Leaves

Leaves 10 14 07, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

We rarely get a lot of vivid Fall color here. We have warm weather most of the Autumn, and then we have not-warm weather immediately thereafter. We lack the endless days of chill that make leaf paradises so colorful.

I've been examining weblog templates. I want to set up a weblog which will simply do the kinds of things a website will do, but with the
convenience of a blogger-style interface. I've been hunting a pre-designed template which eschews dated posting, and just allows one to post items. The items I would post are a song collaboration I did with a friend, after his website got too full to continue hosting it.
I can power the music hosting with a set of box.net widgets. However, I would need to have an attractive date-free template for the individual weblog postings.

I am so impressed with so many templates people have made out there for the public to use. Yet I'm puzzled that a goodish number feel the need to appropriate corporate/commercial trade imagery so wholesale. I don't mean the understandable artistry of the collage-maker. I mean the "Hello Kitty' and Disney character templates.

I think sometimes that people fail to see that the internet is "Steamboat Willie". By this I mean that the medium, like the earliest animated films, provides endless chances for people to create new icons and new characters. Rather than be mired in the appropriation of others' ideas, people have the chance to launch new ideas, and have them seen and heard.

I'd rather have a podcast of a great story by an unknown than file-share some absurd book-on-tape. I'd rather hear new music than what some a & r fellow in New York has picked for me based on market reaction studies. I'd rather see new pictures than "Hello Kitty".
That's not a knock on "Hello Kitty", who looks pretty "hello" to me.

When technology permitted graphic novel publishers to affordably generate new work outside the major publishing houses, a blossoming took place. The technology is there for new blossomings, which are already taking place. My hope is that the flowers resulting will be new flowers, and not merely appropriations.