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The infamous Tucker Max, self-proclaimed asshole. (Photo: Randy Stewart/blog.stewtopia.com)
Since the holidays mean preparing gifts for friends andloved ones, one of the best ideas for holiday gifts are custom printed t shirts.They are easy to make and quick to produce in large numbers. They can bepersonalized with names, dates and places custom printed on the t shirts.
DODOcase, one of more than 1,000 businesses created in the last six months, has sold more than 10,000 units at $60 each.
If youve been on Twitter in the past month, youve probably bumped into the Fail Whale once or twice. The popular social network has been crashing pretty consistently from an influx of tweets and traffic. Seeing the whale, you (like everyone else) might have been frustrated you might have yelled at the screen. You might hate that whale.If you do, chances are you dont know Yiying Lu or the story behind the Fail Whale, originally called Lifting a Dreamer. The whale (first drawn as an elephant) was created by Lu as a sweet greeting to her friends overseas. The minds at Twitter found it on iStockphoto and used the image as a 404 page (replacing a picture of a LOLcat).The whale, once an image of Lus well-wishes, was supposed to represent the Twitter teams effort to fix problems of scalability. Instead, the associations have largely been negative. Lu is hoping to turn that around even as she begrudgingly calls herself the Fail Whale designer.Hate it or love it, Lu got on the phone with us to chat about her early artistic influences, her new collection of animal designs, announced exclusively on Mashable, and why she hates the term Fail Whale. Lifting a DreamerQ: How did you get into graphic design? Was it something you always loved?Lu: I suppose its one of those things you find yourself more good at artistic things, like drawings and shapes and color I didnt know that I was an artistic kid until I went to [a] technology high school and Im like, Oh my God, everyone is so good at math and Im pretty shit! I was sort of self-taught in high school times. I would spend two hours or three hours every day just sort of browsing all these artistic books like Salvador Dali and Ren Magritte I didnt even know I was learning it. I just though it was one of those, Its like youre eating main meals but you thought it was a snack.Q: How did that experience inspire your personal style?Lu: If I wasnt trained in the tech high school I probably wouldnt be as confident to use all these new technologies, and all these new websites and all these new things, really. You wouldnt be able to have the guts to try it and that was particularly interesting and insightful.Q: Do you still draw by hand or is it all on the computer?Lu: I think the beauty of it is that I have all these hand drawn illustrations still here, but then technology enables me to scan them in and put them online to share with more people. I guess its a whole experience a combination of technology and organic processes that I truly appreciate.Q:You posted the Fail Whale image on iStockphoto. Did it end up anywhere else?Lu: Oh yeah, I only put it on iStock at the time. I was sort of using it as a showcase because I didnt have a website at the time.Q: For you, is the image still Lifting a Dreamer even though everyone calls it the Fail Whale?Lu: I mean, that thing really bothers me and I really wanted to be very honest and transparent to you because I hate the name Fail Whale. Really, I do hate it Im like, Its not a Fail Whale, its like, originally, just a message for my friends far away and it has absolutely nothing to do with failure. The original icon and symbolism was originally about good wishes and happy thoughts, and thats what this image is all about. And I guess thats why people really love it.Q: Are you more frustrated by how Twitter has used the image, or how its been publicly named?Lu: Its really just about how people interpret the picture. Rather than people seeing the picture as a sign of technologys failure, they should see it as a sign of, you know, sit back and relax. You know theres a problem, but at the same time, enjoy the time being. It should be a visual soother, like, it should be a visual therapy rather than something that people would get really mad [about]. Sometimes you will see some tweets [that] go Fuck the Fail Whale! and I just go No, it had nothing to do with the whale!Q: Have you been able to make any money from the image?Lu: Yes, I do have a merchandise website. I am selling some t-shirts and its really great that now there are more opportunities from other people. People start to negotiate and talk to me about licensing possibilities. Its just good to find all these good people to work with. I think the whale image actually enabled a lot of opportunity for connecting with the right people in a lot of different areas.Q: How are you trying to reclaim the image to turn it from something negative to something positive? Is it just the fail whale forever now?Lu: Again, its something Id leave to the public to decide because originally the name of the fail whale was a meme and it came out from the public. I really appreciate the fact that people started to dig out their own creativity by interacting with the original image. So, I guess I dont want to force anything. I just want to see the organic process and just sort of let it sprout as it should be.Q: Has it opened doors or pigeonholed you into one design style?Lu: It has been really...
Swans Personalized Name Meaning Print - Bookshelf
544 pages
Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China
Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century.
About this book
Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, "Wild Swans" has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold. The story of three generations in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love. Jung Chang describes the life of her grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother's struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents' experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving -- and ultimately uplifting -- detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
480 pages
The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable
I had to spend a lot of time writing personalized and courteous notes declining invitations to dinner with suit-wearing ... suit-wearing archeo-hotshots, suit- wearing proto-hotshots, and the nasty brand of suit-wearing name- droppers.
About this book
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.From the Hardcover edition.
Yankee
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