Cartographers are “quite meticulous, really high-precision people,” he says. Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp. To sustain this kind of concentration, Hurni suspects that they eventually “look for something to break out of their daily routine.” The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their transgressive nature— the labor and secrecy required to conceal one of these visual puns.

So this is Seminar II. I designed the AV systems for it in 2002-2005. There were over fifty sheets. Evergreen asked for "fiber optics" for their AV plant and we said "single mode or multi-mode? What are you doing with it?" and they responded "we don't know give us both." This is the equivalent of saying "we don't know if we need a freight train or a dump truck, bill us for both."

Seminar II has, in a few places, a green roof. It used to have an entirely green roof and then budget cuts happened. One of the running jokes at the meetings was how the green roof was going to be kept tidy; this was before everyone knew that green roofs were basically "sedums eight ways" but once you've worked on a green roof project you know this. My boss, who was a loathsome man, suggested a goat. Everyone laughed. The goat became a running in-joke of meetings. My boss, who was a loathsome man, did not know it was a joke.

Project design goes through a few stages - "SD" (systems development), "DD" (design development) and "CD" (construction development). Typically you get one or two sets for SD, then a 50% DD, a 75%DD and a 100%DD, then you might get a 50%CD, a 75%CD, a 90%CD, a 100%CD and a bid set. For those counting at home, that means I had to draw fifty sheets nine times. Except at 90%CD Evergreen asked why their roof, with their marvelous gardens, didn't have any guard rails to keep the fine children of Olympia from plummeting five floors to their deaths. The architect said that guard rails weren't aesthetic. The school said that guard rails were a requirement of the Uniform Building Code. My boss, who is still by all accounts a loathsome man, asked about the goat. Everyone looked at him and said nothing. The architect argued that no part of their contract required them to adhere to the Uniform Building Code and Evergreen, being Evergreen, agreed to pay them to redesign the whole thing with guard rails. We, as subcontractors, saw none of that money. So we went to 90%CD and then went back to 50, 75, 85, 90, 95, 100, 100 again and then bid. For free.

I was not in the initial meetings. I was given "the goat" as gospel truth. I had a few conversations with my once loathsome, always loathsome boss about the goat - he wasn't sure where the goat was staying, how the goat would be brought up there, penned etc. At one point I was on a phone call with someone at the architecture firm and said "there's no goat, right?" to which I got laughter.

So at 75%CD (the first time), I added a goat to the roof.

Something you should know about architectural drawings. They use XREFs - "eXternal REFerences" - which are generally the things drawn by the architect. You put them in as a non-editable layer and draw your stuff on top. Architectural CAD requires decent file hygiene or else you're fukt. And, of course, part of development is importing the XREFs from the architect each time, looking to see what's changed, and making sure all of your design still fits. You then upload everything to a folder and everyone can pull down your shit and make sure it works. I was dependent on Electrical, for example, to make sure that I had power everywhere I needed it and Electrical was dependent on me to make sure they captured my conduit etc. So my routine became 1) Get Xrefs 2) Crack them down so they were compliant with the layers we were using 3) bring them into my drawings 4) update my drawings 5) painstakingly go back and add the goat to this one sheet using the same layers as the green roof. That way the goat was screened back and subtle and I didn't need to worry about it. Also, the goat never showed up as an AV object that needed addressing.

So. Sixteen sets of drawings, eleven of which had a goat in them. Nobody noticed.

Until the bid documents went out.

There were four AV contractors bidding on our stuff, two who were incompetent, one who was an asshole and one that didn't do stuff this big generally. The little guy called me up about two days after it went out to bid to say "tell me about the goat" and I had to say "we'll talk about that in person when my loathsome boss isn't in the next office over." I called him later and relayed the story - we laughed - and I mentioned that I hope he got the bid considering he was the only person in three years of design that had ever noticed the goat.

"Oh, it's yours?" he said.

"Uhh... yeah?" I said.

"That's weird," he said "because it's on the electrical sheets, the mechanical sheets, the lighting sheets, the fire protection sheets..."

Near as I can tell, everyone else had gotten so lazy about dealing with the architect's Xrefs that they had gotten in the habit of just stealing mine off the server. After all, mine were already cracked down. Probably saved them three days of work. And when the architect often doesn't give you what you need, you find shortcuts.

So. Although I drew one (1) goat to be on one (1) sheet out of 700, the goat ended up in the bid documents at least two dozen times.

And nobody noticed but my AV contractor, who got the job by the way. Fifteen years later they're the only ones still in business.

related link

It inspired me to write a poem:

  Dans la bibliothèque aux étroits hexagones,
  J'ai marché plus d'une fois vers un but précis.
  Loin de ce tome ultime et de ses facéties,
  Que cherchent les héros comme une autre Gorgone.

Lisant chaque ligne dans ma quête infinie

Plus impossible encore et plus simple à la fois,

Puisque dans ce royaume, bâti autrefois,

J’attends l'Amour qui absout de l'ignominie.

  Espérant celle qui dans le semblable livre
  Plongerait son regard; son regard qui délivre,
  Hébergerai mon âme dans sa palmeraie.

Mais le hasard est cruel, et son couperet

Sans fin, me laisse seul, isolé à poursuivre

Ces lignes que tu lirais, toi que j'aimerais!

...

According to google bot, this will roughly translate as :

  In the Library with narrow hexagons,
  I have walked more than once towards a specific goal.
  Far from the Ultimate volume and its jokes,
  That heroes seek like another Gorgonian.

Reading every line in my endless quest

Even more impossible and simpler at the same time,

Because in this kingdom, built in the past,

I await the Love which absolves from ignominy.

   Hoping for the girl, in the similar book
  Diving her gaze; her gaze that delivers,
  Who will host my soul in her palm grove.

But Chance is cruel, and its cleaver

Endlessly, leaves me alone, isolated to pursue

These lines that you would read, you that I would love!

Devil's advocacy: most people never needed it anyway

The MP3 revolution was interesting to watch as both a music fan and as an audio professional. On the one hand, people with no storage always opted for the lowest possible quality so they could maximize their quantity. On the other hand, people who had a handful of CDs would download thousands of MP3s. They also wouldn't back up, they also wouldn't duplicate across devices (because then you have to manage dupes!) and when they lost all their files to hard drive failure, they made no attempts to resurrect their collections.

I watched a futurist lay things out for upper-level media execs at a closed conference in 2010. "That kid with 800,000 MP3s. Guys, do you really think he represents a million lost sales? Do you really consider him to be a threat to your business model? He's not collecting, he's curating and he's curating for the sake of possession, not the sake of consumption."

The torrent kids weren't the customers of Spotify. Spotify is for people who know some music, don't have anything weird and aren't at all interested in alphabetizing their CDs. Those people listen to the radio, watch MTV and had a shelf with 20 albums on it before they could pay $7 a month to never worry about it again.

It's not that files have gone away. It's not that Dropbox is gone. It's that the people who never had a use for it in the first place have now been lured away by services designed for people who never got file structure in the first place.

Dropbox is an excellent example. It's a version control plugin. Where Dropbox made their money was by realizing that version control was useful for people who had no idea how to open a git repository. Where dropbox failed was in not understanding that even then, most people have no use for version control. The ultimate use case for Dropbox? Five people working on a group project who never work with other people and who were told by a nerd sick of dealing with them that if they just put the project file on Dropbox nobody has to worry about who has the latest version. The ultimate failure of Dropbox? Nobody understanding Dropbox, and someone deleting the file out of their dropbox, and everyone else screaming at the heavens "WHO DELETED THE DROPBOX" without understanding how to log into Dropbox to see the version control.

You see, most people never needed files anyway. They wrote a resume a few years ago, they have a list of babysitters, there's a spreadsheet with all the phone numbers in their carpool and that's it. The reason their desktops were miasmas of assorted documents is because they never need to find that shit anyway. Their desktop runs an unpatched version of XPSP3 because they bought it in 2007 and haven't used it to do more than TurboTax since 2013.

Bill Gates wanted a computer in every house because he saw the utility of ubiquitous PCs. Everyone put a computer in their house because they heard the hype. But what everybody really needed was a thing to do Youtube, Facebook and SMS. It's still just a fuckin' television, it just fits in your pocket now. Fundamentally, most people use technology as an asymmetrical pipeline of undifferentiated culture dispersion. This is why they store everything in their email inbox: emails are the most official thing in their lives, gmail makes it virtually impossible to delete anything and text is easily indexed so whatever they really need they can find by fumbling a word or two in the importantbox.

We're constantly upbraided about the "service economy." Really, the past 25 years of software development have been about creating services. "You're too stupid to do this yourself, let me give you the 5% of the functionality that you actually use, wall off the other 95% and charge you $70 a year so you can curate your own dick pics, sincerely, Dropbox." People, including myself have lambasted Yahoo for failing to achieve with Flickr what Instagram achieved by being a cheap, shitty version of Flickr. Thing is, though? Flickr was created for photographers sharing photos with people who like photography. Instagram was created for Kardashians sharing photos with people who like to eat paste.

The computer revolution was founded by people who knew that if they built it, an entire generation of artists and thinkers would use the tools to build a better tomorrow through the miracle of access and technology. The computer revolution was paid for,, however, by people who only wanted to sell each other Beanie Babies and watch each other eat Tide pods.

A quote of a quote:

“The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.

Two decades ago you would have fired up Internet Explorer which would have broken a few links, insisted that your Flash was out-of-date and rendered things pretty-sorta-OK at 1024x768. But two decades ago we would have considered this "perfect" because things had to run on Explorer with updated Flash at 1024x768. Now? Now I need all the content indexed for Google, capable of rendering landscape or portrait and be usable on Android and iOS through the same URL. Which - yes - means your espresso stand menu now relies on eight Wordpress plugins to be legible on seven different versions of iOS. Microsoft lost the mobile battle by presuming that a soccer mom waiting in line would put up with constantly patching her browser in order to know the price of a latte. Apple won by knowing they were selling devices to people who wanted a Swarovski panda on the back of it.

So I get it. The geeks who grew up being told that theirs was a shiny future of egalitarian brilliance prompted by the boundless promise of ubiquitious computing are slowly realizing that the Kick Me In The Balls Channel wins on content.

But you can't blame the technology and you can't blame the people profiting from it. Most of humanity has no goddamn business fucking around with file structure, and most of humanity knows it. The idiots were the people who tried to force them to adopt one even when it could only do them harm.

Self-improvement.

Tell yourself "Self, we can do better. Let's get some." No need to buy a gym membership, but it's a great time to re-evaluate what you eat and why, how you exercise and why, and what's important to you and why.

What hobbies have you let slide because she wasn't into them? Revisit those. What music haven't you been listening to because she hates it? Cue up that playlist. What places have you wanted to visit but haven't because she was lukewarm? Plan a voyage. This is a chance to revisit "you as you" instead of "you as reflected in someone else."

There are aspects of your personality and self-image that have improved because of her. Embrace those and welcome them. There may be aspects of your behavior and regard that have degraded because of her. Dismiss them. One of the golden-age movie moguls used to celebrate whenever a famous person died because that meant they could finally do a biopic; without an ending, you can't really put someone's life in perspective. Now that your relationship has an ending, you can put it in perspective - what was it good for? What was bad about it? What will you miss? What will you not miss?

There's a psychological process we must go through before we are ready to be with someone again. It's a process of recentering, re-evaluating our wants and desires and reacquainting ourselves with ourselves. The people we are after a long relationship are not the people we were before a long relationship and our two selves must meet, get to know each other and merge. This is an active process and one which we must experience largely in solitude. Not to say you need to eschew the company of others, but recognize that the void you feel inside can only be filled by you. It's a you-shaped hole and only you know what to plant in it.

Fair warning - this void you feel is visible from the outside. It can be sensed. It will be avoided by others. You will not find someone new (someone of quality, anyway) until you have filled it. Note that the more you fill it, the greater the content you add to your life, the more attractive you will be to external observers.

Don't ask us for movies and music. Ask yourself a year ago for all that stuff you didn't get a chance to check out and check it out.

Good luck. These are hard, formative experiences and no one enjoys going through them. I think we can all agree, however, that they make us what we are.

First off, I'm very grateful that the Hubski team is willing to cover the costs so far. I've seen a couple of great sites / projects evaporate because of financial issues. Thanks everyone.

My opinion is that having a donation button would be nice and I think there are enough users who'd want to donate (myself included). I don't think it's a good long-term option, though. Donations are sporadic and it's not something that alleviates the financial worry / stress. Merch is in the same category - it's nice to have, but not something stable to build a site on. That's why I think a monthly donation option would be better, name-your-price style.

Just don't make it visible publically, or only make it visible to the user who's donating as a reminder. It shouldn't be a badge of honor. The only reason people should support the site is because they want to support the site.

Girl in my class thought my animation was good enough to give me her number few days ago and we have hit it off pretty well since (and also since she's ssuper hot).

This is such an outlandish sequence of events that I can't even make it up. If I get laid tonight somebody better badge the fuck out of this post because I did the impossible, reserved for indie movies about sensitive artsy guys.

I mean shit it wasn't even that good but whatever I'M NOT COMPLAINNIG

Until then lookielookie I'm in the process of migrating my blog. Come read about how much I hated the Last of Us because it fucking sucked so much oh my God.

If it seems like I'm sleep deprived, I am

I DON'T CARE JUST READ