Sorry for the lack of posts in the last week! I haven’t bailed on you, but the internet is a distracting place and my laptop’s been sickly and I’ve been ill…all which resulted in not much blogging. Anyway, here’s a few things of interest to file under Other Things I Like.
♥ If you haven’t yet tried out the new search feature on Postcrossing.com, be sure to give it a go! As I said in the comment section of the project’s official blog, my only problem with it is that people very rarely sign postcards with their usernames so wouldn’t it make more sense to have a search field for the sender’s real name? But other than that, it seems great and it’s a lot of fun to find out who Postcrosses in your local area. There’s very few active users in my homestead so I won’t be organising a meet’n’greet any time soon.
♥ Woophy is a site I’ve loved for a long time. Its international community spirit is reminiscent of Postcrossing’s. Here’s the self-explanation from the website:
Woophy stands for WOrld Of PHotographY, a website founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who believe navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative.
The goal of Woophy’s founders is to create an accessible, visual, current, democratic and collective work of art comprised of a database picturing our remarkable world.
With the help of (amateur) photographers across the world we strive to ultimately cover every inch of our world map with images that represent the world’s beauty and peculiarity from all different cultural perspectives.
It really is great to spend a while looking at our amazing world.
♥ Another of my obsessions is podcasts. And because I love free things, it was while searching for free podcasts that I found the brilliant LibriVox project. [It was actually through the Open Culture website, an amazing database of free cultural podcasts.] LibriVox provides free audio books from the public domain – i.e. members of the public record themselves reading books that are too old to be copyrighted. Thanks to LibriVox, I’ve listened to all kinds of classic books I never would have managed to read. The quality of reading is a bit variable and of course it’s not the same as a commercial audio book. But if you can look beyond that and imagine someone is reading to you, it becomes a pleasure. It’s my New Years Resolution to record one myself!
♥ My REAL Wall is fun to keep an eye on. A guy in London decided he’d had enough of his Facebook wall and instead asked to be sent postcards to adorn his actual wall at home with. I’m sure it’s pretty and all but my postcards are too precious to be pinned to my bedroom wall!
♥ And finally…I’m really into French cinema at the moment and for Christmas I bought my mum three DVDs of them. [I always buy people presents I would like myself…] One was Etre et Avoir which we finally got around to watching the other night – and it’s absolutely brilliant! It’s the most charming, funny, sweet film you could imagine. It documents a year in the life of a tiny rural primary school in Northern France. Here’s a clip I found on YouTube that sadly isn’t included on the DVD:
Postcrossing And Other Things I Like 