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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

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The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Family image, 2 pandas 1 penguin

New featured images – The rest of the categories

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
April 21 2020

When I started blogging about my featured images (Astronomy), I was culminating a series of other steps that I had taken to even getting to this point. Since then, I have added other images (headers and websites, governance, writing, and anything goal-related). What remains to be covered are miscellaneous items (quotes, humour, etc.) and reviews.

Miscellaneous

I have a category called “family” and for a long time, I’ve used a simple symbol of a house. It’s a cute clipart image, kind of almost gingerbread-ish in its feel. But it doesn’t really say family to me. I have another one, a logo of two pandas together that my wife and I used for our wedding theme which I quite like. But it’s only two pandas — no image for our son. We called our son cub for quite some time, but a few years ago, he decided he’s a penguin. So even finding three pandas wouldn’t solve the issue. No, he’s a penguin, and we’re pandas (although my wife is converting slowly to being a penguin too). With a little graphic magic, I combined two images, and now we have 2 pandas and a cute penguin together in the same photo. That’s my new family image. And I guess I need one for just Jacob. Maybe a penguin by itself. He chose a bunch of penguins he liked (besides the Linux mascot), and I chose from those options one with books since he’s always reading. Technically, I think it is an owl that someone recoloured to match a penguin, but it’ll do. I can use the original “house” emblem for any house- and home-related posts.

Family image, 2 pandas
Family image, 2 pandas 1 penguin
Family image, 1 penguin
Family image, house

I confess that for the next few types of posts, I haven’t decided exactly on the format / layout of those posts. For example, I like to post humour to my site, but here’s the issue…Let’s say I post a quick humourous item or joke. I’d like it to be easily shareable on social media. To do THAT, and have it so people don’t have to click through to read it, it has to be some form of graphic. Like an e-card maybe. But if it’s a graphic, then Google doesn’t index it. So, suppose I had 25 jokes about monkeys. Google wouldn’t find them. Nor would my own website search engine. Because it would just know there was some graphic attached, and unless I add “monkey” to the page or post title, it would never know. Unless I *also* add the text to the post (a second copy, or in the ALT-TEXT of the image). But even then, there are no guarantees the image is shareable across media platforms easily. Does that matter for choosing an image? Nope.

I have up until posted them with an image of a court jester / clown. The image hasn’t always resized well, and blends in on certain backgrounds, but overall it’s decent. So I thought it would be a no-brainer just to use that one. But in the interest of “due diligence” to my blog, and my commitment to being anal-retentive, I looked for another possible image. Just to see what else I might find.

After a bit of searching, I actually found six other possible images. I have an image of a stuffed monkey, just the head, and it is REALLY cute. It automatically invokes a smile. But there’s nothing about it that says “joke” or “humour”, just makes me smile. So I eliminated that one. An obvious option is the laughing emoji, but I feel it is too obvious. A version of Mike from Monsters Inc. with his tongue sticking out is a serious contender, as we really enjoyed Monsters Inc. with Jacob. But not strong enough. There’s a great one of Groucho Marx fake glasses, nose and mustache image but it doesn’t look right on anything that doesn’t have a white background.

Which left me with it narrowed down to three. As I said, I do really like the original jester, it is a transparent image and when it is on a white background, it’s great. His eyes and mouth are white, everything looks normal. If you put it on a dark blue background, his eyes and mouth go blue, and it looks ridiculous. Like a badly developed polaroid. I tried and succeeded in filling his eye sockets with white, but it just doesn’t resonate enough with me.

I found a cute jester’s hat embedded in another option and I cropped it out, but the colours seem more sombre than festive. So that was out.

What was left? Kermit the Frog. PolyWogg, frogs, it’s not easy being green. I’d be hard-pressed to find another image of a laughing frog. So why not? Oh, right. It’s trademarked. But I really like the frog tie-in. So…umm…what if I take the jester’s hat, add it to my PolyWogg frog logo, brighten up the colours a bit, and try to merge the two? And add the Groucho nose, glasses, and mustache? Umm, no. Too much. Okay, just the jester hat on the PolyWogg logo.

Humour, frog as court jester

I then have three inter-related ideas. One is about “learning” (the process of learning), one is about “ideas” (a bit more abstract), and one is about “libraries”. Libraries may in the future be more about the business of running a library, perhaps closer to the idea of public administration and governance, but for now, it is mostly just about books. And on top of that, I have a fourth one that I want to create which is to sub-divide my existing “book reviews” into the formal book reviews themselves and other musings while simply reading.

Let’s start with the library side of things. I have some images of stacks of books, lots of bookshelves or bookcases to choose from, etc. Even one of a librarian at a desk (in male or female options!). But many of them don’t say “library” strong enough to me. A library book truck would be a great image, and I struggled to find one online that I liked. But something in the back of my mind made me think I’d seen one before and discarded it at one point because I was looking for a bookcase at the time, so I re-searched my own clipart collection. And BAM! There it was. Perfect.

Libraries image, book cart

Reading is also relatively simple. I have another image of a frog reading that is very similar to the one of a frog typing. It’s quite cute and I’ve been wanting to use it for something, so this seems like a good option.

Reading image, frog with book

For Ideas / Thinking, I had an image of a businessman sitting at a desk and thinking. It works “okay”, but it seems almost depressing. Like he’s sad. I like more the idea of happy or fun than sad. The idea, no pun intended, that ideas are about sparking innovation and new thought processes. So I found a new one of a cartoon man getting a lightbulb above his head. It’s a bit cheesy, but it works.

Ideas, man with lightbulb

Learning is a bit more of a challenge than I thought. There are LOTS of images of students in classrooms, little kids going to school, ABCs and 123s, apples, actual schools, graduation, presentations, diplomas, etc. And none of them resonate with me. Each one is too specific to one type of learning environment. You know what resonates with me? The idea of someone who has gained a lot of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, learning for learning’s sake. A wise old owl. Maybe sitting on a book.

Learning, wise owl

My website also has some recipes on it, and that is a relatively easy category to represent. I have a cartoon panda eating out of a bowl with chopsticks. Perfect for “pandas” trying new food.

Recipes image, panda with bowl of rice and chopsticks

I thought photography would be easy. I have two images that are relatively straightforward. One is simply of a camera with a couple of snapshots behind it. It’s okay, nothing special. Another one is a funny one, with a older photographer aiming the camera to take a picture but all the film has unraveled out the bottom of the camera. Unfortunately, the funny image is not the right dimensions (very tall and slim). Searching for new ones, I found some more with cartoon photographers, but they were all similar — tall and thin dimensions. There’s one that works but it is relatively bland (b/w drawing with orange backpack and orange flash from the camera). A re-colorized version turns it from a black ink drawing to a blue ink drawing, which isn’t bad. A possible contender. There’s one of a meeple (dough-person) with a gold camera, but recolouring didn’t really help. I thought I hit jackpost when I found images of a tree frog using a camera. A frog that looks like my master logo using a camera? What’s not to love? But they’re not great layouts or styles.

I’ve harshly come back to a choice between either the blue photographer or a camera. I’m not a huge fan of either one. I decided initially to keep both, one for process and one for actual shots, until I stumbled over an image I’ve had for years in my clipart and just wasn’t using. A cartoon photographer taking a shot. Crouched down, so the dimensions look right. Perfect. I added another one of a dark sky landscape to cover astro imaging too.

Photography image, photographer crouching
Photography image, nightscape

Memes

I have a large collection of meme topics. Lunch notes, astronomy, books (already covered below), humour (already covered above), movies (already covered below), music (partially covered below), and TV (covered below). For the ones not already covered, I’m working on an outline that has a common look and feel to it, which will likely be a combination of the humour image above and some layout options. For some kids-oriented ones, I’ll go with a simple little knight with a sword.

Memes image, young knight

With those all covered, and a few options to play with some layouts here and there or add pictures, etc., one thing I definitely do NOT have covered is any sort of image to represent quotes. A simple quote bubble is sufficient.

Memes image, quote bubble

Reviews

For my reviews, I have a book review symbol that I have always liked, so that one is easy. I have tried to come up with a way to put the book cover for the books under review in a good layout that would replace the featured image, but the styling options and extra work that goes with doing that are really not worth the extra hassle. Instead, I’m going to style the book covers within the review itself, and leave the book review symbol out to the left, as normal.

Reviews image, books, frog reading

For television reviews, I have a similar issue. I want the logo for the show, but too challenging to style it properly and consistently in the featured image location. Instead, I’ll style it inline with the content, leaving me to include an image of a man slouching in front of a giant TV. I’ve used it for awhile, and I find it amusing. Definitely not the image of a professional TV critic, nor do I want to be one. So it works for me. And it’s good that it does, because there are more than 250 posts related to TV reviews on my site, almost 20%. I’ll be seeing this image a lot!

Reviews image, TV, man watching large TV

For music reviews, I will follow a similar format to the above. I have an image I’ll be using for each year of reviewed music, or perhaps an album cover, but I’ll style those inline with the rest of the text. For the featured image, I’m torn between two images. Both have old-style radios as the main image, but in one, an older man is listening while in the other, it’s a young boy. The old guy has a bit of a creep feel to him, so I’m going with the happy innocent boy just enjoying his music.

Reviews image, music, boy listening to radio

My last review category is movies, and while I would like to have way more on the site than I do, I don’t really have an image that screams “pick me, pick me” to represent those reviews. With the decisions above to use books, TV logos, and music covers all inline, and to use a regular image as the Featured Image for each sub-category, I do in fact need to find one.

I have a collection of images…39 in total. And I like them all about the same, which is “not much”. Ticket stubs. Ticket agents. Videocameras and camera operators. Directors, producers, actors. Clapboards. Film canisters, film strips, even a premiere style logo. The only one that excites me is an old style GIF of a movie projector. Way back when I started my site, “motion” wasn’t that common…there was even an ad running on TV for web design where someone was showing a website where the logos were on fire (with flaming letters) and the average designer saying “I can’t do that.”. But the projector actually is a moving GIF. Incredibly common now, of course, but for the time, I thought it was akin to magic. I’d use it except I don’t want one image moving and the rest not, plus the image looks like it was designed for an 8-bit Atari game console, not a modern website.

I really want something that sparks the fun of movies. The magic that I felt as a kid. Popcorn comes close, in a way. There are better pics of projectors online too. Maybe curtains. Or movie seats. 3D glasses. Hodge podge images with multiple elements. Images of genres from western to classic, sci-fi to Oscar winners. Home theatre setups. Tapes, DVDs. Surprisingly few that showed actual movie theatres or cinemas. I expected a lot of marquees and premiere images. Not what I wanted, but I expected them. I did peek at one, but the dimensions were so far off that when reduced to FI size, you couldn’t really tell what it was. I kind of liked one that just showed three movie seats, but the dimensions / proportions were off again. I found a REALLY cool projector image, cold metal with light coming forward out of it. Except of course the background is full black. On a black BG, it could look awesome; my site is NOT black. Sigh.

In the end, it came down to three options. One is a movie projector image from the original collection. It needs the BG removed, which is easily done on this image (couldn’t do it on the projector one with the black BG). The other two are of seats in a theatre looking at the screen. One, done in dark blue, shows the audience waiting for a curtain to open. Pretty dark though. The other is done in red, the screen is there and ready for projection, with bright, empty seats. And yet neither quite look right. I tried merging the two — a nice screen from the red image on top of the curtain on the blue image. Nope. Okay, both gone. That leaves me a projector!

Reviews image, movies, film projector

Whew. That is a LOT of images for a final “miscellaneous” grouping. Now, on to actually using them all.

Signature, happy reading
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Posted in Book Review, Family, Humour, Ideas, Learning, Libraries, Movie Review, Music Review, Photography, Quotes, Recipes, Television | Tagged family, images, memes, reviews, website | Leave a reply
Reviews image, movies, film projector

Wings (1927, PWMR00008)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 5 2019

Plot

PWMR00008a-Wings
Two men from the same hometown and in love with the same girl go off to war and become fighter pilots.

What I Liked

This movie was the first movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture — in 1929! — and so I wanted to see how it held up. Surprisingly well for a silent picture. I was totally blown away by how good the aerial combat shots were. I was expecting some hokey special effects, but for filming in the 1920s, they did a great job. The two men are Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, and while they are okay, it is a secondary girl from back home (not the Juliet to the two Romeos but a second Juliet in love with the hero) who steals the picture. Clara Bow plays a rough-and-tumble girl who goes to France, drives for the motor pool, does a lot of support work. She’s brash, happy go lucky most of the time, and great at mooning towards the unsuspecting lovestruck hero.

What I Didn’t Like

There’s a twist in the tale that is a bit hard to believe that pits the two fighters against each other, and some of the ending is a bit sentimental, but for a first Oscar winner, it holds up.

PWMR00008b-Wings

The Bottom Line

Still holds up after all these years

My Overall Rating

🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 – 5/5 Excellent

Signature, happy watching

Links To Other Information

Other Movie Reviews at PolyWogg.ca
Movie details at IMDb.com
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Posted in Movie Review | Tagged movie review, Oscar | Leave a reply
Reviews image, movies, film projector

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, PWMR00005)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 4 2019

Plot

PWMR00005a-Batman-v-Superman
Eighteen months after Superman battled Zod, Batman is convinced that Superman himself is a potential threat and needs to be stopped. Meanwhile, Clark Kent wants to unmask Batman the Vigilante.

What I Liked

The original premise seemed silly, until you see both Batman and Superman fearing what the other might do, and seeing themselves as the saviour. Diana Prince does a great job managing around the two testosterone-filled superheroes. And it is great to finally see a real villain that poses an actual threat — Doomsday is so powerful, he can even kill Superman, and it takes all three of the heroes together to stop him and Lex Luthor.

What I Didn’t Like

Lex seems more like a cliché, and using adoptive mothers as extortionary bait seems contrived.

PWMR00005b-Batman-v-Superman

The Bottom Line

More enjoyable than I was expecting

My Overall Rating

🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪️ – 4/5 Enjoyable

Signature, happy watching

Links To Other Information

Other Movie Reviews at PolyWogg.ca
Movie details at IMDb.com
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Posted in Movie Review | Tagged movie review | Leave a reply
Reviews image, movies, film projector

The Protector (2019, PWMR00007)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 9 2019

Plot

PWMR00007a-The-Protector
A father hires an ex-SAS officer with a past to serve as his daughter’s bodyguard when he gets a series of threats against her.

What I Liked

The basic premise is sound, and the woman (Emma Rigby) is decent to watch. I saw her briefly before in Becoming Human but it wasn’t a show I was into, so didn’t see much of her there.

What I Didn’t Like

The production has a made-for-TV feel to it with low-budget action plus a schmaltzy romance feel to it. Plus showing his supposed flashbacks is a bit ridiculously done. And did I mention the “plot” makes no sense after the first round? The father is a big tycoon, and is being targeted for something else. His daughter is threatened so it makes sense to hire the bodyguard too. Except here’s the thing — the final revelation of who is behind it all makes NO SENSE for the methodology. As a spoiler alert, the father is being blackmailed by someone with photos of him in a compromising position. Which is enough on its own, and he’s paying the blackmail. But they also threaten his daughter, which MAKES NO SENSE. Two entirely different threats from the same person when the first one worked on its own. The person behind it is relatively obvious, and the “reveal” is all told to the viewer, not even shown. And finally the main actor can’t act to save his life, nor the father, or the brother. Which leaves the daughter, her friend, the bodyguard’s booking agent/friend, and the mother. So why did I watch it? Because it accidentally ended up on my preview list when I thought it was the start of a TV series like the Equalizer. Nope.

PWMR00007b-The-Protector

The Bottom Line

Not worth watching unless nothing else is on.

My Overall Rating

🐸🐸⚪️⚪️⚪️ – 2/5 Not bad

Signature, happy watching

Links To Other Information

Other Movie Reviews at PolyWogg.ca
Movie details at IMDb.com
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Posted in Movie Review | Tagged movie review | Leave a reply
Reviews image, movies, film projector

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (1987, PWMR00004)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
February 24 2019

Plot

PWMR00004a-American-Ninja-2
Michael Dudikoff and Steve James are back as Army Ranger buddies sent to an island where some Marines have disappeared. The reason? Witnesses saw guys in black outfits, hoods, and swords carrying them away.

What I Liked

The movie jumps from fight scene to fight scene so the action rarely slows down. And there is a great scene with Steve James using fairly large knives in an epic battle. Overall, most of the secondary fight scenes are much better done than in the first movie.

What I Didn’t Like

The plot is almost non-existent (super soldiers, meh), almost all of the acting is hammy, and the ultimate battle is a let down compared to a big car chase scene doing a bit of a take-off of the first movie’s opening scene (person being dragged behind a vehicle).

PWMR00004b-American-Ninja-2

The Bottom Line

A significant step down from the first movie.

My Overall Rating

🐸🐸⚪️⚪️⚪️ – 2/5 Not bad

Signature, happy watching

Links To Other Information

Other Movie Reviews at PolyWogg.ca
Movie details at IMDb.com

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Posted in Movie Review | Tagged action, movie review | Leave a reply

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