tech bro (derogatory)

fiveducks

This week I attended a work conference. The coffee was too hot and the cookies were stale (still ate ‘em), but the real stand-outs were the speakers.

• Essays

So I’ll make my clothing myself

devon

Second hand clothing market is cesspool. Searching for decent clothes I like and are of good, natural materials in Normal price is a very… masochistic nowadays. So I decided to torture myself more and make most of my new wardrobe myself.

• Projects

man i love eating takeout on the floor

fiveducks

Nothing screams “I’m out” like being 19 in January eating takeout in an empty living room in a shitty apartment. I should sell all my belongings.

• Retrospectives

First Draft: Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

mariteaux

Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.

This especially long-winded First Draft concerns the infinite permutations of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco’s 2002 art rock opus which streamed online officially for the first time 22 years ago today.

• Show-and-Tell

YouTube Layout Timelapse Redux

jake

Today’s menu, remaking the YouTube Layout Timelapse video. I felt the original was a bit incomplete and the process of which I took the screenshots was very ghetto, so I dedicated this afternoon to writing a quick script in Python and sent it running.

• Projects

Fully licensed campus printer

dotcomboom

Getting your printer set up for wireless printing is relatively simple on a home network. Most printers can connect to your Wi-Fi network and make themselves discoverable, and we’ve seen units be all in one, neat little packages for about a decade. It’ll be ad-hoc (Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth) or infrastructure, usually, and current operating systems are pretty good about finding them. Save for the occasional clogged spooler problems on Windows—I just reinstall the printer when this happens—it isn’t too bad.

But what if you’re trying to print from your printer as just one of thousands of users on a campus network?

• Projects

What Even is Somnolescent?

mariteaux

I’m standing around at work, tidying the shelves, and something pops into my head: no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of what Somnolescent actually is. We’ve been called a tilde, we’ve been described as a community of Windows 2000 users and MSN Messenger reverse engineers, a group of Furcadia friends, people have said we built toyhou.se, all sorts of wild shit. Those Somnolians, they get around!

Some of this was promulgated by me wanting to make Somnolescent sound spooky and cultlike, so I was intentionally vague describing it to people for the first year or two. We’re almost at five now, though, and whenever we’re mentioned online, folks still try to put us in a box–and they keep getting that box weirdly wrong. I didn’t think we were doing anything all that complicated, but apparently, Somnolescent perplexes people.

• Essays

trip photos: toronto!

fiveducks

Hey! I mentioned in my Art Fight post I was in Toronto at the time of posting. Wanna see some photos?

• Happenings

Update Rollup for dcb services

dotcomboom

I’m going to keep this post a bit short- I have drafts (and a lab report,,,) in the works, and the nature of this post is partly catch up. I’m gonna cover sites, sites again, and site generator generatoring. So here’s a few updates from my neck of the woods.

• Happenings

Bunch of random scans off the press plus bit of related rambling

devon

As I’m getting rid of some part of my collection, the earliest one because I need money, I ended up scanning some which I’ll compile here. Some favorites from few mid 90s Dazed & Confused issues. It will be probably split in few installments I guess.

• Show-and-Tell