The Journey Within

The Written Road

Sometimes it’s long and sometimes it’s short. The writer cannot always know ahead of time. If they plan on a work being long they may tend to fill in sections that don’t need filling in. It is best to see where the story takes you. The ending may be clear to you from the start, but it may change overtime and that is okay.That shows that you are growing with the characters. A reader shouldn’t know whats going to happen at the end from the beginning, so why should you? What’s the fun in that? Let the characters you came up with take you on a journey.

It’s best to keep to your element. If you think what you have written is worth reading then other people will feel the same way. Of course you cannot engage everyone, so why waste your time trying? Keep it to what you know and what you like. If for example you like horror, write about horror. Don’t worry about feeling you might be typecast  as a horror writer. So what? Do not try to up your vocabulary either, because you may feel yours is not up to par. By looking through the thesaurus you are writing something you would not normally write. This takes away from what could be a well written, engaging story that people would enjoy reading. Don’t worry about the extent of your vocabulary for now. It will get better the more you read and write.

On the contrary, writing is not like riding a bike. You cannot simply just hop back on. You have to keep at it for it to mature. Reading is also essential. How is one expected to write better if they cannot engage in what others have written? By keeping to only your own writing, you cannot experience anything new. It’s good to read up on many authors. Not only that, but also articles in the newspaper, the average person’s blog posts, etc. Read stuff from this century, the 1800s, from when rock n’ roll first hit the streets. This way you are guaranteed to get a broad stroke on all types of different avenues of writing. You will be able to pick up more things than if you were just to stick to one thing.

Writing should be a daily exercise. There  is this article Morning Pages by Julia Cameron. She states that by writing down three pages once you get up can ease the tension and get you into the flow. This is a great exercise especially for those who find it annoying at first. Some of the best writing is done when a person feels unhappy and just wants to be left alone. There is more emotion that can sweep through the pages. Writing everyday can ease the stresses one may be feeling allowing for the mind to become clearer, being able to come up with more ideas to write about. You basically have to give a little to get something out of it. Don’t expect ideas to hit you all at once. Keep working at it and they will be flying around your head in no time.

The Release

Hello everyone. So I have talked about my tutorials projects in previous blogs. The two before the one I am about to talk about deals with diabetes. The routine of injecting an insulin injection into my leg and a what if video if I were to get a pancreas transplant. This new project deals with the release of pain for a diabetic before and after injecting themselves with a needle.

The before images show me preparing to limit the pain before I even inject.

The after images show how I can limit the pain that has acquired. Now it doesn’t always hurt, but these are just precautions to help ease the mind. Most of these images are healthy alternatives yet there are a few that could and will cause more harm if done repeatedly.

At first I drew the images from references. Then I covered the canvases I used with an acrylic paint wash. After that I used charcoal  to bring out the drawings. I decided to add a little bit of color to each one to bring out certain elements. Then I took an knife and cut into the canvases, stitched them back up and poured different amounts of fake blood so it looks like it is coming out of the stitched marks. This is to convey that even though I am trying to reduce pain, the pain is always there underneath and it can rise to the surface at any moment, no matter what I try to do to relieve it.

Roommates

(Hello everyone. Here is a new narrative I have been working on. It is a bit revolting at parts so fair warning. Well enjoy!)

“Hey John.”

“Hey.”

“Everything good?” asked Ben as he opened the door to find his roommate in a parka lounger staring at a blank television set.

“Yeah. Yeah everything’s just gravy.” John got up from the chair and moved toward Ben. “Where do I start? I lost my job today.”

“What?! What happened?” Ben asked with a high pitched squeal.

“Well apparently marketing firms find it impolite to jerk it off in the company bathrooms.”

“John what the hell–”

“Never mind that I was on my break of course!”

“Why couldn’t you just wait til you got back here?”

John turned his head impatiently to his right as if a nervous tick came over him. “Well a Miss Jessica, I decided to bring her over a nice little cinnabun for her this lovely morning. Her door was unlocked so I just wandered on in. She was soaked, Ben. No, not from water but from the pool boy’s own personal selection of swimmers. Streaming right from her mouth. Her mouth Ben!”

Ben didn’t know what to say. “I, I’m sorry John. Really I–”

“So we break up. Short end of the story.”

What in gods sake did you do to her…them? Ben wondered.

“So, mighty pissed off at work I was, but I held it together until my break. My eyes turned to the bathroom and instead of putting another hole through the wall, I thought I’d do something along more of a healthy measure.”

Another? But Ben decided not to interrupt.

“So I was in the stall whacking it and I guess I was making a wee it too much noise and guess who comes in?”

This time Ben did speak up. “I don’t know John.”

“No guess, come on!”

Ben just stood there with his mouth slightly ajar, head shaking slowly back and forth. John looked at him with an open hand gesture. Well, I’m waiting. “Well you’re close! But no. It was the head of the company. Apparently his private toilet was backed up. Not a surprise. The fat bastard has been eating gyros for lunch everyday for the last five years.”

“John–”

“So he hears me and knocks on the door. Well I was at the reach of orgasm, kind of loose control of my pecker and splat all over the floor hitting Mr. Duffy on his left shoe. Whoops!”

“Jesus John.”

“So I zip up, look at Mr. Duffy in the face, he tells me to get the fuck out, so  I pop him one in the mouth and leave.”

“You hit him?!” Ben couldn’t stand up straight anymore and had to grab the counter for balance.

“Yeah, yeah I hit him. So that was  my day buddy. How was yours?”

Ben suddenly woke up in a fright. He checked the clock. 5:26 AM. He would have to get up for work about half an hour. Oh wait, he thought. No I don’t. I don’t work there anymore. For reasons Ben couldn’t say. He got out of his bed none-the-less and entered John’s room. Sound asleep, at least that’s what people would think if they were to see him right now. But not Ben. He knows the truth.

They lived private lives, Ben and John. Both lone wolves, with little family connection. John had his mother in Seattle who maybe gets in contact with him once a year to send out the annual Christmas picture. Ben on the other hand, well Ben didn’t really have anybody. If it wasn’t for each other, at least one of them might have gone crazy from loneliness. In fact it looks like one of them has, but for a different reason.

Ben never had a girlfriend, never worked in a marketing company and never assaulted his boss. No that young lady and her pool cleaner he would hear on the news later that day died from falling over the ledge of a balcony. Also a poor old Mr. Duffy suffered from a heart attack after slipping on some left over mayo that was dripping from his hands. Although, that dream he had very well could have been his brain saying John was in on the whole thing.

Ben couldn’t deny he did kill John. Self defense mind you, John was drinking heavily at the time and came at Ben with a meat cleaver. It was a matter of kill or be killed. In his mind it all fit together and he believed every word of it. Even in his dreams his subconscious had pointed away from himself. It’s just too bad he will later have to convince more than just himself.

Ben walked out the door into the brisk morning with the couple of days he had left, his sanity not too far behind him.

Coding

Have you ever taken a class on coding, learning to make a website or a form on such programs as Dreamweaver and thought why can’t their be an easier way? Having to remember the coding for every part of a website, every little maneuver, can really take away from your precious time. Well with JotForm you do not have to know a lick of coding to build professional, high quality looking forms. The number of pre-made templates you can use are endless. JotForm is not limited to other peoples templates, you can very well make your own. As the late Michael Jackson might say, “It’s easy as one, two, three.”

JotForm allows you to mess around with color, font size, the type of font and so much more. With the CSS Helper you can change the border size, height, width, etc. with the click of a button. With images you can take them from the internet and upload your own to fill your form and/or background. Let us not forget about the opacity. You can change how solid your form is to match the background more and the same is true with font. A new slogan JotForm may want to think about is JotForm: coding made easy.

Books VS Movies

Books are a great way to escape reality. Movies can do this too, but with movies what are you left with? When I read a book I find myself in the setting, relating to the characters, no matter the genre. With a movie  I watch it and a couple of hours go by and that’s it. There is little to no interaction.

Novels are these gateways to imagination. Sure many people can read the same novel, but everyone will envision something different in their minds. It can be how the setting looks, how the characters look, how they sound, etc. When everyone watches a movie they all watch the same movie. There is no difference. Constant readers tend to get lost in a novel, to loose themselves in a fictitious world, where their worries can be put on hold. A movie may provide this, but when reading your mind is fully within the story. With a movie, it is not as hard for ones mind to wander.

Reading a novel is a solitary act. One can read at their own pace and create their own visions. People are not yelling out that the killer is behind the door, because the reader is the only one who knows this. Being part of a book club is no exception to the rule. Many people may be reading the same book, but most likely they would not be reading in the same room or at the same pace. Discussions can then be made to see how other people have interpreted it and see if it matches up. A movie rarely requires this. Reading allows people to raise their awareness. Having learned about so many characters, readers are more intoned to how people in the real world act. Movies show what people expect from one another, not always what they are all about.

Movies based off novels usually always have some flaws. The main problem would have to be the casting. Everyone pictures someone different for the lead cast, so how can a producer appeal to everybody? It really boils down to the characteristics shown in that character throughout the novel. An example of casting gone wrong would have to be in The Shining. In the original novel by Stephen King, Wendy Torrance is shown as a strong capable woman. In the movie she is played by Shelley Duvall who is portrayed as a cowardly naive shell of a woman.

Constant readers are rarely pleased when a novel is adapted into a movie. They want the entire novel in there and with just a few hours of showtime, there is usually material that is missing. If that is not bad enough, sometimes screenwriters will take out important parts and make things happen in the movie that never appeared in the novel. The Hunger Games, for example, provided a different way in which Katniss obtained a mocking jay pin. This caused a little bit of an uproar.

There are exceptions to the rule however. Sometimes the movie is well intact with the novel. In rare cases the movie can sometimes even be better than the novel it originated from. There are some producers and screenwriters who really can rise to the challenge in making most of their audience happy with the result. Although great praise must come from the novel, in any case, for the movie would not be seen without the author’s written hand.

How Online Forms Can Help Nonprofit Organizations

A high percentage of any nonprofit organization’s budget goes toward their cause. Creating forms, so people can donate to these causes, is a great step forward. There are plenty of free form builders out there one can easily obtain. JotForm has an almost endless amount of free forms to choose from and plenty of tools for an organization to make their own unique and professional form. Forms online do not always get the best recognition, but once a person sits down to make one they can see how essential they are.

Many nonprofits host different events throughout the year. Forms can be used to invite people to these events. Doing it online is a lot more simple than having to send out all of them through mail. Plus think of all the trees that you would be saving. Other information can be collected, such as where the event will take place and what would be going on.

Working together is essential in any organization. More ideas are thrown around, ideas are challenged and ideas can be branched off from other ideas. Having a partnership allows for people to get feedback or ask questions. All the burden is not placed on a single pair of shoulders; there are more people there to help carry the weight.

Some people are not always right for a specific organization which makes it good to have an application form. Instead of wasting time and calling people in to meet with you, one can simply write down questions and see if their answers would allow them to qualify. People have been known to lie on such forms, but if they are not who they say they are then they can simply be let go. It is really just a safety net screening out process. Plus it allows the organizations to go through applicants more quickly.

Forms also should integrate with other websites. Donation forms, for example, would progress using Paypal as their provider. Integrating with Google Maps makes it easy to pin point directions to an address on a form. The information is streaming on the web so nonprofit organizations can maximize their impact on their communities.

The Scientific Use of Animation

Molecular Biologists and researchers are still living in the days of textbook drawings to engage in how a cellular process occurs.

These two dimensional drawings show how little of what a molecular object can do. Janet Iwasa, a molecular biologist, knows this all too well. She sees these drawings as vast simplifications of these complex systems as she describes in her TED talk.

This is where animation kicks in. Using such software as say Cinema 4D allows a biologist to create a three-dimensional structure of the whole system they are trying to convey and can even move them around.
By seeing the whole cell, molecular vessel or whatever it may be can help a biologist create new hypothesizes on how it works. There is a deeper knowledge when that biologist or researcher is able to start moving that object around.

Most scientists, however, relentlessly revert themselves back to the simple two-dimensional drawings. They simply do not have the time to go through the courses to learn how to make these animated structures come alive. The pay offs would be astronomical, brooding audiences with extreme accuracy. These animations can help for what these molecular objects really look like, how they function and what can be done to keep these structures working.

Due to the lack of time, a new software has been installed specifically for biologists to create molecular animations. Biologists, animators and programmers integrated together to work on Molecular Flipbook. For a biologist that has never touched this kind of software it has been estimated that they will start making their own animations within fifteen minutes. This is huge in the ability that one sees these structures. Biologists are learning new ways to explore data and can now engage with their students in more profound methods. Only time will tell where animation will be able to lead biologists and the hypothesizes they will come up with.

JotForm VS Google Forms

For all you Google Form users, can I give you some advice? Switch over to JotForm as quickly as you can. Just by the name alone you should be able to tell that JotForm has a better use of forms. Here are a few things that JotForm allows you to do. You can upload images from the internet or your very own, same with logos, you can create your own branding, change fonts, colors, sizes and so much more to make it your own. With Google Forms you have a maximum of twenty-five templates to choose from. After a while they kind of loose their originality, don’t they? Here are just a few of them.

Coding can sure be a drag, can it not? Well with JotForm you can create professional forms that look appealing without having to know any code with the CSS Helper.

With Google the only way to stand out from the crowd, to make your forms look better, is from your own personal use of coding. Now coding may be important to your field of study and it really is not a bad thing to learn, but to those who want an easier way to create forms, JotForm is the way to go with no hassle.

Let me go over what Google Forms does not have at all. They do not have a method of payment, there is no spam prevention and with “Google forms” there is branding everywhere, you cannot make it your own form for your personal use, for a company, etc. Not only that, but to the options that Google Forms do have, they are very limited. Integrating with other websites, they only have google spreadsheet. They only have a few functions to help make your form your own, different than anybody else’s. As for different widgets, you need to know a required HTML code or CSS code to add any.

Integration is a great way to come together as a whole. Ideas grow more rapidly among  different organizations that way. They can help each other out by promoting themselves. JotForm integrates with websites such as Paypal, Dropbox, SalesForce, WordPress, Twitter, etc.

An example of this is once you have completed making a form you can drop that form right into another network you have.

Customizing your form is very important. It is what makes yours different than anybody else’s. JotForm has various tools to make your form look anyway it wants. This includes the widgets you can use such as taking a picture or uploading a video from Youtube to your form. Let us say you made a video on pet adoption. Having that video next to a form so people can put information to adopt would be a great approach.

JotForm with its various options and credibility is a lot more reliable than Google Forms. Go do yourself a favor and check out the difference. Having an online form is so important these days for what you may be trying to show people. Make it easy on yourself and choose a website that will work with you. You will be amazed at what you will be able to do.

Adobe FormsCentral Shutting Down. Three Actions to take!

Adobe FormsCentral is Shutting Down. 3 Actions You Must Take Now

 

To the dismay of its users, Adobe’s FormsCentral is shutting down this July 28. They are discontinuing the product due to a lack of interest. The major players in form building have edged out this Adobe product, by hosting stronger products, continuously innovating, and focusing on ease of use. Although Adobe struck down the product due to it not being able to garner a large enough following, the users that it does have now don’t know what to do or where to go. Have no fear, JotForm is here.

 

JotForm’s engineers have worked diligently to help the doomed FormsCentral users. They have developed the first, and the only, completely seamless import tool.

 

1. Easily import forms and responses to the FormsCentral Alternative: JotForm.
2. That’s it. That’s all you have to do to save all of your hard work and data. So have you done it yet?
3. Lounge on your couch, walk the dog, crack open a beer, all while savoring the moment of inner peace that JotForm’s Import Wizard has afforded you.