The art of paper making

So some of you may know that I'm a crafty geek, and enjoy fibre arts the most.

How many of you have thought about paper making before? It is a fibre art too! Just, different fibre.

I got into making paper maybe five years and a house ago. Set up a vat, blender and screen in our basement laundry room and churned the stuff out for a few months. Then school, cold weather and depression put a kibosh on it.

Oh, and moving to a house that doesn't have a drain in the floor of the basement. And had a fully carpeted basement for a time.

So I slowly ditched all the made up pulp, cleaned the vat, stored the screen and pressing boards, ditched the old cloths.

I made journals for all my teachers in grade ten, cards, backings for poems and neat art paper. Even a box to hold 105 tiny paper stars (about 5mm or .20in across) for a very special person.

After stopping I got into writing, geofiction, conlanging, reading, crochet, knitting, spinning, weaving, braiding, sewing and more all over again. (The first three were more prevalent for the first two years while I dealt with the aforementioned depression.) So I'm happy I stopped, it opened the door to a lot of other things I had ignored.

Fast forward to about a month ago. First year of college was ending, and I was looking forward to a summer of boredom, work and boredom.

So I thought, hey, paper!

Well, that and I was thinking about things I could add to an Etsy shop or similar, and dying/spinning wool seemed to expensive/time consuming for a start up. (Plus I'm not sure I would be able to give up the things I made >.>) Then I remembered the paper, and how so many people fawned over it and wanted things made from it, and thought it would be a good idea.

So I tore the old screen off and got a new, tighter one. Found and washed my old vat. Spent days trying to find a second hand blender, and eventually my mum said I could use the house one. If she ever wants one, she'll get another. (She barely used this one. A nice new blender for me!)

The furnace room was stripped of carpeting last year after the oil spill. (Torn up by a friend and I), so I do most of the work there (Until I can convince mum to tear up the disgusting carpet in the laundry room.) I've made two posts of sheets in the last three or four days, and will probably pull another today (Though I may experiment with some other fibres. I never got too far into the experimental last time.)

I hope to make some pulp out of old blue jeans and dryer lint soon. Maybe next summer try out some plant fibres. (Probably have to wait longer than that. I'll be done school then. Looking for permanent employment and housing...) You will probably soon get sick of the flurry of paper-making posts I feel are to come. Pictures too, hopefully!

I hope to make gift/greeting cards, some finer stationary, envelopes, boxes... Things are looking crafty around here.

So tell me, intrepid reader, what kind of crafts do you do?

Mario...nette?

So I've been thinking a bit about the relationships in Mario recently, especially the rather messed up Mario/Peach/Bowser/(Luigi/Daisy).

Now, had you asked me this time yesterday, I would have told you out right, I hate Bowser/Peach pairings. I don't support interspecies kidnap/rape/forcible childbearing.

But I was reading over some of the facts yesterday (Spurred by a Cracked.com article, yes...), and I'm starting to dislike it from a different angle. I'm certainly more sympathetic of Bowser.

What it looks like:

Bowser is bored out of his spiky skull, so kidnaps Peach and sets a maze of asinine tasks for Mario to do for Bowser's amusement.

How it seems to me:

Bowser is alone. His old squeeze died/left/turned into a transvestite, and now he is left with a couple of kids and nothing to live for. Then comes Peach, and he sees light at the end of his despair. Peach is kinda huffy about having to run a castle and says hey, here's a guy who is a king, and does a damn good job of it. So she runs off to him with no warning. They have a fling, maybe a kid or two...

Then the Mushroom Kingdom is left with no notice and ruler-less. So they send out the cavalry. An idiot plumber and his marginally smarter brother. Mario probably had a one-nighter with Peach at some point, thinks he loves her etc etc. Or just wants in on this ruler thing. Luigi is there to keep Mario alive, and possibly has a crush on her (Daisy was not introduced in the first few games, so he can't be trying to save her...). (Mushroom Kingdom probably asked him first, but Mario jumped on it.) Peach realises, oops, I done fucked up, and makes an elaborate plan to stay hidden.

Bowser probably was never trying especially hard to keep a hold on Peach. His castles are just well defended because otherwise who knows what would happen. That, and since Koopas take something close to a nuke to kill, it makes a good playground for his kids.

By the time he finally notices Mario, he's angry 'cause his kids are hurt and whining, not because Mario wants Peach.

So he finally gives up and goes back to Koopa Land, thinking that Peach fucked him over. (Say, yeah, you can have my land, then send in your fighter? Not cool bish.)

Peach is "rescued" and all is well.

Then Peach gets bored of Mario (He is just a portly plumber, after all. Bowser is a king) so says heck with this, and lures Bowser in with her feminine wiles.

So now I think that the Bowser/Peach pairing sucks because Peach is a manipulative whore.

It makes some sense though. I mean, why else would Peach not upgrade her army? Keep inviting Bowser to go-kart and golf and tennis? She considers him another plaything. Heck, she dumps the resultant kids on him, and pretends he is THE BAD GUY for years, staying with Mario until, oops, I'm bored of the Italian, lets get our turtle on.

I feel bad for Bowser now. All he wants is a good wife and mother for his kids, someone to love and lavish and give kingdoms to. Instead he gets Peach.

Thankfully Luigi eventually meets Daisy, the somewhat slow relation to Peach, who seems a bit more loyal to him.

But outside of that crazy quinrangle, Yoshi/Birdo forever. A dinosaur and his boyfriend cum girlfriend that don't seem to have any issues staying together and making plenty of cannon fodder, I mean, children.

I guess I just showed some of my inner geek there. But things like this bother me when I'm busy doing crafts and such.

A $25 computer?

Not quite.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation seems set on bringing one of my favourite movies to life. And thankfully not the previously mentioned eXistenZ.

No, they're going the way of The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest. In that movie they are trying to make the PC $99, a computer that costs less than a hundred dollars to make. Now, if that seems kinda familiar, you might want to remember the One Laptop Per Child company, the one making a full-on laptop and selling them near-cost for $100 to impoverished children?

Yeah, this is kinda like that.

The Raspberry Pi is a computer that costs approximately $25 and is hoped to be used to teach computer programming to children. The little thing has no monitor or keyboard, but instead has two ports, an HDMI and a USB: One to plug in an HDMI capable TV or monitor, the other to attach a USB keyboard. (Is it bad to feel old that I remember the keyboards that used headphone-esque jacks?)

The little stick then allows you to boot up Ubuntu or another open-source OS.

Anyway, I'm not a very computer-y person. If it isn't working I can give some suggestions to how to fix it, but the jargon that surrounds the field goes way over my head. So instead of just lyring the specs, I'll just link you to a few places that have more info, in case you are on of the more savvy among us:

Slashdot

Geek

And of course, the previously linked foundation website, Raspberry Pi.

So what does this mean? Hopefully it will help bring about change in the computer world, much like the One Laptop per Child did, and unobfuscate the way the computer is built and functions. Hopefully it will bring more power to the young and trodden upon in places that are in desperate need of change.

If nothing else, hopefully it'll help bring about some more savvy people, and create a trend for lower cost, high function machines in this world.

A short response

So a teacher of mine (or past teacher? I'm not sure if this is the last we get of her? anyway: ) posted an interesting... post... about her relation with the short story. Read it here. It got me thinking about my relationship with short stories, and I started to write a Facebook response, but it got too long. So I thought I'd share it here.

Alex makes some good points on the thought of short stories. Their very nature can be annoying to people. They're just so dammed short! And yeah, that can seem like a silly complaint. I mean, it's a short story for a reason, right? But if you're not in the right place for one, it's like a kick to the teeth.

"Oh, good characters, neat idea for a plot annnnd-- wait, it's over? What?"

As I said, good points.

I'm on the other side of the spectrum, however. I have a hard time settling into novels anymore (though school may have been a big factor in that as I've devoured two novels in the last three days of being off school for the summer (though I slept through one day...). Short stories have kept me well fed for a few years now.

I didn't always like them though. In fact, I used to be so against them that I dragged my writing out into longer stories simply because I didn't want to be a short story author. Enter Letters Unsent, Letters Unwritten (or LuLu) and I started to see the appeal of shorter stories. Now I have a good number of anthologies in my collection and I have to say that I am all for them.

But what is drawing me to them? The short nature of the story is still frustrating to me, I still often find myself at a loss at the end, wondering where the rest of the story went, or feeling I've been abandoned.

And it isn't a lack of time that is making me read them. When you read a three inch thick paper-back of back-to-back short stories in a sitting, it may as well be a novel.

It is the very brevity of the stories. When you only have ten pages to get a point across, there is little to no room for flowery language. Only things of great importance are mentioned. Even if their importance is only to make you think that other things are not so important.

My interest in shorts may come from my found love of writing them. The author gets to play with a story that size. Where is the harm in writing an ultrashort? (varyingly defined as less than 1000, 100, 10 words. ) I can put out 1000 words in a half hour trying to get a paper done.

There is no fear of getting it perfect. You don't like it? Toss it. You've wasted nothing.

So you get to read something just a little more raw. If you don't like it, you've wasted nothing. Ten minutes.

So I'm glad she's getting back to short stories. A cut up look at the world(that is, could be, would be, was, never will be, isn't, etc) is a nice mirror to the daily life that plagues so many people this side of the globe.

Shorts are a zap to the brain of a new thought, new way of seeing. Easily digested, like precut cubes of meat. And like precut cubes, they shouldn't be the only thing in your diet. But they can become a staple, and can become a delicious alternative to the chewy steak-like portions of Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick.

Vanilla Sky

I don't want this to become a movie blog... but it kinda is.

However that's what I've been doing, so it's what I'm writing about. (A lot of contractions in that sentence.)

I watched Vanilla Sky Friday night. Another from that list of more mind-blowing than Inception.

And I'd say, eh, not so much. It was a good movie, interesting, confusing as hell at times, but the base concept wasn't any more mind-blowing than Inception really.

Spoilers ahoy:

Guy dies, is frozen cryogenically, is stuck in a lucid dream (though these people don't seem to understand that part of a lucid dream is that you know you are dreaming...) and gets fucked up in his head before choosing to wake up.

Of course, not so straight forward. It isn't until the last scene that any of it really makes sense.

Good movie, I'd give it 4.5/5 It lost half a point for being just a bit too confusing at times. Kinda left me bored because of it.

The way life is...

So life kinda hates me right now. But I think I'm getting over it.

I got the last bit of money from my stepmom yesterday, yay.

Not so yay I had overdraft fees. I only have 14 interacts allowed on my card, each extra costs $0.65. So I had $14 in extra interacts that got overdrafted when I only had $0.23 in my account. Yay me...

Anyway. I finally got all my Res fees paid at least.

I'm writing this on Friday to auto-post on Saturday ('cause I'm not sure I'll feel like posting tomorrow and I'm here now.) so I hope I went grocery shopping, but it is looking less likely...

I hope to go to Mick and Franks today (Saturday), but the bus tickets are $7.50 for three bus rides, so $15 for three somewhere-and-back trips. (Assuming each is more than an hour (bus transfer timeout)) I have enough change ($2.10) from paying the res to go get a slushie. Woo.

I was crying my eyes out yesterday, I missed another French class and I think I'm going to fail that course. Money is tight, I'm hungrier than I can afford to fill most often... I'm still behind on some assignments. Bleh. Good thing I'm going home soon.

Anyway, just thought I'd update on that side of life.

Movies, Movies, Movies

So I've been watching movies. A lot of them.

I tried to watch Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street again, but the only version I could find was in French. Fuck French.

That's when I went on to eXistenZ. Then I watched The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Which was an interesting concept, but kind sucked...

I watched Mrs. Doubtfire again yesterday, and I found a great example of being "in lesbians" with someone, as Scott Pilgrim put forth. The mother, Miranda, dislikes Daniel and the way he acts, but loves Mrs. Doubtfire for the things she does. But Mrs. Doubtfire is Daniel, just a different side of him. So while she may not be in love with Daniel, she is certainly in lesbians with her.

I don't know, it made more sense at the time.

I just finished watching Matilda for maybe the millionth time. I love that movie so much. But I can probably mark it as the beginning of my teacher obsession. Who wouldn't want to meet Ms. Honey?

Alas, the teacher thing will probably never pan out for me, (though I can hope~) but it is heartwarming to watch. Roald Dahl is an amazing mind.