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The 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites of 2014

The 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites of 2014
Editor’s note: 2015’s list of the best, most interesting websites has arrived! The video above is a sampling from that list. Welcome to the most awesome blog post you’re going to see all year. Yep, it’s the third installment in the super-popular annual series in which I document the sites I think you’ll want to spend a lot of time on in the coming year (below you’ll find a few highlights from recent years in case you missed out). There’s more to this article! Related:  Websites useful or funCool sites & linksaaaaaaaaaaa

Make Animation Free | Best Tools to Create Animated Video How to Make a Cartoon Yourself: Top 7 Animated Video Makers Compared Video production is not an easy and cheap matter. A short video for your YouTube channel or website may cost several thousand dollars if you address to professional video studios. No doubt, there are free and low-cost alternatives which can be easily mastered by any web user. A self-made cartoon or an animated video is one of the options. Animated Video Makers: Pros & Cons Animated videos are illustrations existing in a purely fictional world. Animated cartoons are frequent on YouTube, since everyone can make them with online tools and ready design templates. So you don’t need to order a professional cartoon from a design studio or draw it yourself. animation templates look professional;you don’t need to dub videos;templates are usually done in high resolution;pricing plans are scalable;characters look engaging and funny. However, there are several disadvantages: Top 7 Cartoon Makers 1. How to make a cartoon with GoAnimate?

GEEKtyper.com The Burning House The Desktop Wallpaper Project Archive - The Fox Is Black 1280×800 • 1440×900 • 1680×1050 • 1920×1200 • 2560×1440 • 3840×2400 • iPhone 5 • iPhone 6 • iPhone 6+ • iPad When I come across a well-designed pattern I tend to marvel at the time and effort that must have taken place to achieve such perfection. In my mind I see it as an artist creating a jigsaw puzzle in their head without the photo on the box to guide them. For Nancy’s wallpaper we decided to go with her Ink Dots pattern. 1280×800 • 1440×900 • 1680×1050 • 1920×1200 • 2560×1440 • 3840×2400 • iPhone 5 • iPhone 6 • iPhone 6+ • iPad It’s always fun visiting with old friends. This wallpaper is titled I Hate Parties, which is about “that dreadful feeling when for one reason or another, you clam up at a social gathering of some sort, and just sit back and detach yourself from the situation and those around you.” 1280×800 • 1440×900 • 1680×1050 • 1920×1200 • 2560×1440 • 3840×2400 • iPhone 5 • iPhone 6 • iPhone 6+ • iPad I feel you Emory. It’s easy to enjoy Jesse LeDoux’s work.

Smithsonian Digitizes & Lets You Download 40,000 Works of Asian and American Art Art lovers who visit my hometown of Washington, DC have an almost embarrassing wealth of opportunities to view art collections classical, Baroque, Renaissance, modern, postmodern, and otherwise through the Smithsonian’s network of museums. From the East and West Wings of the National Gallery, to the Hirshhorn, with its wondrous sculpture garden, to the American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery---I’ll admit, it can be a little overwhelming, and far too much to take in during a weekend jaunt, especially if you’ve got restless family in tow. (One can’t, after all, miss the Natural History or Air and Space Museums… or, you know… those monuments.) In all the bustle of a DC vacation, however, one collection tends to get overlooked, and it is one of my personal favorites—the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which house the Smithsonian’s unique collection of Asian art, including the James McNeill Whistler-decorated Peacock Room. via Kottke Related Content:

Free Stock Images & Videos ~ AllTheFreeStock.com Hyperbole and a Half: The Awkward Situation Survival Guide Awkward silence You are talking to an acquaintance or having dinner with your coworkers. The conversation suddenly comes to a crossroads and no one knows where to steer it. The Solution: Sudden, loud noise Foot-in-mouth You are having a great time, talking loudly, feeling like the life of the party. Now everyone is staring at you and your confidence implodes like a punctured balloon. The Solution: Confuse... ... or redirect... Getting caught staring Sometimes you are ogling a pretty girl, sometimes you are trying to get a better look at a horribly misshapen person and sometimes you are just spacing out and your eyes happen to be pointing directly at someone. Whatever the case, when you are caught, you will feel shame. The Solution: Encounters with close talkers Conversations with close-talkers are usually only awkward on your end. Unwanted conversation I am painfully bad at avoiding/extricating myself from this one. The Solution: I have no idea; you tell me. The Solution: You have several options

Behind Brilliant Bread This article was originally published in Shetland Life magazine and was written upon receiving my first copy of “Brilliant Bread” Writing a book not long after finding yourself churned from a reality television show, you come to expect a standard set of questions from tabloid journalists: “Has your life changed? How long did it take you to write your book? Did you write it all? If you’re interested, the answers are: yes; two months; yes; yes. For whatever reason, now, here’s why and how I wrote about bread. Soon after we filmed the third season of the Great British Bake-Off, a few of us were put in touch with literary agents. It was expressed to me in no uncertain terms that a general baking book encompassing a wide variety of culinary categories would be both easiest to sell to the publishers and to the public. Not one approached baking from an evidence-based perspective. I wanted to write the best bread book on the market. The first hurdle is the ‘proposal’. Order now!

Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs. You may remember that we featured the site a few years ago, back when it offered 397 whole books free for the reading, including American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915; Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library; and Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Related Content: Download Over 250 Free Art Books From the Getty Museum The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online

RadioISS: Listening to Earth from Space

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