All posts in August 2012

  • What I Learned from Helen Gurley Brown

    I have never purchased a copy of Cosmopolitan in my life.  In fact, it has rarely done anything other than annoy me with its covers featuring too-perfect women, too good to be true “lifestyle tips”, too far beyond the average budget “must haves”, its constant subtle implications that, happy though I may think myself, I could be doing better.  Nay, I should be doing better.

    However, it must be said that the work of Helen Gurley Brown has had a profound impact on me and the way I live my life, an impact that has so far spanned 25+ years and will no doubt continue as long as I do.  I first read Sex and the Single Girl as a teenager, back in the 80’s.  I have reread it several times since then.  And not a day goes by that I don’t apply something I learned from that book to something I am doing that day.  I’m not single, and I’m no longer really a “girl” in the youthful sense of the word, but the lessons still apply, some even more so now than they did when I was younger and on my own.

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    I was here and read this!

  • Things That Are Not Artistic Nudes

    I spend quite a bit of time on deviantART, scouting out content for The Poetic Pinup Revue.  It’s one of my favorite parts of the job, and it has netted some truly beautiful images that might not have found their way to our pages otherwise.

    However, it must be said that for every gem uncovered, there are several layers of non-gemlike material to be got through first, and the majority of them are found in dA’s “Artistic Nudes” category.  Granted, they only wind up there for lack of a more suitable category, such as “Porn by People Who Do Not Have the Balls to Admit Their Work is Porn” or even a more general “Photos of Nipples and Genitals with Little Else to Recommend Them” but, while I will never tell another artist what to create, the following really don’t qualify as “Artistic Nudes”.

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  • A Niche is Supposed to be a Good Thing

    Once upon a while back, I read and refrained from joining in on a conversation about required sizes of digital images for quality print.  One individual insisted that 300 dpi and 72 dpi are exactly the same thing and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they are talking about.

    Yeah.  I’ll let you absorb that for a moment.

    Party B said “um… no” and proceeded to explain why.  Party A refused to listen, and Party C, on whose page this conversation was taking place, finally said “hey, let’s just cite artistic difference and end this”.  Wise party, that C.  C was wrong, of course, but at least the conversation ended.

    It has recently been brought to my attention that someone of the Party A school is starting a magazine.  And their “niche” will be not requiring high-resolution images.

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    I was here and read this!