TWIC: goodriter, Sci Am and old illustrations available online.

Word count

Saturday, Dec 19: 0

- but it's early still.

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A friend on Facebook linked to Goodriter, a site with lots of gifts for people who share their email address.  As he said, you might be opening up yourself to lots of spam, but there is definitely a lot of stuff to be collected. Click on the image to better see some of the names and titles available.  I took screenshots of only the first titles in each category so there are many more books, classes and audio files.

The first course I clicked on had a sign up deadline of Dec 21.  I don't know if that is three days from time of registration or a hard deadline.  Nor can I recommend for or against the courses.

Indeed, as ML for Busan region, South Korea in Nanowrimo, I was given many ebooks on writing - "how to write fight scenes" and "How to write horses" and more.  I have no idea if any of them are useful.  Do(es) my reader(s) have any opinion on the subject?  Once I have finally finished a first draft, I think they will be of greater value as I turn my imagination into something believable enough.

I am posting the link here and now because of the quickly approaching deadline.  Hurry and decide if the books and more are of value!
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Sci Am has excerpts from a book on how to cultivate your creativity:

Openness to experience—the drive for cognitive exploration of one's inner and outer worlds—is the single strongest and most consistent personality trait that predicts creative achievement.
Among the “big five” personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), openness to experience is absolutely essential to creativity.

...
Openness as a personality trait hinges on engagement and exploration, but it is also more complex and multifaceted than that. Openness to experience comes in many forms, from a love of solving complex problems in math, science and technology, to a voracious love of learning, to an inclination to ask the big questions and seek a deeper meaning in life, to exhibiting intense emotional reactions to music and art. Visionary tech entrepreneurs, world travelers, spiritual seekers and original thinkers of all types tend to have highly open personalities.

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Mental processes on the schizotypy spectrum may interact with protective mental qualities such as greater intellectual curiosity, improved working memory and cognitive flexibility. Indeed, in 2011 neuroscientist Hikaru Takeuchi of Tohoku University in Japan and his colleagues studied people with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness and found that the most creative thinkers among them were those who were able tosimultaneously engage their executive attention in an effortful memory task and keep the imagination network in the brain active.
You never know—some of the most seemingly irrelevant or “crazy” ideas at one point may be just the ingredients for a brilliant insight or connection in a different context. It bears repeating: creativity is all about making new connections.

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I don't have the technical skills, but if you can get this code to work - please explain how - you should be able to remix some dance music.
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Some cool old book illustrations are available online for downloading. I found this in searching for Canada.

Via Boingboing