I'm employed! It's a temporary grant funded position, but it has the potential to be extended, and is a great foot in the door either way. Because it's temporary it has no benefits too. Yay being young and mooching off my parents' benefits. I'm going to miss that so much.
I make books by hand for a hobby. They're not anything fancy, as I'm not able to afford equipment such as sewing frames, guillotine, book presses, etc. So I make do with small tools that pretty much everyone uses, such as exacto knives, binder clips, vices, etc. Even then though, when you use the right materials from places like https://www.hollanders.com/ or https://www.talasonline.com/ and follow traditional methods, the end results come out not only sturdy, but halfway good looking. I've been thinking a while now about buying cheap paperbacks and re binding them using the double fan method and putting them in hard covers. Not only would the new binding be more sturdy than the standard perfect binding manufacturers use, but I'll have something new to figure out how to do and improve upon. I haven't tried this yet, but I do have two things I'll need to figure out. In regards to removing the original glue, should I heat the spine up to take it apart or go to a print shop and have them cut the spine off. The heat method means I'll have to hassle with glue removal, but it'll preserve the margins of the pages. The cut method is easier, but it means I'm cutting into the margins. I also exclusively make flat back casings for my books and I'll have to figure out whether or not that pulls on the spine too much. If it does, I'll have to go with a more traditional casing, where there's not that extra bit of book board along the spine. Which might have its own unforseen problems. Looks like I'll have to do some research this week.
I've long wanted to get involved in this kind of thing. In my case, though, I have less interest in the physical binding side as I do the printing side: the layout, etc. I've always loved the visual aesthetic of text.
Yes! I wouldn't know of any titles to recommend, but there are a lot of really good books out there in regards to bookbinding. They cover everything from history, to materials, to techniques. I'm sure there's equally good resources for printing, both traditional and modern methods.
I found a bunch of poetry that I had written from 2015. I'm thinking of selling a few copies. Would anyone be interested? Anyways, still working on my book. I also found a good copy of Thoreau.
I've re-started my development project, namely writing a console-based journaling app. I'd toyed with a couple other methods, but I wanted something with better organization (and better editing capabilities than jrnl). I did decide on a couple of other things since my last go-round. First, ditching C#. There's a lot to like about it, but I'm mistrustful of MS's sudden change of heart when it comes to this stuff, and the licensing for C# is still a little shaky (it's basically MS pinky-swearing they won't sue). So I'm going to good ol'-fashioned C. This also means that I can just say fuck it and use curses, rather than trying to do everything from scratch. This will make things a billion times easier, if for no other reason that it has the capability to refresh only parts of the screen independent of cursor position. The only thing I'm still trying to figure out is how to get it to use more than 8 colors. It can theoretically create color definitions with RGB, but whatever it does on the back end doesn't seem to come across (or at least it doesn't in Konsole). But since I'm hoping this will work on Windows, and the Windows console is its own animal, I'm probably better off sticking to the basic 8. So off we go, and I hope I don't end up feature-creeping myself into oblivion.
Hopefully I won't either. The only thing I've run into so far was an obnoxious conflict between char and const char (at one point it looked like I was going to have to try to cast between the two), but I resolved that by using a different method for one of them.
It is, but Konsole has always been a little screwy with this stuff. I was doing this same project in C# awhile back, and was using ANSI escape sequences to do colors, and Konsole was the outlier in how it handled this stuff.
Had a communications training the other day with some colleagues from work. It was quite an intense day - most of it consisted of roleplaying scenarios with real actors in difficult scenarios, heavily reflecting on effective behavior in a work environment. The interaction with the actors in particular was difficult, but also equally enlightening - it's one thing to reflect on one's behavior, it's quite another to actually practice changing that behavior with a person in front of you whose goal it is to not let you off easily. My biggest takeaway was that I too often judge my behavior by its effects on others (did they like it or not), instead of judging it based on how close I stayed to my values and intentions. I've always cared a disproportionate amount about how I'm perceived by others and worry far too much about negatively impacting others, but until last week I didn't realize that there was a way out of those trains of thought and doubt. In other news - I finally got a less shitty bike, had a family photoshoot with my gf's family (relatively soon for us but I don't mind), and this week I realized I might need to learn myself some Autodesk Revit+ Dynamo because it's the future of urban planning.
Know what's worse than being in a deep LA shithole? Being in a deep LA shithole with no internet. Fortunately that resolved after about an hour and a half so I'm day drinking. I bought new rims for the bike about a thousand miles ago. I discovered my rear wheel is badly out of true because it snapped a spoke. Never before have I snapped a spoke. Previous rims? No snapped spokes after 8000 miles. I'm debating doing something really dumb. "I am Wallace Chan."