Catchup Post...

I keep meaning to circle back and do a really nice fancy write-up like post about my Bookhead series. Really pull together the sketches and ideas and construction process... and I keep not. There's also the fantastic Intercon Q to review and reflect upon and that's over a month past... It's now almost April of 2017 and my last post was September 2016... Better something than nothing at some point...

I remain very crafty. I've switched most my posting to Tumblr though where I feel I can just drop a cellphone photo and little description. This blog is what I make it, I could totally switch to doing that here... but I have hopes of a bit more long-form content here. My Tumblr is just the snapshots of progress... So what progress?

October. There was a lot of time and effort spent on/at work. I had the initial idea of the Bookheads and quickly made the first and second. Knew what I wanted for the third but it took several months to finally wrap that up. Also participated in a Dali themed cooking event and worked on but never finished a Halloween costume idea.

November. I turned 33. I started on the 3rd Bookhead before getting distracted with life. Family reunion in Mexico, lots of tabletop gaming, first time hosting Thanksgiving. Being happy and social.

December. OMG, so flipping over-booked! Completed class 3 of 4 in the bookbinding series with the Center for the Book. Became obsessed with The Expanse series (book and tv show). Social life and games of the tabletop and board variety.

January. So much crafting. Started the month with a couple more tiny books and then spent the rest of it working on a series of glow-in-the-dark cyberpunk masks for Intercon Q. The masks consumed a lot of time. There was also the Edwardian Ball and being social. I love my friends.

February. Intercon Q! It was awesome! It was so much! I'm still processing/thinking about it. And then to celebrate being done with that and returning to SF and having free time Adam and I went on a hike... and I promptly got poison oak. Real bad. Real bad. I've mentally blocked out the 2nd half of the month, it was so bad. But I also finished the third Bookhead when I wasn't suffering too much. But so much suffering.

March. I've become obsessed with OpenGL ES for some reason. I'm really, really bad at it. I bound a book for the spec and am trying to read it but that's not improving anything. I'm attempting to improve my Android skills outside of work. I'm less happy at work. I'm really happy with my bookbinding and recreational Android programming. I started taking an Improve class with friends.

Soon it will be April.

I think the major take aways here are that I still really enjoy my bookbinding activities. I'm attempting to flex it as an art form and incorporate it into more things. I'm on a programming uptick but on a sketching downturn. Gaming (board/tabletop) remains important to me (I've started winning Race for the Galaxy finally! After yeeeears of playing) but I play less. My social circle has become predominantly female and I think this makes me happier. I'm feeling older these days but I'm also feeling more productive/focused in my crafts.

My Bookheads, silly and simple and only three as they are, represent a major milestone to me in that they're my first "set" or "series" of something creative I've actually seen through. Something "artistic vision"-y. I had an initial concept that I executed on and they came out approximately as planned. My set of 5 masks are also important to me for the same reason- though my satisfaction with them is not as strong.

While I don't exactly have another specific series planned, I do have several one-off projects in mind that I'm hopeful for. The short term goals are a book bug, some sort of graphical Android multiplayer game over Bluetooth, and maybe a circular story that crosses itself and is specific to is printing/binding.

Hopefully I'll post again before another 6 months pass...

Onto New Things

So July 10th was my last day of work at Rdio. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years there and chose to leave for a number of reasons. There's a large number of really awesome people still working there and I wish the best of luck to them. I still plan to use the service and do some side projects with the JS and Android SDKs.

As a tech worker in the Bay Area I understand I'm extremely privileged and lucky when it comes to employment. Because I have the freedom and security to do so, I've decided to take a couple months off before looking for my next thing. And so today was the end of week two of that horrible phrase which I'll use once and avoid using from here on out: "funemployment"

I've lots of projects, both in progress and still in the idea stage, that I want to work on. I have years of learning-to-cook to catch up on. I've a basement that still needs to be cleaned/sorted/half thrown out/organized. I've travel and friends and beautiful weather luring me outside. There's so many things to do and I already feel like there's not enough time in the day. At least my previous stint between jobs helped prepare me for that one. I'm not surprised when the end of the day rolls around so soon, but I still grit my teeth and wince.

A couple key things I'm trying to focus on:

Visit all the public library branches in SF. I'm at 6 of 28 right now.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Draw more.

Doing so-so on everything other than the drawing and quilting. Purchased a dehydrator at the start of week one and have been experimenting with that. Dehydrated mango- insane success. Dehydrated avocado- not so much. Dehydrated rhubarb- iiiiinteresting. Anyway, also hope to blog more in coming weeks. We'll see how it goes.

Winning and Gaming

Life goes on, like it does. Things continue to be reasonably well. I am sad that I failed to post something in March. We visited Hawaii, it was nice, hopefully photos will make their way online at some point.

I've had some minor successes here and there recently that please me. While camping at the start of the month I was Mistress of the Campfire and managed to start several fires (in the fire pit) with one match each. This makes me proud. In the last seven months I've managed to lose 10 pounds and am only about 3 away from my randomly-chosen target. In that same time frame I've gone off the pill, and despite initial fear/uncertainty stayed off of it. While I struggle with Feelings, less reliable biology, more Feelings, and whatnot I think being free of it has improved a lot of things in life. When I ask Adam if he's noticed any change his immediate response is "You want to draw all the time."

At work I've been more assertive and involved in more external facing stuff. On a recent call the folks on the other side of the line said something along the lines of my introduction being the best they've ever heard and they were happy/excited to work with me. I continue to "Make an Impression" on people. It helps that I finally feel like the non-engineers I'm working with respect me. While my hatred and loathing of Python blossoms by the day, I've been able to carve out work for myself in Java and it's a delight.

On the art side I've had several crafting successes that makes me extremely pleased with myself. The feeling of having an idea, executing on it, and having it not suck is incredibly delightful- and sadly still quite rare. My sketching is still sporadic- I've fallen off the "morning sketch" routine and ache to return to it- but at least I'm sketching sometimes. Tonight at Dr. Sketchy's I finally won again (2nd place) which always makes me happier than it should.

On the other hand, there's been some gaming. Definitely no winning there. Have been mostly having fun, but so not winning. Except for one game of Pandemic, which was won... but when I think back on it, I'm pretty sure we were cheating...

Extended 4th Terminus session was fun- there was a map and even some dice rolls! But sadly there was also NPC deaths and damage, despite all efforts. And the party is split. And who knows when we'll ever game together again. The end is nigh.

Played my first LARP character this weekend. Burying oneself in costuming does in fact help with nerves! Does not magically help you win however. Upon hearing my character's description, Adam asked if I was worried about being typecast, to which my response was simply :P

Game of Thrones is a horrible game. It may not displace Caylus as Worst Game (since Caylus has fundamentally broken gameplay in my opinion) but it displaces Power Grid for certain as Most Unpleasant To Play. Will I ever get to play Puerto Rico again? At least Adam and I played a couple hands of Race for the Galaxy and while he (as always) won the 2 of 3 set, I put up a solid fight each round.

Life goes on, like it does.

Worken' on things

If I try hard, I might be able to finish this quilt before Thanksgiving, keeping it under a year of work. Am excited to try the idea of laying down masking tape as guide lines when I get to the actual quilting portion.

Been seeing a lot of people lately, doing a lot of things. This is good. Behind me is pizza, soap making, pretzel making, dinner cooking, and gaming. Ahead of me is archery, gaming, and hopefully more dinner cooking. I have finally cooked a meal with meat, I feel so proud of myself. Want to try it again. Thanks, Hannibal, for showing me the way!

Got a lot of things going on at work. I hope this is a good thing. Learning more things. Working a bit on things that I actually use daily in my not-work life. Trying to be a good person and actually follow through with quality documentation and faster email responses. It's hard. Being lazy is way easier. Shout-out to my awesome manager who leads via good example on those fronts.

One of the problems about work going well though is that it makes side code projects hard to do. I've been really wanting to work with WebGL but can't seem to find the energy after a day of work-- and weekends are meant to be spent entirely outside, in my opinion. I got a Cardboard headset from unofficialcardboard.com and haven't yet made something for it.

So instead of coding I've been finding myself drawing a lot. The morning doodles have decreased in number due to poor sleep... but on the other hand, when I do doodle half the time I've got crazy dream inspiration. Drawing while on a flight remains solid as well-- I made some progress trying to draw the character Hayley on a recent short flight. Dr Sketchy's this month also went quite well.

The 4th Terminus game has been going quite well. Playing Monster Hearts was interesting. Winning at Tigris & Euphrates and losing at Glass Road was fun and makes me sad that we don't play more board games.

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

My Oculus Rift arrived yesterday and I have no Windows machine to run it with (and they've still not released the Mac SDK). So rather than fall into a pit of despair, let's focus on some recent positives.

Visited my parents in Vancouver two weekends ago. Lounged in my verdant childhood backyard and gobbled a number of fruits and veggies right off the vine. Saw The Book of Mormon. Did a lot of reading.

Our head of Engineering keeps bringing in veggies from his garden, a most kind and appreciated gesture. On a Friday my posse & I made squash/everything/anything cookies. Too much egg resulted in them being more like mini muffins than cookies... but still good! The whole squash that was grated and tossed in did no harm!

Visited Seattle last weekend for a wedding. The planets aligned and my sisters were both in town as well (for their own Washington based weddings to attend). Always disturbing to see which parts of you come from your family, visible in the looks and behaviors of siblings. Weddings that prominently feature Jesus and preach about marriage belonging only to men and women are aaaaaawkward.

I've been carefully grooming a playlist themed on my character Jaya from the 4th Terminus game. Good times, been listening to it a lot. A lot. Have found myself doodling while sitting on airplanes (a disturbingly common occurrence lately) and I've been running through my list of tabletop characters but frequently finding myself back to drawing Jaya.

I've been pushing numbers around at work lately. Wringing my hands frantically wishing load times to be faster. Pulling at my hair trying to extract meaningful information from a pile of logged data. I appreciate the diversity of work for my current team- writing SQL statements, poking at iOS code, still battling JavaScript, and possibly getting better at python (I still hate python)

I saw Snowpiercer in theaters. Twice. Damn fine film. Most excellent. Best thing I've seen in a long while. I felt good while watching it, like someone hitting a hard to reach itch. Have finally escaped my horror shlump of reading material and am back on a good kick of distopian material. Am on book 3 of the Silo series (which starts with Wool). The author, Hugh Howey seems like a cool guy. Finally read Starship Troopers. Am looking forward to the new Mad Max movie coming out in 2015.

My old art blog just passed 10k views.

Tumblr is best thing

I've been fond of Tumblr for some time now, and that fondness has only grown with my usage of it. Started in on a wordy write-up on why I liked Tumblr so much, but I'm not feeling it. Brain is in image mode, not text mode I guess. The above sketch is from a work weeks' worth of morning warm up sketches, drawn while I sipped my tea before leaving the house. All of them are drawn from reference, see the tumblr post for links.

Ask me about it in person some time, I'd love to wave my hands about and rant why Tumblr is so marvelous. I don't think it is the single solution for all Internet things (see, I'm still posting on Blogger), but I find great value in what it provides and no end in sight for the delights found there. Distilled: animated gifs, fan art, community, content creation, reference photos, and simple interactions.

I continue to favor it as a dumping grounds for artwork. Currently the artwork chain goes Tumblr -> Flickr -> Blogger.

Was in Barcelona last week attending a Music Hack Day event for work. There was a minimum team size of 2 so I worked with a Paul fellow on making a web monome (he had a real monome that you could plug in and use with the site) [Github repo][Site]

It's 11:36pm and I haven't been hit with jet lag pains yet... am almost frightened by that. I don't worry about sleeping either since my eyes are already heavy, now as I type...

March marched by...

Sheesh, March 26th already? And only 55 minutes of it left... Been a busy month. First I went to Iceland. But only for three and a half days. Then I came back. My summary: "Imagine Hawaii. Then take a butter knife and scrape off all the dirt and plants and stuff. Then cover it with snow. That's what I felt Iceland looked like."

I switched teams at work. I am now officially on the API team at Rdio. My brain already feels happier. Am still learning what this new position means for me overall, but at least I'm getting the chance to learn iOS and Android. And writing in so many different languages that are NOT JavaScript. My brain! My brain, it rejoices!

Then I went to Lumi Island for a weekend with Adam (and Adam's friend & his girlfriend). It's always sad visiting Seattle when there's good weather because I get all sad about having left... No Internet access while out there so I brought some yarn.

Now I'm hanging out at home while Adam is in Seattle for a bit. Realized that I, an oh-shit-how-is-this-possible 30 year old, am still scared of the dark and monsters in the dark at times... There was a possum outside last night upsetting the cat who upset me and everything was horrible. And I was scared of the dark. Luckily I have a machete so I could take some comfort in that... Duck does not have a machete and expressed his upset by vomiting. A lot. A little bit on my craft supplies in the TV room that are strewn about. There are few joys when the boyfriend is absent, but craft supplies EVERYWHERE is definitely one of them. (until cat vomit) On a whim, I bought an Oculus Rift dev kit what will ship "some time around July". Am excited.

Another Academie of Magic session took place- in particular my character Olivia's finale. Tears, destruction, guilt, regret, wrath. Just how I like my character arcs to end. Really wish I had a sketch ready to post from that session... Spent this evening cleaning up my basement craft-room & finishing up new green monster instead... So many interest, so little time!

Soon I will fly to Illinois for a long weekend to represent Rdio at HackIllinois.

Clearly I need to post more frequently to avoid these types of long list-y posts.... I apologize.

Not-Work at Work

Work, the location, should be somewhere you enjoy going. I find working at home to be too distracting (or rather, distraction to be too accessible) but a dull workspace makes me depressed. You can't control your coworkers (for good or bad) but as long as you don't work for crazy dictators *coughcoughAcuituscoughcough* you can make your space into what you need it. And I need it to be "interesting".

One of my coworkers was super awesome and ordered a box of 36 mixed succulents from Amazon. He then distributed one to each member of the team and then other random awesome devs around the office. This made me happy. My friend Suko was awesome and used her Google-fu to sleuth out that the plant I got was a gasteria disticha.

It took me some time, but I eventually pulled together a teacup monster to house my new little green companion. I've named it Gretel after a book character I'm currently enjoying. Turns out Dremeling through cups is a bitch. Had to break it up over the course of several nights, so horrible was the sound and so tedious the grind/cooldown cycle. The legs didn't really turn out the way I wanted-- initially had hoped for a more realistic clay/resin type of leg... but I had to settle since I'm actually quite bad at sculpture. I'm not that dissatisfied with how these turned out. Adam pointed out they were rather elephant like, which makes me smile. I still have 2 more teacups so I might take another stab at it...eventually. Once my ears stop bleeding- ugh.

Another thing I do at work some times that makes me happy is bake. I think I've mentioned we have a fantastic oven there. Nice little well-stocked kitchen as well. The Friday before my vacation (you know, the day when it's near impossible to focus on work) I baked some bread at work that I made from scratch. In the office. Working somewhere that allows for such sillyness makes me extremely happy. I didn't waste *too* much time doing it and those who sampled the results seemed very pleased. It was one of the best loafs I've made in a long time.

I chopped up some strawberries and mixed them in with a normal batch of bread... which resulted in ridiculously wet dough. It was quite difficult to work with, I had to keep adding flour, and took over half an hour to work into a reasonable state. After its first rise (which went perfectly) I spread it out, laid down more slices of strawberries, honey, and M&Ms, then rolled it up. Pushed it into a bread tin, waited for the second rise (also nice), and then into the oven. So good. SO GOOD.

Coding with the aroma of baked goods filling the office is a good way to spend an afternoon.

Yay

Time Flies

Wow. It's already mid-July. Crazy. A lot of stuff has happened in the last month (though none of it all that important)

There was a hack-a-thon at work early early June and I got *really* into my project. Picked up my first Arduino and made a Next & Start/Stop external button for Rdio using the Rdio JS API and Chrome's USB API for apps. I had an intense weekend of non-stop coding and yet didn't quite finish the project (input works, but I haven't gotten output yet). I mean to finish it yet! Soon...

Adam's mother visited and we went to see The Tales of Hoffmann (an opera) which was quite fantastic. The Doll Song has always been one of my favorite pieces. Then Andreas visited and then we went way for a much needed vacation. Obnoxious vacation post to follow soon once we get our photos in sorted out.

Tonight was another fantastic Dr. Sketchy's. The dedicated Mercy Beaucoup posed as Beatrix Kiddo from Kill Bill. I appreciated Mercy's great outfits and ambitions/creative poses. I've sketched her before (as Wonder Woman) but the pictures were lost on my way home! Luckily I managed to hold onto them this time. I'm thankful that I won tonight's context with the below image. The prize was this super awesome book The Art of Sketch Theatre Volume 1 which I look forward to reading after this post is done.

Speaking of reading, I've been doing a lot of that lately as well. Was horribly let down by Robin Hobb's Rain Wild Chronicles which I dropped mid-series. Am struggling not to be entirely consumed by the thrilling magic realism World War II series by Ian Tregillis. I accidentally staid up till 3am finishing the second book (on a work night no less! shame on me!) and I'm worried the third book will lead me to a similar fate. Bitter Seeds (Milkweed series) is the first book and I'd probably recommend it to most folks.

In less happy news I installed Minecraft for the first time this weekend and lost several hours of my life. I regret it and wont be doing so again. Sigh. Having re-read World War Z and watched the movie (and surprisingly not hated it) I've a strong hankering to play some Left For Dead again, which I will not regret. But there are better things to be doing with my time. Like sketching. Quilting. Finishing my hack day project. Writing letters. Cleaning.

Pacific Rim was great. Not perfect, but what it delivered it delivered well. You should go see it. Now.

Fun with work

I finally finished a new little monster. His mouth is a binder clip, one of those large ones, and he looks quite dashing on my desk. He holds several of my business cards for me for easy access. I have business cards now because I went to FluentConf! Network network network!

I enjoyed the conference and the people I met there. Not sure if it quite lines up with where I am right now, technical skill wise... But I worry that a more advanced conference might leave me in the dust. Makes me miss college a little.

Enjoyed hearing about things that are coming down the road (ECMAScript 6, Data Parallelism) and some things that are here right now (Content Security Policy, some programming concepts). Esprima is magic. Paul Irish is a stupidly good speaker. There were lots of women attending and presenting.

Dr. Sketchy's this week was fun but I was totally not in the right mental space for it. Not a single scan-worthy sketch. I was rocken' my doodles of the speakers at the conference though. I only failed to sketch two of the sessions I attended. You can see the full set here

Tomorrow is my second Hack Day at work and I'm excited. Am not certain which little project I'm going to do, perhaps several. There's a nice oven at work with which I've baked bread and cookies so far. Someone else used the stovetop to make delicious... somethings. The sense of community cooking fosters is extremely pleasant. I'm hoping to bring more dough in tomorrow.

Tomorrow is also Friday Tie-Day.