Day 296: Mommy Dearest

Today's my mom's birthday, so my make is the beautiful art I drew on the box I put her gifts in. Classy gift wrap around here.


It's not a great picture, because it's dark and raining.

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Day 295: What's Worse Than Incest?

Apparently, it's gay marriage. I've made two maps to illustrate my point.

There are even more states that will let you marry your first cousin if you're really old and not likely to reproduce. Because having deformed babies is the only reason incest is wrong. Yeah.

And there are websites out there that defend the marriage of close relatives based on interpretations of the Bible and spurious birth defect statistics and the fact that we're all apparently at least 50th cousins with everyone else on the planet, so why should first cousin be any different? Um...because there's a big difference between 50 and 1, that's why. It's gross. I saw that episode of the X-Files with the family living under their house and inbreeding since the Civil War. No thanks. There's nothing that great about your genes that you need to double up on them.

Besides, with 6 billion people on the planet, you can't find a second cousin to fall in love with?

And with a final ew, I bid you adieu.

Day 294: Mashed Up and Twittered

It's Wednesday, so that means my make is going to be a web assignment for school. That's what my Wednesdays have turned into, and I have no intention of suffering alone.

This week, I learned how to make a mashup in Yahoo Pipes, convert RSS feeds into Java, and make a Twitter widget (a Twidget?) for a hashtag. Confused yet? Me too.

You can see all the (lumpy and tasteless) fruits of my labor on this lovely page and this fabulous blog.

Day 293: Ring Cycle Cycle

When you work in the processing department of a library, you realize just how annoying it is when the makers of music and film decide to go all cute with their packaging. Normally, when a CD or DVD is packaged in a normal way, I just have to slap on a shelf tag and move on with my life. Not so with more elaborate packaging that cannot withstand the unwashed library patron masses.

Here's a lovely million-disc DVD set of Wagner's Ring Cycle that just arrived. And I'm going to show you all the steps I get to go through just to counteract the fanciness of the people who packaged this wonder of inefficiency.



You see, it's a cardboard sleeve with four separate disc cases in it, each holding either one or two discs.



And this is the compact, efficient, mostly patron-proof multi-disc case it has to go into.



Each of the seven discs needs to have a "donut" sticker attached, with the last three numbers of that set's barcode on it.



If you stick on enough stickers, you no longer have fingerprints. True story.



Oh, did I mention that each of the four parts comes with a booklet? Those all have to find a home in the case too.



So putting the donutted discs into the new case is easy enough. Time consuming, but no big deal.



Since the new case hold 8 discs, and I will only be putting 7 discs in it, I have to add a sticker indicating that one of the slots is intentionally blank. Otherwise there is confusion and crying.


I also need to stick a little library sticker on each booklet, so it can find its way home if it get separated.



And thanks to the innovative strategy of only numbering discs within each of the four mini-sets, I have to assign numbers so that they are all part of one big set. Go Sharpie, go!



Now all the booklets get crammed into the front of the new case.



And I get to fiddle around with it until it will close.



And this whole process gets repeated over and over again until all of Wagner's Valkyries and fat ladies in viking helmets are safely in their happy little patron-proof cages.



But I didn't even take any pictures of the really fun part. Because the box set is not the same size as the new case, new cover art has to be created, which requires scanning and moving around all the bits and pieces from all sides of the original box until it fits into the shape and space of the new case. Then that gets sent to graphics where they make color copies for the new inserts. When those are all done, they get barcoded, spine labeled, and inserted into the cases, and the world of entertainment can finally be sent on its way. The complete library processing life cycle of the Ring Cycle.

Next time you're going to buy one of those fancy CD or DVD box sets in the cute and oh-so-destructible packaging, consider checking it out from the library instead. It would be a shame for all my work to be for nothing.

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Day 292: Octopus or Squid?

Today I used my iPhone to draw an underwater scene including an octopus (or maybe it's a squid), some coral, and a few starfishes.


I want a Wacom tablet so I can see what it's like to draw digitally without using my stubby fingers.

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Day 291: Snickerdoodley Perfection

Today I baked some snickerdoodle cookies.


They were deemed perfect by the snickerdoodle connoisseur.



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Day 290: Stupid American Origami Instructions

I much prefer the origami instructions written in Japanese. The American instructions make no sense.

Here's what I ended up with:


I think it's some kind of arrow. Whatever it is, it's not a pyramid-ish container like in the instructions:


But mine is more stabby.





Useless, but stabby.

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