Dyepot, Teapot

Daydream Games

November 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

According to my notes, in the last week I’ve read Heart-Shaped Box, seen District 9, and knit the sleeve of a sweater. I’m also up to 17,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, which has been eating my brain when I’m not working on something else.

Part of the fun of this is that by writing every day, at a pretty steady pace, I’m giving myself permission to daydream that I too could be a Real Professional Writer, with books on shelves at Powell’s and fans who give me 5-star ratings on Amazon. I imagine that I will finish this book, and I will revise it and sell it to a publisher, and I will write another one that will be even better. And really, this is an easy dream to indulge. I’ve been writing stories on and off since I first learned to read and write.

This fits in nicely with Russell Davies’ notes from his Playful talk, about things that are barely games, exercises that tend to be open-ended and have a minimum of rules. He says,

When I walk through the crowds on Oxford Street a tiny part of me is pretending I’m an assassin slipping steely-eyed through the crowds in order to shake the agents on my tail. And I bet it’s not just me. I’m not saying I’m massively deluded, just that, very often, some bit of us is always trying to play those games, to make mundane things more exciting. … I think that’s why we find Jason Bourne so resonant. It’s easy pretending to be him. Because most of the time he’s just commuting.

Click the link for the full thing with some fun pictures, graphs, and interesting ideas. The comparison of time spent in “moody commuting” vs. “fighting & killing” cracks me up.

Pretending to be a writer is enough fun that a lot of people do it, though most remain at the stage where they haven’t gotten around to putting words on paper (or screen, as the case may be) just yet. Right now I have a third of a novel, which may or may not massively suck (probably does, since it’s an unedited first draft), and I don’t have to have a real plan. But the possibilities seem endless, especially if I just continue to write. I like this feeling; it’s a good place to be.

# # #

A quick “things for sale” reminder: I have yarn and felt things in my Etsy shop. They make lovely gifts. I’m also thinking about setting up some sort of photo print shop, and putting last year’s family cookbook Christmas project up for sale as a food bank fundraiser. It has a jello salad recipe in honor of my aunt, who died last spring, as well as a number of other tasty things.

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Writing and Rayguns

November 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Through the raygun 2

I watched all twelve hours of the V marathon on tv yesterday, since I don’t think I’ve ever seen it (unless it was when it aired originally, but I was four then). This gave me plenty of chances to engage in my current favorite tv-watching game, which is to guess at the plot points before they happen (things like: it’s the last half hour of the 2nd part of 3 episodes, so the girl will probably give birth to the alien baby just before they cut until next week).

There’s sort of a point to this, which is that I’m trying to figure out how to write stories with an actual plot, and not just a character with issues who will sit there and moan about them for a while. I’m actually practicing this skill, by participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo. Currently I’m at 3674 words and into my third story idea (I’ve been keeping a file with these for several months, writing down a couple keywords and an idea for the first sentence as I think of them). The first piece was about a space probe (needs more research so it has Realistic Details instead of a lot of hand-waving), and the second is about stalking people via the internet (needs a plot before I bore myself to death). Idea #3 is a take-off of last week’s comic book remake/remodel challenge, the lovely kung-fu ballerina Super Ann.

Super Ann

I think I have the first act figured out, but not much past that, so I’ll either switch to a new story at that point, or (ideally) be struck by inspiration and figure out how to keep going. I’m not worried about my ability to write 50k words in a month, so much as my ability to stay interested in my under-plotted story long enough before I want to work on something else.

The other half of this post’s title, the raygun, is my Halloween prop. I went as a space pirate. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture, so you will just have to take my word for it when I say my hair looked awesome. Also, the gun makes a good tool for interesting TTV-style photographs.

In closing, here’s Lucas looking menacing as a lumberjack.

Halloween

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Photos and Food Carts

October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Saturday I got out and took a few pictures around the new Mississippi Marketplace cart cluster, as well as my own part of town. Good timing, too, because today has been torrential downpours and I don’t want to go anywhere.

Mississippi Marketplace Wolf & Bear's Lone Fir Cemetery Cartopia

I have 12 out of 16 pages figured out for I <3 Food Carts now, which seems like progress. It's looking something like this:

iheartfoodcarts-no1.indd @ 82%
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I’m in that middle stage where I have no idea if this is working or not, but I know I need to finish so I can move on to the next thing. That’s the trick. Keep moving.

Things I do know I like right now: Dark Night of the Soul, Machinarium, and this talk by Matt Jones about how time works (and what that means for design).

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Progress Report

October 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Back in September I started keeping a daily log of everything I make, read, and watch, along with excursions like meetings or trips to the farmers market. It’s on paper to discourage over-analyzing, and excludes my “day job” work (I try to keep that in its own area).

Anyhow, this lets me go back and see how I’m spending my free time a bit more clearly, which is nice when you’re juggling a bunch of different side projects.

Open Source Bridge is winding up again, starting with an initial fundraising push. If you’d like to get involved, we started a new mailing list (we weren’t very happy with how we split things up before). Sign up and see where you can help.

I haven’t forgotten about I <3 Food Carts, but I also don’t have any new news other than plans to start the layout this week. The cart owners survey has received some neat responses, but there’s definitely room for more.

There’s some neat stuff going on around the City of Portland and open source, but not much that’s ready to point to yet. My part mostly involves going to meetings, and later asking people I know “so if there was going to be [a regional data apps contest|a professional association for open source developers|a bouncy castle with kittens and rainbows], what would you want it to do?”

Glycon

I’ve been doing some more drawing. Right now I’m inking the sketch from the Lovecraftiana post (I finally learned out how to use the pen tool in Photoshop, and to make better use of layers for lighting and coloring, and now it’s up there with photo editing for “most relaxing computer activity”). The picture above is my first attempt to put some of these new skills to work.

My Etsy shop has been barren a while, but after a fair amount of waffling, I relisted some of my favorite unsold items. There’s still several skeins of handspun yarn, hand-dyed sock yarn, scarves, and bags available, and I have more I may list if these sell.

All of the knitting projects have stalled again, possibly because I’m reading instead. I started Planetary, which is interesting timing because the last issue just came out, and now I’m in the middle of Unseen Academicals, which is succeeding in cramming in all the football [soccer] culture jokes possible (I’m not even convinced I’m catching them all, myself).

And you know, other stuff. Like noticings and Freakangels and thinking up ideas for when Newspaper Club is open for business and enjoying the pre-Halloween surge of Lovecraftian crafts being linked everywhere. But not very many events because I seem to want to hole up at home and think, more than anything else right now. It’s a good change from the first half of the year.

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WhereCampPDX and Portland Timbers Playoffs

October 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

A slice of the weekend.

WhereCampPDX Opening Party
Everything set up for the party at Gallery Homeland.

WhereCampPDX Opening Party
James Fee plays with his phone.

WhereCampPDX Opening Party
Rafa kept the music going.

WhereCampPDX Opening Party
Toward the end of the night.

WhereCampPDX
Rick Nixon from the City of Portland talks about the open data initiative.

WhereCampPDX
In front of the schedule grid.

WhereCampPDX
Preparing for the zombie apocalypse causes much laughter.

WhereCampPDX Hackfest
Hackity hack.

WhereCampPDX Hackfest
Mayor=1

WhereCampPDX
Ben ponders the PacManhattan set up.

WhereCampPDX
Ghosts waiting for their turn to go.

Portland Timbers vs. Vancouver Whitecaps (playoff)
The start of the Timbers game.

Portland Timbers vs. Vancouver Whitecaps (playoff)
Smoke after a goal.

Portland Timbers vs. Vancouver Whitecaps (playoff)
We lose. It is sad.

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An Easy Way to Rename Files with Attachment_fu

September 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This is pretty simple, but I couldn’t find anything similar when I searched for it, so I’m posting in case it’s useful to someone else.

I’m using attachment_fu, the popular Rails file upload plugin, on a project where users upload photos. We needed to change the file names on upload so they wouldn’t contain any identifying information, and attachment_fu doesn’t have this functionality built in. Most of the discussion I found online covered changing the directory structure too, which is overkill here. I just need a simple way to change the names without accidentally clobbering some other part of the plugin’s functionality.

Here’s what I put in my image model, which has one thumbnail type (named “thumb”):

after_create :anonymize_name

def anonymize_name
  extension = filename.scan(/\.\w+$/)
  if thumbnail == "thumb"
    self.filename = "picture_#{parent_id}_thumb#{extension[0]}"
  else
    self.filename = "picture_#{id}#{extension[0]}"
  end
  save
end

And that’s it.

As an aside, I discovered that there’s an attachment_fu rewrite in progress, which you can check out at http://github.com/technoweenie/attachment_fu/tree/rewrite, so that might be of interest to anyone looking to extend it further.

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Lovecraftiana

September 23, 2009 · 1 Comment

Part One:

Lurky

Lucas and I have a running joke about Mudshark being the Lurker in the [Hallway, Bookshelf, Closet, ...]. When we were working on Yog’s Notebook [1], we both read the Lovecraft/Durleth novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which is about an encounter with Yog-Sothoth, the zine’s namesake.

I don’t remember who started it, but Mudshark is kind of an odd furry monster of a cat, so it stuck.

Part Two:

I came down with a cold on Friday, forcing me to cancel all my plans in favor of lying around coughing. I barely felt well enough to read (a dire situation!), so I was browsing around on my phone thinking about Halloween costume ideas when some line of free association got me thinking about historical expedition gear and Lovecraft [2]. This led to finding some very nice patches and pins commemorating the 1930-31 Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica (sadly, all sold out).

And that reminded me that I’ve never read “At the Mountains of Madness” (which describes the doomed expedition to Antarctica), but it’s available through Feedbooks for the Stanza iPhone app, so there you go. [3] Then I read “The Call of Cthulhu”, and “The Dunwich Horror”, and a few others. I think I’d been putting off reading much Lovecraft because I was afraid of liking the beasties more than the style of writing, but everything I picked up over the weekend was a lot of fun.

One thing I kept noticing was what sorts of details were emphasized, and what was glossed over. There’s a lot of “oh, I dare not speak of it!” with respect to the monsters, but at the same time a certain amount of gleeful scientific curiosity, and artifacts are often described in terms of how they match no known artistic lineage or culture (apparently the protagonists are well-educated in this area). Our narrators tend to be complete nerds about something (geology, medicine, architecture…) and enthusiastic about sharing everything through that lens.

Anyhow. All of this is a long way of explaining what’s going on with the image at the end of this post. [4] In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, we encounter a town full of people who’ve been mating with the Deep Ones, a race of fish-frog people who provide them with food and wealth in exchange for sharing in their Cthulhu-worship, and eventually, creating a town full of fish-frog-human mutants who will then take over the world. [5] The narrator is happy to dissect the town’s architecture, but apparently he really does not want to ponder how you go about making fish-frog-human people, so we look the other way.

I’m sure I’m not the only reader to consider how the biology of this would work, but I’m a little scared to Google it. So I drew my own version. I think this is hilarious [6] but YMMV.

What happened at Innsmouth

Maybe “Scenes Lovecraft Left Out” will be my next comic?

[1] Copies of both issues are still available, if you don’t have them yet. Buy them through the site or email me to pick up at an event.

[2] Alas, I don’t remember how I got these two topics combined. I was thinking about Dürer, and demon ladies, and …?

[3] Another case for ebook readers on the phone: sick days. If I could just download hot tea to go with it, I’d be completely set.

[4] It’s like a shaggy dog story. A creepy, wet, slimy one.

[5] Or something.

[6] Ask Lucas, I was laughing so hard I had to get up and have a drink of water before I could finish the sketch. I do not actually expect anyone else to have the same reaction.

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Next Week: WhereCampPDX

September 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

WhereCampPDX 2008 by Paige Saez
Photo by Paige Saez

The second annual WhereCampPDX is coming up in just a week and a half. I’m really happy to be helping plan this again. Last year’s event was a great mix of location tracking ideas, games, food system discussions, and planning for community preparedness.

What’s in store this time? Friday, October 2nd, we kick off with a party at Gallery Homeland. Come meet people, talk about session ideas, try another round of the Arrivals game we invented for last year’s event. Please RSVP (helps us plan food/drink/chairs) on Upcoming.

Then, Saturday morning, we’ll have the unconference session kickoff at the Metro Regional Center at 9am, with sessions running all day. Add yourself to the attendee list on the wiki now, and browse or add to the session idea list.

Saturday night we’ll have pizza and hacking at PIE in the Pearl District. Bring your project, or just an idea for something you’d like to try, and find other people to collaborate with. Calagator, Geomena, and maybe even Shizzow are all likely to be represented there.

On Sunday we’ll wrap up with a day of games. PacManhattan is scheduled for a repeat run. We’re also considering geocaching, a mapping walk, scavenger hunts, and other fun. Check the blog for an updated schedule closer to the event.

See you there!

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What Happened to the Environment for Collaboration?

September 14, 2009 · Leave a Comment

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how the current tech environment in Portland feels leaner over the last several months. An economic downturn seems like the perfect time to branch out, try new things, experiment, but that’s not the atmosphere I’m feeling. Everyone seems stretched, hunkered down, focused on finding work or keeping the income they already have. Freelancers are traveling more to get to clients, or navigating big gaps in work, and full-time employees are working longer hours in leaner organizations, or just pushing themselves harder to not be an easy layoff target.

Cash is scarcer, too. Either we don’t have any, or we’re holding on to what we do have for fear things will get worse and we’ll need the reserves. WhereCampPDX has raised only a third of its budget so far, with just three weeks to go, and that’s even after we cut expenses relative to last year. BarCamp Portland had similar difficulties last spring.

CubeSpace closing was hard on many of us, as well. Just about every group I work with has struggled to find replacement meeting space, and some activities are on hold because we’re just not sure where to do them now.

Putting this into the context of last winter’s post on community health, it’s clear that many people are struggling to earn a living. The Oregon unemployment rate is up to 12.2%. [Update: The Oregonian confirms the effects on tech jobs as well, saying "Oregon's high-tech work force is at its smallest since 1996".] We’re also struggling with the room to incubate new ideas: we need meeting spaces, free time, and not too much stress about how things will turn out. Last, seeking stability wins out over growth.

It’s not all doom and gloom: there are new spaces like Portland Incubator Experiment, and NedSpace now has a second location. We have Word-, Where-, and DrupalCamp(s) planned this fall. Planning around the City of Portland’s support of open data and open source continues, if quietly (outside the design community), and several of us are pondering rebuilding infrastructure with open source community centers and professional associations.

Still. I am wondering what we will need to regain the sense of creative latitude I saw even a year ago, and whether this will continue to get worse, more constrained, before it gets better.

Tell me: what are you building right now? What’s holding you back?

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Call for Submissions: I <3 Food Carts

August 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Last spring I set up a website for an impulsively considered project, a magazine called I <3 Food Carts. Now that I have slightly more free time (yay!), I’ve been working out what I want to do with it.

In the last few months, Portland’s food cart scene has been getting an increasing amount of media attention. I don’t really want to duplicate that: I think Food Carts Portland is doing a great job of documenting what carts are out there. Instead, I’m looking to make a sort of fanzine about what we like about our carts, and street food around the world. What makes this fun? Why are you at Whiffies at 1am three times a week? What surprises you (in good and bad ways)?

To that end, I’m looking for photos, essays, pirate maps, and other documents about street food experiences. You can find more details about the format and what I’ll be doing on the website, and the link to submit.

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