• I’d call this “Who you are on the London tube by your sun sign”: ‘Tube Zodiac‘ (via Sensorcaine)
• ‘The 10 Most Common Awkward Moments On Elevators‘: A hilarious video on elevator etiquette. (via Cracked)
• ‘When White Guys Listen To Daler Mehndi‘: Watch the guy in yellow shorts during ‘Tunak
• 

  Image by bravesheng via Flickr

  tunak tunak tarara’. With perfect lip sync, mind! (via Youtube, link courtesy Ashwini Mishra)

• ‘How To Look Like Shit‘ – Put this under ‘Humour’ and under ‘Style’. Poking fun at our own worries should never go out of fashion. (via Jezebel)
• If some of the most surfed sites were online dating profiles, what would you do with them? ‘Would You Date This Domain Name?‘ (via the ever hilarious Thought Catalog)
• ‘All About Rajni‘: A website that runs only when you switch off the internet! No kidding, it runs on Rajni power! (via the irrepressible Desimartini, link courtesy Jason Menezes)
• ‘The Tam Brahm Chart Of Progressive Food Tolerance‘: A funny look at food tolerance from the motherland. (via Tambrahm Rage, link courtesy @Suchitra Sukumar)
• The 6 Stupidest Things We Use to Judge People We Don’t Know‘ (via Cracked)
• I want to print & laminate this and put it up at my desk on certain days: ‘I’m Taking A Sad Day‘ (via Thought Catalog)
• This blog got featured in the media once, with DNA carrying my ‘Bandra Is No Longer Queen Of The Suburbs’ story on their Around The Blog section.

You can catch the links as they come in and even post your own to The Idea-smithy Facebook Page.

My past Ideart posts have gone into great detail on technique but I haven’t seen any response to indicate that these interest anybody. If you do want me to elaborate, do leave a comment here or write to me. I’ll be happy to share what I did and how.

All I used was a set of brushes and the colour yellow (with a few highlights of gold). Here’s how it turned out:

And here’s the full garment:

*Cross-posted to Divadom.

If he looks familiar, you’re thinking of the infinitely funnier ‘Blog Song’.

I’ve been receiving emails from a certain ‘Avid-Avidedu‘ for months now. These are generally announcements of events of some sort, usually focussing on culture with a semi-religious undertone. It didn’t interest me the first couple of times and I just deleted the mails without a thought.

After a few more of these came my way, I began looking for a way to unsubscribe. But that courtesy lifeline, provided to mailing list recipients, even if it is in tiny letters, “To unsubscribe, please click here“, was nowhere to be seen.

I took that for a simple (but really, quite unforgivable) oversight. So I emailed back to the addresses, instead, telling them that I was not interested and could they please take me off their list? That mail saw no replies.

Many more days and emails later, I visited their website to look at the ‘Contact Us’ section. All it had was their postal address and a form to sign up for updates. There wasn’t a section to leave a message. Interestingly, now the website is still there but the ‘Contact Us’ section doesn’t lead anywhere. Typing the URL in takes you to a 404 error.

They are also on Facebook but their page does not allow outside posts on the wall. And here is their Twitter stream. I’ve left a comment on one of their Facebook posts, sent them a Facebook message and tweeted to them. No responses to report.

Here’s what their latest email had.:

Look at the quality of text, images etc. There’s obviously a lot of work going on to create this.

Never mind the ranting about whether an ordinary netizen should be subjected to this today. What purpose does this serve exactly? There are emails coming my way, periodically so obviously someone at their end is working and working hard to put that content out. What kind of a bizarre system is this that churns out content, events, updates of those events but makes no response to messages? Being a content provider myself, I can only pity that poor souls who work so hard to create experiences & content. This is only alienating their audience and turning indifference to irritation.

Here are all the ways they’re managing to throw their content out, while shutting out anyone else’s voice to them:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/avidedu
Twitter: https://twitter.com/avidlearning
Email addresses: avid@essar.com
Phone numbers: (from this tweet)

Avid Education, you need to learn how to listen to your fellow netizens and possible audience. Essar, what are you thinking?

Update: I just received a reply to my Facebook message, asking for my email address and saying that they would take me off. Avid, I hope you’ve taken note of this experience to spot a glaring problem in your online presence.

Yes, my dear condescending younger reader, some day you will cringe at the mention of Justin Beiber, as I am now. Till then, enjoy some ‘retro’ partying and thank your stars I didn’t talk about this other song (which made me cringe even then).