THE FOREWARD
I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED (s/o to ilex)
Maybe the real craft was friendship all along?
THE AGENDA
Post updates to your projects, announce the beginning of new projects, or just show off what you've done!
QUESTION ONE: Are people at all bothered with the craft thread's posting scheduling being a total tossup between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? I could definitely plan it a bit more - thus far I've just been posting it when the moment feels right!
QUESTION TWO: Does anyone want to be added/removed from the tag list? Feel free to DM me! Some people have been intermittently active: let me know if a preference emerges!
THE TAGS
Foveaux, kleinbl00, veen, zebra2, applewood, darlinareyousleepy, elizabeth, Dala, thenewgreen, ilex
Personally I'll take the sporadic schedule, thanks, because it gives me a random check-in that I have to be aware of. It's highly motivating, actually. So this week has been about process. I gave up on the aquarium community when they had their two-year-long affair with kitty-litter planted tanks; everyone on the internet was dumping kitty litter (laterite) into their tanks because it was clay and it was turning into goo and they were convincing themselves that the plants loved it and their fish were dying and their water was cloudy and then they all stopped all of a sudden and nobody ever talked about it again and fuckin' hell, the 3D printer community makes the aquarists look rigorous. Remember kids! Always shake your resin! Here, we'll put that in 14 point font and underline it and highlight it red! That way you can be sure to get all these lovely bubbles in your prints! And ohhhh boy, better make sure you cure the ever loving shit out of your prints! Whatever you do, don't just sit them under an LED for two minutes! Gotta make 'em bright orange and brittle! To be fair, that was a torture test; I had forgotten that the garage and the kitchen were on the same circuit so a little microwaving and a little 1400W heater and suddenly the print stops abruptly. So might as well throw it under the lamps without getting the alcohol off and leave it there for half an hour to see what happens. Catastrophe. Catastrophe happens. Anyway. There's no real instruction on any of this stuff and the people you get advice from on the Internet are probably 14 and like their orcs with tits so you get what you pay for; I stopped watching one advice video when I noticed that a grown man had managed to bend a fucking allen wrench as if it weren't no thing and really, the little things largely print just fine out of the box but if you do venture forth to try and get some advice? Best not take it because these are the people who will spend fourteen hours building an LED discotheque when a frickin' $20 lamp and 2 minutes solves all your problems. So despite all the alarmism it turns out printing goo has gotten phenomenally easier and cheaper than the last time I did it (1997) and frankly, a modicum of common sense goes a long way with this stuff. We've had snow days last three days so me and the 7-year-old are a little sick of each other; I told her I'd print her something while she was at school today and she decided "a gathering of fairies" would be nice but unfortunately because of previous orcs-with-tits problems you can't just search for "fairy" on Thingverse you have to search for "fairy that is not also a streetwalker" and there just aren't that many choices in a place that is basically the id of the hikikomori. So she's getting "cute dragons" - two of them - and then I intend to start printing up some chess pieces because they seem like a good place to figure out some stuff. And really, all this "3d printing" nonsense is just a preamble to the main event. Yeah. Sold some stuff on eBay, rolled it back in. Basically a melting furnace and some consumables away from shit getting serious.
On a related note, quite a few bonsai tree owners (including myself) have their trees planted in specific brands of cat litter. It needs to be ones which are 100% moler clay. It's holds on to a lot of moisture whilst still providing good draining so that the roots don't become waterlogged. Unfortunately, the brand of choice in the UK has recently been discontinued.I gave up on the aquarium community when they had their two-year-long affair with kitty-litter planted tanks
Right? Trick is, you just need to soak it long enough. "Long enough" appears to be "more years than you are willing to deal with." The next move after "cat litter substrate" was "garden soil substrate" whereby people who will happily dip their plants in a 10% bleach solution for precisely 30 seconds were literally digging in fields and dumping it in with their cichlids.
Finally started with the embroidery! I have a couple designs in mind, just need to buy the right color thread for it. For now, I haven't bothered looking up any tutorials or learning any fancy stitches, just winging it. I'll move up to fancier stuff in due time. I'm actually quite happy with the results! But the back of my pieces are a TOTAL mess. Gotta work on that for sure. 
It looks fantastic for just winging it! Do you have experience with needle and thread from a past life, or are you genuinely just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks? I’ve got fantasies about picking it up one day with the end goal of owning a super badass embroidered denim jacket. Maybe I’ll learn something from watching you :)
Thanks! I've done some crochet before, but when it come to sewing I've never done much more than sewing on patches on a jacket. I feel with these kind of crafts, it's usually quite easy to be "acceptable" but then the gap until "good" is pretty big. Like how I think anyone can probably learn to knit in about an hour and then make a decent scarf. But would totally fuck up anything more complicated.
Sewing is weird in that, at least with hand sewing, there are as many subtle components as there are obvious components. For example, a lot of stitches end up hidden, so unless someone tears apart a piece, how are they gonna know? Each time I make something, I learn something, from how a certain fabric works to a better way to hold my piece to learning how to make more consistent stitch lengths. Messing up something, for me, is the quickest way to learn something, and I've made a ton of learnable mistakes that have influenced how I want to piece things, how I treat my fabric and threads, how I keep my needles from breaking, etc. Five embroidery projects from now, look at the backs of those pieces and compare them to the pieces you just made. You'll have made mad improvements, but because the backs are hidden, no one will know, except you. The gap is big, but it's easily traversable, the gains are there, but they are often hidden if not outright inmaterial.I feel with these kind of crafts, it's usually quite easy to be "acceptable" but then the gap until "good" is pretty big.
This is a section from a knitted blanket of mine and Dala’s. Of the many we have, this one is by far the most fragile, both in terms of loose knitting as well as the strength of the fibers its made out of. Sometimes our dog’s nails get caught in it, tearing bits of it. This section is by far, the most damaged. It’s a hole. So I figured I’d see what I could do to put it back together. After all, I can’t make it much worse, can I? I figured I’d go and weave up and down first, like this, to kind of build a netting to cross weave against. It seemed easier to try to close the hole short ways before tackling it long ways. I didn’t use any darning tools. I didn’t use a embroidery hoop or a sewing frame. I thought to myself, starting out, how hard can it be? It’s a wide knit, I can see and count the threads easily, why get fancy? Quickly though, this project became a living example of why we should guard against our own hubris. With each stitch, I couldn’t help but wonder more and more, am I making things better, or worse? It’s obvious I bit off more than I could chew and while I’ve learned from life that there is beauty in chaos, there’s such a thing as too much chaos. Visually speaking, this hole is no longer a hole, but the mess is more of a mess. I’m unhappy with the final result in the sense that it’s not what I intended. This result is bad because the spot was bad and because I didn’t do right by the blanket. But the stitching holds. More over, despite the disaster, the whole thing was meditative and now that it’s ruined, yet better, I feel like I can do whatever I want to it. I’m gonna do the whole blanket now, but better. Different threads. Different colors. Hearts. Stars. Squares. Start in the corners. Sometimes move to the center. Wherever things take me. By the time things are said and done, this blanket will be a practice of creating through destroying and destroying through creating. I ruined the blanket, but I made my day. I’ll ruin the blanket some more, and maybe, make my winter.
Word to the wise: Post when it feels right. #psbattle I’ve got a project I’m working on using this dataset https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/ It’s for school, but also a passion project for getting better with Python dataviz. I will be sharing in the appropriate craft fair thread once it’s complete. My craft is 1’s and 0’s currently. 🤖 I’d pref not being tagged in the meantime. These show up for me ez since they got good traction.
I haven't figured out when they update the information of late. Seems weekly rn? Real-time woulda been so damn neat. Could make real-time velocity streaks of bolides. Word on the street is a Canadian gets money from the U.S. to track this stuff (...and nuclear testing in the atmosphere, just in case). 🙉
Truth be told, I merely know a little about a lot, so I'm not mega-fluent in lingo. I'm assuming ML means machine learning. This is the first time I've seen Keras, and a google search into it looks hella neat. Looking beyond my scope, currently. What I'm using is solely Python libraries. For API access ('requests' package to retrieve, and 'pandas' for data manipulation) to both that dataset and Google API ('bokeh' for visualization, but 100% planning on something else) to make a nicer map. Those parts are complete thus far. Also, some dynamic querying (meaning you can look at all fireballs within a specific year or month or recurring month/year/decade) rather than just 'from this date backward/forward'. The following checklist is sorta me cleaning out my brain space, but also goal setting to look back on here. What I'd like to present in the thread later is a cleaner version: - not using Bokeh - show generalized shockwave impact areas per fireball, see: Chelyabinsk: - be able to share my code without sharing my Google Maps API key (hehe) - clean up symbology with proper visual scaling per impact energy Stretch Goals: - Better hover tool-tips - Create GUI to dynamic query, rather than going into the code to query - Efficiently import CSV data into a PostgreSQL database, and pull from there rather than API since the CSVs give velocity components. I really just wanted to make the map on the site more interactive, and less static.... Also gives me something to present to employers in an application to NASA. O:^)
I might have some tips for ya as I do quite a bit of Python and PostGIS these days. PostGIS is a Postgresql extention that allows you to work with geodata and is the bread and butter of most of my geo algorithems these days. Look into Seaborn and Plotly for visualizations. Seaborn is easier, but Plotly extends to Plotly Dash which I think is phenomenal and has been on my to-learn list for over a year now. It does require you to understand Python decorators, which I haven't figured out yet. But it means you can load dynamic data into a customizable dashboard without any front end dev, and no matter what job you end up with that's a damned usefull piece of wizardry to have. My north star in visual, clear design is the Vignelli Canon. Look it up, absorb it, you won't regret it I think. For the key thing: learn how to use github, save the key in a file, use .gitignore for the file, open(file, r).
You're one of the inspirations for the project. And, I can confidently speak well to what the heck this means now too: My north star in visual, clear design is the Vignelli Canon. Look it up, absorb it, you won't regret it I think. I have to say that using something other than Seaborn and Plotly were explicit design constraints last semester. So, I'm ready to hulk out using those this time around. Sweet lord, thank you. That's been bugging me. Using Github makes it more simple. Also, found a free version of Vignelli Canon. Woot!I might have some tips for ya as I do quite a bit of Python and PostGIS these days. PostGIS is a Postgresql extention that allows you to work with geodata and is the bread and butter of most of my geo algorithems these days.
Plotly Dash which I think is phenomenal and has been on my to-learn list for over a year now. It does require you to understand Python decorators, which I haven't figured out yet. But it means you can load dynamic data into a customizable dashboard without any front end dev, and no matter what job you end up with that's a damned usefull piece of wizardry to have.
For the key thing: learn how to use github, save the key in a file, use .gitignore for the file, open(file, r).
That's wonderful to hear - glad I could inspire you a bit. :) I taught myself matplotlib as part of my master's thesis, as I had to automate generating almost a thousand graphs to then pick the interesting ones. The good thing is that once you learn some graphing library, the others are usually in a very similar vein. It's almost always structured as "here's a graph object, update the object attributes to change things in the graph". Most of them work really well with Pandas dataframes which is dope. But I recommended the other two over mplib because they're easier to learn, as far as I can tell. I always google that one PDF. Maybe I should get around to actually buying a copy since I like it so much...I do have some giftcards lyin' around somewhere.Also, found a free version of Vignelli Canon. Woot!
I agree with kb - I like the reminder to be more creative, even if I only sporadically have something to show for. Had another private lesson on Monday on making electronic music. We mostly discussed the ways of creating music over time, eg how to introduce a new track to the mix. Next week is my final lesson, and I wanna finish something soonish after that. kleinbl00, NI's Komplete Kontrol was 25% off so I snatched that up. Should arrive next week. Stoked to play around with it all - I was very sad to run out of my demo time the other day.