Month: November 2020

Categories
Note to Self

How to Discipline a Procrastinator

Every time I set out to start a new project I go through 3 phases:

  1. Excitement – Thrilled to realize the potential of the new project I can’t wait to get started
  2. Accountability – I take whatever steps I need to get started and make sure I do them right
  3. Exhaustion – I lose steam and come up with whatever reason I can to put it off until later

If you’re like me, once you reach exhaustion you probably feel disappointed in yourself and it makes you question every decision you’ve ever made.

I have only one choice, and that’s to develop discipline. If I could, I would hire someone to tell me to get to work and belittle me for making excuses, but I don’t have the money for that. Instead, I’m going to create that person in my head and every time I find myself slowing down, remember to make that guy scream at me. 

Curse of multiple interests

Too Much to Handle

I might have too many things going on to give each of them the attention it deserves. I’ve been like this my entire life, and I’ve always been convinced it’s a flaw but I’m not so certain it is anymore.

I like being able to switch gears in any given day from studying to writing to playing guitar to skating to building websites to drawing to stretching and so on. Should I give priority to just one thing for the majority of the day? Maybe, but I get bored of one thing quick, even if I’m super excited about it. 

This blog is something that I know is important. One day I will look back at all my posts and feel like I had contributed my voice in a time where it’s important to have one, but something still holds me back from getting on my laptop and just writing:

Lack of Discipline

In order for me to get in a flow state where I’m writing a blog I need to wait for this inner voice to say, “Hey let’s write about this today.” But sometimes that voice gets drowned out by procrastination and that is an internal conflict. 

My work ethic slips away as time passes only to be resuscitated by my guilt of procrastinating. Can I skip that odd mental torture I submit to? Well, if I had discipline I’d be a little more aware of it, and for the sake of bypassing that mental torture, this blog post that I’m writing at this second serves as a reminder to self discipline. 

Peaks and valleys

What to Remember

Life is a series of peaks and valleys or waves however you want to picture that. Knowing the excitement of the peak is eventually followed by the low of the valley prepares you for how to behave when you’re either on the peak or in the valley. When I’m on the peak I need to remind myself of the nature of waves, and to work hard while I’m in that flow state. When I’m in the valley, I need to embrace its presence and remember the peak is coming. Am I in a valley right now as I’m writing this? Feels like it, but writing this is helping me find the base of that next peak to climb. 

Have any advice for self discipline? Leave a comment below or reach out to me on instagram @kyleknob

Categories
Design

So You Want to Learn Graphic Design?

If you’re new to graphic design and want to get started I tell anyone that asks me to first find something they want to build out that they are passionate about. I got started in design because I’m a skate rat at heart. I wanted to put all of my friends and I on the internet to show everyone how good we were at skating and I wanted it to ‘look cool.’ 

I don’t know what came first, me wanting to build a website with something like Angelfire.com or me wanting to design things with photos of me skating that my friend Jbo shot, either way the point of this is that you should take something you’re already passionate about and work on that as you learn because there’s nothing more annoying than creating things that don’t matter to you. 

Learn because you’re motivated by your own passion.

Now that that is understood, I’m going to start with Photoshop. Adobe design software is Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign those are the 3 hitters that any employer will want you to be proficient at. Everyone kind of lies about being proficient in InDesign though cause it’s something that you can learn the ins and outs of in one night once you mastered the other two. 

Adobe Photoshop

How do you install Photoshop? Well you gotta pay for it monthly, but there is a free trial, so if you’re super cheap create like 10 e-mail address and sign up for the free trials every time one runs out or simply pay $9.99 a month for it. 

I wish I could actually get into teaching you something in this post, but there’s some technical stuff you should know before getting started. Your machine should have at least 8gb of RAM in it, and I recommend Macintosh. If you have a PC cool, but know that I’m on a Mac.

Once you installed Photoshop you’ll see this:

This is your welcome dialog. It’s asking you what kind of document do you want to work in. Here is one thing even designers with degrees forget that is super important:

Resolution, DPI, or PPI, make sure that you understand the 2 major resolutions. 

72 DPI is for anything that is going to live on the internet.

300 DPI is for anything that is going to print.

Remember that, write that down, make it a song, anything so that you don’t accidentally send a 72 DPI document to a printer, you’ll be tremendously disappointed in the quality, and if you’re employed by someone, you might get fired. I’d fire you if you made that mistake.  That’s why I’m making that 101 of graphic design. 

For the sake of this introduction we will work on a 72 DPI document in pixels. Let’s make a 2000 x 2000px document.

The file size for this document will be under 1 MB if saved out as a JPEG, if saved out with transparency it could be anywhere between 2-8 MB.

The reason I’m telling you about the file size is because websites perform better with images that are under 1MB in size.

Google will rank your website better because it loads fast.

1 MB will load faster than 7 MB. Note that down too.

You got a square document, perfect for Instagram or a product image on your web store. What do you want to make? Your answer should be anything. You should be excited right now, ready to explore a program’s interface like some archeologist in a newly discovered tomb in Egypt. Get ready, filters, effects, adjustments, tools and masks are going to populate your brain in a matter of time.

Start your learning journey by having fun with what you don’t know anything about.

Once I got done writing this blog I realized that this is better off as a video, but I’m going to keep what I have here in case you’re more of a reader anyway. If you have any questions reach out to me on Instagram @kyleknob or leave a comment below. I promise to do more of these intro to design posts.

Categories
Note to Self

What’s Avatar: The Last Air Bender about?

I’ve been hearing about Avatar: The Last Airbender for a few months now from my co-worker and on podcasts, and last night I found the live action movie on Netflix. I wanted to get the gist of the story in an hour and half rather then like 6 hours from the show, and it was amazing.

If you watched the series first, you hated this movie.

The world we live in today is drastically different than the world of our ancestors-ancestors-ancestors, and it’s become imperative that we rediscover the secrets of that time. What is it we need to remember to overcome the slavery, the oppression and the endless wars we inherited from our immediate ancestors?

Are we magicians capable of great power or are we lower class citizens incapable of finding a well paying job?
Avatar
Am I the Avatar?

In the aftermath of every war and every battle, we have lost most if not all, of our sacred knowledge. For many of us, we disconnected ourselves from those far reaches of our history and traded it for some strange state of hypnosis we call modern life.

I’m certain that in the teachings lost, we will find the importance of our individual power and restore the balance that was once here on earth.

Getting back to Avatar:

The Fire lord and his Fire army conquered many of the lands on Earth and they plan to claim them all, even the spirit worlds, but with the discovery of the Avatar, a 12 year old air-bender, the earth has a chance to take it all back.

This is symbolic to the zombie like state we find our populations around the world in. We’ve been convinced that we have no earth bending abilities and we must remain in our prisons while the Fire lords conquer the planet. 

Avatar’s symbolism is unique in that we need to resurrect something that we forgot long ago to get out of our vegetable like stupor. Do we need to resurrect a person that will show us the way or is that person inside of us? There’s a duality to this understanding: how we definitely need help to awaken and that we also need to have the courage to awaken ourselves. 

“Instead of seeing what they want you to see you got to see the possibilities.”

Support Each Other

You can’t stand alone, as much as you’d like to define yourself and be an individual you also need to surrender to the love others can offer you and the love you can offer them. There’s a reason every major philosophy talks about the importance of balance and the duality of nature.

Buy it from your local store or the Last Book Store

“You are angry, you need to let this go. As the avatar you are not meant to hurt others.”

You can find this film and the show on Netflix by the way.

Categories
Note to Self

Hindsight is 2020: We Can See Clearly Now

We all have 20/20 vision now

2020 showed me:

  • The entire world can be affected by a pandemic
  • A cop can kneel on someones neck, kill them and get away with it
  • Protests were anonymously supplied pallets of bricks
  • A president can tear gas civilians to take a photo with a bible
  • A 78 year old man can be elected president
  • Systemic racism is obvious
  • Joe Rogan is the leading commentator on the internet
  • David Icke and Alex Jones aren’t making everything up
  • CIA’s MK Ultra operation and operation Mocking Bird
  • Many mainstream media outlets are corrupted
  • The Rockefeller Foundation wrote a paper called Lockstep 2010
  • The United Nations have an Agenda for the 21st century
  • We’re more connected now and faster then ever before
  • Bitcoin is extremely valuable
  • Decentralized Finance has better APY’s than any banks ever
  • The Federal Reserve will print infinite money devaluing the purchasing power of the dollar
  • I could potentially have no access to food or water
  • The importance of an emergency back pack
  • China is spying on me with Tik-Tok
  • Big tech can censor whoever they want
  • CDC, WHO or White House never mentioned eating healthy and being active to combat the virus
  • Lockdowns destroyed businesses, mental health, and relationships
  • There’s water on the moon
  • Self education is important
  • I’m not good at growing hydroponics
I’d go swimming on the moon

So much happened in this year so far that 2020 will forever be remembered as the worst year to date in the 21st century, but I’m not just a pessimist. I’m an optimist too. 

I’m hopeful that consciousness is enveloping the generation, as love makes it’s self the only obvious alternative to hate. 

I’m hopeful that the truth will rise to the surface and we can understand it and work toward building communities that thrive. 

In a world where technology is centralized there is no doubt that its power will be abused. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google or Amazon or the advent of A.I., the future of centralized technology in the hands of an authoritarian government is not so hopeful.

Censored for your protection

However, the progress blockchain technology has made with Bitcoin leading the way has shown that not only can alternative systems be designed, but they can be implemented and impossible for any government to stop. The creation of DeFi itself is a huge milestone for cryptocurrencies. We are looking at the take over of banking, governing, and voting, all done on a blockchain.

The creation of the tools of the future are at a precipice. On one hand, the centralized entities have complete control of our lives with fear of the virus and their development of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

On the other hand, we have decentralized technology that can offer you exponentially higher annual profits on your savings, a governing system that can do what Uber did to Taxis, and a voting tool for us all to participate simply and fairly. 

As much hopelessness as there is in the world surrounding the globalist agenda, the end of cash, the personal taxation of carbon, the closing of businesses, and the lost of jobs and homes, there will always be a silver lining. 

What is the silver lining? 

Well you can change and do better. We all can do better, and we must if we want to move forward as the United States of America and not the Red and Blue States of America. I trust you’ll be better because now in hindsight, we aren’t doing so good. Swallow your pride, recognize your outrageous ego demons, and be helpful.