Free Download: Wefunction Icon Set

The nice fellas over at Wefunction have rolled out a shiny, sexy new set of 128 completely free icons. All the standards plus a few of those oh so popular social media icons. Check em out, and don’t forget to spread the word.

             

128 Free Icons | Download Here

Why Non-Professionals Need Professional Stuff

Have you ever noticed that once you get your hands on some professional equipment you yourself magically become better and what you do?

Take photography for example, a truly impressive art form in it’s mastery, seemingly reserved for those who have spent years studying the form, endowed with a superb eye, the perfect lighting setup and crinkle-less canvases.

But if you’ve ever laid down your point and shoot and taken a few shots with an SLR you’d see that taking a pretty incredible looking photo isn’t as mytical as you thought.

Not to discount or devalue the immense talent that professionals and their equipment exhibit. (surely their in a league entirely their own). But in many case I have found that sometimes it’s the non-professionals that need professional equipment the most.

Over the years, I’ve formally studied many instruments, guitar was always the most challenging. I never invested in a decent one because it wasn’t something I was “serious” about learning, just something I wanted to riff on for fun. It wasn’t until I picked up my brother’s custom Paul Reed Smith that I realized “Hey, this is kind of easy, I’m better than I thought”. The perfect balance, low fret noise and weightlessness of the instrument made it feel like it was playing itself. I mean even Satriana might have trouble making the music store fender with free amp combo sing like an angel.

Another perk to investing in professional equipment right off the bat is the elevated potential for discovery. Many of us tend to feel limited by the things we use instead of liberated, but I also think that has a lot to do with what things we choose to have around us.

The age old Mac vs PC debate is another fine example. Naturally, any PC user will duel you to the death to defend their OS and even with all of the evidence against them they would still rather continue using a mediocre machine (yes, I said it) than venture into the realm of the different or unfamiliar.

I know because I was one of them. “But my bootleg windows programs won’t work on a Mac”. That’s because on a Mac, you don’t need half-ass bootleg programs, the legitimate Mac programs work and work really really well.

It’s a matter of our own conceptual and imaginative complacency that keeps us stuck in the same unproductive and self limiting patterns.

Not a professional photographer? Perfect! Go out and buy a $400 SLR. I give you 2 weeks before you’re selling your prints on deviant art and your point and shoot on ebay.

When you’re PC gets a virus (which invariably it will) go out and buy a mac, live with it for the return policy period and then try to think of a single reason why you shouldn’t keep it.

Unfortunately though, the fact is that in many cases, ease of use of a thing is in direct correlation to its price. But chances are you’ll spend less money in the long run and a lot less time learning how to do something if you have the right equipment spurring on your creativity and imagination.

9 times out of 10, you’ll find that the reward far outweighs any preconceived risk about purchasing top-of-line gear. Faced with a new world of possibilities you might just find that you become better and more productive at what you do. And hey you never know, you might even end up a professional.

Breakdown of Modern Web Design

          

Thanks to Alan Foreman of poisonedminds.com for this unsettlingly accurate depiction.

Cricket: Dancing Girls and Movie Stars

Call me closed minded! Label me as avert to change and progress! But when it comes to what I have long considered the only gentleman’s sport left, I feel deeply uneasy and uncomfortable with the whole shenanigans that is 20/20 cricket.

For those that aren’t familiar with “good sports”. Eh-hem, cricket, ‘used to be’ a glorious game lasting at times well over a week drawn far beyond the length of any sane person’s attention span and demanding the rare and painstaking ability to calculate large odds and scores in one’s head and on occasion experiencing the sufferance of listening to the ominous voice of the awkwardly white Tony Cozier. Ah, the innumerable joys…

But what appalling atrocity is this that has conspired before us in the form of the IPL?! The Indian Premier Cricket League has diminished this conservatively paced game into an event that is intensely exciting and fast-paced, done away with tea time in favor of beer time and even allows players the liberty of removing their sweater vests! The lovely (albeit rhythmically challenged) ‘cheerleaders’ on the ‘sidelines’ gyrating to djs spinning club-trance-chutney remixes through speakers endowed with enough wattage to satisfy Madison Square Garden injects far to much fun into the atmosphere.

As a strapping young 24 year old myself, I find it all utterly intolerable and…. Turn down the music! I’m not done talking!!!

Pro·jec·tion

"I can hardly tolerate such blogs whose content, brimming with non sequitur, nonsensical phrases, masquerade as authoritative observationalism". -Elle