Wednesday, 25 of November of 2009
A Tale Told By An Idiot, Signifying Nothing
Hey guys! School starts next week and I realized I haven’t made any fractals all summer. Well, better late than never, here’s my newest one! Made with Apophysis, it’s a composite of three variations of the same flame. No julian variation! :O
Don’t you hate it when you realize you want something you can’t have? Take for example, knitting. I love the look and feel of knitted fabric, particularly the smooth V’s of pure knit, and the twisty cable designs. Sure you can make cables with crochet, but it doesn’t look the same. Being a crocheter, I find knitting to be extrememly tedious and cumbersome and frustrating, especially when I drop stitches, which happens frequently.
But you know what they say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, and I’ve got to say I’ve found my way with Tunisian crochet.
Tunisian crochet is a variant of crochet that uses one long crochet hook, and it’s a mix of regular crochet and knitting. In every row you cast on stitches like knitting, but then you bind them off like crochet. Therefore each row has two parts, and you don’t turn your work. There’s a certain stitch (Tunisian Knit Stitch) you can do with Tunisian crochet that produces fabric which on one side is indistinguishable from knitting.
I made my first scarf with Tunisian crochet. It seemed pretty boring, so afterward I made two strips of Tunisian knit stitch and sewed them on to look like cables. I call it “One. Giant. Cable.” The base scarf is pretty thick, due to Tunisian Simple Stitch, and it’s even thicker because of the cables, so in the winter it would definitely keep you warm.
One. Giant. Cable.
Here’s the pattern.
About 300g of worsted weight yarn. I used 1.5 skeins of Hobby Lobby “I L♥ve This Yarn!” in Antique Teal. The base scarf was made with a little under 1 skein, but I had to dip into a second skein to make the second cable strip.
Size J (6.00 mm) Tunisian crochet hook. You could probably get away with using a regular crochet hook if you scrunch up your stitches and put a rubber band on the end to stop them from falling off.
Yarn Needle
Pins
TSS — Tunisian Simple Stitch — The basic stitch used in this pattern. Insert hook across through the front vertical loop of the next stitch, yarn over and draw up a loop.
TKS — Tunisian Knit Stitch — This stitch looks like regular knit stitch. Insert hook from front to back between the two vertical loops of the next stitch, yarn over and draw up a loop.
YO — Yarn Over
YOPT — Yarn Over and Pull Through
Chain 25
Foundation row: Forward Pass– Insert hook through second chain from hook, YO and pull up a loop. Continue to pull up loops in all other chains (25 loops on hook) Return Pass– YOPT 1, YOPT 2, YOPT 2 until the end. (24 stitches completed, 1 loop now on hook)
Do not turn your work.
Row 1: Forward Pass– TKS 4, TSS 16, TKS 4 (Remember to always skip the first vertical bar when starting a row [that's the vertical bar directly under the hook when you start a row]). Return Pass– YOPT 1, YOPT 2, YOPT 2 until the end.
Row 2-end: Repeat row 1 until desired length. My scarf is about 5′8″. To bind off the final row, each time you work a stitch in the forward pass, immediately YOPT 2 to bind it off. Repeat for each stitch across.
Note: The scarf will initially want to curl, but this can easily be fixed with blocking.
Cables:
Make 2
Chain 6.
Foundation row: Forward Pass– Insert hook through second chain, YO and pull up a loop. Repeat till end (6 loops on hook). Return pass– YOPT 1, YOPT 2, YOPT 2 till end.
Row 1: Forward Pass– TKS 5. Return Pass– YOPT 1, YOPT 2, YOPT 2 till end.
Row 2-end: Repeat Row 1 until cable is a little bit longer than scarf (about an inch or so). The extra length accounts for the twistyness. Doesn’t have to be exact because TKS is quite stretchy vertically.
Sewing in cables:
Lay out your scarf flat. Pin your two strips side by side in the middle of the scarf. Start twisting, pinning and repinning along the way to make sure the twists are even.
With extra lengths of yarn and your yarn needle, start sewing along the edges of the cables into the scarf. Because TSS is so thick, you only need to sew into the vertical bar of the stitches. This will also keep the yarn from showing up in the back of the scarf.
There are many ways to sew in. I used a simple whip stitch, along one complete edge of a cable at a time. Because of this, you will get into tricky places where the cables overlap, but I just insert the needle through to the other side and continued. Other ways are going section by section along all four parallel edges of cable;or along the bottom edge, switching cables as they cross, then across the top edge. Whatever works.
Afterward I added some double-knot fringe. This is optional. If you want to do this fringe, you’re better off Googling it because for me to explain I would need a bunch of pictures I don’t have…
Enjoy!
While at work today I got this idea for a movie while listening to Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do?, which I do all the time when I want to waste 14 minutes at work.
Here’s the gist: There’s a boy who always wanted to be a singer, but through some tragic accident, he loses his ability to speak. Going through the typical teenage ordeal– He has horrible grades in school, his parents get killed in a car crash, his girlfriend dumps him for someone who can talk– he instead decides to learn how to play the guitar. He gets really good, and decides to start a band. While cleaning out the garage he finds his father’s old TalkBox and figures out how to work it. His life suddenly goes in a new direction as he learns how to talk with his TalkBox. Everywhere he goes he brings his guitar/TalkBox/belt amp, and whenever he says something he just frets out a riff and mouths his words and the guitar sings for him.
He decides to use this to his advantage and becomes both the singer AND guitarist of his band, and they go on to get a platinum album, and everyone’s happy.
Oh yeah, and did I mention he’s a Beatles fan? His love for their music is what ties the whole movie together, and what makes the title relevant.
Discuss.
Face it. Movies are happy. Everyone wants their happy ending, and producers will give it to us to sell more tickets and make more money. If the movie happens to have a ’sad ending’, there’s usually some sort of happy or hopeful feeling associated with it, like: “Yeah, he died, but it just goes to show you how much they loved each other!” or “He had to sacrifice himself to save the others!” Way to chicken out, movie producers.
And while those kinds of movies certainly are depressing, I know there’s gotta be some truly sad/tragic endings out there. No hope, no inspiration, no catharsis. If you happen to know any, please comment!!
So while I’m on the lookout for tragic movies, I was planning on having a Depressing Movie Week event sometime over the summer. While these movies aren’t necessarily tragic, they definitely tug at your heartstrings, enough so that the 3rd goes out of tune to make a minor chord. Sadness.
My plan is to have one representative movie from several genres, for every day of the week. The only problem is that I haven’t seen many sad movies to begin with. After asking my friends for some depressing movies, this is what I’ve come up with (Movies I’ve seen are A*terisk’d)
This list is in its early stages, and has definite room for improvement. Once I have a final list, I can compile the movies and start this depressing movie extravaganza! I’ll bring the Pessimistic Popcorn, you bring the Melancholy Cola.
PS, Rodeo, you’re a CMS major, help me out!! What are some sad movies?
Finally getting the hang of the 3D features of Apophysis. I bring you Things Fall Apart, the second in my series of fractals named after lines from random poems only vaguely having to do with the fractal itself.
Remember in PP#1 when I said one could fill a whole book with tea recipes? Well someone did, and I must say it has some interesting info about tea, and some tasty recipes. I got this book over spring break in Oregon, when my mom and I drove up to Portland (Tigard, to be exact) to visit the Stash Tea Company. The store itself was amazing and I got lots and lots of delicious tea, but I also got this book. I saw the recipe for a “Green Tea and Passion Fruit Spritzer”, which looked interesting and moderately delicious, so I tried it out. It’s a mix of green tea, honey, passion fruit nectar and sparkling water. It was alright, though a little watered down. If you’ve tasted my PP, you’d know that I love concentrated drinks with a punch, so I took the liberty of changing it up a bit. It’s more concentrated, uses guava and pineapple nectar instead of passion, and ginger ale instead of sparkling water, effectively taking this recipe to the EXTREME *crosses arms in an X motion*
Here’s the recipe for my Pink Tælixir:
Ingredients:
Step 1. Boil the water, add the tea bags, cover and steep for 15 mins.
Step 2. Add honey and nectar.
Step 3. Refridgerate. To serve: fill a glass 3/4 the way with tælixir, top off with ginger ale. Makes about 2 liters.
Now that I have a fancy new laptop, I can make fractals again! If I may borrow from Catullus 22: neque idem umquam aeque est beatus ac fractales cum facit.
Breaking Out of Solution by =Khold01 on deviantART
It’s kinda like those balloon things I had the other day. When you smash them, they make a chemical reaction that releases gas and inflates the balloon. But not really. It’s more like a self-contained solution of gas in a liquid, in which the gas effervesces upon agitation.
Edit: This fractal has since received a Daily Deviation!! That means it was featured on the front page of DeviantART.com for the day it was picked. Don’t forget to buy prints, y’all!
Today in 21W.730.01, we were discussing our views of Utopia and Dystopia and how they impact our writing. If you’re writing an advocation essay, you imagine a world in which people heed your advice, and this world would naturally contain elements of your utopia. Conversely, this world would have traits opposite to your dystopia. I immediately began to think of several versions of dystopia that appear in popular media, and as a CMS major, I felt it was my duty to think of several examples and organize them into a Venn Diagram. Explanation after the jump.
I took seven each of movies, literature and video games and organized them into such categories as:
Totalitarian/Utilitarian Dystopia: A society in which the government or controlling body has complete authority over society, or in which the government or controlling body chooses to run society such that the greatest good is achieved, no matter the means. See George Orwell’s 1984 or Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia: A society in which a grave event destroys society and is then rebuilt. This rebuilt society is usually a dystopia where the government tries to control the society in order that the grave event doesn’t happen again. If not this, then the protagonist is usually left to his own devices in trying to navigate the society in an attempt to escape, start his life anew, or try to fix society. See Anthem by Ayn Rand, or the video game Fallout 3.
Cyberpunk: A cyberpunk society is one characterized by high technology with evident or latent social issues. See the movies Blade Runner or The Matrix.
Anti-Utopia: An anti-utopia is a society which started out as or was intended to be a utopia, but by a turn of events descended into dystopia. See the video game Bioshock or the movie The Village.
False Utopia: A false utopia is a society in which the government or controlling body tries to make a dystopia seem like a utopia. See Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the movie The Matrix.
Government Secret: This kind of society either tries to be or successfully becomes a utopia due to a secret known only to the government. If the people knew the secret, society would collapse and cease to be a utopia. These secrets keep the societies from becoming true utopias because they are usually too dark for the general population to handle. See the movies The Matrix or Soylent Green.
There are much more classifications of dystopias and numerous more examples, but the analyzation of those is better left for my thesis.
Addendum 5/1/09: I also concede that Mirror’s Edge is a false utopia and I Am Legend is an anti-utopia.
If I had a choice either only to eat or only to drink for the rest of my life, I’d choose to drink; i.e. the number of delicious drinks is greater than the number of delicious foods. There is an astounding amount of potential in drink mixing (by that I mean any drink, not necessarily alcoholic), such that simple liquids in various ratios can produce such amazingly tasty results. That said, I must say that my favorite drink is simple, old-fashioned black iced tea. It’s classy, it’s refreshing and it’s Southern. Yet there are so many ways to prepare and mix iced tea that one could fill a whole book with tea recipes. Take, for example, the Arnold Palmer. Created by golfer Arnold Palmer, it’s a blend of iced tea and lemonade, a rare example of when the phrase “I like x and I like y, so putting them together must be even better!” holds true. Having made multiple attempts at trying to find the right ratio of tea to lemonade, I finally had a revelation and decided to integrate the lemonade with the tea, instead of making both and mixing afterward. After several attempts at this method, I have finally decided on a recipe that I’m proud of, and I call it the Patrick Palmer.
Here, in print for the first time ever, is the recipe:
Ingredients
Step 1. Bring 6 cups of water to a boil. Turn off heat, add the tea leaves and baking soda and steep for 4 minutes. Strain out leaves.
Step 2. Heat 2 cups of the tea in a small saucepan. Add the sugar until dissolved, then the corn syrup, then lower heat and cook until a medium-think syrup forms.
Step 3. Combine the tea, sugar-syrup and lemon juice in a large pitcher. Mix well and chill. Serve over ice, makes 2 quarts.
Making the simple syrup ensures a smooth taste without that gritty sugary taste present in most lemonades. The baking soda added to the tea cancels out some of the bitter tannins making it less bitter and astringent. Enjoy!
Be sure to watch out for more Patrician Potations!
I love writing — not writing in the traditional sense; putting words together to form coherent ideas and sentences is rather boring and pedantic, but the act of dragging my pencil across paper is very satisfying. Needless to say, my notebook is very entertaining to read. So many pages with so many lines, few of which are actual notes.
Whenever I start a new lead on my mechanical pencil, I make a habit of writing nonsense on the page just so that a bevel forms on the lead, giving me wider lines. Wider lines means more surface area coverage with less work, meaning I fill my pages faster and feel accomplished. I hate white space in my notebook. White space means I didn’t learn anything. The more I learn, the more I must write. I don’t necessarily write about what I learned, I just need the feeling of lead on paper as a celebration of knowledge.
If I like writing so much, what’s the point of a blog? Wouldn’t it be easier to write my thoughts in notebook or journal, then scan them and post them online? Well it would, but there are inherent problems with this:
If I tried to write this same blog in my notebook, it’d be so full of doodles and flourishes that it would become incomprehensible to anyone but me and the most accomplished handwriting analysts.
Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m writing. My notebook can be described as a transcript of my thoughts. And with a violent need to write, you could say it’s the ultimate stream of consciousness. Whenever I get the urge to write, I don’t care about what I’m writing; I just want the satisfaction of texture. Therefore, I write the first thing that comes to mind. Usually this would be the next two words that the professor happens to say during lecture. During one 7.013 lecture, I became obsessed with the word “allele,” which happened to be the word du jour for the class. In addition to being so fun to say, it’s insanely fun to write in cursive. the ls and es are so similar, it becomes a game to write the word as fast as I can without messing up. There’s one page of notes where I become so fixated on the word that I wrote over actual notes with repetitions of “allele allele allele allelelellallellelele.” And during one 8.02 class, I literally wrote a page full of the word “constant” repeated ad infinitum.
In a way, maybe this repeptition has improved my handwriting, which, I will admit, was inherently incoherent pre-MIT. When I try, my cursive is quite lovely now. When not actively concentrating on what I write, I start writing in fonts. I have several fonts. When actually trying to learn, I write in print: large, loopy letters that so that I understand what I’m writing and so I can go back and read later. When I’m writing notes to self, or less important class notes, I write in cursive: small, thin letters that I can read, but probably have to explain to others. When I’m bored or falling asleep, I write in tall, thin and loopy cursive letters that you would have to read at an angle in order to decode. My fonts can also be described as a function of how thin the lead is. When the lead is thin, my writing has a tendency to be more readable, more correctly proportioned letters that look like they were written by a normal person. As the lead gets thicker, my writing tends to get loopier, taller, thinner and messier. God save me if I ever get a hold of .9mm lead.
And if what I’m thinking isn’t a word that was recently said, I’ll draw random shapes: Excersises in perspective, sweeping flourishes, 3-d structures or complex rectangular diagrams. If these are the first things that come to mind when I’m absent-minded or in a rush to write, does this mean I think in shapes?
Either way, I invite anyone to read my notes and try to decipher the inner workings of my mind. And when I fill up enough notebooks, I totally wanna publish them… or donate them to science… or an art museum.