Admit It.
Sometimes,
it’s healthy to recognize
that Mondays
will always suck.
Don’t be surprised,
and you’ll move on that much
more quickly.
-nicopolitan
Archive for August, 2009
Get Through Monday (#678)
Monday, August 31st, 2009Get Brazen
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Click on an image to enlarge
Today is the day that one of my favorite sites, Brazen Careerist, launches!
But wait, you say, how can a site that hasn't yet launched be one of your favorites? To be clear, the site and its community have been around for a while, so this is why it already had a place in my bookmarks. But this site launch is more than just getting a tricked out sleek look. The mission has changed, and for the uninitiated, BC was kind enough to give me some copy to share with you:
What is the new Brazen Careerist all about?
Brazen Careerist is the career management tool for next-generation professionals. In the online career space where experienced professionals win, we’ve created a network that helps young professionals level the playing field.Instead of just a traditional résumé, at the core of the new Brazen Careerist profile is an idea-based feed that showcases your knowledge, opinions and thoughts. In other words: Your potential.
We all know there are pools of new talent coming into the market, but no career site showcases the most critical thing that talent should be sharing: Ideas.
What’s new? And what has changed?
Although you will still be able to easily access your favorite posts from the bloggers on Brazen Careerist, the current blog-driven homepage is being retired. Our goal is to give you—the member—control over the content you see when you log on. So immediately after you log in, you will be directed to your personal Fan Feed where you can follow real-time updates of the ideas your favorite members are sharing.In addition to the Fan Feed update, your user profile is going to be more idea-centric than it ever was before. A quick visit to your profile will reveal that the main focus is the important things you have to say. Accompanying your personal Ideas Feed is a new resume section that tells other members where you’ve been.
The rest of the Brazen Careerist you’ve come to know and love is pretty similar. We just gave it a facelift!
Essentially, that copy appeals to my peers and fellow members of Generation Y. But if you're on the outside looking in, this accommodates for a specific need unique to Generation Y. And before anyone gives us grief by stereotyping us as entitled, consider how out of a group of 5, 1 will be out of a job and 2 will return to school and accrue even more debt. When so much of hiring hinges on experience while there are no experiences (read: jobs) to apportion, employers put Gen Y in a kind of Catch 22.
Brazen Careerist is evidence that we as a generation realize no matter what kind of knowledge we have, it's our personalities that will connect us to opportunities. This is why we spend so much time on social networking sites, blogging, tweeting, txting, and emailing. We need to be extroverted to meet as many people as we can. We were introduced to a professional world built in a way where it's not what you know, it's who you know. So we are banking on safety in numbers.
And moreover, employers are speaking our language more and more (Oh, you want evidence?). We're one of the largest demographic segments to appear in a long time and we will probably make up a huge portion of the workforce if we don't already*. So it only makes sense that Brazen Careerist should come around with a mission to gather up the go-getters.
But enough hype.
Get down to Brazen Careerist if you're so inclined to check it out, employer and employee alike.
And get to work.
____
*Interestingly, that article also mentions Brazen Careerist. Go figure.
Get Through Monday (#360)
Monday, August 24th, 2009Move It!
Some rare weekends
will be spent
rolling up sleeves,
wiping sweat off foreheads,
and moving your furniture
into a new situation.
Who is this new person
moving into the building?
Whoever they damn well please,
that’s who.
-nicopolitan
20SB Vlog Day
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Better late than never, I guess.
Q: What does 20SB mean to you?
20SB Vlog Day (nicopolitan) from nicopolitan on Vimeo.
+1
Saturday, August 15th, 2009This isn’t necessarily a post fully about the most awesome date I got to take to a wedding, but it had inadvertently created for me a new perspective on how strong our community is at 20sb.net.
Only via blogging communities would I be able to simply post, “anyone interested in going to a wedding?” on this blog, and then a friend I had met in Chicago would fly from Minneapolis to Los Angeles for such an adventure. And really, the key bond here is friendship. It’s not anything lurid like most common sense might suggest if you take a step back and frame the situation: A girl, flying alone, to stay in a friend’s house, with whom she has had less than a week total physical contact, in the middle of the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles — that only takes guts on her part, but an amazing amount of trust for the both of us. 6 years ago, in the height of the popularity of MySpace, this is the opening of an internet horror story.
But not this time. (more…)
busybee
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009Photoshop Phriday: The Flyer
Friday, August 7th, 2009Flyers for shows are usually ignored. It’s like good old Mitch Hedberg once stated, passing out flyers is like saying, “here, you throw this away.”
As someone who used to be a promoter, I never throw flyers away. I keep them in my car, and then when I’ve gathered enough, I tape them together and bam, I’ve got a wall poster. If some get outdated and I gather even more, I start slicing them up and tacking them onto existing posters.
After all, it took the artist a while to drum up the flyer in the first place. It’s a shame to let all that artwork go to waste. Plus, being wasteful with flyers means you hate mother earth. So there.
Anyway, I got asked to make a flyer for some good friends’ (This guy and this guy) upcoming show and it reminded me of how much fun it is to Photoshop when you’ve got free reign over what it looks like.
So here’s what I whipped up last night:
Before I Forget…
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009…LA is massive.
Photo by Evan Stiles
- Friday, I spent my day like I usually do at work in and around the hipster neighborhood of Silverlake.
- Friday night, I went to night 1 of the music and arts festival Magic Garage, which was tucked away in an industrial district.
- Saturday, I started off in the suburbs of Pasadena.
- I drove out past some of LA’s ghetto to pick up a friend for a carpool.
- We then went to a bachelor party dinner in Beverly Hills, which was ridiculously expensive but also ridiculously delicious
- We cut back through the ghetto so I could drop him back off at his house, a trip which was impeded by police tape from some kind of crime scene, slowing me down so that I was unable to make it in time to catch a friend’s set at night 2 of Magic Garage
- Sunday, my roommate from the near-future and I drove out to our near-future landlord’s house to sign a lease; he lives on a cliffside in Playa del Rey, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
- We trek back to the industrial area between Silverlake and Glassell Park to check out a rehearsal space, where my band may be pitching in to share the lockout
- We make a quick stop in the building where we’re going to be renting, in which we already have friends.
That’s another big thing in my life: I’m moving to another apartment.
I like the area okay as it’s turning into a suburb, but I should note that it used to be known for belonging to one of the deadliest gangs in LA, Los Avenidas.
Now, however, it seems to be gentrifying (I can see a friend of mine already rolling his eyes), but its movement in this direction is slow and actually quite different than that of the other gentrified LA neighborhoods. Sure, the hipsters come out at night and hang out at the local dives, but the bars themselves are very fortunately easy for most people to overlook, so they aren’t claustrophobic like the rapidly growing Echo Park and Silverlake. The native Hispanic culture is reassuringly still very much the identity of the neighborhood, but the culture is less gang related as much as it is itself generating a different brand of hipster. I actually tend to like them better than traditional stereotyped hipsters because they don’t carry the pretense of irony, or taking erudite obscurity as a personal challenge — rather, a lot just tend to be into Morrissey and hot rods and/or thrash metal and skateboards, some are into smoking pot, most are into drinking. As with any young and “hip” subculture, they are large proponents of the arts. Instead of lamenting being “lost”, they are fully aware of their cultural identities and are proud of it. They take family seriously, and treat friends like family. And, oh, how refreshing to see that they are quite the opposite of blasé. Some are in fact so extroverted that getting a flyer for a show leads to standing around, smoking cigarettes, talking about who are the best tattoo artists in the neighborhood, and even exchanging phone numbers.
So yes, I can definitely get along with all of this.
But the best part about the neighborhood are the kids. Every other night I hang out there, I can hear the neighborhood kids screwing around, but they aren’t getting into the same trouble as their gang member predecessors. I hear skateboards on concrete and poorly tuned drum kits and cheap guitar amps blasting covers of The Casualties.
And when the local kids are punk rockers, you know there is hope in your neighborhood.
Get Through Monday (#641)
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Question Answering Efficiency
When people ask you how
the bachelor party you attended over the weekend was,
all they really want to know is if there were strippers.
Just get to the point
so you can get back to
drinking coffee and working.
-nicopolitan
