Fri 16 Jun 2006

Other People Are Interesting, Too

I do not intend to become a "link blogger". Nothing drives me off the edge faster in the morning than scanning my RSS feeds only to find a bunch of posts that are 50% hyperlinks and 100% information free. Once in a while is OK, doing it regularly just makes me want to look up some GPS coordinates and hunt out the launch codes.

That being said (I feel so much better now!), a couple of random items I thought were worth sharing...

World Cup Football

I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, although I do kind of follow the English Premier League results throughout the year (more so than the Australian A League, strangely). With Australia having qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 30+ years (and their previous attempt resulted in 3 losses from 3 games with zero goals scored), it's a bit hard to avoid the media coverage around here at the moment. Most of the coverage is not that entertaining. One notable exception is Der Blog, written by an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the US version) reporter who is following the Australian team. It took me a while to put my finger on why I was enjoying reading it, but his enthusiasm really comes through in most posts. Here's a guy having a lot of fun doing his job and writing articles you don't normally get to see as the event unfolds for a professional journalist.

Secondly, to see how an intelligent, enthusiastic fan might be spending these few weeks, go read Dave Mason's daily predictions (although you do have to actually know the results, since he seems to have slacked off a bit on post-match commentary).

Pretty Pictures

Often when you read about personalised newspapers in a science-fiction novel, they have a requirement or feature that you always get a little bit of random news you didn't ask for or that you might disagree with. I like the idea. I have a few random feeds in my aggregator and sites in my links collection that serve no real purpose other than to provide ideas.

One of the these is The Illustration Blog. Via this site, I have discovered the Photoshop Experiment, containing detailed play-by-play overviews of how some amazing illustrations are created in Photoshop. I'm no artist, but I like to play in the Gimp a lot. Seeing this website brings home (yet again!) just how fiddly really good art is to do. It's not just talent or luck; it's hard work. The main blog of Cory Godbey (the person behind The Photoshop Experiment) is worth a browse, too, if you like illustration.

Topics: art, sport/football, software/graphics