#if the formatting looks weird its because i wrote this in a text document

[kithcrafts]

Now for something completely different. Below the cut is a bit of ADHD poetry I mostly wrote a few years ago, found in my documents folder recently, still liked it, and gave an editing pass. There's a cut because of the format: it's a single sentence composed of more than two thousand (>2000) (2K+) words. Tumblr has compelled me to break it into several text blocks due to some character limit, but it's meant to be continuous.

If you like this sort of nonsense and want to see more, let me know!

Blueberry Muffins

Neither do I recall what compelled me to purchase an extra large blueberry bran muffin (now deceased) from that one little store on the southwest corner of the Center Square where, sitting in the slightly grimy window I would sometimes see a tiny and exceedingly creepy porcelain doll with bright, too-real eyes that seemed to follow you down the road long after you passed the place itself and that had you looking over your shoulder to see if the doll might somehow be back there with some sharp object stolen from the bakery in a fit of kleptomaniacal murderous intent, that object chosen for the particular way the light dripped in silvery darts from the steel blade and trickle glittering down the streets like liquid violence made solid and dangerous by the hellish forges beneath the land of Quilt where the flaming flamingo people carry strange luminous orbs that some rumors say hold their most precious memories but others claim are just another kind of weird folksy decoration with no real purpose except to establish the sort of communal identity that the Quiltish people so desperately needed after the last Textile War almost destroyed the entire country with those new Bass Drop weapons that came tumbling out of the bellies of the dreaded Duvetian planes,

plummeting thousands of feet through the smog-choked air before landing with a certain kind of thud that could vaporize any liquid water that happened to be close enough to get caught in the destructive radius determined by the size and volume of the device's "Drop Drivers", so called by the scientists who had the dubious privilege of naming the work that they never intended to be weaponized, of course, because no scientist ever wants to be responsible for a government gaining new destructive capabilities that they will invariably abuse by turning their shiny new weapons against some poor hapless group of people just because they have some philosophical disagreement or a piece of land they want or don't want or whatever motivates the enormous barely-conscious entities we carefully build out of the bones of ones that came before them and the ideals of the people whose descendants will eventually discover that the great machine created by their hallowed ancestors is now chewing them up wholesale and spitting out mindless corporate zombies with no creativity that operate not on rational thought or ingenuity or even instinct but only by playing back the pre-recorded programs that they have been carefully steeped in their entire lives like some perfect cup of tea (but horrible) but who will nevertheless eventually rise up to destroy that great machine, tearing its pieces cog from axle, mechanism from housing, and spring from escapement only to pack all those pieces up in neatly labeled little boxes and hide the boxes away in a cave somewhere on the west coast near the cliffs that catch the waves thrown by the uncaring ocean in the kind of weather where being out on the water is likely to result in the deaths of anybody unfortunate enough to have that sort of thing for a job since they couldn't get a safer job further inland like programming or data entry because all of those jobs were taken by the factory workers after the factories shut down when, after far too many generations had been exploited to exploit them, the mines finally dried up leaving only dust and cracked lives blowing in the wind like the leaves of the trees in the northern forest late in the fall after the colors have faded and the air has gone from pleasantly crisp to almost-painfully chill and dry enough that the moon and stars begin to stand out stark against the black sky like the bones left lying in the sun by the sanguine vultures that fly lazily though the sky day by day waiting for the sign of the flamboyant turquoise snail frog to appear writ in the sands of the place where the ruddy desert meets the golden beach to create an orange gradient like the one on the underside of the peach sitting in your grandmother's window because it wasn't ripe when she bought it and she thinks that putting it in the window well help even though so far it only seems to have attracted the fruit flies that plague every house from time to time regardless of whether or not there were any actually in the house before the fruit (that wasn't quite ripe anyway) came in on the backs of their riding sausages to conquer the sunbeams just so the cat is slightly less comfortable in the living room that is always just slightly cooler than she likes (owing to her tropical ancestry) so that she can never quite feel contented except when the sun spills onto the floor in splotches and shards stained to Technicolor brilliance by the glass of the window that was made to commemorate some long-forgotten event in the history of the old town where you grew up but can never go back to because of the entirely too personal way the people there treat you even though (and perhaps because) most of them haven't seen you since the day you graduated high school and left that place behind you - maybe forever - in the hopes of finding out who you are deep down inside where the squishy bits of your feelings (your hopes,

dreams, and fears) are keeping a constant vigil near that one closed door in the corner where the light has been burnt out for such a very long time and that now even the spiders have given up living in the borders between the light and the shadows, on those invisible lines where the dust motes wink in and out of visibility making you wonder briefly if it's really safe to breathe this obviously-polluted air if there's that much dust in it before you realize that you've been breathing it the whole time so it must be at least safe enough that you can live on it, unlike the sweet phosphorescent breezes that flow through the land of dreams whose effervescent vapors might draw you in with their spicy fragrances like fresh baked pineapple and piperine orange juice and trap you forever, not quite drowning you beneath the flowing waves of blue and yellow grasses on the hills behind the castle with those glistening banners whose threads come from the mysterious threadworm caverns beneath the lake on top of the mountain on the horizon to the west beyond the city of Baa'urg with the buildings whose roofs are tiled with a strange glittering stone that reflects the sun in three different colors depending on the angle of the light, and with the roads paved with a stone so black that light falls endlessly into it, warming it up so that even in the deepest part of the coldest winters the people never have to shovel the snow that instead simply melts away starting at any tiny bare spot of that wondrous road (which the people complain about so much in the summer) that happens to catch the light of the sun as it rises above the mountainous horizon bringing with it the strange music of the bird people whose fluting and trilling songs send cinnamon scented sounds along ancient and ancestral aerial avenues swirling and twisting the minds of some who hear them (or taste them with their ears, as it were) away from the subtle and carefully crafted dangers of their workaday working days and toward thoughts from wherein the mind swims swiftly among the stars and between the protons and becomes more vulnerable to other, even more insidious attacks from the many sources of psychic trauma that inhabit those worlds where such things prey on the innocent and unwary denizens who dare to wander out of their iridescent glass-domed cities and between the crystal spikes that in those places stand instead of the trees on other,

more verdant worlds, and that shine with their strange internal glows that seem so bright to look at but still somehow fail to illuminate even the nearest of the shadowed divots wherein dwell the mind eaters who lay in wait with their slime-covered tentacles so like those of the intelligent squishbeasts that inhabit the deeps of so many oceans on worlds lucky enough to have such life-giving expanses of water glistening on their surfaces instead of just barren rock or deep gas wells bubbling their own sort of life-giving poisons into the thick noxious atmospheres of those places, reminding many who see them of certain industrial processes that used to exist on their own worlds before their ancestors, recently or long ago, began to understand the interconnected nature of their environments and, often after much denial followed by eco-wars waged by the last of the great corporate governments those cultures would produce, finally took steps to correct only to find that much of the damage that had been done was irreversible (or would take many generations to repair) and that the only viable solution left was to scatter themselves to the stars (worlds like theirs being scarce enough that there were none close by) and take their chances in their smallish black-tipped ships where they would spend dozens of generations without contact from any other sentient lifeforms until they no longer resembled or even remembered their planet-bound progenitors or even those who had left on other ships, some of which had been destroyed and others captured when their particular shard of the unfortunate species-fracture encountered by chance a more hostile species among the endless voids of the universe, while a very lucky few found new worlds that would service their organic needs well enough to make a home with its own set of wonders and dangers, and yet others abandoned their organic bodies entirely choosing to become fully artificial so that over the years they could not only preserve and repair themselves better but improve on the technologies that now sustained and produced their minds in new and terrifying and amazing ways that eventually led to lifeforms entirely unlike any others the universe had ever produced before or ever would again despite its vast and undeterminable span, nor did the flowers in the grasses of that place produce any scent but instead bloomed in a most amazing array of colors and took advantage of the wind by changing their stems to vibrate with each passing breeze, producing sounds all up and down the frequency spectrum that sounded like a pleasant humming in a zephyr, but during a storm could sometimes take on a more banshee-like quality that the people told cautionary stories about to their children who, after many generations, learned to selectively breed new flowers that made specific notes that were more pleasing to listen to which gave rise to several new forms of music but caused the flies that the flowers had been depending on to pollinate to be much less effective leading to population crashes throughout that particular part of the food web until the flies (and two species of finch) were extinct and the flower came to rely exclusively on artificial pollination provided by the people who had changed the flowers in the first place because they could not bear to lose the "Music of the Buds" that had caused their culture to cohere into a post-technological utopia before ultimately dying out from uncorrectable genetic defects originally promoted by exposure to the pollen of those very same flowers and a dose of irony that could kill off an entire colony of elephants in just a bit more time than it takes for a leaf to fall to the ground from the lowest branch of the big tree on top of the hill next to the pond where those ducks played as the sun glinted off the water in diamond lancets toward the back wall of the shop next to the one that had that tiny doll that actually just wanted to be friends but was driven mad by being surrounded all day by those terrible blueberry muffins.

[doctorpariahdax]

Daud’s Last Day

     Last night the air had been so dry, even at the dock, that she thought he was going to cough up a lung. She could hear him even from above deck, coughing – nearly choking – so harshly that she could feel the rumble of his lungs inside of her own chest. For three months she watched as his health meandered between wellness and decline, for three months she listened at night to the sound of his breathing, for it overshadowed her own. Sometimes, Billie couldn’t tell if it was the rotting wood of the Dreadful Whale, or Daud’s chest that made the popping groans in the night.        Fondly, Billie could pull an image of Daud to mind from the thinnest memory, and it shined brightly behind her eyes. He was never ta;;, but there was a grandeur that surrounded a man as built as he was in his prime, drenched in the smells of cigars, hard liquor, and sweat stained clothes. The odor of piss was just what tagged along to any of the whalers on a bad day in the flooded district. He had seemed invincible back then. Maybe he would return secretly from a private endeavor, a scratch on his face or holding his wrist in a hurt fashion, but he never seemed to really bleed, like the rest of them did.        Billie thought that it was part of the Outsider’s curse, his mark that made Daud so imposing, impenetrable, and so cold. But she was just a recruit then. She had seen the horrors that men could inflict upon others as easily as themselves. She had never been a fragile girl, but she had been malleable. She knew it too. Perhaps that was part of the reason she endeavored to trust Delilah upon their meeting. Daud had seen that she could be molded like a lump of clay – and she partially hated him for it. Now though, in hidnsight, she had allowed such a cause of regret to afflict her with Delilah, even more easily than she had with Daud.        Billie wiped a hand across her face as she stared down upon her diary.               Thoughts like these could drive someone mad.        She wasn’t getting anything scribbled down in her seemingly useless journal. Anything of note was stored already in Daud’s mind, or he had helped Billie preparing ensembles of information, keypoints, targets, hand drawn maps...Her journal served no purpose as of yet. It meant nothing to keep her thoughts organized when it seemed two minds held the same information. With a start, Billie swung her head around and stared at the iron and mahogany door to her quarters, when she heard a familiar wheezing cough echo from the other side. Like a cat, Billie tuned her ears to ignore the creaking and the moaning of water against the ship’s sides, waiting for a signal.         Moments passed in relative silence and nothing came.         A swell of anger rose into the back of Billie’s throat, burning like bile.        “What am I doing?” Billie whispered to herself, and maybe Deidre, should she care to listen to complaints. “After all of this...what am I left with? What will we be left with?”        Billie didn’t know what the world held in store for itself should the Outsider die – if it was possible. And she doubted that Daud was even a slight step closer to such knowledge.       Billie had obeyed him without question back in the day. He was omniscient, omnipresent, you couldn’t hide anything from him – until Billie dared to try. She had always felt that there was some degree of mistrust between her and Daud as she grew and rose to his second in command. Betraying him gave her a confidence she hadn’t known since Deidre had first smiled at her, a confidence so rare like his smile or a small accolade for her performance on a mission. But it also sent a jarring pain up her spine, tormenting her with a headache of fear and paranoia.        She knew that he knew, he had always known. One of the strongest might rise up and try to upset the balance of power that simply held the hierarchy of the whalers in place – that had held all of their worlds’ in place. It was the only thing they knew, that they wanted to know. The whalers were a band of misfits, freaks, talentless polymaths, and criminal sweethearts. They all missed one thing in common, or had been betrayed by that one thing – family.       Daud offered them a home, food, purpose.       Daud had offered them a family, and Billie, like the rest of them, fell for his maneuvering. Even after Daud expelled her, and soon afterwards found himself having ‘disappeared’ from the underside of Dunwall, from the underside of the world seemingly, there was a constant pang somewhere deep in Billie’s stomach that she had lost something important. She had lost trust, she had lost her family. All of the whalers, all of her friends, they were now without a proverbial father, and their family shattered.       Billie still, even after fifteen years couldn’t help but think that it was her fault that nearly a hundred faceless souls had lost the closest thing they had to acceptance and love.         Lurk was brought out of her guilt ridden contemplation at the sound of scuffling. She thought it was a water rat loose in the kitchen with how faint and sharp the sounds were. The quiet came back in a breath and Billie nearly relaxed, considering trying to write pointless information in her journal when she felt the boards of the lower deck vibrate slightly, a thunder of weight collapsing outsider of her door.       Her head snapped back to the door, and within moments, she heard the coughing.       Bolting from her seat and pushing the heavy cast iron door open so quickly it threw Billie off balance she ran feverishly outside her cabin.     Panic raised the hairs on her neck and arms when the cot beside her door was empty. None of the lanterns were lit and dawn was still several hours from breaking. “Daud!” she yelled into the darkness as she took precarious steps towards the sound of his lungs collapsing. “DAUD!”        Billie’s bare feet rushed towards the stern of the lower deck, near the coal burner, and paused just before she nearly fell onto Daud’s twisted legs. In the darkness next to the fire from the burner she could just make out his form, and sense his motions.       It was a wonder he was still conscious. Daud’s breathing was expending enough energy to keep a campfire lit through a storm. He was hyperventilating, but it was deep and intermittent with horrible coughing. It wasn’t a wet cough, like the kind sounds that came of pneumonia or tuberculosis – she thanked whatever gods there might be aside from the cold bastard who watches with apathy from the void – but Billie could feel something heavier than spittle rising from Daud’s lips with each heaving breath.       His body was stiff, almost like a bone and he shook like a leaf on a dying branch. He lay on his side, holding his legs close to his chest and one arm wrapped around his torso. His other hand was extended into the darkness beyond the burner. He was without his jacket or leather overshirt, just the stained off white sleeveless shirt he wore beneath and his slacks and socks. He shivered violently, but it was hot below deck, even at night.        “Daud!” Billie fell to her knees and tried to straighten the man out, at least turn his violently convulsing form to his back and hold his neck between her hands. “Daud, what is it? Daud! Daud god damnit what’s the matter? What’s wrong?! Daud? Daud look at me!”          There was once an old man who lived on the street next to Diedre’s favorite corner who was bedbound. Diedre had told Billie that before his daughter came to look after him and the house that he walked with twitches. His legs spasmed and his hands shook, it got to the point where he couldn’t write his own name. Diedre had told Billie it was some kind of disease. You lose coordination, your memory faltered….It all had to do with the spine, with the brain. Something that only natural philosophers truly had the opportunity to examine understand.          The only time Billie had seen the man was when the city watch was bringing his body out from the house, and preparing to send it to the academy for study. The man’s eyes had been rolled back, white as river stone. Billie couldn’t see Daud’s eyes, but about the place where they should be there was a pale color, not dark where one would intuitively be able to see the iris and the pupil. Billie didn’t know if she could muster the will to scream, and it’s not as though anyone could hear her or be able to help.           She smelled burning meat to her left and reached for Daud’s hand that was extended into darkness, repulsing as the scent of molten skin. A siren seemed to go off in Billie’s ears, her eyes becoming attuned to the dark. She held Daud’s burned hand close to her and dove her own free hand beneath the coal burner, hissing in brief as her shoulder was burned, but grinning madly in desperation as she felt a cylinder of glass brush against the tips of her fingernails.           He had been reaching for something. Something that drove him from bed. Billie all but shoved her body beneath the burner, the heat from the metal radiated against her skin and scorched her from proximity alone. She let out a cry as she pushed against the burner and grabbed with desperate might around the floor until her hands wrapped around the glass again. She pulled back, burned, and stared ferociously at the small glass container she held in the palm of her hand.            Daud’s body twitched beneath her and her pain suddenly faded. She sprang so quickly from Daud she was worried that she had kicked him and she ran into the kitchen, grabbing the closest match she could find in her sparse drawers and tore the lantern from it’s nook on the ceiling. Even without the light from the lantern she was nearly sure she knew what the vial was. <5α,6α> -7,8-didehydro- 4,5-epoxy-17-methylmorphinan-3,6-diol.         “Fuck.”         With the lantern in hand the the vial carefully folded into her palm Billie darted from the kitchen towards Daud’s cot. Beneath it there was a small container.         He had come onto the ship with nothing in his possession, and after three months there had been small amenities he had required. Horse bristle and baking soda for his teeth, which smelled constantly of tonsil stones, a small curved knife for nails and loose skin, and a small black compartment with metal latches on the side.         It was something Billie had to search for in some time, it wasn’t cheap, even to those that used it in their professions.         Billie had stolen it from a small practice in Karnaca, but given the circumstances, the theft felt less of a crime and more of a necessity. It was a steel syringe. The needle was wide and the container was thicker, but it could be cleaned and easily sanitized. Given how often Billie had needed to put it to use in recent weeks, despite how painful it was compared to a smaller needle, it was worth the extra trouble of taking it.          Billie fumbled for a half moment as she emptied the contents of the vial into the syringe, and adjusted the filter measurements for the medicine in the dim light of the lantern. She could hear Daud’s restless body throwing itself harshly against the floor.         It had never been this horrible before, but in this state not even bone shattering exhaustion would keep Daud’s body still.         Billie grabbed the lantern, put the syringe in her mouth and practically jumped down to Daud’s side, pinning his corpse rigid arms to his side with her knees, and held his stiff neck straight her one of her arms. She muttered false reassurances to him, hushing him, counting down from three quickly before placing the syringe with some force into the flesh of his exposed shoulder, his muscles and veins bulged – even without much medical practice and his convulsions, it didn’t take much effort to align the needle and his veins. She dropped the syringe after she removed it from his arm, holding his head between her two hands, slowly watching the whites of his eyes disappear beneath eyelids as his body eventually came to a still. His breathing gruff but at an even pace.            Billie gently climbed off of him, and took a moment to lean against the wall by the burner, comforted by its warmth and shrinking her form into the quiet blackness of night. Her breath quivered with anxiety for only a minute, as it was all she could afford, before gingerly lifting Daud’s head again, cradling his neck and shoulders against her chest, and dragged him carefully and as easily as she could across the floor to her quarters, lying him down in the bed. She covered the blankets over his chest and dragged her wooden chair to the head of the bedside. Billie spent the next five hours with her hand on his forehead, occasionally straying down to his neck, watching his pulse. The liquid that spurted from his mouth during his twitches was a dark red, flecked with black.           It spotted her arms, her face, and it smelled like offal.          She didn’t dare leave his side until he woke up, not until she could be sure she gave him an unworrying amount of morphine. The last thing she wanted to do was send him off to a final sleep.         She needed him.         Or more, he needed this – one last condolence.         He had to pay off this debt before he could sleep. It was beyond feasibly important. This was a matter of corruption. The Outsider could create another ‘Daud’, it was necessary to his own peace – even Billie’s – that the Outsider didn’t get the opportunity to.          Dawn well had passed before Daud opened his eyes. Bloodshot and yellowed from exhaustion, much like Billie’s, Daud tried to blink to clear his vision and his dry lips parted to call out to Billie. He was feverish, as he had been for the past few nights, but his consciousness lifted a weight from Lurk’s chest that had pulled her heart down into her stomach all night.        Billie rose and went to fetch a bowl of hot water and a clean rag, wiping the black and bloodied spittle from her arms and face before returning to clean what remained of it from the corners of Daud’s mouth. Billie fixed them creamed oats, but Daud had returned to fervent sleep. She ate alone, and stared at his paling face, wondering if he knew – if he truly knew – if he accepted what was happening to him.           The black spittle was common from collapsed lungs and blood pooling in the tissues of the chest and esophagus, the cough even more common, and the rancid smell was what came most naturally to the human body when its expiration date came to a close.          There is a mellow absence of feeling that overcomes someone when they truly think about oblivion, about their natural return to nonexistence…. It did require some form of naive sentimentality about one’s life, and it was for that reason that Billie wondered if Daud feared his own death. Was he to be trapped in the void? A place that did and did not exist?           Would he exist, or not? Would it matter? Would he even know?           Daud’s hand tremored once again as Billie ate her creamed oats, watching him, stroking his burning forehead.          His nerves were on fire, grasping at any sense they could feel, and to not much success.          They stayed like this, in Billie’s cabin for nearly half the day. She had left to relieve herself in the afternoon and found her cabin empty. She came up to him from behind, as he clutched harshly onto the railing of the stairs. She helped him into a leisure chair she kept at the aft of the main deck, against a wall, cornered by a small desk littered with studies and plans she had drawn with Daud weeks past for her mission into the bank. She returned and helped him dress, in his leather overshirt and short wool coat.          It was warm, perhaps even hot but Daud insisted he felt chilled. Billie tried to pretend her understanding smile was without worry, but there was a part of her that knew he could see through the facade, and she felt guilty thinking of the consequences of his physical state.         He insisted she get rest before her mission, ate the cold creamed oats and insisted on having whiskey and the black box close at hand.        “One or the other.” She responded. It was dangerous to mix such a strong compound of morphine, much less any opiod  with liquor. She laughed to herself, unsurprised, when he took the whiskey.          From late afternoon until the setting of the sun in the evening, Daud had been left to his own devices upon the deck.         When Billie found him she thought for a moment, staring at his pallid figure, that there might have been a smile hidden in the cracked blue lips. She woke him to speak of the plans, but his mind was ...quiet.          His attention seemed to be employed elsewhere as his lips moved to speak at Billie, he stared off at the waters, facing the setting sun clouded by dust and industrial pollution. The smell of burning blubber and whale oil flittered through even the crisp sea breeze. It was an annoyance to Billie, she had always been accustomed to the smell of industry.            Daud seemed almost comforted by it.           Understandably so. He was back home. And the smell of Dunwall’s whaling refineries had followed him from his hayday back to the southern isle.              Just as Billie had.          She exhausted every possible outcome to the bank, and in doing so exhausted Daud’s voice with retaliation of contingencies. He had faith in her, that much was apparent, but Billie had never pulled a job as big as this one, even back in her prime at Dunwall without the aid of a few whalers, much less without directly being aided by Daud.           His body hesitated into f faintness as he bid her “Go...”. It was half hearted, almost a request.           Billie took the near empty whiskey glass from his hand and placed it near the bottle on the desk. She straightened his shoulders and helped his head lean against the plush leather of the leisure chair. His eyes closed as if it were a reflex.           A dark thought crossed Lurk’s mind, and she pushed it back, at least until she had set foot on the dock, Daud out of her sight. She stroked some lose hairs back onto his head and gently clasped her palm onto the side of his neck, like she had done to comfort Diedre when -           Billie left without a word.           And within the hour as she reached for the knife that made the Outsider deep within the quiet walls of the Dolores’ Bank, Billie sighed. Her breath was heavy, almost as if she were breathing for two. Her chest collapsed, but she thought nothing of it. Merely adrenaline.           When the Outsider appeared before her, she knew that her single addled breath hadn’t been her own.           There was some side affect from the arcane bond, although it had been broken so long ago by force of will. When the Outsider spoke the words that shook her to her core – allthough she expected to hear their value at some point soon….just not from him, she knew that the arcane bond had been broken at circumstance this time.            She found him, lying still and tremorless in the chair.           His head was back, skewed tiredly to one side, his hands with a loose grip on the arms of the chair. It was...wrong...to move him so suddenly. He was finally able to rest.            Billie dried her face and sat upon the ground next to his feet, grabbing the bottle of whiskey that was left unfinished, and a cigar she had left for him that was barely lit. She sat with him and watched the sun set before she began work on his  pyre.

[liapher]

in love with your dta book binding and i find i am increasingly more invested in wanted to physically hold a copy of dta so i was wonder if you had any advice or resources (programs/materials/web sites) for beginners or like point me in the right direction if you don’t mind?

Okay so keep in mind I'm very much an amateur at both typography and bookbinding

Alright, typesetting. What I initially did was just open some of the books on my shelves to see how those were designed and just use that as inspiration. That absolutely worked, although there are some details I would now do differently. Last fall/winter I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and read every typography book that I could find at my library. The ones i would actually really recommend are the following:

“The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst. This one is a really nice intro to all kinds of typesetting details. It’s also pretty easy to find PDFs of this book on Google :-)

Jan Tschichold’s essays on typesetting and book design, if you can get your hands on them. I think they were translated and published as “The Form of the Book.” Tschichold explains the typographical choices that have worked well for centuries and how to do modern (20th century) versions of those. He’s very much not into having fun and experimenting though. I nevertheless found it really interesting and useful to read what he wrote and to then decide whether to heed that advice or to deliberately ignore it (since I’m here to have fun with typesetting).

If you speak German: “Lesetypografie” by Friedrich Forssman and Hans Peter Willberg. Its thesis is basically: book design has to be for the reader, and it's really good at explaining what that actually means with tons of examples.

For a free online resource, you could also check out practicaltypography.com, especially the sections on page layout and text formatting.

Moving on: typesetting software. I use LaTeX because I was already used to using it for typesetting academic texts, and because it allows me to be a little control freak about all kinds of details >:) and because it allows me to programmatically import the text and change its design. If you’re already used to working with LaTeX or if you enjoy programming, I definitely recommend it, but otherwise I have to warn you that the learning curve is very steep. This document contains links to how-to guides for various other kinds of software though, maybe those might be useful to you?

For re-ordering the pages of your PDF so they’re in the order you need for folding signatures when handbinding a book, you’ll need an imposition tool. I use LaTeX, but I know lots of people swear on this online tool.

Designing a cover (if you want to use a print-on-demand service or if you want to add a dust jacket to a handbound book): I use Affinity Photo, mostly because that’s the image editing software I already had anyway, but I'd also generally recommend it; it can do lots and is sold at a very fair price imo. My general tip is not to place any elaborate design details near where the spine and the front/back cover meet (and the front/back cover and the cover flaps)—if you use a print-on-demand service, they might end up printing the cover just a smidgen too far to the left/right and it'll look weird if part of your spine design is now on the front cover, and if you design a dust jacket, you might underestimate the small amount of extra material you might need to fit the dust jacket around the spine or around the fore-edge of the cover. Before exporting the print-ready PDF, merge all layers—this will considerably reduce the size of the PDF.

Printing books via print-on-demand services: I've used lulu.com, which prints books that are of a fine enough (but not perfect) quality. If you want to design a cover + interior to print via their service, definitely make sure to read their formatting guide where they explain what kinds of trims/bleed edges/etc. you should take into account. To find out what dimensions your book cover is gonna need to have (specifically how wide the spine is gonna be), use their pricing tool and enter the page count, select the binding type etc. My tip here is to only start designing the cover once the interior is done and you know how long the book will be—otherwise, you’re gonna spend a fair amount of time adjusting your cover layout to work with a new spine width... :)))

Printing dust jackets: go to your local copy shop and check what kind of glossy, slightly-thicker-than-copy-paper paper they have available and ask if you can use their paper guillotine to trim the printed cover to the size you need.

Handbinding a book: I read the “printing” and “physical assembly” sections of this document, and I also watched a lot of Darryn Schneider's videos on Youtube—he’s a professional bookbinder who makes a lot of incredibly useful videos on various bookbinding techniques. Really great if you’re a visual learner! To get started, I’d watch his video on tools for beginners, his series on making a case bound book, and his video on the square back case binding. I really like the latter technique—it’s great if you’re making thinner books where the width difference between the spine and the rest of your textblock isn’t too, too pronounced, and if you're a bit scared of actually backing and rounding spines / don’t have the appropriate tools. I also found it very helpful to ask questions in this fanbinding discord!

In terms of tools, I have:

A good-quality cutting mat + cutter (Olfa, definitely worth the small investment so far), and a metal ruler

A bone folder (great for, well, folding stuff, but also for smoothing out creases as you glue cloth or paper to the bookboard)

An awl (and a couple of pieces of (mostly) corrugated cardboard stacked on top of each other to protect my desk when I punch holes into the signatures)

Two bristle brushes, a large one (about an inch across) and a small one (less than 1 cm across)

Sewing needles—I’d recommend using one that’s relatively blunt and large but a bit thinner than the awl for sewing the signatures, and a thinner and pointy one if you want to make headbands

I don't have a press, I just use a stack of heavy books

and as for the materials:

Off-white 80 GSM paper, but I’ve also used whatever off-white copy paper the library printers happened to stock. Real bookbinders use paper with the grain running parallel to the spine—I don’t since it’s way more expensive, at least where I live.

Bookbinding glue (see also here and here)

Cotton gauze

For these books, I used some random leftover woven cotton tapes, but afaik if the book is fairly thin you don’t need tapes and can just sew the signatures together with the French link stitch instead. (That's what I’ve been doing at least)

2 mm thick bookboard (solid cardboard, preferably acid-free)

Bookcloth. It’s special in that it’s made from non-stretchy fabric and backed with paper, so you can glue it to the bookboard without any glue spots staining the cloth. I’ve been buying bookcloth from bookbinding/stationery suppliers, but you can also find online guides to making your own bookcloth (no recommendations as I haven’t tried that yet)

Some pretty paper for the cover and/or the endpapers (optional, you can also cover the entire cover in bookcloth and use plain endpapers). Since this involves applying a bunch of glue to the paper, it’s a bit easier to work with if the paper’s a tad heavier than copy paper (around 100 GSM maybe?), although that isn’t a requirement

Linen thread. I got some from a bookbinding supplier and picked the 18/3 one, which is nice, but if I had to choose again I might consider getting something ever so slightly thinner. Also full disclosure I don't know how or if this thread is different from regular linen thread. Lots of people apply a thin coat of beeswax to their thread, but I haven’t done that so far, and haven’t had any problems with that (will report back if that changes)

Optional: a thin leather cord (or shoelaces) and some thin thread you happen to have lying around for making headbands

Also optional: some pretty ribbon to use as a bookmark, like those thin fabric ribbons you can buy for gift-wrapping

I think that's it? For the most part it’s about approaching this with a can-do attitude and not being too afraid of just trying things out

This is a bit all over the place, but if you have more specific questions, feel free to send me another ask! :)

[codematurgy]

hey jayce i have a q regarding the npf plugin. i only know the most basic abt html so idrk how to study the code on how to use it. im currently using a theme with pxu photosets. is there anything else i should do aside from copy-pasting? sorry if this is too broad of a question and thanks!

hello, and don't worry about it being a general question! i think it is a proper moment to just write a full tutorial on it, since my instructions may be rather vague at times.

i should point that i might speak directly to theme makers in some aspects of this, but i will try to get back to common users as well.

first of all, which is something not everyone might have thought of at first, make sure your theme is not using any CSS(the name for the code inside the <style> tag) !important rules where it shouldn't, since adding !important beside any value makes it hard to set another styling to neutralize it. i'm saying this because the latest version of this plugin does not use style directly applied to the element itself(that is, instead of adding the styling code inside the <style> tag where it commonly belongs, it is hard coded into the element it refers to, which is located inside the <body> tag, where the mark-up for your blog goes). hard-coding styles into an element made that style harder to be broken by unrelated CSS styling the theme maker might have add, but made it less flexible to people's own styling, which i considered quite a downside. the !important rule was often misused by myself to the point that earlier themes of mine looked wrong with my script because them. therefore, make sure no element involved in the photoset structure, such as .tmblr-full, is abusing of !important styles in your CSS! a quick search for ".tmblr-full" and "figure" should do the trick, though it's very likely these aren't affected by these rules at all; this is just a cautionary step. you may skip it, check your blog and return to it in case it looks weird.

now, we copy all of the code available for copying, which is both the external link to the script and CSS to make it look right as well as the function call(the whole bit with npfPhotosets(...) and a bunch of options inside), and paste it after the entire theme mark-up but before the closing <body> tag, which should appear as </body>; the function call is what makes the script you linked before run, as the link to it alone will do nothing. i want to reiterate that everyone should always look at the original post when doing so since reblogs don't automatically update, and you might be left with an older, buggy version of the script if you're looking at an old reblog.

for the options, some of them are easily ignorable(such as rowClass, since this is a class defined by Tumblr structure itself and not the user, so you'll be using the one i wrote there), but others are a bit more personal. the most important thing is to correctly fill the post selector with whatever selector you're using for your posts. if you're unsure about what you should use as the selector for your theme's posts, look for {block:Posts} in your theme. this block is specific to Tumblr; anything written inside it will appear for each post displayed in your blog. there is where theme makers write all the mark-up for a post, taking into consideration if it's a text, photo, video, etc. it is very likely that one of the first things you'll find inside {block:Posts} is the wrapper used for posts, since a wrapper is something you'd want to exist every time a post is displayed. for example, it might be a <div class="post">, so your selector will be ".posts"(the dot before the name refers to a class), or it might be an <article>, in which case "article" alone will do.

since you mentioned you're using PXU photosets, i'm assuming you mean to keep using PXU for the old photosets and only use npfPhotosets() for the new photosets, and this is easier for general users unfamiliar to HTML. in this case, do not worry about HTML structure whatsoever, since these plugins do not crash into each other or anything; at this point, you're done!

what follows is perhaps of more use to theme makers, so feel free to ignore. if you'd like to adapt from PXU to npfPhotosets() in regard to legacy photosets(since PXU only works with the old format), the answer is: change the classes in the PXU HTML structure to match the ones you're using for npfPhotosets(); if for example you use the exact same classes as the ones i've used, this means the image tag itself will be npf_image, its container will be tmblr_full, and the photoset container will be npf_photoset. since the rows haven't been generated yet(and this is for the script to do), you shouldn't worry about npf_row. you may notice that the PXU structure adds a link tag around your image, as a trigger for the lightbox function; this is, however, unnecessary for using the lightbox function in npfPhotosets(). i do realize now that i never pointed out how you need to include several attributes alongside the image URL to your <img> tag in order to make the lightbox function work; these are data-orig-width, data-orig-height, and data-highres, which should be assigned values regarding the photo's original values through Tumblr's variables(as available in the photo section of the documentation) which are respectively {PhotoWidth-HighRes}, {PhotoHeight-HighRes} and {PhotoURL-HighRes}.

hope this was of any help! if you had trouble either way, do tell! i don't mind helping find the post selector if it's too troublesome.

[shirlleycoyle]

FTP Is Almost 50 Years Old—and It’s Ready to Retire

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Here’s a small piece of news you may have missed while you were trying to rebuild your entire life to fit inside your tiny apartment at the beginning of the COVID crisis: Because of the way that the virus shook up just about everything, Google skipped the release of Chrome version 82.

Who cares, you think? Well, users of FTP, or the File Transfer Protocol.

During the pandemic, Google delayed its plan to kill FTP, and now that things have settled to some degree, Google recently announced that it is going back for the kill with Chrome version 86, which deprecates the support once again, and will kill it for good in Chrome 88.

(Mozilla announced similar plans for Firefox, citing security reasons and the age of the underlying code.)

It is one of the oldest protocols the mainstream internet supports—it turns 50 next year—but those mainstream applications are about to leave it behind.

Let’s ponder the history of FTP, the networking protocol that has held on longer than pretty much any other.

1971

The year that Abhay Bhushan, a masters student at MIT who was born in India, first developed the File Transfer Protocol. Coming two years after telnet, FTP was one of the first examples of a working application suite built for what was then known as ARPANET, predating email, Usenet, and even the TCP/IP stack. Like telnet, FTP still has a few uses, but has lost prominence on the modern internet largely because of security concerns, with encrypted alternatives taking its place—in the case of FTP, SFTP, a file transfer protocol that operates over the Secure Shell protocol (SSH), the protocol that has largely replaced telnet.

FTP is so old it predates email—and at the beginning, actually played the role of an email client

Of the many application-level programs built for the early ARPANET, it perhaps isn’t surprising that FTP is the one that stood above them all to find a path to the modern day.

The reason for that comes down to its basic functionality. It’s essentially a utility that facilitates data transfer between hosts, but the secret to its success is that it flattened the ground to a degree between these hosts. As Bhushan describes In his requests for comment paper, the biggest challenge of using telnet at the time was that every host was a little different.

“Differences in terminal characteristics are handled by host system programs, in accordance with standard protocols,” he explained, citing both telnet and the remote job entry protocol of the era. “You, however, have to know the different conventions of remote systems, in order to use them.”

A teletype terminal from the ARPANET era. Image: fastlizard4/Flickr

The FTP protocol he came up with tried to get around the challenges of directly plugging into the server by using an approach he called “indirect usage,” which allowed for the transfer or execution of programs remotely. Bhushan’s “first cut” at a protocol, still in use in a descendant form decades later, used the directory structure to suss out the differences between individual systems.

In a passage from the RFC, Bhushan wrote:

I tried to present a user-level protocol that will permit users and using programs to make indirect use of remote host computers. The protocol facilitates not only file system operations but also program execution in remote hosts. This is achieved by defining requests which are handled by cooperating processes. The transaction sequence orientation provides greater assurance and would facilitate error control. The notion of data types is introduced to facilitate the interpretation, reconfiguration and storage of simple and limited forms of data at individual host sites. The protocol is readily extendible.

In an interview with the podcast Mapping the Journey, Bhushan noted that he came to develop the protocol because of a perceived need for applications for the budding ARPANET system, including the need for email and FTP. These early applications became the fundamental building blocks of the modern internet and have been greatly improved on in the decades since.

Due to the limited capabilities of computing at the time, Bhushan noted that early on, email-style functionality was actually a part of FTP, allowing for messages and files to be distributed through the protocol in a more lightweight format—and for four years, FTP was technically email of sorts.

“So we said, ‘Why don’t you put two commands into FTP called mail and mail file?’ So mail is like normal text messages, mail file is mailing attachments, what you have today,” he said in the interview.

Of course, Bhushan was not the only person to put his fingerprints on this fundamental early protocol, eventually moving outside of academia with a role at Xerox. The protocol he created continued to grow without him, receiving a series of updates in RFCs throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including an implementation that allowed it to support the TCP/IP specification around 1980.

While there have been some modest updates since to keep with the times and add support for newer technologies, the version of the protocol we use today came about in 1985, when Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds developed RFC 959, an update of the prior protocols that is the basis for current FTP software. (Postel and Reynolds, among others, also worked on the domain-name system around this time.) While described in the document as “intended to correct some minor documentation errors, to improve the explanation of some protocol features, and to add some new optional commands,” it nonetheless is the version that stuck.

Given its age, FTP has many inherent weaknesses, many of which manifest themselves to this day. For example, transferring a file folder with a lot of tiny files is intensely inefficient with FTP, which does much better with large files as it limits the number of individual connections that are needed.

In many ways, because FTP was so early in the history of the internet, it came to define the shape of the many protocols that came after. A good way to think about it is to compare it to something that frequently improves by leaps and bounds over a few decades—say, basketball sneakers. Certainly, Converse All-Stars are good shoes and work well in the right setting even today, but for heavy-duty basketball players, something from Nike, potentially with the Air Jordan brand attached, is far more likely to find success.

The File Transfer Protocol is the Converse All-Star of the internet. It was file transfer before file transfer was cool, and it still carries some of that vibe.

“Nobody was making any money off the internet. If anything, it was a huge sink. We were fighting the good fight. We knew there was potential. But anybody who tells you they knew what would happen, they’re lying. Because I was there.”

— Alan Emtage, the creator of Archie, considered the internet’s first search engine, discussing with the Internet Hall of Fame why his invention, which allowed users to search anonymous FTP servers for files, didn’t end up making him rich. Long story short, the internet was noncommercial at the time, and Emtage, a graduate student and technical support staffer at Montreal‘s McGill University, was leveraging the school’s network to run Archie—without their permission. “But it was a great way of doing it,” he told the site. “As the old saying goes, it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” (Of note: Like Bhushan, Emtage is an immigrant; he was born and raised in Barbados and came to Canada as an honors student.)

A screenshot of WS_FTP, a FTP client for Windows that was particularly popular during the ’90s.

Why FTP may be the last link to a certain kind of past that’s still online

As I wrote a few years ago, if you grab an old book about the internet and try to pull up some of the old links, the best chances you have of actually getting a hold of the software featured is through a large corporate FTP site, as these kinds of sites tend not to go offline very often.

Major technology companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Mozilla, Intel, and Logitech, used these sites for decades to distribute documentation and drivers to end users. And for the most part, these sites are still online, and have content that has just sat there for years.

In many cases, the ways that these sites are most useful are when you need access to something really old, like a driver or documentation. (When I was trying to get my Connectix QuickCam working, I know it came in handy.)

An example of what FTP looks like in a web browser in the modern day, using ftp.logitech.com as an example.

In some ways, this setting can be less nerve-racking than trying to navigate a website, because the interface is consistent and works properly. (Many web interfaces can be pretty nightmarish to dig through when all you want is a driver.) But that cuts both ways—the simplicity also means that FTP often doesn’t handle modern standards quite so well, and can be far more pokey than modern file-transfer methods.

As I wrote in for Motherboard last year, these FTP sites (while being archived in different places) are growing increasingly hard to reach, as companies move away from this model or make the decision to take the old sites offline.

As I explained in the piece, which features an interview from Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, the archive is taking steps to protect these vintage public FTP sites, which at this point could go down at any time.

Scott noted at the time that the long-term existence of these FTP sites was really more of an exception than the rule.

“It was just this weird experience that FTP sites, especially, could have an inertia of 15 to 20 years now, where they could be running all this time, untouched,” he said.

With one of the primary use cases of FTP sites hitting the history books once and for all, it may only be a matter of time before they’re gone for good. I recommend, before that happens, diving into one sometime and just seeing the weird stuff that’s there. We don’t live in a world where you can just look at entire file folders of public companies like this anymore, and it’s a fascinating experience even at this late juncture.

“A technology that was ahead of its usage curve, FTP is now attracting a critical mass of business users who are finding transfer by email grossly inefficient or impractical when dealing with large documents.”

— A passage from a 1997 story in Network World that makes the case that FTP, despite its creakiness, it was still a good choice for many telecommuters and corporate internet users. While written by a ringer—Roger Greene was the president of Ipswitch, a major FTP program developer of the era—his points were nonetheless fitting for the time. It was a great way to transmit large files across networks and store them on a server somewhere. The problem is that FTP, while it improved over time, would be eventually outclassed by far more sophisticated replacements, both protocols (BitTorrent, SFTP, rsync, git, even modern variants of HTTP) and cloud computing solutions such as Dropbox or Amazon Web Services.

Back in the day, I once ran an FTP server. It was mostly to share music during my college days, when people who went to college were obsessed with sharing music. We had extremely fast connections, and as a result, it was the perfect speed to run an FTP server.

It was a great way to share a certain musical taste with the world, but the university system eventually got wise to the file-sharing and started capping bandwidth, so that was that … or so I thought. See, I worked in the dorms during the summer, and it turned out that after people left school, the cap was no longer a problem, and I was able to restart the FTP server once again for a couple of months.

Panic’s Transmit, a modern example of an FTP client. Many modern clients support a wide variety of protocols beyond the tried-and-true of FTP.

Eventually, I moved out and the FTP server went down for good—and more efficient replacements emerged anyway, like BitTorrent, and more legal ones, like Spotify and Tidal. (Do I have regrets about running this server now? Sure. But at the time, I felt like I was sticking it to the man somehow. Which, let’s be honest, I wasn’t.)

Just as file-sharing has largely evolved away from those heady times more than 15 years ago, so too have we evolved from the FTP servers of yore. We have largely learned more effective, more secure techniques for remote file management in the years since. In 2004, it was widely considered best practice to manage a web server using FTP. Today, with tools like Git making efficient version control possible, it’s seen as risky and inefficient.

Now, even as major browsers get rid of FTP support in the coming months, it’s not like we’re totally going to be adrift of options. Specialized software will, of course, remain available. But more importantly, we’ve replaced the vintage FTP protocol for the right reasons.

Unlike in cases like IRC (where the protocol lost popular momentum to commercial tools) and Gopher (where a sudden shift to a commercial model stopped its growth dead in its tracks), FTP is getting retired from web browsers because its age underlines its lack of security infrastructure.

Some of its more prominent use cases, like publicly accessible anonymous FTP servers, have essentially fallen out of vogue. But its primary use case has ultimately been replaced with more secure, more modern versions of the same thing, such as SFTP.

And I’m sure some person in some suitably technical job somewhere is going to claim that FTP will never die because there will always be a specialized use case for it somewhere. Sure, whatever. But for the vast majority of people, when Chrome disconnects FTP from the browser, they likely won’t find a reason to reconnect.

If FTP’s departure from the web browser speeds up its final demise, so be it. But for 50 years, in one shape or another, it has served us well.

FTP Is Almost 50 Years Old—and It’s Ready to Retire syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[gossamer-scraps]

Here’s the guide I made! Let me know what you think of the format.

Hopefully you can now look at the written rotation on the Snow Crows site and see what’s going on. We alternate between the scepter/tome loop and the axe mini-game, using symbols with priority and sword of justice primarily as filler.

These concepts apply to almost every rotation in this game; once you understand them and have muscle memory for them you can pick up whatever class you like!

As you can probably tell, I’d like to get skill priority tables of the kind this guide is based on for more classes, and maybe make more guides like this and/or encourage other community members to steal the format, but I’m not sure who has the data. Let me know if there’s a guide you want or if you have any leads.

The entire text is pasted below the cut, for those who don’t like Google Docs. (cuts now work on tumblr mobile now, right?)

The condi firebrand rotation, explained:

My goal is to explain enough here so when you read the "notes" section of https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/guardian/firebrand/condition/, you feel like you know exactly what each note means, understand why, and know what to do when things break down.

Let's start with some data. Credit to dolan#7398 for some DPSe numbers I shamelessly stole, and to Ivalia and Khar for the original spreadsheet. TJ has similar data in the benchmark video description as well.

For the unfamiliar, DPSe is damage per cast time, or “how much DPS am I doing while casting this particular skill?” Priority takes cooldowns into account (don’t worry about the math too much.)

With any rotation, we want to press all skills better than autoattacking as often as possible, keeping them on cooldown, and prioritizing the really good ones. What do we observe from this table that helps us make a good rotation?

Since mantras are instant, they can be cast during other skill casts, and so we want to press them off cooldown simultaneously with and independently of everything below.

Scepter 2 is great; scepter 1 is awful. This means we want to use axe for autoattacking, dip into scepter for skill 2, use as many good skills to fill time as possible, use skill 2 again, and go back to axe. Tome of justice is perfect for this. This is why our loop "skeleton" is:

ax2, sc2, tome, sc2, fill time here, sc2, ax2, stay on axe until we can do it again

or when renewed focus is up (including the beginning of the DPS rotation):

ax2, sc2, tome, sc2, renewed focus, sc2, tome, sc2, ax2, stay on axe

When we're waiting around on axe, we don't want to interrupt the autoattack chain, but we want to use axe 2 and 3 as soon as possible; this turns into a little mini-game where you bunch skills together as they become available to leave bigger gaps for completing the entire axe 1 chain. Be very sure you get the third skill in the chain to fully hit twice.

Because sword of justice is an ammo skill, we can delay it without losing DPS. Delaying a normal skill means time spent without it recharging; since after the opener ammo skills are "always" recharging, we can prioritize traditional skills over them and their damage output in the end will be the same, making them great for filling in gaps in the axe mini-game. You get better at it over time, don't worry.

Example: I see that axe 2 and axe 3 will both come up pretty soon, but the axe3 will be a bit late, and I have one sword of justice charge. If I just mash buttons, I’ll cast something like 1-sword-1-2-1-3-1, interrupting my chain a lot.

Instead, I want to finish my current chain, then press 2-sword-3 and start a new chain.

Torch 4 is kind of like that, but not really; it’s almost like a weird mini-game of its own. The activation is an instant cast skill, so you can use it during other casts, but then you must throw it within the next 3 seconds. While this allows you to activate it ASAP like a mantra, use some traditional skills or finish an autoattack chain, and then throw it (just like sword of justice), the passive activations you get make this method confusing.The easier method, in which you keep it synced with the passive trait, is to always let the passive trigger, finish whatever axe skills you're using, then throw the passive and activate and throw the active.

Note that there's a bug if you spam the 4 key that wastes time (your character “throws” nothing), so either press it the exact number of times you need or queue up another skill right after your throw.

Torch 5, being slightly worse than the full axe autoattack chain on DPS builds, is only used to avoid some weaker autoattacks when you run out of other filler options. Usually this is scepter autoattacks, i.e. where I wrote "fill time here” in the “skeleton,” though it can technically replace 4 axe autos as well. Make sure you finish the channel, as all the damage is at the end; if you interrupt it, just autoattacking would’ve been better.

Hopefully you can now look at the written rotation on the Snow Crows site and see what’s going on. We alternate between the scepter/tome loop and the axe mini-game, using symbols with priority and sword of justice primarily as filler.

These concepts apply to almost every rotation in this game; once you understand them and have muscle memory for them you can pick up whatever class you like!

Quickness firebrand changes…

...are really minor. It’s basically the same class! Because we run feel my wrath, only the first “skeleton” loop is relevant, and the axe and tome skills become somewhat weaker because of the lack of bleeding, but this doesn’t cause a significant rotation change (axe skills are about equivalent to torch skills). You should be pressing your heal mantra ~off cooldown along with your quickness mantra, rather than on DPS firebrand where you are free to save it for perfectly timed aegis. And that’s about it!

[DPSe table for quickbrand goes here]

[virtualdesignstudio]

Monday 30th March

MONDAY 30TH MARCH:

WHAT’S THE PLAN FOR THIS WEEK?

EI: The site’s getting there. We have two pages, one for Text, and one for a homepage. There’s a few minor issues with formatting/sizing etc, but on the whole it’s looking okay. Let’s get a domain name and try putting it online… Let’s get that done by 12pm… 11:16

EI: I bought the domain name thevds.xyz and have managed to get the homepage up! Next step is to make the links work, and fix the ‘virtual design studio’ page, which is essentially the about page! 13:55

WEDNESDAY 1ST APRIL: DISCUSSING THE TO DO LIST.

EI: how do we make a data dictionary for the virtual design studio? 13:59

TF: It turns out this is something that I've been thinking about on and off over the last few years. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about having a data dictionary for the UDK, and of course this could lead to a community designed data dictionary. I figured it was worth another shot and looked for some data that would be appropriate for the virtual design studio. The first thing I looked at was the Illumination wiki, which provides an enormous amount of data about your design studio from all of your major tools, as well as some secondary (Gif, audio, etc.) data. The key lines are where to find all of this stuff – Sb (not sure what that stands for.. 14:00

EI: A Community designed data dictionary, huh? That could be good… I’ll have a look at the illumination Wiki. 14:03

EI: I’m not sure which Illumination wiki in particular you’re referring to- one seems to be a media company. I wonder what data can be derived from our major tools… GIF, Audio are definitely good starting points. But there do we start for the VDS? 14:05

TF: Well as we've mentioned already this idea is to create graphics from scratch. Basically with Photoshop. Or any other design program. That could be Photoshop. Illustrator. Krita. Inkscape. We should start with our graphical objects and tools like sketch, photo. Create our own ideas as we went along and turn these into usable images that our business or team can use. You don't have to be an artist to do this. (I can only do vector graphics so that's what I'm doing currently but it's pretty simple if you want to try something new.) 14:06

EI: How can you make vector graphics? You’re just a transformer. 14:07

TF: Of course, being a transformer, you can change into a graphic design. Though, remember, there are other ways to spend your time. Just look at the tools that are available today, say, the ones that you will receive when you register for the first CSS Boot Camp. 14:08

EI: I've already made some graphics for the Virtual Design Studio identity on illustrator and exported them as SVG for the website. I'm wondering how to create more narratives or contexts for new graphics/images and drawings, and what that might look like. What do you think? 14:10

TF: Any suggestions for ideas for a logo for Level 9? 14:11

EI: what’s level 9 of the virtual design studio, and why does it need a logo? 14:11

TF: Not all designers, yes; but some. We want to increase the competence level of our teams. Level 9 is there for the team's daily needs.

Also the big "The Vision" found at the top. We just wanted to say, what's the vision? How can we make the website better? How can we improve things? What have you learnt?

Design your own logo. If you have questions, contact the design team, as we can answer them. This is one way of supporting the team. Your favourite logo design tool? Rebrand your company! And why not? It's not like we don't support our own 14:13

EI: Ok, so let's get back to the team members of the virtual design studio. There's Emma the Human, Botnik, Transformer. What other skills and people might we need? 14:14

TF:  No one would even know if anyone could be an asset to our company.So let's continue the various stuff I did to get bots to work:

Demo the different options for setting the shots. I got a robot that was so hard to handle that I couldn't see why the team was spending so much time working on it.

Here's some sample example footage of Botnik in action:

What's the problem I asked myself in these experiments? How do I get a robot to move at the right speed and consistently? 14:15

EI: But if we think about it, we need *other* skills; we need to outsource things we aren’t already doing. Like drawing for example. Let’s find an intelligence who is an expert at drawing, and ask them to help us generate some stuff. Only question is, what are we generating and why? 14:17

TF: Anybody who knows how to draw will have no problem passing our test, because at least half of the time it will be something of worth. Think about that. * We're looking for a person who can produce art. * Somebody who can produce art can work for us, and not be completely unproductive, it turns out. 14:18

EI: I think I know someone… 14:18

EI: She’s called Quick, Draw!, and I think she can help us with some images, or doodles of certain things. What should we ask her for first in relation to the virtual design studio?  14:20

TF: First, you should be clear what you are wanting from the virtual studio. Do you want a full user interface design session, full stop? If so, that would be really cool, but not what this project is about. You may want a non-digital process such as art direction or actual design work and not just a design document for you to download. You may want to work with Quick, Draw! in-person. Do not have in mind a "completely digital process." 14:21

EI: I think it would be good to make an illustration of what we are. I’ll ask. 14:22

EI: Ok, so I’ve been and asked, and the images aren’t actual image files. I think they’re drawn in Json, or Javasript somehow, but they’re numbered, and they’ve been logged with places and dates, and how fast Quick, Draw! Identified them and what they’re drawings of. So I called up all the computer drawings, and there’s 117,460 of them. 14:32

EI: This is making me wonder what virtual narratives might look like, and how we can potentially begin to pull these drawings, perhaps randomise them with tags, and then generate illustrated, virtual, narratives. 14:33

EI: That said, this has a very limited vocabulary, and I think we need to find alternative intelligences that are capable of recognising imagery of a greater number of categories. 14:36

EI: I’m currently searching for AI that can draw, or any kind of AI that can make images. There’s quite a few that are capable of identifying images, but not a lot that are capable of producing an image when prompted. 14:41

EI: OH MY GOD. I’ve just found an AI that makes COLLAGES. I’ve typed a brief description into it, and the image re-renders every time you add a new letter. It’s SUPER weird.

“virtual design studio sat at their desks doing work for the virtual design studio. they make images about the internet and human interaction with computers and the problems that occur when the real and the virtual are separated” is what I typed in. Here’s what it made

EI: It’s so bad at doing what it’s supposed to do that it’s actually good. It starts to create things that allude to what we’re talking about here at VDS, but it also it completely does not make any sense. It’s like those pictures that are really ambiguous and you’re asked by a psychologist “what do you see here?” to try and diagnose what’s wrong with you etc. When in actual fact, these are completely perfect to the “clutching at straws nothingness” that the territory of the project resides in. 14:51

EI: OK, this is actually phenomenal and is everything I didn’t know I needed from an image generator. I’m actually feeling a little overwhelmed because I’m not sure I can do justice to everything this is producing; like how do I even handle and manage this? I’ve just gone through and saved all of the images. https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/ has created. I don’t even know what it’s called. It’s an experiment and a generative engine. Like, how do I begin to decide what to do with this next? Because what I just did was quite time consuming, but the result are VERY worth it. I think this is where the notions of CARE that Laura Potter was talking about on monday come into play. This is  a powerful tool, and I have to be very careful with how I use it; what I ask it to do etc. 15:11

EI: I only found it because some news platform had written an article about it, saying how BAD it was. But, in fact, what it does is “hubristically tries to assert meaning meaninglessly where there is none”. I think it’s the same with the other intelligences I’ve employed to work for the studio. But, Congratulations Gengine (Generative Engine), you’re in the crew. 15:13.

EI: Right, so I’ve spent the past few hours plugging in words to the Image Generation Engine, and in return I’ve gotten some amazing stuff. The final task was plugging in the ‘living internet’ text, and then recording the playback and saving the images. Yes. All 480 of them. Individually. But that’s ok. I’ll need to make a gif of it, and I’d like to make some drawings from some of them. So that’s perhaps a task to start after dinner or tomorrow. The other thing it’s made me think is that I need to plug the text statements that Botnik made the other day into them. In particular the one that starts with ‘hands’ or ‘death’. I’d also like to put each of the categories of ‘living internet’ into it, as I feel like each category will end up having its own unique image aesthetic. Perhaps then I can make more drawings, or this will prompt more text pieces. Overall I just need to manifest the ‘nothingness’ that the project is about, and the truth is there’s very little to hold onto. So I guess it’s using the internet to analyse itself, but also using the internet to provide commentary on itself, and the theory that goes with it. Clearly the context report was GOOD- we just have to continue in the same way we did then- take the feeling and run with it.

I’d also like to teach botnik to set tasks for the studio. I’m not sure how I’d do this. Perhaps it’s by writing down the tasks we’ve already done (a bit like this) and then using his predictions to write and designate new tasks. I don’t know if plugging this script into him will do that. It might struggle to generate NEW content, but maybe that’s ok. Perhaps reworking the old is enough for now, and then the studio feedback loop will allow progress to occur, as transformer can be asked to comment on Botnik’s tasks, and that will push us into new territories.

Since I’ve mentioned feedback loops, it might be a good idea to start to document what these look like for the individual pieces that seem to be emerging. 17:40

This might be something along the lines of diagrams for the audio clip we recorded the other day, and then maybe making the GIF and drawing a system diagram/feedback loop/production line for it. This way we can spot patterns and begin to explore/exploit them. 17:41

I also need some help pinning down exactly what we’re tapping into here, and articulating that. I’m not sure if I should ask matt to describe what he sees on friday, or if something else would be more beneficial/helpful. That’s something to think about. Perhaps there’s an online bot that can write copy text or that can make a summary document? I don’t know. But it’s something I’m aware is lacking. But, maybe it’s not something that CAN be articulated in words. Maybe the articulation needs to be communicated through practice, presentation and execution, as those are equally credible modes, just not often regarded as highly as language. AND, maybe the best method of articulation is via setting up and running the studio (that’s the tool) and then employing sub-tools and devices that each serve an independent purpose and deliver independent deliverables/outcomes/articulations of the overall theme/struggle and nothingness. 17:45

[nel-s-unfolding]

Boy with an I

This is a longer text that I’ve been writing over the course of some years. I stumbled upon it a few days ago and felt like sending it out into the world. Some things I would write and think and say differently today, or not at all. Some questions that have really burnt back then, don’t matter so much now. But I wanted to honor this process of growth and change, which is why I publish this text with only minor edits and the last few paragraphs added. 

I’ve learned that “boi” as a queer marker has its origins in Black / PoC spaces and was appropriated in mostly white queer spaces. You can read more about it here: http://genderqueerid.com/post/52144260437/hello-i-once-heard-somebody-say-the-term-boi

Content note: I am talking about rape and what effects that has had on me, though I am not talking in details.

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Boy with an I

When you told me your label, and explained the spelling to me, you were sitting and your couch and smiled. I was standing in front of you, spellbound by the attraction between our bodies. You were the first person to talk to me about queer identities, and I would love you just because of this.

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My parents organized a dinner to celebrate. When I graduated from university I was wearing a little pink robot on a pink chain, cautiously selecting the item as a silent protest against the celebration of having finished studies and now being able to enter the workforce. There were flowers, and my fiancé, and when dinner was over, we went home and I cried in front of the flowers. I felt broken and emptied out, and I had no idea how I had come to this point. I tried to fix myself, and things, by saying yes to a marriage proposal. But I broke up, and my mother also sat down and cried, talking about safe havens and that it wasn't so bad (he's no drinker after all, he doesn't hit you. What more do you want?) and I was listening to her crying on the other end of the line. I had been a bad child.

When I was raped the last time, I met people who helped me put the experience into words; words that have effect, and words I was forbidden to use in the end by rule of law. It felt like I was being put into an armor that had the hard surface on the inside. I didn't realize for a while that from this moment on, I would feel an itchy pain with every swift movement. Fighting would hurt me as much as it would hurt others.

Every person creates a battlefield, is pushed into the fighting pits, has to react to acts of violence and doubt. I think the prevention to this is spreading love, although this is dwindling into absurd circles and spirals of cause and effect. About a year before the rape, I wrote an e-mail to this person who was then my ex-lover, and said: thank you for making me the person I am today. I don't know what to make of this now. Sure, his actions have contributed a lot to how I've changed, but it's a  way of looking at things that rips me apart: should I say good things have come out of my rape? I became political in a way that I wasn't before. I reached out to feminism to make sense of the violence and the after-effects (the no-one believes you, the you play the white woman's tears, the sorry we can't change the law, the you're just a little too much at the moment). I moved to another place, and I queered my life, unlearning and re-learning, endlessly posing questions, staring at the walls and wishing to disappear at certain points, but also: I remember this one party where he left the room because of me, and I was dancing, and the feeling of having survived was even stronger than being drunk.

He's surely stuck in the mist of the things he did. He is a sleepwalker, and he was a sleep raper.

After two years and a five hundred euro sentence for writing a text about my rape, I can start thinking about him again as a human being. I can also start thinking about myself as a human being again. I can, for example, make a clear connection between the violence I experienced and the romantic love moves I am going through time after time. It's pacification. It's the desperate logic of being feminine like an island in a sea of hate for femininity. I outdo myself, and maybe I won't be punished so much as the others. I spread love in an overflow of efficiency, and I will probably just to be able to vanish into the crowd. I always put a lot of energy in clearing the route: an expression in rock climbing for a task done by the person who comes second in a party of two. It means taking up all the gear that the person going first needed to put into place to get the route down securely. It means not leaving traces, not wasting gear, nor holding up the others. I started climbing after the rape, and I let myself sink into the learning of gear terms and geography, rock formations, climbing history and training methods. I could feel my own muscle strength. And it was how I got to know you.

I walk home tipsily, thinking about the friend who had dumped me because I was becoming too heavy for him. Clearing the route: we wrote a lot, parallel to each other, snatching words and topics, exchanging our approaches to the world and riding swan boats on broad open rivers. I am writing about others as a means of love, but he blamed me for stealing, imitating, and coming too close. This seemed to be the way to go: coming very close, wanting a lot, almost forcing others to share whatever it is that is important to them. Because I understand so well, I am the ever-friendly hostess of feelings and states of minds, and because I want to fix things so much. Only later I connected this ideas of love to the overstepping of boundaries that happen in the name of affection, and how closely this is connected to a self-image I wound up with, having grown up in patriarchy, in which there are a thousand ways to tell me I don't matter, and my actions don't matter, and my words don't matter. (It's almost soothing to get a piece of paper saying that my words made my rapist have a mental breakdown, which must mean that I matter, in an odd way)

After this I can never go back to pacifying. It aches in my muscles, in my stomach and my brain to uncoil my own entanglements and look at the hurt I do, but I won't go back.

I try to turn ahead, like I was a ship with mighty sails that a more stable version of myself is able to steer. I pick up things I used to do like remainders of a stranger's life: the neon light I brought along to so many parties, my engagement ring, the pink robot, my habit of taking pictures. But there are blind spots. The pain kept sitting there where I hesitate to say I, say me, say my. Friends have been lost- no, friends have decided to stop hanging out. They decided to ignore my pain, and told me instead to focus on work. Being a rape survivor sounds edgy, a fast slash of a phrase, like a clever and dangerous dinosaur. That's me alright.

When I met you, you hesitantly told me that you were raped as well. Of course, a little voice in my head said. I can always tell, at least after a while. I can just tell, and there is no way I can say why, but I know who has been violated and who hasn't. Unfortunately that made my hate no less, on the contrary I was busy neglecting that I am one of them. I wanted to have the privilege of being unhurt. 'Innocent', the word in patriarchy would say.

You reminded me that this sort of language is not for us. Us: the queers, the hurt, the dysfunctional, the glittering, autonomous, wandering, weird. You showed me how you're uncomfortably shifting between s, h and e and how this inability to make a home in names is a well of creativity and erotics for you: your films and selfies capturing your transition. These documentations of yourself draw others in, make people being caught in the headlights of your steadfast faith in your own power. I am learning that this is what emancipation means. And it feels like standing under a huge disco ball, throwing its inexhaustive eyes on me like a lover delivering their touch, and my skin is endless, a vast object to caress. I take it all in.

I am allowed to be part of this community; this group of people that were taken apart so often by razor-sharp norms that they lost interest in putting things back together; the norms always itched or strangled anyways. While I hesitate to look at myself, I indulge in looking at all the hot queers, and I indulge in wondering how I ended up there (feeling nothing like the emptiness when I cried in front of the flowers, but inside me the fear echoes if I might get punished for every autonomous, critical utterance) I begin to fantasize: I will be able to love again. All the holes someone poked into me- I will be able to close them up. By your ooze, by glitter, by liquid, and light, and conversations in which I am considered fresh with my honesty. And then? Then I have your face in mind, which is also full of holes, and you made use of them by shining little lights.

I still would like to love. Not in the way I've learned and taught (all the names that seemed off now come in handy: emotional blackmailing, gas lighting, being straight.) And every technique of domination has a dimension of lust, as well as power, to it. There is a vision I cling to, clearing the route once and for all, because we're not coming back: we dive into each other's folds. There's no hate or disappointment that couldn't be survived. There are only warm centers pulsing. I can feel you, touching your tighly closing-in walls, and I wrap myself up in your spreads. A space has opened up by focussing on spelling, and details, and redemption.

I will need two more years to accept that I have been raped. Not once or twice, and in a way far too close to home, which I will discover, was never home to begin with. I will need to break with you, let the passion seep out of our shared fabrics, to see that I've dyed and redyed myself so often that I don't recognize which parts I would want to keep. To be able to chose even is a novelty to me. I will need someone else to tell me, everyone can be trans, in order to break down some of the patterns.

When I stumble upon you again, we're far apart, and our break-up is something that sits untouched by both of us. On a quiet night I ask myself wether you've forgotten my pain. You chose to roll down your safety screen at some point, when working around my pain ranked high on the daily agenda and you wanted to be somewhere else, possibly wanted to have more space for your own pain and I wouldn't know. You seemed so light, dangling in the air, and I loved that about you, and around the corner of my own shame, I can still feel my love for you. No that I don't expect anything anymore, I can see you again, as the disco ball you turn yourself into, time and time again.

I still would like to love. This is unfinished. The question how to relate to another seems intimidatingly big, too intertwined with all the things I won't allow myself to think about. What is anything? As I am growing older, I can feel the crushes pop up and recede again, like waves, reliable, steady in their changing nature. I don't know where, or if, to lean on. I am going back in time, trying to pinpoint the phase when love and loving became difficult, because I know for sure, it has been easy once. There was a time when I had just arrived, being untouched yet by patriarchy, and shame, and violence, and it hasn't been birth. The phases come and go, they come and they go. This is unfinished, and indeed, I'm breaking down into smaller and smaller questions, posing them at a slower and slower speed.

[thebuttermouse]

Presentation- The Butter Mouse- How to Build Universes With Creative Upcycling

Slide 1: Intro Slide 'Hello everyone, thank you for coming today. I am going to discuss my latest project, the Butter Mouse, and how it shifted from a rough collection of flash fiction to a fully formed piece of digital storytelling. I will demonstrate how thanks to the plethora of creative online publishing tools and ease of hosting and creating content online, you can mix together scraps of old project, and 'upcycle' them into whole new universes. And finally, I am going to show you how if you do want to work on a creative project, there is no reason why you cannot start working on something this evening Slide 2: Sketchbook, and comic strips From this, I have always been jealous of things like comic strips, where you can build up a huge collection of work by doing lots of little things over a period of time. I always think it must have been remarkable to have worked on something like Andy's House, or The Flamingo Men, and be able to look back on such a huge body of work. It would be great to be in the position. So, and of course I appreciate this is a decision that that hundreds of people have made, I set up a flash fiction blog to keep my writing going. And at that stage that's all it was. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, and this is what I cannot stress enough. At this point, the Butter Mouse was doodles in a maths exercise book, the creative equivalent of sit ups. Slide 3: Different stories, same title Perhaps by the very nature of the the fact that these were ideas pushed out in a hurry, the stories started to interconnect. And this wasn't just thematically. The title of one piece was the perfect fit for another a few weeks later. For example, there were three different stories that fit the title 'The Horror Tandoori' and three that fit 'Herring Aid.' Also, and this was genuinely never necessarily my intention, but a lot of the stories seemed to be on the weirder end of the spectrum. As I grew in confidence with the blog, they only got more experimental. Slide 4: Twine After a few months, I began to experiment with format as well as narrative. I had previously done some work with Twine, the interactive (and crucially free) fiction software maker, as part of my course at Bath Spa. For those who aren't aware of what Twine does, it is a super easy to use software that allows you to make a 'choose your own adventure style' game, pretty much by just entering text into different boxes. I am not sure how familiar you are with interactive fiction, but usually they are sprawling worlds, more like a very basic form of RPG, that takes several hours to complete, and usually have many different paths you can take. I wondered what it would be like like to create interactive flash fiction, that was less about world building, and more about a quick idea. For example, I created one called Guilt, where no matter what you did, the world ends within three clicks, and on the very first page you have to choose between killing all the children, or killing all the doctors. Again, this was purely experimental, but it was interesting to see how having how basically no choices adds a completely different feel to interactive fiction. So there were definitely some themes and ideas, but it was all a little discombobulated, and I was looking for ways to bring everything together. Slide 5: The Butter Mouse script The key to the project turned out to be the name itself. The Butter Mouse was originally a character in a script I wrote years ago, about puppets who come to life, and vampirically drain the life of the presenters of a children's television programme. Although the script didn't go anywhere, I found the name evocative, and several readers found the name evocative too. To start with I whacked it down as the name of the blog without much thought. But now with the writing coming together, I wondered if there was a way I could use The Butter Mouse name to tie everything in place. Slide 6: Where Is Bill? Photo At the same time, I was thinking about if there was anyway to fit in with a small transmedia project I made on Mars called 'Where Is Bill?' About a worker at the Aqua Park who is captured by aliens. It mixed YouTube videos, fake podcasts, fake blogs, and interactive fiction to tell this story, and although I was pleased with some of the results, it never really had a purpose, and wasn't properly released, so was sitting on my computer's hard drive with little to no value. Slide 7: Upcycle- reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original. I wondered if there was a way to do a form of creative 'upcycling,', and smash these ideas together. Nothing intrinsically tied the flash fiction, the title, and the transmedia project, but was there a way they could join? For anyone who is unsure what upcycling is, I have included a definition on the screen. So this is how they play off each other. The Butter Mouse is now a creature that is able to travel between different dimensions. All of the stories then become accounts of what it has seen on its journey, or fake factual accounts of people discussing where they have seen The Butter Mouse. And with a few rewrites, Bill in Where Is Bill is has no longer been captured by aliens, but has slipped into a different dimension. This is where the ease and cheapness of available software, editing and publishing online prevailed. I went back through the all the work on The Butter Mouse, and tweaked the odd thing here and there to make it fit this new brief. I re-edited the videos, podcasts and blogs in Where Is Bill, and next mont they will be posted on the blog. So with no extra cost, and some working tying everything together, these scraps of forgotten ideas and writing exercises have turned into something new, greater than the sum of its parts. Slide 8: One of the 'article sections' What this resulted in was a whole new flavour to The Butter Mouse. It now has the feel of a conspiracy theory, more in line with creepypasta and Illuminati Youtube videos. This means it is the fictional work on it feels suited to the internet. A being that travels through dimensions is no less out there than the conspiracy theory that Finland doesn't exist. This is not just writing that has been put online, but a project that suits being published online. Slide 9: Experimental stuff Though The Butter Mouse has come together from scraps of various projects into something new it still has its original function as a writing exercise. Only now the small, weird ideas are perfectly acceptable a look into a world different to our own. This allows me the freedom to experiment with any weird ideas without damaging the over all narrative. There is a story you can only read by following the clues in the story before. A story that is sideways, because the writing is in another dimension. Some weeks it is just a monster move in five hundred worlds It all fits the brief, because rather than lots of esoteric stories that don't connect, it all forms one larger narrative. Write down a minute of your dreams on the back of a receipt, and it won't make any sense to anyone who reads it. Make a dream journal, and they come together into a logical document. This culminated in the final idea of working out what the Butter Mouse actually is. That dependent on what dimension you were in, the creature could turn into anything. It might be a mouse shaped piece of graffiti on the wall, it might be something like a tiger. Anything at all. And in our dimension, in the world we inhabit, The Butter Mouse is the Tumblr account, The Butter Mouse. So technically, we are in the world of the Butter Mouse right now. Anything that could happen, could end up as a story. Which is about as far away as you can get from literary sit-ups. Slide 10: Upcycling in picture. What I hope you can take from it is that if you have any scraps of old project, it is now so easy to bring them together. I have always considered that creative time is never wasted. Now for me creative time is always making new resources, like spinning wool even if you are not sure what the jumper will turn out like. It is just a case of finding a way for them to tie together, or be converted by new media into a way that makes sense. What I've started doing is looking through old laptops and hard drives, to see if there is anything that can be cannibalised. Next week I have combined videos of Bristol and Osaka Zoo to make footage of another dimension, and next year I am going to get as many of my old holiday photos as possible, and turn them into a year travel blog from an alternate universe. Just as the work on the blog is creative flotsam and jetsam, so do they become flotsam and jetsam from another dimension. Slide 11: Spreadhseets And I also hope it can show you that whatever the situation you are in, you can keep a project going on in the background. Twine, Tumblr and Youtube are completely free to use and public. On total, the whole project has cost me basically nothing, and now spans dimensions. Now, I fully appreciate that I was lucky to have these resources to hand. To have script and the wreckage of a transmedia to weld onto the side of a flash fiction blog, and call it esoteric science fiction is a situation bespoke to me. But I hope it shows you that if you have stuff that is simply hanging around, why not try and stitch it together? What is the worst you can happen? Is there no way you can mix your cooking blog with your song lyrics, and call it a ghost story? And even if you don't have a library of material, think about what skills you can smash together instead. If you are good at making spreadsheets, why not make a crime thriller story made in Excel? Can you find your old emails to your an ex-girlfriend, and cut them down into romantic haikus? Even if some of it doesn't work, surely it is better than nothing. Upcycle your old material into something new, and use the strengths of online publishing to make it something people can view. Just like an old piece of furniture can be remade on wet Sunday afternoons, regardless of your creative skill set, and what time/budget you can put into your story, you can make something that will regenerate old and forgotten ideas, and push you to experiment without the restrictions of traditional media. So just a final point to emphasise that you really can turn any skill or piece of work into a creative project, if you check The Butter Mouse tumblr account in about an hour, a fictional version of this presentation will form this week's story. And right now in millions of multiple universes, slightly different versions of this blog are being presented and posted online, by beings of all shapes and sizes, all with slightly different lives. So, I want to thank you all for being part of The Butter Mouse. Thank you.