Just give in and save your sanity for later.

bblum was at my house the other day, and asked a question about a sewing project I was working on. I said "It's a dart. It's a way of controlling fullness. Wait, that's jargony and not helpful to you..." and then explained in a (hopefully) more enlightening way. But it occurred to me last night that the fuller explanation is not actually that complicated, and some of you might enjoy it. ( So here's a little jcreed-style writeup about 'controlling fullness' and what that means in sewing. (With crappy ballpoint pen pictures!)Collapse )

"Although the idea of a bridge spanning the Golden Gate was not new, the proposal that eventually took place was made in a 1916 San Francisco Bulletin article by former engineering student James Wilkins. San Francisco's City Engineer estimated the cost at $100 million, impractical for the time, and fielded the question to bridge engineers of whether it could be built for less. One who responded, Joseph Strauss, was an ambitious but dreamy engineer and poet who had, for his graduate thesis, designed a 55-mile (89 km) long railroad bridge across the Bering Strait." [emphasis mine, from the Wikipedia on the Golden Gate Bridge]

aleffert: just draw a really good circle on the machine and call it a day
me: like
me: with the circle tool?
aleffert: yeah



(I saw a fish this color today, and I will try to draw it tomorrow.)

I have a list called "Movies I would like to own," and several of the items on the list are there because they haven't been released in America yet. So today I was checking to see if one of them is still unreleased. Well, it turns out it's available here... but at what cost to dignity? (For reference, the original poster art that got me to see it, which is a lot closer in spirit to the film itself, looks like this. Note the significantly less horrible title, too.)

Tell your friends, tell your enemies.

I just hacked the couch in half with nothing but my lucky coping saw, Nicole/KGB's zombie-preparedness pickaxe and sledgehammer, some scissors and some pairs of pliers. Needless to say, I am feeling pretty manly.

There's an IF Month meetup tomorrow at 6:00 in CFA. Can anyone lend me (or bring with them) a laptop with video chat capabilities?

Hey, remember when I was talking about maybe having an IF Month? Well, it starts tomorrow. Here's the website, and here are some other people talking about it. There are currently 23 people on the mailing list, with two of them added while I was writing this, and of which only nine are people I actually know. Get psyched.

A little while ago, I tossed around the idea of February as Interactive Fiction Writing Month and met with some positive feedback. It turns out that February is Real Soon Now.

( So here's the pitch...Collapse )

So, the question is: who is in? Who would be in if it were a different month (be honest)? Or if we did the second half of February and the first half of March, maybe?

I have been trying to make a different thing almost* every day this month. Here are the results so far. I know lots of the things have bugs or are otherwise highly imperfect, but after the month is over I will fix the ones I still care about. Otherwise I will get bogged down very quickly!


*The exception is the typeface, which spanned two days.