Skulls and hearts are still cool.

• Me: I just got a search referral to my poetry page from Ask.com for “what does a woman mean when she says, I don’t like drama.”
• Dwayne: It means she’s lying.
• Everyone: “OOOOOooooooh.”

How do you measure ‘bohemian-ness’ in New York City? Not in ‘number of illegal clubs’ or art-supply stores, that’s for sure. Dorothy Gambrell developed a method of calculation, and has maps to illustrate her findings.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us realize magazines and other advertising is typically digitally enhanced to appear more perfect, flawless, sexy, etc., but it’s always alarming to see side-by-side comparisons of reality and what we’re actually shown,. For example, Kiera Knightley’s chest (or lack there of) in the U.S. promo materials for King Arthur. Poof! You’ve got breasts! (Warning: pun) Photoshop has a Curves function, you know.

YouTube bookmark cleanout: the Superman Returns shuttle scene was all rendered? Woah. Nick Burns: your company’s computer guy, more Bobby McFerrin only this time he’s Thinking About Your Body, and I’ve been enjoying the guitar work of Eric Mongrain lately… so melodic and such great compositions.

www.knifefight.com is my new favorite domain. Soon you’ll be able to learn about obtaining popularity by knife fighting, knife fighting as the ultimate weight loss program, why knife fighting makes one attractive to the opposite sex, and how to make big money knife fighting. (via M.A. Turner)

I’m loving Mark Jenkin’s street installations. The lollipop parking meter is pretty much the best thing I’ve seen all day. (I could have done without the dog, though.)

The secret diary of Steve Jobs. Ah, satire.

So… apparently MySpace went down this weekend… and deleted misplaced some people’s About Me sections (which included their fancy styling.) Hahahaha. Ahem. And the best part? My last login was apparently on 1/1/0001. I knew I felt old. Update: the profiles seem to be coming back, here and there.

USA Today info-graphic of religion percentages by state. Unsurprisingly, the south is quite Baptist.

Check out Kory Westerhold’s recently updated design/art direction portfolio The Unibaumer. It’s been fun to watch Kory’s work grow, progress, and improve over the past few years.

Give me a bull horn
and I’ll shout the truth
and gorge the matador.
That devil’s held the cape over our eyes for too long
so all we see is red.

We are shells of what once was could be.

Vicious cycles are pouring over me.
Lies we believe are roaring over me,
drowning out my speech
like sorcerers who know the universe was built with words
and if you control words
you can make the universe whatever you wish it to be.
So they cast spells to make us misbelieve.

But they’re not fooling me.

excerpt from Dreams, a new poem

This crazy family built a porch and flowering meadow on the roof of a 6-story building in New York City that meets code, is structurally sound, and didn’t cost them fortune.

The new trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain looks wonderful.

LOST toys. That’s just a bit too much. (Hi, Charlie!)

The tagline I’ve been toying around with of late has been “Doing lots of stuff, mostly all at once.” One of the benefits of being interested in so many different artistic disciplines and general thing-making is that it’s becoming increasingly diffcult for me to get bored because there’s always something else I could be doing. It has a downside, too, in that I quickly get surrounded with 15 or so projects in some state of unfinishedness.

This isn’t a huge deal when it’s a painting or a song or something else that typically never sees widespread release until it’s completed. However, in web world, it drives me crazy when things don’t match and feel like they’re a part of the whole. I’ve lost count of how many subpages joshuablankenship.com has grown to, but I know I’ve let my garden grow a bit wild lately. So…

Site-wise navigation and similar two and three column layouts are (or will-be-soon) gracing most of the subpages. It’ll take me a little while to get the blog integrated correctly and I have other plans for Notes to Self, but overall, I’m trying to bring this little corner of the internet into some cohesive form. The programming is sloppy right now, but I’ll get to that eventually.

Bear with me. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S. Stay tuned on Wednesday for some big announcements.

I’m going to go out on a limb (with limited research) and say that Guns of El Chupacabra may have the best tagline of any movie ever. Tell me how anyone can top “One Blood Thirsty Monster. One Space Sheriff. And One Million Bullets.”

I think I might have to start letting some of the spam comments that Askimet catches actually go live. They’ve been so very uplifting and complimentary to my character and skill level.

Let me give you some examples:

With spam like that, who needs friends?

Update: And the hits keep on rolling:

Um… Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trailer? TMNT on the bigscreen again only minus the SUCK of the live action movies? I can’t believe this is getting made. The animation and rendering looks awesome; I only hope they make it more in touch with the dark undertones of the original comic.

Reilly Stroope has a great, simple illustration portfolio that makes me smile. Be sure to check out #58 in the gallery (that’s what we call design industry satire) and #41… because honestly, there just isn’t enough imagery of Death doing Dance Dance Revolution.

I tried out something a little different at Prom Night Fist Fight, but I’m not 100% happy with how it loads from page to page, but nonetheless, a step in the right direction I think. (I still have some code to clean up, but it must wait.)