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Happy birthday to Jess of the Shire! It turns out that she shares a birthday with celebrated fantasy fiction author Terry Pratchett, albeit a half century apart in birth year. While Jess is mostly known for her Tolkien related content (obvious by the screenname) she has dabbled in other areas of fiction like the Dune…
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In the twenty-first century, every waking moment for a content creator is calculated towards appeasing the ever-hungry beast known as the algorithm. What a time to be alive! Forget about tortured artists starving for the sake of the craft; now, we have hustlers fueled by energy drinks, furiously tapping out tweets at 2 AM, all…
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Thanks to my best friend showing me and gifting me a license of the Corel Painter 2023 program, I’ve decided to revive many photos from my past. While I’ve always been a bit leery of using AI-powered photo editing software, the results with what the software can do with particularly old digital photos is marvelous!…
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In 2003, I wrote many short essays as part of a weekly homework assignment. One of these has hung around in my archives for many years, a more substantial piece called “Life is Not a Grade,” a whimsical yet insightful expedition into the notion that our existence cannot — and should not — be quantified…
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Our human experience, this trek through Absurdia, is a complex and multidimensional journey. It’s full of both ephemeral and everlasting moments. Every memory we create, emotion we feel, and day we experience shapes us into the individuals that we are. Even when their effects appear lost to the passage of time, the residue and essence…
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I’m quite fond of this quote from American journalist Bill Moyers: “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” No matter how mundane something may at first appear, creative efforts can find ways to make it not only interesting, but marvelous! How’s this done?Let’s explore how creativity can transform even the most ordinary aspects…
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A society that normalizes bullying is no society at all. Yet in our grand age of progress, we’ve apparently decided that bullying suddenly isn’t that big of a problem. It’s as if we took all those anti-bullying campaigns from the early 2000s and collectively decided to toss them into the same memory hole where we…
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This photo was taken with a regular camera – I can’t remember which one – and later scanned to a JPG. I decided to edit it with my Corel Painter 2023 program to give it new life. I heavily cropped it and used a “Post Impressionist” filter to make it look more artsy. Let me…
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Why Consistent Effort is Better Than Flash-in-the-Pan Success I’m going to drop a brutal truth right now: most of us will never be the winners of life. If you’re the sort of person who still holds onto dreams of grand success, allow me to rain on your parade — gently, of course. One of the…
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When we think of adulting, we usually imagine the difficult things: paying bills, finding well-paying jobs, and settling down. But, in reality, adulting is much more about living your life to the fullest and making your dreams come true. It’s about making a difference in this world, whether it’s through charity work, starting your own…