Amy’s Stuff

If you watched the Big Idea Tour feature on the Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie DVD set, then you probably remember the guy in “Tie-land” with the uke and all the “regrettable edibles“. Pretty funny stuff. (If you haven’t seen all the extras on the Jonah DVD set, it’s worth getting just for those… OK, the bonus features AND the Larry/Lunt commentary, but that’s another story. Back to the guy with the disgusting foods.)

Well, that guy is Bryan Ballinger, an amazing artist and tremendously funny to boot. Phil Vischer calls him “truly one of the most unusually creative folks we ever hired.” And if you take a look at some of his web projects, you’ll see what he means.

First take a stroll to his recipe for Caramel Flassies. Click on the gooey goodness to read the recipe. Yummy.

Then you might want to browse his blog, too, where you’ll find sketches, 3D illustrations, and snippets from his recent projects. My favorites are his DailyBreadwig posts in which he illustrates obscure Bible verses like this one.

Ahh… it gets my creative juices flowing.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore the social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, you’re missing more than just a great organizational tool; simplified sharing, easy researching, relevant search results, and subscription feeds are just some of the benefits I’ve discovered. Let me show you what I mean:

But first, a primer. del.icio.us is a no-cost web site that allows users to create accounts and store bookmarks (favorites) of their favorite sites. The immediate benefit for users is that their bookmarks are now not limited to a particular computer, they can now be accessed from anywhere. (Hmm… you can get your favs from home OR work. Interesting…) These bookmarks can be marked as public, available for anyone to browse, or private, for only specified user(s).

Tags. When a user saves a bookmark, he “tags” it with keywords of his choosing (see folksonomy) for easy retrieval later on. For example, the users that tagged PuppetryLab.com chose one or more of the following keywords: “puppetry” “puppet” “instruction” “read” “blog”, to name a few. Users can then use these tags to organize and search their own bookmarks or they can search the entire site with a given tag. (Just today there are 897 listings tagged “puppetry“, 111 of those have been tagged by me.) Now, the benefit here is that people–not machines/spiders/bots–actually did the tagging. That means that if I search tags on del.icio.us, I’m more likely to find relevant sites than if I used a traditional search engine. Cool… Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend brings me back near my childhood hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago for One Way Street’s Chicago Regional Puppetry Festival. As best I can figure, it was 20 years ago this year that I attended my first Chicago Fest–then held in Wheaton. How time flies!

Back then I was just a kid who finally found a niche where I could use my suppressed creativity and not be thrown in a locker for doing so. Now I go to these festivals and conferences as a puppetry coach and workshop leader, helping a new generation of artsy misfits discover and master this thing we call puppetry.

During my non-conference time in the area I’m looking forward to spending time with friends and family before returning to my own little clan here in Colorado. Hopefully I’ll get some good pix to share. Watch for ‘em…