Elizabeth Gilbert, an author, gave a talk on Creativity and its deadliness to the human psyche.

It connected with me on a personal level. I enjoy drawing but I don’t like drawing the same thing again. There is a fear that any other reiterations will never be as good as the original. It’s the same thing with humor. With every joke I make, I feel compelled to make the next joke, next observation more clever and more funny than before. It’s a never ending cycle. To be able to place this blame of the lack of success on something “outside” I can see why it would be liberating.

It’s a very personal talk, and quite interesting.

So while roaming the internets, I stumbled upon http://www.iscribble.net. iScribble is a website that allows you to paint chat. You can chat and draw pictures with people online at the same time. Drawing with strangers make for some interesting collaborations.

I enjoy chatting to people, but I enjoy drawing with others doubly so. While the “drawing” software is a bit archaic compared to some current oekaki boards, I find the group nature very entertaining. I’m sure a quick Google search will yield many other paint chat sites and there may be better ones out there.

Anyway, give it a shot if you haven’t, and if you wouldn’t mind gettin’ some awesome group draw-age, free feel to drop me a message!

http://en.gravatar.com/

Some of you will notice that there are spots for pictures next to the comments. They are linked to a Gravatar account, which you can create for free. It is a universal avatar system that links an image to your email addy. Nifty. If you post on other blogs that use the Gravatar system, it’ll automatically carry over the avatar to the comment. Check it out if you get a chance.

Yes. I have ads on my site now.

My ads are through Project Wonderful. They have an interesting system for ad payments, utilizing an cost per day model determined by an infinite auction. I don’t have to worry about clicks, as my earnings depend purely on what advertisers deem appropriate. I’m not seeking to earn money, but I’ve decided to see if having ads displayed on my website could offset my hosting costs, which aren’t terrible.

I figure, if I could maybe get 5 cents per day, I’d make about 18 dollars in a year, and cover about a third of my hosting costs. It’s just something I’m testing out. And maybe this will give me more of an incentive to develop this site and give you all more of a reason to visit everyday, which is always nice, no?

It looks like ComicPress 3.0 (the wordpress theme I’m using) is prolly gonna be released relatively soon. This means I prolly should upgrade my base wordpress install to the current version before that happens. I’m still using 2.9 and it’s prolly likely I’m wide open to some security flaws.

I’m prolly gonna upgrade soon, meaning it’s possible and Likely that I’ll ruin everything and lose a ton of data.

Maybe this is a good time for some site revamping. If the current color scheme is disagreeable, please let me know. Otherwise, if my current layout doesn’t work, I plan to create a new one with similar colors.