Colouring Books and TED

    Hello everyone, it's been so long since I posted here that the website looks different. I don't know if you can tell from your end, but the page where I'm writing this is all white now. It's weird. I don't like change. Unless that change is towards something more awesome, which I guess is probably what they intended. So, good job. Btw I'm probably going to change how my blog looks at some point in the future (knowing me, probably some time in late 2012, right before the apocalypse) because with this new-look website comes a bunch of new potential blog layouts, and some of them look cool/better than what I could do with my absence of web design skills. So look forward to that (the new-look blog, not the apocalypse, unless that's your sort of thing).

    Anyway, a brief update on my life. I'm still in school. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk colouring books. Yes, the school I previously referred to was university not preschool, but that's okay because colouring books transcend generational boundaries, granted it would be weird to walk in on your grandparents doing it (colouring), but on the other hand, your grandparents are awesome. On an entirely unrelated note I'll also be talking about TED, which is like YouTube for nerds*. TED and colouring books are two things that you might not expect to go together, but you'd be wrong because they're both awesome. And what's better than 1 awesome thing? 2 awesome things of course! You have a lot to learn, and you've come to the right place. You'll be awesomer in no time. Remember, becoming awesome is not a spectator sport, so get out there and start being awesome.

*Fun Fact: The word "nerd" was first used by Dr. Suess in If I Ran The Zoo. The more you know.

Colouring Books

Level of Awesomeness: On a scale from red to purple, it's all of them. ALL THE COLOURS!!!

What Is It: Normally books are long and have lots of words because for some reason authors think it is better or "more professional" to describe plot and other trivial book elements with words rather than childish pictures. But every once in a while an author comes along who is simply too lazy to write words and instead draws pictures. This person is sometimes known as an artist or illustrator. On even rarer occasions the author is not motivated to even colour their illustrations, and so the colouring book is born. Colouring books consist of pages and pages of usually textless, colourless images. It's like a choose your own adventure where you provide all the storylines and character descriptions. I'm pretty sure if you just ripped a bunch of pages out of a colouring book and stuck them in some order, you could write an amazing movie. Maybe you could just send Hollywood a bunch of pictures paper clipped together, they seem to be running out of movie ideas anyway. In fact, I see my story, Tragedy With A Monkey, doing well at the box office maybe sometime in 2013. It goes like this:

When I was young, I used to sleep outside in the mountains and look into space dreaming about my future.

When I was 15, my grandfather taught me how to dance in a pit of quicksand, and I fell in love with the jungle.

Years later, I developed a relationship with a monkey and we got married soon after. I loved my monkey bride.

One day, some dinosaurs somehow started living again (maybe like in Jurassic Park), and they began chasing me.

I tripped over a root and fell to the ground. A velociraptor approached. I closed my eyes to avoid seeing myself get eaten.

Luckily, my wife knew some kind of crazy monkey kung fu, and she risked her life to protect me from the dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, she was badly injured and horribly disfigured in the fight, and I had to put her down.

I got really depressed and let my hair grow out. Also, I started using hard drugs.

I even invested in a bionic face to mask my depression, but to no avail.

Eventually the pain was too much, and I threw myself off the top of an office building.

The x-rays showed that all of my ribs had disintegrated and part of my spine was missing. I died of these injuries.

My family was in shock from all the tragedy and stuff. There is no happy ending; this is the saddest movie you will ever see.

Fin

    If there are any movie producers reading this, you better not steal this story. If I see this in theatres without my consent, there will be hell to pay. Of course I would be willing to sell the story for the right price, so contact me if you're interested.

    Anyway, I sort of got off-topic there, we were talking about colouring books. Now admittedly, I did not use crayons (or an actual colouring book) to colour these pictures - which I regret because that is a fundamental aspect of colouring books - but you get the idea. So run down to your nearest colouring book store (or if you're already awesome, grab them from somewhere in your room), and start creating your own fabulous stories.

Why Is It Awesome: Because books with no pictures are boring. Nobody likes them. Books with pictures are much better, and when you're done colouring your colouring book it will be ALL pictures + they were coloured by you + you're awesome...therefore, AWESOMENESS LEVEL OVER 9000!!

TED

Level of Awesomeness: Worth spreading, or so I'm told.

What Is It: You like learning about awesome stuff, right? Of course you do, you're reading this blog right now. But school is so boring. The Internet is much more fun and exciting. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

    But just reading things on the Internet is also boring. It's almost like reading a book. That's why they invented video. If a picture is worth a thousand words and a video plays at 60 frames per second, that means those 3 minutes and 37 seconds you just spent watching a poptart-cat fly through space was the equivalent of reading 13,020,000 words. That's like reading War and Peace more than 23 times! See how much more efficient watching videos is?

    So, we have established that videos are better than reading and real life. What if they were educational too? (Not that nyan cat isn't educational) Enter TED. A wondrous world of learning in the form of videos on the Internet. TED talks feature some of the world's smartest people and best presenters and teach us about things we didn't even know were so awesome.

Like dynamic sculptures made from fishing nets,

or Earth getting hit by an asteroid (not awesome, but interesting),

or juggling (I guess we already knew it was awesome, but maybe not this awesome).

And of course, it teaches us how to be awesome (like all the best websites).

Why Is It Awesome: Because knowledge is power!

Yeah...