The topic of guns doesn’t come up very often in my life. I don’t spend a lot of time around people who own guns and I live in an area of the country where guns aren’t all that common. However, there is one time of year when we always end up talking about guns - Christmastime.

That’s because we have a friend of the family that we always see on Christmas who has a son that is obsessed with guns. He’s been talking about guns since he was a little kid. Every Christmas, he seems to get a new gun of some sort and we all take a look at it.

For a long time he was into paintball so we would see his new paintball gun on Christmas. Then he got into airsoft. He quickly amassed a collection of tokyo marui and kwa guns that we would all ooh and aah over before we dug in to our Christmas dinners.

The kid turned eighteen this year and joined the military so he’s “playing” with real guns these days. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to make it home for Christmas this year but I’m sure if he does he’s going to have a whole lot of stories to tell and stories about guns will definitely be some of them!

Technorati Tags: airsoft, kwa guns, tokyo marui

There are some tools that are designed to be moderately creative but which can add a significant amount of creativity to our lives if we choose to let them. For example, CD printers and DVD printers which are designed to allow us to create labels for our audio and video discs may be used for either moderate or full creativity depending on our own impulses.

Here are some ways that you could get more creative with a disk printer.

• Enhance mixed CDs for gifts. Mixed CDs made up of songs that are important to you and the person that you are giving the gift to can be highly creative. Make them even more creative by using images that are related to the songs to create the label for the CDs.
• Unique photo frames. Instead of just framing your personal photos, print them as labels onto DVDs and then create hanging mobiles of these DVD-backed photos for your home.
• Create a colorful suncatcher. Old CDs can be used to make cool suncatchers and other crafts. Additional designs added with the CD labeler can make these crafts truly unique.

The point is that we can use tools to create things or we can use them to be truly creativity. The choice is up to the user!

Technorati Tags: CD printers, DVD printers, disk printer

I have a love for art. I’m not an artist per se but I’m definitely one of those creative people who is always attending art gallery openings and going to art museums. And since I’ve seen a lot of art, I’ve also started to see patterns in art that I didn’t notice when I first started frequenting these types of places.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of objects that turn up again and again in mixed media and found art pieces. These are objects that you wouldn’t typically associate with art but which you’ll find in many art displays nonetheless. For example, I’ve recently seen the following objects in more than one art display around town:

• Tins for mints. Perhaps it’s because these are so common or maybe not but for some reason they are constantly turning up in art.
• Traffic safety products. Things like traffic cones must disappear from the roads a lot because they’re often in galleries.
• Chunks of big products. Car parts, pieces of jersey barriers and other bits off of big things are repurposed in sculptural art quite often.

I suppose that part of the reason that these things end up in art is because there are a lot of them waiting around to be used but sometimes it surprises me just how often these odd objects become art pieces.

Technorati Tags: traffic safety products, traffic cones, jersey barriers