can be identified by their reddish stems (the Original has a similar bloom look but green stems):

Anyway, the point of this story is just that unbeknownst to me, I wound up carrying on my dad’s tradition after all. So instead of making me fuming angry at the nitwits at the local nursery for almost making my garden look like it was having an identity crisis (well, ONLY angry at them, that is), I can look back and once again have a crazy story about this house to tell my friends, and a nice little funny family memory thrown in every time I go back out there to see how my “new” new hydrangeas are doing (as if I need more funny stories, right? This house, I swear!).

Where were we? Oh right: Hydrangea Care and Maintenance!

Color and fertilizing: Like I mentioned, one of the reasons why I agreed to work with the Endless Summer folks in the first place was that I already knew how easy their plants were to care for; so even though I had to sort of “catch up” the new plants to the ones I planted back in the spring, they all started growing in nicely once I added some slow-release fertilizer (I prefer Osmocote as a good catch-all fertilizer, but if you specifically want to change the color of the blooms, you can also use a pink or blue fertilizer that changes the pH balance in the soil for the color you want).

Watering: To keep things coming in nice and healthy, I took the swapping out of the wrong plants as an opportunity to add a soaker hose, but wound up turning it off about halfway through the summer since we’ve had a little extra rain over the last couple of months and this garden area is close to the roof downspout (too much water can lead to producing less flowers, and the hard Georgia clay already holds more water than sandy soil).

(FYI — for more care tips and reminders, you can text ENDLESSSUMMER to 73095 for timely care tips (this is not for marketing purposes… it just provides care instructions throughout the season). Furthermore, Endless Summer® Hydrangea has teamed up with Pandora to create a playlist. To find it, open Pandora and search for Artists Rebloomed. Happy Gardening!)

Sun and wind: My number 1 tip about hydrangeas is to pick a place where it is protected by the wind, which is why I plant them near fences and under the shade of larger trees; I’ve found that when they’re protected enough from the sun and wind, they can grow like crazy and pop up blooms before I know it. The southern heat can lead the leaves to wilt in midday, but they perk up in the evening again once the temps cool down a little (usually by the time Charlie is due for her evening walks).

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

Once things were corrected, they started blooming and showing off their beautiful range of summer colors. I’m going to let them get better established before I do cuttings, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look in the fall too. I just love how deeply purple they have been coming in with all of the recent rain we’ve had in Georgia:

The lighter hues aren’t half bad, either :

So, enough of that crazy tale… how about another awesome outdoor giveaway?? Here are all the details!

Endless Summer® Bloomstruck Giveaway – Experience Life in Full Bloom™

Prize:

One (1) set of Edison String Lights

One (1) Notch Wood Server

One (1) Beverage Dispenser, and

One (1) pair of Endless Summer® branded gardening gloves

Number of winners: one

Giveaway ends: Friday, August 11th at 11:59pm

Geographical restrictions: U.S. only

To enter: Leave a comment on this post answering the giveaway question below. Yes, you have to leave a comment. Or don’t, but if you don’t, you probably won’t win. I check them because I’d much rather reward a regular reader (usually giveaway jumpers don’t stop to leave a comment, so that seems to help your chances!).

Please update the Rafflecopter widget to confirm you’ve left a comment. Winner will be chosen at random via the widget auto-generator.

Giveaway question to answer (many of you know how this goes): Have you ever found something cool or unexpected growing in your garden?

Ready, and… GO! Good luck! (And if you want to share your own hydrangea photos on IG, be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #LifeinFullBloom so I can see them!)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Endless Summer® Hydrangeas. The opinions and text are all mine.

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The post Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

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Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) published first on http://ift.tt/1kI9W8s

[garagedoorsbrighton]

Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway)

My new corner garden of hydrangeas is blooming! But before I get to lots of photos of pretty flowers, I need to tell you a family story.

When I was a kid, my Dad would plant lots of varieties of flowers. But because he was also a penny pincher (and a little more talented at growing flowers than I), he preferred to grow gardens from seed. There was just one little catch…

He wouldn’t mark, label, or pay any attention to what flowers were growing where. Dad would buy packets of seeds whenever they went on sale and just sort of scatter them in various places around the house. No real color scheme, or height planning, or knowing what grows best with what. It would always be a sort of surprise each spring and summer (much to the chagrin of my mom) to see what would suddenly pop up or completely take over. But many times, the results would also turn out beautifully:

Gorgeous, right? But then again… why am I bringing this up?

Even though Dad was clearly pretty good at this little gamble, I have spent years struggling to figure out how best to grow things in my own gardens. I like to think that I’ve gotten far more confident about knowing what will thrive these days, but if I’m spending cold hard cash on a flower or shrub, I tend to be more of a planner (however, I’m still my father’s daughter at being a “Frugal Fogle” as I’ve proven with some of my plant hacks before).

So you can imagine my surprise when I spent some time and effort planting my new hydrangea garden in the corner of the back yard… mulching… putting down fertilizer… and watching things suddenly start to bloom… to realize that some of my plants were blooming… a little different than how I expected.

When I originally looked at the tag and bought my new BloomStruck® hydrangeas, I expected to see them coming in like the way I’ve known my other Endless Summer hydrangeas to come in: big, “mophead” clusters of little flowers varying in color from pink to deep blue. And since these were specifically supposed to be the BloomStruck® variety and I’ve seen lots of pictures on the Endless Summer® website gallery, I knew that the color would probably be even more vibrant. But as I inspected some of the shrubs closer, I realized that some of my plants were showing more delicate centers that looked like they weren’t blooming all the way. Hmm…

As you guys have seen from the disclosure I’m required to post (FTC rules being what they are and such), my new corner garden is unique in that it is sponsored this year directly by the Endless Summer® folks. I have planted their Original variety in my yard over the years and fell in love with how easy and pretty their hydrangeas are to care for, especially since they bloom and re-bloom from spring to fall. So, it was a no-brainer when they reached out to partner for my new corner garden idea. Just as the flowers started to bloom and I published the first blog post about my plans, one of their reps contacted me and solved my curious little flower puzzle: some of these flowers were not, in fact, the BloomStruck® variety!

I went back to looking at all of the signature blue pots that Endless Summer hydrangeas come in and all of their labels. Was I nuts? Had I picked up the wrong plant? I had only just started cleaning up the garden so I still had all the labels the pots came with. What the heck???

A little back and forth with the ES folks and we got down to the bottom of it: when the local nursery put out the plants, they’re also the ones who put the pricing labels on the tags (I had Photoshopped the price out of this original image I took at the nursery, but pictured is the label I’m talking about). Somehow, when they did that, they must have taken off the tags and then stuck them back in each pot, mixing up the pots and labels and sold a different variety — called Twist n Shout, which is a “lacecap” bloom style — as BloomStruck! 

As you can imagine, I was kind of embarrassed over the whole thing — when you promote something for a brand, you not only want to be accurate for the sake of professionalism, but I also don’t want to accidentally tell you guys something wrong either. Not to mention pretty irritated at the nursery for the mixup, since it meant I’d have to dig up the ones that were wrong and replant (I could have kept them, but it’s merely a preference thing that I specifically wanted all the plants to match). Luckily the nursery (like most these days) have a refund policy so it was easy to return… and then I went and picked up BloomStruck pots at a competitor location.

But just to double check (since now I was super concerned about how little I knew of identifying these plants beyond what the blooms look like, ha!), I also learned that the BloomStruck variety can be identified by their reddish stems (the Original has a similar bloom look but green stems):

Anyway, the point of this story is just that unbeknownst to me, I wound up carrying on my dad’s tradition after all. So instead of making me fuming angry at the nitwits at the local nursery for almost making my garden look like it was having an identity crisis (well, ONLY angry at them, that is), I can look back and once again have a crazy story about this house to tell my friends, and a nice little funny family memory thrown in every time I go back out there to see how my “new” new hydrangeas are doing (as if I need more funny stories, right? This house, I swear!).

Where were we? Oh right: Hydrangea Care and Maintenance!

Color and fertilizing: Like I mentioned, one of the reasons why I agreed to work with the Endless Summer folks in the first place was that I already knew how easy their plants were to care for; so even though I had to sort of “catch up” the new plants to the ones I planted back in the spring, they all started growing in nicely once I added some slow-release fertilizer (I prefer Osmocote as a good catch-all fertilizer, but if you specifically want to change the color of the blooms, you can also use a pink or blue fertilizer that changes the pH balance in the soil for the color you want).

Watering: To keep things coming in nice and healthy, I took the swapping out of the wrong plants as an opportunity to add a soaker hose, but wound up turning it off about halfway through the summer since we’ve had a little extra rain over the last couple of months and this garden area is close to the roof downspout (too much water can lead to producing less flowers, and the hard Georgia clay already holds more water than sandy soil).

(FYI — for more care tips and reminders, you can text ENDLESSSUMMER to 73095 for timely care tips (this is not for marketing purposes… it just provides care instructions throughout the season). Furthermore, Endless Summer® Hydrangea has teamed up with Pandora to create a playlist. To find it, open Pandora and search for Artists Rebloomed. Happy Gardening!)

Sun and wind: My number 1 tip about hydrangeas is to pick a place where it is protected by the wind, which is why I plant them near fences and under the shade of larger trees; I’ve found that when they’re protected enough from the sun and wind, they can grow like crazy and pop up blooms before I know it. The southern heat can lead the leaves to wilt in midday, but they perk up in the evening again once the temps cool down a little (usually by the time Charlie is due for her evening walks).

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

Once things were corrected, they started blooming and showing off their beautiful range of summer colors. I’m going to let them get better established before I do cuttings, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look in the fall too. I just love how deeply purple they have been coming in with all of the recent rain we’ve had in Georgia:

The lighter hues aren’t half bad, either :

So, enough of that crazy tale… how about another awesome outdoor giveaway?? Here are all the details!

Endless Summer® Bloomstruck Giveaway – Experience Life in Full Bloom™

Prize:

One (1) set of Edison String Lights

One (1) Notch Wood Server

One (1) Beverage Dispenser, and

One (1) pair of Endless Summer® branded gardening gloves

Number of winners: one

Giveaway ends: Friday, August 11th at 11:59pm

Geographical restrictions: U.S. only

To enter: Leave a comment on this post answering the giveaway question below. Yes, you have to leave a comment. Or don’t, but if you don’t, you probably won’t win. I check them because I’d much rather reward a regular reader (usually giveaway jumpers don’t stop to leave a comment, so that seems to help your chances!).

Please update the Rafflecopter widget to confirm you’ve left a comment. Winner will be chosen at random via the widget auto-generator.

Giveaway question to answer (many of you know how this goes): Have you ever found something cool or unexpected growing in your garden?

Ready, and… GO! Good luck! (And if you want to share your own hydrangea photos on IG, be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #LifeinFullBloom so I can see them!)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Endless Summer® Hydrangeas. The opinions and text are all mine.

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The post Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

from The Ugly Duckling House https://www.uglyducklinghouse.com/endless-summer-hydrangeas-bloomstruck-twist-n-shout-corner-garden/

[bespokekitchesldn]

Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway)

My new corner garden of hydrangeas is blooming! But before I get to lots of photos of pretty flowers, I need to tell you a family story.

When I was a kid, my Dad would plant lots of varieties of flowers. But because he was also a penny pincher (and a little more talented at growing flowers than I), he preferred to grow gardens from seed. There was just one little catch…

He wouldn’t mark, label, or pay any attention to what flowers were growing where. Dad would buy packets of seeds whenever they went on sale and just sort of scatter them in various places around the house. No real color scheme, or height planning, or knowing what grows best with what. It would always be a sort of surprise each spring and summer (much to the chagrin of my mom) to see what would suddenly pop up or completely take over. But many times, the results would also turn out beautifully:

Gorgeous, right? But then again… why am I bringing this up?

Even though Dad was clearly pretty good at this little gamble, I have spent years struggling to figure out how best to grow things in my own gardens. I like to think that I’ve gotten far more confident about knowing what will thrive these days, but if I’m spending cold hard cash on a flower or shrub, I tend to be more of a planner (however, I’m still my father’s daughter at being a “Frugal Fogle” as I’ve proven with some of my plant hacks before).

So you can imagine my surprise when I spent some time and effort planting my new hydrangea garden in the corner of the back yard… mulching… putting down fertilizer… and watching things suddenly start to bloom… to realize that some of my plants were blooming… a little different than how I expected.

When I originally looked at the tag and bought my new BloomStruck® hydrangeas, I expected to see them coming in like the way I’ve known my other Endless Summer hydrangeas to come in: big, “mophead” clusters of little flowers varying in color from pink to deep blue. And since these were specifically supposed to be the BloomStruck® variety and I’ve seen lots of pictures on the Endless Summer® website gallery, I knew that the color would probably be even more vibrant. But as I inspected some of the shrubs closer, I realized that some of my plants were showing more delicate centers that looked like they weren’t blooming all the way. Hmm…

As you guys have seen from the disclosure I’m required to post (FTC rules being what they are and such), my new corner garden is unique in that it is sponsored this year directly by the Endless Summer® folks. I have planted their Original variety in my yard over the years and fell in love with how easy and pretty their hydrangeas are to care for, especially since they bloom and re-bloom from spring to fall. So, it was a no-brainer when they reached out to partner for my new corner garden idea. Just as the flowers started to bloom and I published the first blog post about my plans, one of their reps contacted me and solved my curious little flower puzzle: some of these flowers were not, in fact, the BloomStruck® variety!

I went back to looking at all of the signature blue pots that Endless Summer hydrangeas come in and all of their labels. Was I nuts? Had I picked up the wrong plant? I had only just started cleaning up the garden so I still had all the labels the pots came with. What the heck???

A little back and forth with the ES folks and we got down to the bottom of it: when the local nursery put out the plants, they’re also the ones who put the pricing labels on the tags (I had Photoshopped the price out of this original image I took at the nursery, but pictured is the label I’m talking about). Somehow, when they did that, they must have taken off the tags and then stuck them back in each pot, mixing up the pots and labels and sold a different variety — called Twist n Shout, which is a “lacecap” bloom style — as BloomStruck! 

As you can imagine, I was kind of embarrassed over the whole thing — when you promote something for a brand, you not only want to be accurate for the sake of professionalism, but I also don’t want to accidentally tell you guys something wrong either. Not to mention pretty irritated at the nursery for the mixup, since it meant I’d have to dig up the ones that were wrong and replant (I could have kept them, but it’s merely a preference thing that I specifically wanted all the plants to match). Luckily the nursery (like most these days) have a refund policy so it was easy to return… and then I went and picked up BloomStruck pots at a competitor location.

But just to double check (since now I was super concerned about how little I knew of identifying these plants beyond what the blooms look like, ha!), I also learned that the BloomStruck variety can be identified by their reddish stems (the Original has a similar bloom look but green stems):

Anyway, the point of this story is just that unbeknownst to me, I wound up carrying on my dad’s tradition after all. So instead of making me fuming angry at the nitwits at the local nursery for almost making my garden look like it was having an identity crisis (well, ONLY angry at them, that is), I can look back and once again have a crazy story about this house to tell my friends, and a nice little funny family memory thrown in every time I go back out there to see how my “new” new hydrangeas are doing (as if I need more funny stories, right? This house, I swear!).

Where were we? Oh right: Hydrangea Care and Maintenance!

Color and fertilizing: Like I mentioned, one of the reasons why I agreed to work with the Endless Summer folks in the first place was that I already knew how easy their plants were to care for; so even though I had to sort of “catch up” the new plants to the ones I planted back in the spring, they all started growing in nicely once I added some slow-release fertilizer (I prefer Osmocote as a good catch-all fertilizer, but if you specifically want to change the color of the blooms, you can also use a pink or blue fertilizer that changes the pH balance in the soil for the color you want).

Watering: To keep things coming in nice and healthy, I took the swapping out of the wrong plants as an opportunity to add a soaker hose, but wound up turning it off about halfway through the summer since we’ve had a little extra rain over the last couple of months and this garden area is close to the roof downspout (too much water can lead to producing less flowers, and the hard Georgia clay already holds more water than sandy soil).

(FYI — for more care tips and reminders, you can text ENDLESSSUMMER to 73095 for timely care tips (this is not for marketing purposes… it just provides care instructions throughout the season). Furthermore, Endless Summer® Hydrangea has teamed up with Pandora to create a playlist. To find it, open Pandora and search for Artists Rebloomed. Happy Gardening!)

Sun and wind: My number 1 tip about hydrangeas is to pick a place where it is protected by the wind, which is why I plant them near fences and under the shade of larger trees; I’ve found that when they’re protected enough from the sun and wind, they can grow like crazy and pop up blooms before I know it. The southern heat can lead the leaves to wilt in midday, but they perk up in the evening again once the temps cool down a little (usually by the time Charlie is due for her evening walks).

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

Once things were corrected, they started blooming and showing off their beautiful range of summer colors. I’m going to let them get better established before I do cuttings, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they look in the fall too. I just love how deeply purple they have been coming in with all of the recent rain we’ve had in Georgia:

The lighter hues aren’t half bad, either :

So, enough of that crazy tale… how about another awesome outdoor giveaway?? Here are all the details!

Endless Summer® Bloomstruck Giveaway – Experience Life in Full Bloom™

Prize:

One (1) set of Edison String Lights

One (1) Notch Wood Server

One (1) Beverage Dispenser, and

One (1) pair of Endless Summer® branded gardening gloves

Number of winners: one

Giveaway ends: Friday, August 11th at 11:59pm

Geographical restrictions: U.S. only

To enter: Leave a comment on this post answering the giveaway question below. Yes, you have to leave a comment. Or don’t, but if you don’t, you probably won’t win. I check them because I’d much rather reward a regular reader (usually giveaway jumpers don’t stop to leave a comment, so that seems to help your chances!).

Please update the Rafflecopter widget to confirm you’ve left a comment. Winner will be chosen at random via the widget auto-generator.

Giveaway question to answer (many of you know how this goes): Have you ever found something cool or unexpected growing in your garden?

Ready, and… GO! Good luck! (And if you want to share your own hydrangea photos on IG, be sure to tag me and use the hashtag #LifeinFullBloom so I can see them!)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Endless Summer® Hydrangeas. The opinions and text are all mine.

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The post Summer Hydrangeas In Bloom: a Funny Twist (+ a Giveaway) appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

from The Ugly Duckling House https://www.uglyducklinghouse.com/endless-summer-hydrangeas-bloomstruck-twist-n-shout-corner-garden/

[viralhottopics]

The new iPad is the perfect upgrade if you’re still using… an iPad

The new iPad (2017) looks virtually identical to the iPad Air (2014).

Image: lili sams/mashable

Apple announced a new iPad a few weeks ago. Did you even notice? I wouldn’t blame you if you missed it. There wasn’t any big event, or a keynote, and people definitely weren’t waiting in line for it.

Apple’s new 9.7-inch iPad (it’s just called iPad) doesn’t come with any major redesign and it’s not as powerful as the 9.7-inch iPad Pro.

SEE ALSO: Apples cheap iPad is tailor-made for education

The new iPad replaces the nearly three-year-old iPad Air 2, which Apple says was its best-selling iPad ever. In many ways, the new iPad reminds me of the iPhone SE: it’s got an old, but familiar design, with faster components inside to keep up with new iOS updates.

But most importantly, the new iPad is more affordable than ever before it starts at just $329. That’s $170 less than what the iPad Air 2 cost when it launched in 2014. The price alone makes this product stand out, and is reason enough for old iPad users to upgrade and new iPad users to seriously consider the new model, at least as far as 9.7-inch iPads go.

iPad Air roots

You can get one in silver, space gray, or gold. If you want rose gold, you’ll need to buy an iPad Pro 9.7.

Image: lili sams/mashable

The new iPad is one of those rare times when a new Apple product is slightly thicker and heavier than its predecessor.

The last time an iPad bulked up was when Apple replaced the iPad 2 with the iPad 3; the iPad 3’s increased weight and thickness was a tradeoff as a result of the Retina display and a battery nearly twice as large as the iPad 2’s to power it.

With the exception of the non-polished chamfer, the new iPad looks virtually indistinguishable from the first-gen iPad Air. Even its dimensions and weight (1 pound) are exactly the same. It’s almost like Apple had a factory full of unused iPad Airs it needed to repurpose.

The new iPad (bottom) is slightly thicker and heavier than the iPad Air 2 (top).

Image: lili sams/mashable

I thought I would take issue with the added girth since I use an iPad Air 2 at home every day, but I just got used to it. iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro users will definitely be able to feel the difference, but the new iPad isn’t that much thicker or heavier that it’s a deal-breaker.

The one feature on the new iPad that feels like a serious step back is the display. Sure, it’s brighter than the iPad Air 2’s and as bright as the 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s, but the non-laminated display, which creates a gap between the display and the glass, just doesn’t look as good.

You can’t see it easily in photos, but there’s an air gap between the display and the glass.

Image: lili sams/mashable

I’m nitpicking the 2,048 x 1,536 resolution Retina display still looks fantastic with rich, accurate colors and plenty of sharpness but the display also doesn’t have any kind of antireflective coating to reduce glare from overhead lights. Compared to my iPad Air 2 at 75 percent brightness, I had to crank the new iPad to 100 percent brightness in order to not see my face reflected back at me while watching videos.

I admit these are all minor issues in the grand scheme of things, but it still sucks when you see progress take a step back.

Image: lili sams/mashable

Otherwise, the new iPad is still basically an iPad Air. It’s got the same Lightning port, same Touch ID fingerprint sensor, same 8-megapixel back camera, same 1.2-megapixel FaceTime HD camera, and same bottom-firing stereo speakers.

Refreshed guts for more power

Image: lili sams/mashable

Not that the iPad Air 2 isn’t still a very capable tablet (I just installed iOS 10.3.1 on mine and it still runs pretty damn well), but the new iPad’s internal refresh is all about future-proofing to ensure it’ll be able to support future iOS updates. The iPad Air 2’s A8X processor might still be able to keep up with a few more updates, but it won’t be able to forever.

The new iPad, however, packs a faster 64-bit A9 chip and 2GB of RAM the same specs as the iPhone 6S/6S Plus/SE and an embedded M9 motion coprocessor. My own benchmark tests taken with Geekbench 4 confirm as much:

The new iPad is just as powerful as…

Image: screenshot: Raymond wong/mashable

…an iPhone 6S.

Image: screenshot: Raymond wong/mashable

There’s honestly not much more to say about performance. The new iPad’s fast not as fast as the iPad Pros and their A9X chip but incredibly speedy. I was able to play graphically intensive 3D games like the latest Asphalt Xtreme, which has more detailed textures, more particle effects, and more speeding and crashing onscreen than any previous Asphalt racing game, and didn’t see any major issues like dropped frame rates or jitters.

You’ll have absolutely no problems opening a dozen Safari tabs, streaming videos on services like Netflix and YouTube, posting to social networks, and playing Sudoku. Split View with two apps open side-by-side also works much better on the new iPad than on my iPad Air 2.

That a two-year-old chip still works at peak performance and runs circles around other new Android devices (A Google Pixel running Android 7.1.1 only managed a 1,590 single-core and 4,242 multi-core score) is a real testament to Apple’s chip-designing skills and how far ahead iOS devices are compared to the competition.

Battery life is also as fantastic as you’d expect from an iPad. Apple advertises up to 10 hours of battery for browsing the web on Wi-Fi, watching videos, and listening to music, and I got pretty much exactly that. In fact, you might get more than 10 hours if you manage your power settings right.

Cameras are fine…for a tablet

8-megapixel camera on the back.

Image: lili sams/mashable

On paper, there’s no difference between the cameras on the new iPad and those on the iPad Air 2. The rear camera is still 8 megapixels and the front-facing FaceTime HD camera is still 1.2 megapixels. But in practice, things are a little different if you look closely.

There are a few things I noticed while testing the selfie camera. First, the new iPad supports Live Photos and Retina flash, thanks to the A9 chip. And second, image quality appears to be worse on the new iPad somehow. Yeah, it surprised me, too.

Image: Raymond wong/mashable

Photos have more dynamic range from the new iPad’s selfie camera, but there’s also a lot more image noise. For example, the ceiling in my selfie (look at upper left corner) looks way over-processed compared to the right taken with the iPad Air 2. And if you zoom in and take a look at the words on the books on the shelf below, you’ll notice the text is sharper. Most people probably won’t care, but it’s still very strange.

Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE

Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE

Photos taken with the new iPad’s back camera are a little crisper and also have slightly better dynamic range than the iPad Air 2, but again, it’s kinda negligible unless you’re looking for the differences.

Image: raymond Wong/mashable

Image: RAYMOND WONG/MASHABLE

At the end of the day, photos look fine, even if you’re one of those monsters who takes photos with a tablet.

Who should buy and who shouldn’t?

Image: lili sams/mashable

iPad sales are down and have been trending that way for years. What Apple’s found is that iPad owners are just like PC owners: they’re hanging onto their old iPads longer than expected four, maybe five years. But can you really blame them?

For the most part, old iPads still work just fine for doing basic things like browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music and reading e-books, and that’s primarily because Apple engineers them so damn well.

My mom’s got my original iPad, and even though it doesn’t have a Retina display and the thing is a tank compared to the new iPad, it still works for all of the basic tasks I just listed. That said, she’s exactly the type of iPad owner who could use a new one. The iPad Pro would be overkill for her, but the new iPad would be just right.

These are the most affordable 9.7-inch iPads Apple’s ever offered.

It’s without question the new iPad offers a lot of value at a very attractive price. A 32GB Wi-Fi model costs $329, and for another $100 you can quadruple the storage to 128GB. And as always, cellular cost an extra $130 more than their Wi-Fi-only counterparts.

Simply put, these are the most affordable 9.7-inch iPads Apple’s ever offered. (Remember, for the longest time 9.7-inch iPads started at $499 for 16GB, and that was considered “low” for a 10-inch tablet.)

But it’s obviously not the upgrade for everyone. If you’ve got an iPad Pro congrats, you’ve already got the best, so you can skip right over this iPad. And if you’ve got an iPad mini well, you can go either way and skip or buy. It all depends on whether you want a larger screen or not.

However, if you’ve been clinging onto any pre-Air iPad (iPad 1, 2, 3, and 4), the new iPad is a steal. Give your old iPad to your kid, donate it, or repurpose it as a digital picture frame. The leap in performance you’ll get will be like swapping your Toyota Camry for a Porsche.

The new iPad may not have the latest Apple chip, or support Apple Pencil, or be the thinnest iPad ever created, but it’s still an iPad, which means it’ll be good for probably another four or five more years. Not many gadgets can say the same.

iPad (2017)

The Good

Super affordable price 10-hour battery life iOS 10 runs like a champ

The Bad

Non-laminated display No antireflective coating Selfies are worse than on iPad Air 2 Thicker and heavier than iPad Air 2

The Bottom Line

Starting at $329, the new IPad (2017) is a no-brainer if upgrade if you’ve got a pre-Air iPad or a first-time iPad owner.

WATCH: Apple wants to replace your laptop with the powerful 9.7-inch iPad Pro

Read more: http://on.mash.to/2nXGyoi

from The new iPad is the perfect upgrade if you’re still using… an iPad

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For the most part I was pretty underwhelmed by Kong: Skull Island. Instead of being entertained by an adventurous thrill ride I was irritated by a whole lot of problems. The “plot” is an absolute joke. Pacing is all over the place. The characters are your usual stereotypes… and even the monster fights can’t stand a chance against Peter Jackson’s King Kong from 2005.

It seems like there’s not much left to like about this film. Certainly not Henry Jackman’s mediocre score. Okay, maybe the atmospheric cinematography by Larry Fong. And a particularly nice typography during the film’s opening and closing credits.

But there’s only one thing that really knocked it out of the ballpark for me. And that is Kong’s extensive poster campaign:

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures ordered a wide array of artworks and creative agencies like by B O N D, Concept Arts or Little Giant Studios, to name only a few, delivered big time. What they dished up in the past few weeks is unmatched this year and probably the past year as well. This colourful bouquet of posters and banners is nothing short but stunning. And it’s probably the only thing that really lives up to its spiritual predecessor Godzilla.

#1: Kong: Skull Island (Original)

#2: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

The official soundtrack cover (#1) for Kong: Skull Island is an interesting affair. I figured WaterTower Music would make use of that amazing wide angle shot of Kong posing amidst the island’s impressive mountain range. But I didn’t expect that level of creativity. The title treatment is pure bliss in times of chickenhearted mass market designs off the peg. I also love the overall composition of the cover. But why do they backpedal immediately with this boring font selection for the remaining text (“Alternate Gothic No. 2“)? And I can’t help but think that the cover would immensely benefit from a slightly bigger field of view. It somehow feels a bit crammed. Just a tad more space towards the edges to give it some air to breathe. I think it would all fall into place just a notch better.

Maybe one day I’ll try to come up with my own version of it. But for now this has to do:

Making of custom cover #2 (Click to view)

My goal for this particular custom cover (#2) was first and foremost to create space and go for the full cinemascope effect. It was quite a bit of work necessary to rearrange all these elements as needed. But Photoshop is a pretty powerful tool and it seems to have a solution for every problem. And concerning my earlier criticized font design I decided to go with a more uniform style by using the official logo font “Forza“.

But please don’t think that I consider my custom cover to look any better or even as good as the original cover. It’s just a different take on the same material, bar the imaginative logo treatment. I just could find a way to include that one into my cover. Well, you can’t have everything.

The gallery below consists of the usual doings. Official poster designs transformed into square cover artworks.

#3: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#4: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#5: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#6: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#7: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#8: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

I won’t go into detail about the necessary work steps, as I think most of the times it’s obvious anyway. And I feel like I’ve done this a thousand times already up to the point of repeating myself over and over. And no-one’s interested in the same old stories. I would just like to point out the miraculous change of scale that Kong is depicted in in all of those artworks. I guess that’s what you call artistic freedom.

As with Godzilla back then, I also came up with some additional vinyl treatments again. They perfectly transport the vintage vibe of the film and make for some great eye-catching motives in your digital music library.

#9: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#10: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#11: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

Custom cover #9 is based on a pixel-perfect homage to the Apocalypse Now film poster, created by Little Giant Studios. And it’s close to perfect. From the hand-painted quality over the crystal-clear sharpness down to the tasteful font selection in the bottom area.

Cover #10 is hollering Ape-ocalypse Now even louder by mimicking the official soundtrack album. I also have attempted an even more faithful version, but it ultimately looked a little too cheap for a blockbuster soundtrack.

A far more extensive vinyl treatment went into the two final designs below. I’ve surely spent the most of my time for this series on the following custom covers, probably not so much on the first one (#12), but definitely loads and loads of time on the second one (#16).

#12: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#13: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#14: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

Revisiting my old Godzilla Limited Edition was a sure thing for me, at least when I heard about Legendary’s plan to establish their own version of a cinematic universe, boldly titled the “MonsterVerse“. King Kong, together with his soon-to-be-bro Godzilla, is supposed to form a team of super-monsters. Two allegedly baddies who are about to be saving mankind. Think of DC’s Suicide Squad, but successful. It’s all steering towards a (first?) big showdown between them two in 2020. And who knows what else is following beyond that.

So I dug out my old Photoshop template and adapted it into this Kong: Skull Island Limited Edition. The bold film logo provided a perfect opportunity for a die-cut digipack sleeve (#12) and the presumably most beautiful Kong artwork of all worked perfectly as the Vinyl sleeve inside of it (#13). I had to extensively extend the original image in height by using a textless version of this widescreen banner. And I also applied some subtle colour filters to give it a slightly more old-school and romantic feel.

The concluding addition to this collection is perhaps the most challenging piece I’ve ever worked on. It all started when I came across a viral website named Discover Skull Island. As usual I started to grab all applicable images with the help of Chrome’s developer tools. It provided me with those huge, huge fake satellite views of the island, including different sets of translucent clouds and one particular, highly mesmerizing thermal photography of the same location. Ideas started to grow immediately, but for the time being I put it aside.

It was only after I saw some photos of the New York Comic Con poster, that I started to get a clear notion of where I wanted to go with those giant source images. That day I teased my idea to my Facebook gang, without having an exact concept for it, or the certainty that it would work out in the end. I only knew that I had to give it a try. And it’s only now, four weeks later, that I can gladly announce that yes, it all worked out perfectly. And even better than I could have imagined.

#15: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#16: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#17: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#18: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#19: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

For this set I decided to work on the 6540×3240 full-sized images to preserve as much detail as possible. Both the front and the back went through a fair number of drafts before I settled on the final design and began working on the single artworks in detail.

The animated GIF below is the end result of a full week of work. I’m calling this one the “NEON Edition” and it’s all worth around 1,63 GB of disk space, split into two different Photoshop files (regular and illuminated version), because my computer couldn’t handle a single work file of that size.

The clear plastic wrap that’s ought to house the (seemingly) textless vinyl record sleeve (#17) is in large parts based on the previously mentioned NYCC poster. Why? Well because, just like the poster, it’s meant to reveal all kinds of secret information when viewed under black light.

I’ve added all necessary soundtrack information on the semi-transparent outer sleeve (#15, #16), to save space for the mythology mysteries on the luminescent inner sleeve (#18). The scribbles and sketches have been recreated in meticulous detail using close-up shots of the illuminated poster. For the additional remarks I’ve used ten different fonts to ensure that the individual letters vary enough to give the illusion of real handwriting.

Coming up with four different product mockups was the last step in this custom covers series. And it was another major task since Photoshop mockups usually don’t support transparent elements. I’ve had to come up with quite a few tricks to get the desired end result. But it was all worth it and I’m sure I’ll utilize these newly found techniques on future projects as well.

#20: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#21: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#22: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#23: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#24: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#25: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#26: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

#27: Kong: Skull Island (Custom)

“Kong: Skull Island” by Henry Jackman For the most part I was pretty underwhelmed by Kong: Skull Island. Instead of being entertained by an adventurous thrill ride I was irritated by a…