This type of free, specialized tool is appearing in a million niches and are enabling people of all walks of life to make interesting and sometimes beautiful things. Granted, stick figure fist fights aren’t quite high art:

Rivalry (Pivot Stick Figure Animation)

… but there isn’t anything stopping someone with a tragic and emotionally complex story to tell from picking up Stykez or Pivot Stickfigure Animator and using it. In fact, I’m sure it’s been done, and I’ll keep my eye out for just that. I’ve downloaded both of these tools and they look pretty simple to use. I’ll experiment with them and upload my rudimentary results in the future. If you’re curious, here is a basic demo for Pivot Stickfigure Animator. Try it out and maybe post a link to the video you make in the comments.

How To Create Cool Looking Stick Figure Animations On GIF

(via Smashingapps)

Picture by Anthony Wesley

Today’s inspirational story is amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley who was the first person to detect and report a new spot appearing on the surface of Jupiter this week.  Why is this inspirational?  Forty years ago this week, it took millions of dollars and many man-hours to put a man on the moon.  In our new era, though, an amateur astronomer has the tools and the knowledge to detect changes on the surface of a planet over 360 million miles away.

Whats more, he is able to capture images of it and transmit them to millions of people, alerting them all to the changes.  I see these changes occurring in every profession, hobby, and industry around the world: the “average” person is being empowered to embrace a huge amount of knowledge and tools available to them and use them to do something amazing, like Wesley did this week.

(via BoingBoing)