#intercon q

Turns out SF’s MUNI system dispenses passes that use NFC. Modern Android phones have NFC reading capabilities. Played a hacker for one of my Intercon games and therefor decided to actually hack together a program in a couple of spare hours. Had 3 cards (hot glue kanji, “gun metal” acrylic painted) that I rigged up to perform different tasks when tapped (flashlight on/off, timer start/stop). For some reason I find this to be incredibly cool, no doubt far more so than it actually is. 

It’s 12:30am and my brain feels like a tiger pacing in a cage. I want an interesting coding project... just went through the Android Open GL ES tutorial and I’m sure I’m biting off more than I can chew but I’m excited.  I have no specific goal in mind (vague Expanse-esque terminal designs perhaps) but I’m excited to challenge myself, get back into graphics, and also somehow roll in more real work integrations. 

Bound not one but two books for Intercon. One for a friend who had piles of character background info to memorize (and a nerdy character to play) so I did a half page book with many blanks in the middle and some fake “notes” by the character. (learned about the grep/regex character control in InDesign!)

I made a small book for my 3 games.  Super tiny layout- could fit two whole signatures on one printed page [16 signatures total (256 pages)] and absolutely loved it. Legible! Did my first not silver or gold edge painting and highly approve of the look. 

So last night I literally cried because I couldn’t sketch “the picture I wanted to.”  Now, those tears were likely much more biology related that true genuine emotional defeat, but the issue does continue to haunt me. As I said last night between sniffles, “I’m 33, when am I going to learn to draw? What if I never learn?”

What I don’t mean is “oh, I can’t draw anything! (please secretly praise me)”. Clearly I can draw... some things. But the fact that no one but me can really “see” the picture I want to draw is so fucking frustrating. I don’t want to describe in simile what I was going for, I just want to do it. And my failure to execute is just revealing the weakness of my own mind. 

What if I can’t draw because I can’t actually see with the clarity I think I see? What if my mind betrays me and tells me “oh, you have this excellent idea!” and when the pen comes down, when the bluff is called, it turns out there’s nothing but emptiness and shallow shit in my head? Nobody likes the idea that their ideas are hollow.

...

Ok, moving past the typical angsty artists woe, here is what I hoped would be one of several character sketches from this weekend’s Rabbit Run LARP.  Red Roxie! <3 This girl was fucking AaMMmmMMaaaaaazing! Tall and buff and actually talented with duel wielded boffer weapons.  She hit things real good during battles and yelled at us real good all the time. Super nice out of game and scary good in game.