What I did last week
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Finished a scarf. First experiment in colorwork, complete.
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Started a hat. It has goats! Iām really excited about having learned how to do stranded colorwork, can you tell? (There is so much jargon associated with multi-colored knitting, Iām still learning it.)
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Rebecca Fiebrink hosted a workshop on Wekinator and now Iām pondering how to use it in my own projects.
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Went to FACETS. I was only able to make it to part of the conference, but it was still a thought-provoking experience.
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Got my hands on some Feather HUZZAH boards to experiment with.
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Started planning a soldering class.
Reading
- Learning to draw, learning to learn from Eeveeās blog. Good points about practicing and trying things and spending time on getting better at things.
Do the thing. Do it a lot. No, donāt āpracticeā. āPracticeā sounds rote and repetitive; even reading the word makes me feel pre-emptively bored. Just do it. Find an excuse to do it. Any excuse. You want to write embarrassing fanfiction? Do it. You want to make four-chords pop songs? Do it. You donāt need to do something high-brow or rigorous or chosen from a careful gradient of boring beginner exercises. You just need to something.
- Research on sign language avatars from Alexis Heloir, specifically his paper Sign Language Avatars: Animation and Comprehensibility
Many deaf people have significant reading problems. Written content, e.g. on internet pages, is therefore not fully accessible for them. Embodied agents have the potential to communicate in the native language of this cultural group: sign language. However, state-of-the-art systems have limited comprehensibility and standard evaluation methods are missing. In this paper, we present methods and discuss challenges for the creation and evaluation of a signing avatar.
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MOOC: Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists using Wekinator, by Rebecca Fiebrink. The natural follow-up to the Resistor workshop. I donāt expect to actually take the whole course - MOOCs are poorly suited to how I learn things - but Iām pondering how Wekinator could be useful for my own projects in the future.
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The LA Times has a terrifying article on OxyContin.
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āThe void that only you can seeā - Kelli Anderson blogs about a year of projects.
I always think I want: āIf you could make anything, what would it be?ā as my modus operandiā¦ When really: this is a question much bigger than meā¦and it could crush me if I let it.
To tackle that vastness, this is what worked for me: solve for it backwards. What is missing that only I can see? Then: what subset of that will probably be lost without this opportunity?
- Atlas Obscura on hostile architecture