Cool As Ice

This excellent new wall art near New Road in Kathmandu reminded me of myself, so I figured I'd better post it ;-)

Also, BOOM:

The Winners

You guys!

It has taken way longer than I anticipated to announce the winners of The Chase Gaze doodling contest.
This is mostly on account of I didn't feel like bloggin' fer a little bit.


The judge's pick winner was:

This awesome drawing is by Beth Glick, who sells her other fantastic artwork on Etsy. She's going to get a cool prize!

And the winner of the "Sidelongest gaze award" was:

Michael Neumann drew this. He also makes great webcomics and videogames. He is also getting a great prize.

Many thanks and props to all eight of you who submitted drawings. You are the real heros. And by that I mean you are all great doodlers and you should make sure never to lose that skill.

Also, here's an honorable mention that didn't get entered into the actual contest because it isn't actually a drawing. David Bontrager submitted this hilarious thing though:

I assume this is some stone-cold fox from a sitcom in the mid nineties that I didn't watch because my attention was occupied by Sister,Sister and The Nanny reruns, But hey, he's giving a sidelong glance, to be sure. Nice submission Bon Bon :-)

So, go back to the original post to submit your votes for "people's choice award." You can vote for your own drawing, and if only one person votes, then whoever they vote for will win!

Yayyyy contests.

<3

The Chase Gaze: A Doodling Contest

"People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious."

--Paul Graham

eh...?

My Denver buddy Jesse D. made a great sketch of my Facebook profile pic recently, in which I am giving a sidelong glance to a stuffed cat (right). This prompted me to doodle myself giving a sidelong glance to whom else but the scrutineer of my doodle (above).
Do I not look great giving sidelong glances!?
So here's what's happening: A Drawing Contest!

The  Contest

Submit the best possible drawing of me making a sidelong glance that you can doodle in five minutes or less. Use your imagination. Or photographic evidence of my existence (if you can find any). If you're real lucky you can get me to pose live! (As if I could sit still for five minutes.)

The drawings will be judged by someone who is impartial (to your drawings) but very very partial to my actual studly looks and sidelong glances.

Submit your drawings in the comments thread of this post, or email/facebook message me if you want to submit them some other way. I'll upload all the submissions into this post without the names of their artists so we can have a people's choice vote via the comments.

The judged winner and peoples' choice winner will each get Some Nifty Thing that I'll bring back from Nepal and mail to you when I return in about (gasp!) six weeks.

Pencils ready....

GO!

Update: The submissions are rolling in. Here they are in order of submission:

To vote, make a comment on this post and include the # of your favorite Chase Gaze doodle.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

Hindenburg's Uncertainty Principle

The Sum of my Curiosities, or Why Social Q&A is Awesome.

Lots of people mostly like to talk about subjects they know a lot about. I do too. Who doesn't? It's comfy to stay within our own realms of knowledge.
And also dull. You might teach someone else something by talking about things you know. But what will you learn?

I want my conversations, and therefore my relationships, to be based on what I want to know, not what I know already. I am much more excited about the questions that I have than the answers that I have.

According to a recent study I did by looking at the internet for five seconds, there are a jillion question and answer websites. Many, many people are trying to commingle Q&A style interaction with social networking technology. My two favorite such sites, Kommons and Quora, are doing a great job of making shared curiosity a basis for relationships in social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook.

Myspace and Facebook were/are all about molding an online identity. You curate the events of your life in pictures and text, so that you can show people who you were, are, and are becoming. Whether you portray yourself accurately, or carefully redact parts of your life to present a tamer self for your online audience is (mostly) up to you. Either way, most of what you post is about the past.

Question based social networking is much more forward looking, and therefore thrilling, in my eyes. Kommons allows you to "follow" questions that have been posted by other users, thereby grouping you with those users solely on the basis of a shared curiosity. By choosing questions to follow, you curate an identity for yourself, not based on what has been, but what you want to be. You and someone else have the same question. You're trying to grow your knowledge in the same direction.

Quora (whose budget, it must be mentioned, is tens of thousands of times that of Kommons) goes a step further and lets you follow people and topics as well as questions. This is one more step towards making mutual curiosity the basis for deeper relationships.



Discourse based on experience will always be valuable in its own way, and mutual curiosity has always been a basis for relationships. I am excited about online explorations of how to make all of it easier.

People often define themselves by the sum of their experiences.
I'd rather be defined by the sum of my curiosities.
Not what I do know, but what I will know. Not what I have been, but what I will be.

Tools Matter

My Macbook Pro quit its job this week, and during the few days between when it stopped working and when I took it to the repair place, I felt a surprising sense of relief...that the computer was out of my life for a while.

When I first got this computer, it was shipped to my dad's office so it wouldn't be stolen off our porch or something. I remember feeling euphoric and breathy when I finally got my hands on it, and rode the elevator back down to the office block's main floor thinking of all the projects I was going to do with it. I could make music with it. Electronic music. (I had failed to master an instrument.) I could make music videos and web sites. I could finally learn to animate. Now that I could compute anywhere I'd basically be living my creative dream during every waking hour.

Fast forward almost five years, to last week, the day before my computer stopped working. I watched six episodes of Gossip Girl on DVD that day, on my laptop. The endless creative possibilities offered by my laptop had been overruled by some horrible, sexified Stepford teens on teevee. When my computer broke, the weight of all that "creative potential," (and all that teevee that needed watchin',) was magically lifted. I was able to look around and ponder what I should really do, with what I had, where I was.

New creative tools always give me goose bumps.

"With this, I'll make something awesome!" I always tell myself.

...and then, whatever-unit-of-time later...I find myself staggering under the guilt of not having actually done as much as I had imagined I would.

I have misconceived the relationship between tools and creativity. Tools can't make me create. By being creative, I make space in my life for tools.

Inevitably, after pretending for too long that I'll become a productive, creative genius if I buy the right...markers...sketchpad...software...computer...I have to dig myself out from under my pile of tools and their weighty potentials and decide, without the help of inanimate objects, what I should actually do.

The above cartoon's caption comes from a Twitter exchange I had with Hugh MacLeod. I was gushing about these pens that I really want (which he draws his cartoons with), and I said "Tools Matter."

He said, "Yeah... Until they don't."

Creative processes get easier with tools. But the real creative spirit can use any raw material to make something great.

I am constantly forgetting and relearning this.

Platonic Form

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) just tweeted "People think 'success' exists out there in the ether, like some Platonic form. It doesn't."

I do so much reading about how to succeed, and by succeed, I mean make goals and then reach them within some reasonable timeframe (if there is such a thing as reasonable.) Ultimately, none of the reading helps at all, unless, in a moment when I am on the fence, it pushes me to make a decision...to translate an amorphous 'goal' in my mind into a schedule, a set of activities, and a plan. Whether I reach the actual goal in the end doesn't necessarily determine whether I have succeeded. But there is no possibility of success at all unless I drag it out of the "Platonic form" state, and into reality.

Thanks for the continued inspiration Hugh.

P.S. As of this posting, Hugh's tweet is only about half an hour old. Am I quick on the draw (and on the pun) or what?

You don't need more time...

The words in this cartoon are from a blog post by Seth Godin. The title of the post was "You don't need more time..." and the entire text was "...you just need to decide." 10 words to describe a colossal quandary that vexes me (and I assume everyone else).

Many times I've wished for more time to figure out "what I want to do with my life." I'm young, I'm educated and I've been brought up by my family and my country to think that I can do whatever I want to do, and that I can try out lots of stuff and change course midstream as often as I like. When I graduated from high school, I wished I had one more year so I could beef up my cred and get a scholarship to a hot east coast hipster party haven. When I graduated from college I wished I had more time to figure out how to get a job &c. &c. 

I was offered positions in three countries when I applied to volunteer abroad with Mennonite Central Committee. I agonized for days over which one to choose.  The position I chose fell through and the other two were filled by other people. My initial agonizing had no effect on what eventually happened.
When my current position came to the table, I deliberated for about fifteen minutes, and haven't looked back.

I used to worry that the older I got, the less options I would have.
Now I understand that the number of options available to me will only increase with time. But even with an infinite amount of time, there will never be a moment of pure knowledge, delivered from outside me, about what I should do.

There's no way to find objective "knowledge" about what we should do, there are only decisions.

Decisions take time...but not tons of time. After we decide, we can get to the fun stuff.

This cartoon is a double tribute to Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid), two people that regularly put stuff on the internet that makes me think better thoughts.

I consider this post a sequel to my previous Hugh MacLeod-esque cartoon.

Hands

Hands.
The tools of every trade (except soccer.)
The middle men (and middle women!) between thoughts and actions.
When I start drawing hands it is a sure sign that I don't know what to do with myself.

 

 

Man Disappears Into Nonsense: A Doodle

Doodlism 2

Doodlism

I had a great feeling of 'flow' when I was drawing this, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Wall Art

 

One of my favorite things that happens in all big cities is WALL ART! There's not a lot of good wall painting or graffiti around Kathmandu, but there's some. Here are some pictures of my favorites (so far).  This mural is near the MCC Office. Also close to Claire's house and John and Lynn's house. Hilarious, and also a good message.

This little toxic looking symbol reminds me of a pandabear for some reason. Something about that little face, or is it a bow tie, and top hat. I don't know. There's not a lot of cool graffiti around Kathmandu, but I think this looks pretty cool, and it is all over the Dobighat, Jawalkhel area where the MCC office is.

A gate into a residential compound. Cool bird art. Birdgate.

The shutter on a new made-in-Nepal bike brand's flagship store. The store's called Chain, and they make a nice mountain bike for a decent price (22,000 Rs).  FrogGate.

 This is another little tag that appears all over Jawalkhel neighborhood. Not totally sure what it means, but I like it.

...aand here's some communist propaganda imagery, probably from when the Maoists were campaigning all over the place a few years ago.

all i ever wanted

This is a cartoon I drew in homage to the style of Hugh MacLeod, aka @gapingvoid, one of my favorite cartoonists. Hugh MacLeod's website is www.gapingvoid.com

Hugh MacLeod writes a lot about having Smarter Conversations. As someone who has just graduated from college with a Journalism degree (try monetizing that right out of school these days), I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to have a smarter conversation with myself. A smarter inner monologue, really, and one that will allow me to be and feel productive without getting overwhelmed.
I am constantly flush with Ideas. There are millions of ways that I can think of to put my skills to use in Nepal, and infinite projects to embark upon that would hopefully, eventually, help somebody. Almost all of them feel impossible to actually accomplish. Many would take a lifelong commitment, or so it seems.
So I often feel defeated before even beginning to work on something.
That's what this cartoon is about. Homing in on something. Putting some things on hold so that all of my energy can be here and now and be used in the most relationship building, productive way possible.

I don't remember if I read the sentence "All I ever wanted to do was everything," somewhere, or if it just came to me. If I ripped it off from somewhere....erm...sorry? Creative Commons...?

Check out the companion cartoon to this one: "You Don't Need More Time...."

Cycle Swagga'

I have been living with my host family in Chapagaon (10km south of Kathmandu, uphill all the way), and cycling into Kathmandu for a couple of days now.

A watercolor of my swaggadocious cycling outfit.