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...

All this writing

Life has gone on. The burning wreck that was April bleeding into May has receded into the distance and with the turn taken in June, moving to a lovely new home, I can't even see it in the rear view mirror of life any more. Out of sight, out of mind. So with all of that out of mind I've new things and thoughts rushing in to fill the vacated space.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. A pile of pennies, each individually rather worthless but collected and marveled at none the less by myself like a child with a tiny allowance. Am unsure what to do with them. What does one do with non-actionable ideas and pondered upon questions? I write them down frantically and it makes me happy. My red notebook brings me joy when I simply lay my finger tips upon it. I feel like I'd like to clean up and share my rambling musings in some form but am unsure how to best do so or if it's even a good idea.

But the important thing is that I've already recorded them for myself and in the end that is the only audience I can truly hope or expect to please or perform for. For some reason I thought these ramblings were a new phase, an exciting swell of new ways of thinking... But that's only because my memory is poor and my periods of actual Rebeccian archeology infrequent.

The move required me to fully uproot and transplant myself somewhere else, somewhere smaller and so I was forced to dig up and turn over the top layer of sediment and creation cruft. The churn kicked up many (all?) old sketchbooks and loose leaf doodles and assorted desperately collected gaming detritus. I had the thought today to perhaps prune some of the notebooks- plucking out the "good" sketches and discarding the rest- assuming many blank pages between them. Instead I got a kick to the heart and a rush of memories.

I flipped through two spirals from my time at Cisco, the pages covered in incomprehensible notes about FPGAs and clock signals and truly wandering sketches. I looked into my own youthful gaze, captured in scribbled pen during an evening ride home. The damn things are like paper pensieves.

Another smaller spiral had skinny lists of TODOs and interview notes from yet another job transition. Perhaps I could have done away with that one but it was so small and such a quaint little snapshot of crafting efforts that I tucked it back on the shelf. The next was filled with scribbled text- first pages of prose I have no real recollection of writing (but written with the correct tempo and chalked full enough of alliteration that I could identify it as my own). Then were angry rants and silly musings that felt like a grip about my throat. Those feelings forgotten suddenly back and filling me with indignation or rage or that (now less frequent) strong feeling of distance and alienation.

Finally (flipping backwards as I do and often write) I hit the block of notes for and drafts of letters sent to friends. Dear This. Dear That. Names I still know and message. Names I miss. Names I no longer reflect upon. I didn't read them (I hate dwelling on my written letters once sent- one of the primary reasons I prefer physical to electronic mail) but my eyes couldn't help picking out phrases here and there. Reading backwards I tried to guess (some times with a sense of dread) what name would be at the start. I put that book back on the shelf and declared myself too emotionally exhausted to dare peek into another.

Later. Surely later. I enjoy writing things out by hand in order to think. Surely knowing that they will sit there patiently to return to, legible to me no matter how scribbled, is part of the reason I do so. I think so. I think. I think I need to think a bit more about it later... now onto chicken bones.

The delights of excessive free time

This week marks two months since being unemployed. Utilizing my boundless free time, I went to Golden Gate Park on Monday.

We in SF have had a long stretch of ridiculously good weather. Monday was the first real day that broke. Perhaps not the best day to visit the park. It wasn't really raining, but Karl the Fog was hugging the park really, really tightly.

On the up side, it looks like shooting mid-day mid-week should be entirely doable! The archery range is neeeever that open on the weekend. There was just one individual with a super tricked out bow, shooting by his lonesome. Anyway, after wandering about a bit I decided another day might be better. That day was Thursday.

It can be rather breathtaking, how beautiful the park can be. There's a many a thing to tease SF about or sneer at... but one cannot deny that our park is wonderful and we are all lucky? blessed? to have such easy access to such lovely landscape. Too bad I rarely make it out to that side of the city.

Took a pleasant stroll on my way out through the SF Botanical Garden, which is free to visit if you're a resident! My favorite paths wind through the Australia section, but the entire grounds are delightful. Just be careful- the grounds are so peaceful and calming and restorative that many an individual is inspired to friendliness and chatting... Avoid eye contact!

Was also able to visit two more ocean-ish library branches this week, bringing my total up to 21 of 28. So far Ortega remains the nicest due to it's views but everything gets better the further west in the city you go. Nothing can compete with the catalogue of the main downtown library though.

After all that, I started the binding of my quilt and then went over to a friends house for movie, food, and great company. Life is good. Friends are awesome.

1870: The Board Game

Resource management games can be found on both computer and on the board. I prefer the board variant because there's a limit to how much time you can sink into it before the game ends. Yes, I've had a couple Civ video game binges, but I never come out of those feeling good. And while you can video game with friends, it's better in person over a board.

1870 sort of puts this to the test. Unlike other super-long board games it doesn't overly rely on randomness (Risk) or excessive politicking (Diplomacy) which I'm no good at. It however far exceeds any normal board game in duration. How far? I've no idea. We've tried to play it twice so far and after 6+ hours each time we've yet to reach the end. We've yet to even really get the end in sight. Rather than infuriate me, I'm more determined than ever to play it through (and win, damnit! I'm a winner. Things are gonna change, I can feel it.)

One of the best things about the game is the ridiculous complexity that all sort of makes sense. It seems like half the game is just learning and remembering the rules. Towards that end I whipped a cheat sheet for our second attempt this last weekend.

They're meant to be 5.5" x 4"- here's the Google Doc Cheat Sheet that has them laid out 4 a page.

Above is the "Operating" phase, below is the "Stock" phase (aka, excellently named the President and Person phases by Allison)

Why is such complexity tolerable? I'm not sure. Maybe once we finally reach the end I'll throw my hands up in disgust and come to the same conclusion that I have with Power Grid. Why play resource management games at all? There's just some sort of itch that it scratches... the idea that it can all be done correctly. Both times I've played so far I feel like I failed not due to a bad draw or poor luck or because someone was uncooperative (try as some might to be a thorn in the side), but rather because I fucked up. And if I fucked up that means maybe next time I wont fuck up and then I'll win. And then I'll have won because I'm a winner and I did it best.

But who knows... maybe next time we'll actually reach "mid-game" phase and I'll be able to get a better read on things. To give you an idea of how little progress we made, here's two pictures from our first game.

They're almost 4 hours apart. Can you see how not-covered by tiles that board is? Yeah. Next time... or maybe the one after that...

Interested in the rules? Check them out over at the publisher's site.

One Month In

So I've had a month to myself now. Have I squandered it? Probably. Lets review:

Visit all the public library branches in SF.

Am at 10 of 28 now. I've picked off all the easy ones, they're just getting further and further away from here on out. Mostly the western half of the city left, with a few far north and south to check out. I still believe it's a good idea, gets me out of the house. I've discovered that the Teen section of the library is much larger than I thought/remembered it was. There's apparently a non-trivial section/genre called 'Urban Teen' that I've never encountered before. Also, the graphic novel section is pretty neat. And there's a *lot* of romance novels there, more than I even expected.

Today I flipped through Emily Post's enormous Etiquette book. It was fun and enlightening.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Working out reasonably well... Travel had an impact, but I'm not beating myself up over it. One thing that I find particularly interesting is that it's not so much that the distances increased that much (I used to walk to and from work, and then frequently out to dinner or activities), but that the "active time" is what most noticeably jumped up. Even sitting at home crafting or cooking, I'm moving around around so much more than when I sit and code.

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

Quilt progress continues, slower than I'd like. But it is progressing. There's just so much work to do. I still have about 7 station dots to sew down. And two track bends to correct. And some more border to piece together. And then the whole thing to assemble. And then the back to assemble. And then the quilting can begin. And then, yeah, there's that whole second quilt I'd like to kick off real soon here. Hmmm. Quilt progress, as it comes along, can best be tracked via the #quilt tag over on my Tumblr.

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Eh, going reasonably well. I cooked chicken for the first time ever in the oven. Pathetic, but at least I'm trying to correct the situation. I made some super awesome sourdough bread using just starter recently. Sour and chewy and delightful. Am going to take another stab at it soon.

Draw more.

Fucking failure. A huge gaping hole in my pretty picture of intentions. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've sat down several times, both at the Cintiq and with my pencils. Aside form Dr. Sketchy's, I've not been able to produce anything. It's getting to be a little disturbing... Not tracked in inital post, but worth mentioning:

• Code for fun : going quite well. Have been really enjoying my Google Doc-to-LaTeX document converter project. Will make a stand alone post for that soon. Just got set up today (Tuesday) to run sutro.fm locally so I can start working on that again. Gah, I've forgotten how much I for (no good reason, really) dislike Backbone. Also, after bumping into a swarm of ex-Rdio co-workers, one after another, I feel an urge to clean up my animation patch for Thor. There's also some inventory management system project mentioned in passing by Logan and the joke-but-maybe-not-a-joke idea of contracting for a friend. And finally I'm starting to bump into enough minor nits that I don't like about Stalk like Stecker that I might need to re-write it.
• Be more social : Seems to be going reasonably well. I have friends. They're pretty fucking awesome. They'll even hang out with me some times. There are things on the calendar. A number of them. I'm excited. Will post separately about it so as to not forget. Remember, future Rebecca. Life and friend can be good.

(written Tuesday night)

Scrap

"Keep your shit together," I tell myself as I gaze at the limbless bust of a male mannequin. "I'm past all this. I have all the miscellaneous art crap I need." And then I wander down the next aisle. And I lose my shit.

It's a meltdown with screaming and sobbing in delight. All in my head. Externally I calmly ask the lady next to me where the bags are because I stand before a wall packed tight with fabric scrap rolls and there's a sign that says 15 for $1. I feel tears of joy prick my eyes.

She points me in the right direction. Her glasses rest cartoonishly low on her nose. Because it's the way things are, we start talking. She repeatedly invites me to join the SFQG. I smile and express interest and will never do more than glance dismissively a the website. We ask about each other's projects. She makes scarves out of beautiful fabric bits. I find it hard to express the quilt idea but she helpfully and insightfully suggests that it sounds like a collage project. Old people, they're so smart!

We both discuss how the real value and emotion is in the process, not the final project. She leaves. I spend the next REDACTED minutes picking up fabric, stroking it, sometimes putting it in my bag, some times putting it back on the shelf only to do it all again several more times. I leave with only 30 small roles. I will be back.

I return less than a week later. I leave with fewer rolls but more fabric. There is no more purple fabric left.

If you want to live dangerously, I highly recommend checking out Scrap in SF. It's not just a fabric store. It's an everything-I've-always-wanted-to-hoard-for-potential-art-project store.

Kiel, Wisconsin as a True Detective location

For family reasons, I spent five days in Kiel, Wisconsin. It was interesting. It was hard. My phone had weak signal and no data. The only wifi I could connect to was at the public library. There is no Starbucks, the only chain here is a Dairy Queen, and I spent a lot of time quilting. Things improved when, on the suggestion of a friend in passing, I looked at the town through the lends of True Detective (season 1 only, 2 does not exist). Here are some photos and notes that I took.

Walking down a road. On my left there’s a hum on power lines, on the right is the rustling of leaves in the wind. Down the road there is what looks to be an abandoned housing development. Bird cries and cicadas. The roar of Harelyes and trucks.

Everyone sees you. They are looking, they are watching, and you will know it. Unlike in San Francisco, where you can walk passed someone a foot away and their eyes will not track you, in Kiel there will be eye contact. And possibly a smile.

Of course the truck that drove, at speed, down the gravel road had a billowing confederate flag off the back of it. True, there’s some sort of printed text over the flag but... I’m skeptical that it was a statement condemning the flag it crossed.

There are many discussions about food. What did you eat? What did they eat. Opinions about the quality of food, how filling it was, and how much it cost. Is there really anything else to talk about?

The yards are large. Each house has one to five trees on it, and these are not light weight trees. These are testaments to how long this neighborhood has stood. These old houses’ architecture harkens back to German architecture, houses built by folks to remind them of where they came from, lived in by people who will never go there. All of the houses have basements and I am continuously reminded of Silence of the Lambs.

We’re in the back of a church-run thrift store. It’s a flock of old ladies, ranging in age from old to very old. There’s whispered discussion about how the church is trying to raise four million for a new roof or some such and folks are going to start to go door to door, asking for funds. There’s also the pie stand at the city fair to raise funds. One of the women scowls and mutters under her breath that she’s not going to bring a pie this year. Moments later a lady across the room loudly asks what pie she’s baking this year. “Oh, I don’t know yet...” the first calls back with a smile.

The women fill out nicely here. And then they keep filling in.

There are signs of breeding everywhere. People aren’t having just one kid and there’s whole jungle gyms being constructed for each brood. Toys litter all doorsteps and yards. The names are listed here on sign-posts in the yard. Custom little wooden slats, presumably hanging in birth order, one under the other. It’s unclear what happens to the dead.

On Wednesday, I started talking aloud to myself.

Don't get me wrong, it was great to see family. I got a tour of my Uncle's office and saw a picture hanging on the wall, made by my cousin in his youth. My heart warmed to see how fucking creepy it looked. Talking to my blood... forever interesting. My Aunt said something that struck me, something about "that typical Stecker coddling" in regards to making a sport of watching their friend dying of ALS trying to eat. You know, in a friendly way. Sounded very much like something I would say.

I found myself walking a lot, to get out of the house, to get away from the TV, to not go mad, to not get mad. On one of my walks I wandered by the Sheboygan river that snakes through town. Giving into a whim, I constructed a hanging stick triangle construction, binding it with just river grass and hanging it from a tree. You know, to reflect my thoughts onto the landscape.

The towns sprawl until they just sort of peter out for no discernible reason. A thin sort of sprawl. Crawling but uncrowded across the rolling landscape. Panning shots of residential girds bursting with trees. Patchwork fields on the horizon. I am so happy to be flying home.

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Public Transportation Hike : Pacifica

This post is not about coding or crafting. But an important part of coding is NOT coding. And one of the best best ways to not code is to hike.

Enjoyed another wonderful Public Transportation hike this weekend. We caught a BART down to the Daily City station and then caught the SamTrans 110 bus down to Pacifica. The connections went well there and back, but be aware the 110 runs once every 1.5 hours. But don't let that spook you. This hike was refreshing, interesting, and totally worth the time.

We started off by heading up the Sweeny Ridge Trail. Finding it from the bus stop was easy enough. The first 1.2 miles was some steady incline, but since we were in Pacifica we were blanketed in fog the entire time and never once got too warm. It's questionable if we ever were really warm at any point during the trip. There was definitely apprehension as we watched the fog out the bus windows during the approach. We've had some disastrous hikes in the past... thankfully Adam convinced me to wear not just a thermal top for the hike but also my thermal leggings under my skirt. It would have not hurt to have brought another layer... and a hat... and my own gloves (I wound up stealing Adam's)

Have you seen the movie Stalker? It's a terrible film, don't bother if you haven't, but there is some striking imagery in it of foggy landscapes. That's what this hike looked like. We were quickly swallowed up by fog and the world stopped existing beyond the small spot we occupied. The trail was a constant surprise because it twisted into trees or behind shrubs and then out of existence. Sounds were muted, everything was covered in dew, and Adam's hair and beard quickly got soaked. (My braid was too dense we think to hold the dew). At one point we were wearing sunglasses to keep the fog from our eyes and had to repeatedly take them off to wipe clean.

We eventually stumbled across a Nike missile site that had been abandoned.

The site was at the peak of the hill we think- there was wind there at least. But still fog. After that we started to decent and eventually could see the coast. A little. Here the trail gets a little iffy. In theory there's a much more leg-friendly trail down to the church by the freeway... but we got turned around and took the mountain biker path. Insanely steep trails, loose rock, poor footing. Luckily it didn't last too long.

Popping out onto Highway 1 again, next to the church, we were DELIGHTED to see Lovey's Tea Shoppe right there, across the road! That's not a typo-- while it is related to (and shares the exact same menu with) SF's Lovejoy's, its name is Lovey's. Adam and I were able to slip into the communal table no problem and had us a pair High Teas.

Given that the bus comes once every 1.5 hours we had "just" missed one by 15 minutes, and the Colma BART bound 112 wasn't any more convenient. That's fine, there was still the final portion of the hike-- Mori Point. It winds right along the coast cliff and was absolutely bursting with wildflowers. An excellent way to wind down a hike and aid in a little digestion.

After strolling along between the beach and a golf course, we reached the bus stop with a comfortable 10 minutes to spare. Our BART connection was another 8 minutes. And then we were home.

All in all, an excellent hike and an excellent lunch. GMap-Pedometer puts it at an easy 7.1 miles. Check out the link for the exact route taken. Google Maps doesn't quite let us capture it (it refuses to acknowledge the path down to the highway) so here's the first portion & the second portion.

Looking forward to trying it again (perhaps following Sweeny Ridge trail a bit further)

Thems Blogger Rules Changes

Just wanted to post that the upcoming Blogger changes are bullshit and will probably be enough to finally motivate me to find a different service. Blogger is free, so I guess I can't complain. You get what you pay for. But still, there's a lot of artists blogs out there I'm worried about. I don't think my content would get me in trouble, but with fuzzy lines like these, who knows?

Context: Google Changes Content Policy To Prohibit Adult Material On Blogger Platform Starting March 23 (official post here )

However, under the new policy Google will continue to allow some nudity, as long as it “offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.”

"Substantial" Oh good, we're going with an undefined individual's opinion here. That's some substantial bullshit right there.

In other news, patterns are hard. Photoshop makes them a bit easier with the fantastical Offset Filter, but technology can only help you so much. I think I lack some key "randomness" vibes... Also, I think I need to re-draft the pattern with an offset repeat rather than aligned up repeat.

And now to start poking around for other blogging options...

January is taking forever

How are we not yet in February? Ugh. I'm feeling pretty done with this month already...

It wasn't all bad though. Adam and I caught the Cirque show Kurious, which was delightful. I was distrustful when someone told me it had great clowning, but really, it has great clowning! Mesmerizing! Would recommend the show.

This was followed up by the Edwardian Ball. I swore last year I wouldn't go but there I was again, all dressed up two nights in a row, hauling my sketching supplies. This year's new reveal: LED tea lights! Solves the "can't see my sketch" problem! Would be nice if they were a pinch brighter, but the grip, size, and slightly fluctuating luminosity are great.

There was a sketch artist there, officially set up in the VIP balcony. I spent the entire second half of Saturday night camped out behind him, enjoying lovely dressed folks standing still for long periods of time with excellent lighting for them and my page. (Friday sketches posted over here) The artist was Ben Walker and his ability to knock out full body sketches of two people in such a brief period of time was impressive.

Most people ignored me sketching off to the side but there was one couple who made a point to come over before their pose, say hi, and request a sketch. Very nice, very friendly, pretty drunk people. I took a cell phone photo afterwards, comparing Mr. Walker's style to my own. It's a shocking reminder that I need to learn to draw FASTER. At the end of the night I tore the sketch out of my book and happily handed it over the the couple and-- I swear, for the first time ever-- someone tried to tip me. True, he was pretty drunk, but hey! It made me happy! I politely declined, but it's the thought that counts. Later he came back around again with a tarot deck he had purchased and was randomly handing out cards to folks he had talked with. Was a cute idea, I still have my Temperance that I drew propped up on the desk.