I didn’t actually *go* to any Mardi Gras festivities, but I did feel the need to make a Mardi Gras Mask, and what’s the fun of making one if you can’t show it off? So here it is. I made a sort of mold out of aluminum foil which I laid over my own face and layered up so it was strong. Then I used it as a basis for a papier-mache structure that I built up. (I used starch + water, though I know flour is well-loved, too, starch was nice and smooth.) Then I painted it black with black acrylic paint. After that, I made the beak and feathers out of Sculpey, molded right onto the mask. I then baked the whole shebang in the oven to make the Sculpey magic happen, and only after that did I cut out the little holes and fit the ribbon to it.

I think it came out okay, but if I try it again in the future, here’s what I’ll do differently:

- plan where to put ribbon-holes so there aren’t decorations (like Sculpey feathers) in the way.
- cut down on the forehead-ness. Not sure how I love that.
- incorporate more sparklies. Sequins, feathers, whatever — it needs some shimmer.
- try to get the papier-mache a bit smoother. I’m not in love with the bumpiness.

All the same, first papier-mache ever for me. And now pretty mask hangs on wall. Hoo-ray!

This is weird: this commercial is decidedly a spin on the whole 1984 thing, and maybe even the old Apple ad, but I can’t imagine that its target audience — li’l kids — would get either reference.

This strikes me as the perfect marriage between retro pop iconography and modern technology, which is a dynamite, hipster combo.

More seriously: ladies and gents, I’m in love with Vienna. I got directed to it from Cool OSX Apps (which also gave me Democracy Player and a bunch of other fun apps that I’ll have to review in the not-too-distant future). Vienna’s an RSS Aggregator built for Mac OS X; it’s happily open-source and free-to-download. It’s by far the simplest, easiest to use, *best* aggregator that I’ve found. It’s the easiest thing in the world to add a feed ([CMD+N], paste feed URL, hit [Enter]), and the way that it allows them to be organized is perfect for my feed-reading tendencies.

On a side note to this, I know that online aggregators (google, newsvine, bloglines, etc.) are popular, but somehow RSS feeds feel like a personalized newspaper to me, and as a result, I have the desire for them to fall somewhere between e-mail and websurfing, in an application, appropriately, all their own. Plus, this way I can get the little unread-feeds numbers popping up in my dock, and what’s better than that?