blog.artwells.com » nshrine

On My Toes

artwells — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:46:59 +0000

I’ve been exploring a lot professional opportunities lately. None of them are firm. None of them are yet a path.

I walk around on tippy toes, trying to find a foot size spot of earth for the first step.

In other news, I completed a twitter bot for nshrine. Twitter users can place candles by messaging @nshrine. See the twitter bot help page for more information. Enjoy.

nshrine.com sees a milestone

artwells — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:58:17 +0000

Over 25,000 candles have been placed in public shrines (and now private shrines) on nshrine.com. Though it was a public candle in a well-traffic shrine, I don’t feel quite okay about linking directly to it here, as it was a candle of mourning.

So I have mixed feelings about the milestone. Though if you browse a few shrines, you’ll see that there are many playful and even goofy shrines, most shrines and candles are for people to mark or share the sorrows and losses they’ve experienced. So I can’t really jump up and down–”Yay! Another moment of mourning!”–I can be pleased that there’s one more moment where someone expressed something probably best not left unexpressed.

Memorial Day Shrines

artwells — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:47:39 +0000

I was asked today why I wasn’t promoting nshrine for Memorial Day. It’s a good idea, and were I not on the end of a development cycle and perhaps blinded by trying to come up with longer-term promotion strategies, I might have been ready for the idea. But to be honest with myself, I don’t have the guts.

I believe it when people tell me how much nshrine, and the oracula, have helped them with mourning, grief, and memory and I feel good to help. I also believe abstractly that by reaching out to more people, I help more people. However, I’m stuck with the fear of using others’ grief and loss to my advantage and get torn into inactivity. I suppose this is one of the reasons I’m not making it in business. I don’t see it as a strength of a virtue. It is something I need to overcome.