Godzilla and the Garden Gnomes

Hard to resist letting Godzilla run around in the garden, getting those gnomes in order.

Pesky garden gnomes have finally met their match in the Rampaging Kaiju Garden Gnome. Made of durable cast poly resin, he’s ready to take his place as the guardian of your garden.

Source: Rampaging Kaiju Garden Gnome | ThinkGeek

Build a Better Mousetrap for the End of the World

Would you even guess this is a mousetrap? It’s vintage, from the 1930’s approximately. I first saw it on a video from Shawn Woods and then I went looking on eBay out of curiousity. Shawn Woods makes videos of how mousetraps actually work at catching mice. If you are especially squeamish or strongly against killing rodents, don’t watch.

I think people have been trying to catch rodents, mice in particular, from the earliest days of deliberately planting anything with the idea of farming. You might think we should let all the urban wildlife live and, I’m not out to kill them all, but I do think we need to find some balance. Some animals are very good at surviving, adapting and scavenging. I’d rather see other animals keep their foothold instead of the planet being overrun by predatory scavengers. (I do include ourselves among those).

I enjoyed watching the mousetrap videos for the engineering aspects really. My Father was an electrical engineer and I also like seeing the mechanics of things and how all the little parts work together and rely on each other. Vintage things especially because they were still made to last then. I like the heavy, solid feel of them and 100 years later they made need a little cleaning up but will still work. Often any repairs are simple enough you can manage yourself.

I like to imagine the mousetraps people would come up with if there were an end of the world, a zombie apocalypse, a worldwide disaster, or some other possibility like the end of all fossil fuels. Could you make a mousetrap if you had to design and build it yourself? Don’t go with the “let all creatures live” thing. If it came down to the mouse or yourself for the last of the food you have on hand, I don’t think you would feel quite so charitable about sharing with a pack of rodents.

A Punch Censor?

I remember Batman from the 1970’s. To hide the fights or make them less serious looking, graphics were used to illustrate punches, hits and smashes. While camouflaging the fights the punch censors also made them funny, so I’d guess they worked. Too bad that plan changed. I’d still rather see the censors, they had character.

How would you use a punch censor? Assuming you would, of course.

Cybertwee: Feminine Technology

From a post on The Guardian:

Imagine, though, what the tech landscape might look like if soft hues and girly aesthetics were championed, rather than ridiculed? That’s exactly what three young artists – Gabriella Hilleman, 27, Violet Forest 26, and May Waver, 23 – decided to do a few years ago, when, mostly on a lark, they convened the first International Cybertwee Conference and Roundtable.

…Ultimately, Hilleman, Waver and Forest hope that Cybertwee can be not only simply an aesthetic movement, but that it can restore skills and participation in tech to girly girls who might normally be alienated from the space.

Visit the Cybertwee site.

One point in the article mentions pink being used to show things as fake and/ or sexual. I wish there had been more about that issue as it seems to be the bigger problem with having feminity or girlishness in technology/ the digital world. Pink has become fluffy or slutty. When did you last see something pink that wasn’t supposed to be seen as one or the other? Pink has become a stereotype.

I like the ultimate goal behind cybertwee, getting more people involved in technology. It is such a new area, still evolving. It needs input from a variety of people with different experiences and points of view.

Words from Wordables

One of my favourite things are rainy nights. I like everything dark and shiny with a mix of coloured lights (if you’re in town).

These two words came up from Wordables in my Facebook feed, posted by a friend. I visited the site to find more.

Moved the Site to b2evolution

Just moved the site over from WordPress to b2evolution. People have asked me why, a few times. There are a few reasons. But, for now I am fixing glitches with moving to another CMS. I like b2 and I don’t think it will take me long to get to know how it works and where things are now. Meanwhile, images are mostly not working. Categories and tags did not make the import, not sure why. So I am manually going through my posts one by one to renovate a little. What usually happens when you move to a new place… you renovate to make it look more like the old place. 🙂 People are funny like that.

Making my life easier, I have added comments from the original post to this post. I have been moving my site content to Joomla. It’s a different set up from WordPress and b2evolution but I think it will be more active and user friendly. Still need to fix the images with posts (that was mangled by WordPress) and add my links which I will end up doing manually, one at a time. But, I hope this will end the project of moving from WordPress to some other CMS. It has been a longer adventure than I expected.

Here are the comments:

Comment from: Jane Gassner [Visitor]

I lost the entire archive of MidLifeBloggers.com and JaneGassner.com sometime during the holiday season. It was one of those, “you only have 24 hours to migrate” and for various reasons, I got in at the 25th hour. I couldn’t decide how upset I should/would be. MidLifeBloggers was a longterm venture that still got a lot of hits. JaneGassner.com, not so much. But MidLifeBloggers was old business, and I had said everything I wanted to about midlife and beyond. Jane Gassner had the potential to be new and, if not shiny, then gaining a slight glow about it after time. So I’m redoing JaneGassner.com but starting anew. It’s springtime, and perhaps that’s influencing me to not try to make it as it was. Considering that it wasn’t that successful, it’s probably a wise decision.

Comment from: laura [Member]

I really like history so that part of it would be hard for me. But, I have thought about just starting fresh too. Moving a site is never completely smooth and simple but I’ve been trying to move old content and have not made time to write new posts. That is kind of backwards. Starting fresh might have been better than trying to preserve old content (that mostly only matters to me).

Comment from: laura [Member]

I like your new site. Writing something for writers has it’s own challenge. It makes me doubt myself and compare myself with others too much. I thought about closing this site. But, I do like writing it. So… here it still is.

You have doubled images in posts with WordPress featured image. I kept having that problem too.