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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

My view from the lilypads

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Tag Archives: memes

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.

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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
Goals image, meditation

FtU #01 – The universe can go meme itself

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
June 2 2019

As I outlined previously (Deciding on my way forward), I need a short-term 30-day solution where I ignore any messages coming from the universe that’s stopping me from doing stuff I want to do. Astronomy is on the list, and I’ll come back to that in subsequent posts, but for now, I need something small and symbolic for myself.

Like memes.

I have done some memes several times over the last few years in concentrated bursts. I share comics on FB, sure, but I’m talking more about my “own” creations — quotes, jokes, lunch notes for kids. I loved the idea of having my own little brand that gets shared around. So when I did them, I focused a lot on the design, aka branding, but never really got anywhere:

  • For quotes, I tried out a few designs on people and ended up with a vertical design that looked like a coil bound notepad, used a italicized font like it was handwritten/printed (not cursive), added a picture of a pencil with someone hugging it, and of course, included my frog logo;
  • The jokes/humour design was simple enough…vertical design, a solid background, a picture of a jester, and my frog logo;
  • For lunch notes, I put a banner across the top that said Lunch Notes, kept the background white and horizontal, added a pic of a kid talking to a frog standing on a lunchbox, and again, included my frog logo;

I did about 50 of each type and while I got a few likes, they were rarely shared, i.e. little take up, insufficient resonance or critical mass, and so I felt like I was shouting into the abyss. It happens. And with little response, I did my 50 and kind of stalled. I have thousands of quotes I want to use; hundreds of jokes saved; and ideas for a few hundred lunch notes. But, as I said, I stalled.

Yet I like MAKING them, and while there is no “productive reason” to keep doing them, I’ve rebooted my memes with a non-branded brand. I decided I don’t much care about the consistency of the look and feel, I’ll put something together that I like, and BAM!, out the door it goes. I did a quick bit of research to see what was the best recommended size slide in Powerpoint for sharing with FB (11.25 x 6.25 inches) and Twitter (14.2 x 7.1 inches), found the recommended FB size will work with both without resizing or overlap, and so I started doing the memes again. Mostly so far I’m just redoing the previous ones with simpler non-branding/branding.

For the quotes, I kept my frog logo, added in my website address (just the default polywogg.ca part), and the rest is whatever strikes my fancy:

For humour, the court jester is present with my website address, the rest is freeform:

And for lunch notes, I’m doing solid backgrounds or borders, centred text with graphics, and I kept the lunchbox image with my website address:

I’ve done 10 so far, 9 do-overs and 1 new, and I’ll keep going. I’m also switching over the images and quotes on my website — previously I kept the text so that it would index itself, now I’m just going with the image.

Maybe the universe will like them, maybe it won’t. But I don’t care.

The universe can go meme itself.

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Posted in Experiences, Goals, Humour, Ideas, Quotes, To Be Updated | Tagged depression, FTU, goals, memes, universe | Leave a reply
Goals image, annual planner

2015 – A meme for you, and a meme for you, and a meme for you…

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 3 2015

The fifth item on my vaguebooking list was “Five golden days (Melodious Monday, Thoughtful Tuesday, Wild Wednesday, Throw-back Thursday, and Funny Friday)”. I’m not actually sure those will be the names for the five days, or even the themes, but it is what I have so far.

Late last year, I started playing with some memes. Some of them you might have seen, like “You might be an astronomer if…” or “You might be a statistician if…”. I also did one for my wife about whether memos were urgent or not. I quite like doing them. I also really like doing quote ones. But I kind of put them together a bit haphazardly when I was doing them, or iterative at least. Not all the same design, or layout, inconsistent branding, etc. Theoretically I’m building a brand with my websites, but if you want to do it properly, one is supposed to be consistent in look and feel. There are a few sites on the net that I really admire their look, and I want something similar for my memes.

But I haven’t designed them yet, that’s a January project that I haven’t quite actioned yet, and so my goal is to have them launch later in the year. I’m thinking some of them will start in February, may even try out a few designs on people this month and get them to vote.

As that sounds like a bit of a vague plan, let me make it concrete — I commit to making 200 new memes this year, and to use the Seinfeld method to track progress. That should allow me enough incentive to get busy, although I’m hoping I blow that number out of the water. However, since I knew that I have another project that will affect my output in November, I’m taking into account that January and November will likely have no regular memes at all.

Oh, and while I won’t go into details about the extra project until November 1st, it’s going to be meme-tastic too. Meme-rrific. Memerable even. (Hey, it’s my blog, and I can pun badly if I want to…).

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Posted in Goals | Tagged 2015, chain, goals, memes, Seinfeld | Leave a reply
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