Let’s say you’re on an airplane, and the old man sitting next to you starts chatting. Normally, you don’t like smalltalk with strangers. Or any talk with strangers, especially when you’re strapped into a tiny coach seat on an aging 737. But he’s elderly, so you listen respectfully as he tells you all about himself.

Let’s go on to say that because you’ve shown polite interest in the man, he begins telling you a story. You do a little mental eye-roll, but the old man is a veteran, and when a veteran tells you a story, you shut your damn mouth and you listen.

Two hours later, and the man has finished telling you one of the strangest stories you’ve ever heard. And you know it’s just a story, because it was too bizarre. It was unreal. It just couldn’t have happened the way it was told. But you’re fascinated, so you ask the old man some questions. And he won’t answer you. He shakes his head and changes the subject, acting like he’s uncomfortable that he told you the story in the first place.

Upon landing, the man apologizes for not asking you enough about yourself, so you hand him a business card and give him the ten second highlights of what you do, and you write his name and address in one of your notebooks.

When you get home, you find that his story is still stuck in your head. What parts, if any, were real? Was he just old and confused? He’d told the story with too much conviction and too much detail for it to be entirely fabricated. So you write him a letter, and ask him to tell you more.

But you get nothing in return. Maybe the poor guy died, you think. You forget about the old man and his crazy story, and go on with your life.

Then several months later, to your complete surprise, a thick envelope shows up in the mail. There’s a letter from the old man, telling you some of what you wanted to know. The envelope is full of papers and materials that corroborate a large amount of what he told you in his story.

So now you are completely freaked out, because if he lied about what happened, then so did the other men who were with him.

And the whole thing is just too fucking eerie to believe. But you don’t have a choice.

Tiny owl backpack

(via fuckyeahtinyowlsonthings)

Blown glass bottle, Roman, circa 1st century CE

For that awesome artifact-digger-upper @bsheepies.

He found it hard to stay calm on the gurney and wanted to rip apart the rough institutional sheets and scream and cry but ended up laughing instead because the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP sounds from across the hallway made him feel like he was an extra in some trauma scene in a TV medical drama.

The absurdity of it all soothed him until the nice nurse came in and gave him a sedative and complimented his watch and he looked at her sideways and shook his head and said “I should be dead now,” and she just smiled and left and all he could do was look at the green ceiling and laugh through his tears when the BEEP BEEP BEEP started up again.

Opened the side door to let my dog outside a few minutes ago, and this little guy was sitting out on my steps in the pouring rain. Despite the scowl, he seemed perfectly content, and didn’t even fidget while I took his photo.

(via fuckyeahhoptoadsatmysidedoorintherain)

Thanks, Grandpa. Thanks, Dad.

Awesome little “Coobie” paper cut-out model. Download the file and construct your own. Put him on your monitor and let him tell you lurid tales of miniature Gothic horror. Hours of fun!

(via Neatorama)

But obviously not all writing environments are equal, and recently I’ve become more keenly aware of exactly how productive I am and the quality of work I achieve under certain conditions. I’m getting a good sense for what helps me hit the “sweet spot” of my creativity, environmentally speaking. I haven’t quantified it just yet, but it’s made me consider trying to create one of those “special places”, and just what my requirements would be. Light and temperature are critical physical factors, but then so are less tangible things like creative ambience — e.g. is this the kind of room that inspires me to do creative work, or does it feel corporate and sterile?

My office right now is fine. It’s a nice finished room on the 3rd floor of my house, with a large desk, a small sofa, a fridge, a TV, and a large number of my books. But it’s far from my ideal of a writing studio; there is no natural light (save for the daylight that comes in from the hallway), there’s not enough shelving for the amount of books I’d like to keep in here, it’s insufficiently insulated, etc. If money were no object, obviously I would do something like build one from scratch in some other part of the house. But since that’s far from the case, I’m constrained to making decisions about how to convert my current space into something more environmentally comfortable, and conducive to my work style and habits. A space that can get me to that creative sweet spot. I’m not sure how to create that space yet, but I’m going to keep working on it.

So, for you creatives, what kind of requirements to you have for your workspaces? What helps you be most inspired, imaginative, and prolific? I’m especially interested in how you’ve molded a space for yourselves at home offices and studios. But if you work in an office where you’ve got control over your workspace and environment, that’d be interesting to hear as well.

Among the great historical either/or questions in history—Catholic or Protestant? North or South? Cake or death?—ranks the topic of “Pop or Soda”.

Personally I grew up in a county right on the border between the two lexiconic alternatives, but always called it “pop”.  Then I went away to college, and it’s been “soda” ever since, though the city I live in now is a “pop” town.

If you’ve ever wondered how the Pop/Soda/Coke monikers are distributed through the United States, the Strange Maps blog has a comprehensive map (via the popvssoda website) showing just that.  The post also sites some interesting information from a research article by a philology professor and senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English¹.

(via Strange Maps)