O, Internet! Some glimmers of humor and poetry:
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In search of a book, I found this little gif. It’s a cover design that’s meant to stand in for a missing file, but it’s handsome, balanced, mysterious and beautiful on its own. Book-face with a swash-nose. I’d read it.
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Eugene Halton, The Meaning of Things, 1981
I’m slowly working my way through psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s books. This one, co-authored with Eugene Halton, is on how objects become associated with sentiment. It sounds very enriching for me as an artist. I love this graphic cover too: plates and photos on display, with the title in sentence casing in a gothic typeface.
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Aziz Ansari’s Treat yo’ self! clip from Parks and Rec. Ridiculous, self-indulgent, yet quite possibly a brilliant idea. What if everyone had one big Treat Yo’ Self Day every year? Rewards following accomplishments are nice, but too much performance-orientation can be unsustainable. I imagine that participants might demonstrate more restraint in the weeks prior and after the big day. You don’t need “fine leather goods” to indulge; you can share time, company, grace, learning experiences, etc.
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Ebrahim "Abe" Kazemzadeh, Emotional text recognition using Whissell’s Dictionary of Affective Language. Source: http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/emotion_in_text_cgi/DAL_app/
Ebrahim “Abe” Kazemzadeh’s program, Emotional text recognition using Whissell’s Dictionary of Affective Language. Kazemzadeh is a PhD student at the University of Southern California (USC) studying computer science, with a graduate degree in computational linguistics. The program assigns colors and sizes to emotional words. Red indicates negative emotions; blue, positive. Representing subjective states with programming is such a wonderfully strange idea. The inherent failure is what makes it compelling.
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Pollyanna, I re-learned, lives by the principle of The Glad Game, the objective of which is to find something to be glad about in every situation. It turns out that Littleton, NH, hometown of the Pollyanna author, has an annual Official Pollyanna Glad Day, with a parade. Why not be glad? Why not tie balloons and daisies to and parade in a yellow pick-up?
Official Pollyanna Glad Day 2005, Litteton, NH (hometown of Pollyanna author Eleanor H. Porter). Source: GoLittleton.com
R+D 
Hi Christine,
Thanks for checking out the word coloring app and your suggestions. I liked your artwork a lot too. I can see you’ve thought a lot about words, text, and colors. The positive signs series was really cool. I’ve been trying to visualize some data of people playing twenty questions about emotions. It’s still kind of messy and an algorithm is a poor substitute for art, but you might get a kick out of it: http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/share/emo20q_images (here’s an older one that’s clearer and interactive: http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/emo20q/prefuseDemo/ ).
Take care!
Abe