50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
Anne and I snuck away for the weekend. Last night, we watched a movie called Hell or High Water that we both really liked. All I knew going into it was that Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine were in a movie set in Texas about brothers who are robbing banks to save their family ranch, so I won’t say more about it than that. I recommend it, though: 4 out of 5.
We also went for a long walk in the woods, and managed not to get eaten by a bear.
I kinda want to retreat into Fort Kickass and stay there all day, listening to Stabbing Westward and eating cookies.
The first draft of Ravenswood is with a couple of early readers who will give me the feedback I need to polish it up and send it to my editor. I haven’t decided it if will get released as its own thing (it’s just over 10000 words) or if I’ll keep it as part of the collection of short stories I originally intended for it to live.
Now I’m going back to finish the first draft of another short called Devil’s Gate, and then I’ll circle back around to finishing the puke draft of the short story that became a novella that ended up becoming a novel, which is currently called The Childhood I Lost but needs a better title.
I still don’t know if that thing holds together, and I think that part of the reason I haven’t finished it is being afraid of handing it to an early reader who may say, “this doesn’t hold together, dude.”
I’m late to the party, so most of you have probably watched all of Black Mirror, but Anne and I started series three last night and … wow. It’s intense. I highly recommend it, but probably don’t binge, because each episode deserves at least 24 hours in your brains to unpack itself.
Back in the Before Times, in the Long Long Ago, I’d save up links and stuff over a couple of days, and then post a link dump on my blog. With the advent of platforms that are specifically designed to do quick hits like links and pictures and whatever dumb thing just crossed my mind, it’s kind of pointless to do that today.
But I’m going to do that today, because the whole point of Daily December is to just post something every day, even if it’s a bunch of dumb links.
Let’s start with this really cool thing that @midnight is doing! A weekly Spotify playlist of recordings by the comedians that are on the show.
How cool does Hardwick look in that picture? The answer is all the cool.
I may have bought myself a glowing Enterprise schematic from ThinkGeek because I don’t need a reason.
I did the Arduino version of Hello, World last night.
Maybe it’s my eyes getting older, but I struggled more than I expected to put the wires into the right places on the breadboard. I haven’t worked with electronic connections that small and precise in like thirty years, at least, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right. It turns out that I managed to get it right on the first try, so I guess I win a gold star?
My first impression of Arduino vs. Raspberry Pi is that the rPI (or RPI? I don’t know what the cool kids call it, but I know it’s something like that) is more my speed. I like the idea of connecting electronics, but the reality of writing code and getting software to do stuff is more satisfying and comes more easily to me. I had also forgotten how inscrutable C (the language, not the mathematical constant) is to me, and how much easier Python is for me to understand as a programming language. Maybe it’s because I struggled with C a lot when I was trying to learn it in my teens and twenties, while I’ve been learning Python as an adult with access to more resources to help my understanding, or maybe Python is just easier than C for someone whose brain is wired like mine is. Whatever the reason, my heart or my shoes, I’m going to have an easier time writing a Python script to annoy the Whos.
I’ll probably end up copying sketches for Arduino instead of trying to write my own, at least for the foreseeable future, and I’m okay with that. I think the fun and challenge of Arduino is in the actual use of the electronics, anyway, and not the programming.
This picture makes me so happy. I feel like the world is on fire, and I’ve been finding comfort in little things, like pictures from the RPG books I read when I was a kid and it seemed like the world would never be on fire.
I shipped all the coffee orders from the secret store yesterday. The other thing you can order in the secret store has like ten left, and I’m going to ship all of those things on Monday. If you don’t know what the secret store is, or how to get in, don’t feel bad; it’s a secret to everyone.
This is your yearly reminder that Christmas Lounge from SomaFM is the only Christmas music station you need.
I get these stats from Instagram, and they tell me that like 50,000 people on average are looking at the dumb videos I post there. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but it sure feels like a lot. I realized that something has changed in me, because instead of panicking about it, I feel like oh man I gotta make something amusing or stupid or stupidly amusing, because that’s a lot of people who I can entertain.
I got this picture of all the tires in the world from imgur, and used gimp to make it seamless, so if you wanted your desktop to be a bunch of tires for some reason, you can tile it.
Yeah I don’t know why, either, but there it is. At the very least, it can probably be used as a cool texture for some layers or whatever.
Anne made a thing, and I’m super excited to share it with you.
They are silhouette paintings of trees that I saw at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s crazy. They are literally the first and second thing I painted and I’m selling them. YIPES! Even though I shared the paintings on Twitter, it’s kinda scary to make it into a thing that people can own and now that I’ve made it available, the scary feeling has been replaced with excitement. Yay!
Anne wrote about her creative journey a few months ago, and I love it. It’s inspiring as hell to me, and I love that she found the confidence to embrace the artist I’ve always known she is.
We are surrounded by so much beauty in life, and even as I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery late one afternoon, I could see it. The cemetery is surrounded by beautiful old, gnarled trees that look like enormous protectors, silhouetted by the setting sun. I had never painted before but I had a strong desire to paint these trees, and so I got some watercolor paints and made these two paintings.
I love that she painted these trees, and I love that people liked her art so much, they asked her to make them into cards or prints. I especially love that she found the courage to risk putting them out there in an Etsy store, because I know from personal experience how scary it can be to wonder if anyone actually likes the thing I made enough to spend money on it.
She sort of soft-launched her store yesterday. We were at the hockey game last night (it would have been nice if The Kings decided to also show up for the hockey game last night), and during the game, she was getting notifications on her phone that someone had bought a box of her cards. It made me so happy to see the joy she felt each time one of those notifications popped up, and I was so grateful that I got to be there each time it happened. I’m really proud of her, and still can’t believe that I’ve managed to trick her into staying with me for almost 21 years.
I have so many suggestions and ideas from the replies to my post yesterday, I could do nothing more than work on one a day for the rest of the year, and not finish all of them.
If you, like me, have no idea where to start, but are curious about what you can do without too much difficulty, Make: has you covered, with a blog post that they wrote JUST FOR ME! (But you can read it, too.)
http://makezine.com/2016/12/08/5-raspberry-pi-projects-wil-wheaton/
I think I’m going to make the PiRate radio, because how much fun would it be to take a low-watt radio station to a con?! I mean, in theory, never in practice, because rules are great and should always be followed.
And this photo booth thing that would push pictures straight to Twitter is super cool, and a neat proof of concept for potential shenanigans. In theory, never in practice, because rules are great and should always be followed.
But, seriously, take a look at the comments in yesterday’s post, if you’re pi-curious or leaning Arduino. There’s a bunch of really awesome stuff in there.