Dreams
These are things that I wish existed. I would love to make them real, but there is no way that I will have enough time in my life to do it.
I don't think these will be ordered. As we add more, we should categorize them and make sub-pages. :)
XBW Notebook
The XBW notebook will be handmade with a card cover and gridded interior pages. The tom sachs notebook is the ideal size (it fits in a pocket, but is not too small to write on.
At least 5 full sheets of paper, folded, and folded again to make a 4.25 x 5.5 notebook with 20 writeable pages. There will be some trim loss, but it's about 5x4. A4 would also be fine, it's about the same. One extra sheet of content pages (4 pages in the front, 4 in the back). Printing on the cover.
Rounded corners.
There should be three options for grids:
- square grid (solid or dotted)
- hex grid (solid or dotted)
- isometric grid (solid or dotted)
Print our own:
https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ (this was recommended by Nanami Paper, a fancy paper company run by a guy who seems to be close to retiring)
There is pretty much everything we could want here, with the exception of an aperiodic tiling, which... is VERY INTERESTING IDEA.
Ok, so if we were to go hard on this idea, we would use this: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/app.html and draw a VERY LARGE plane of aperiodic tiling. Then we would use that one single gigantic plane to cover all of the pages. Meaning: no two pages would be the same. I love this idea, but it would probably require some coding. :D
I think isometric is a better grid than hex (it is just hex, but with uninterrupted lines). But it would be hard to write on, maybe? I don't know. I should make a notebook with both hex and grid and see. I do like the rite in the rain horizontal lines and vertical dots, it's unique.
We will probably print our own pages, and we might even want to do alternating (square on one side, hex on the other). We could get weird with it and add very small flourishes/easter-eggs (though I am not sure how fine the laser printer can go). Ideas: on some pages the lines can be irrational numbers, places, or categories of things (fungus species). You would probably need a loup to read it, but that's fine.
sachs has a note: "ghost grid pattern used under license granted by edward tufte"
Pages should be numbered.
Sachs uses 1/4" grid for almost all of the pages, and then (weirdly) 0.5cm grid for the "REQUIRED" pages. I think I like the 0.5cm grid better than 1/4", you get more "pixels" to draw with.
The cover will have the logo, and there should be some fun interior pages similar to the tom sachs notebooks. Rite in the rain does make 100# waterproof cardstock.
The binding should be saddle stitched with waxed colored string. Hand-stitched unless we can figure out a way to make the stitches sufficiently far apart to avoid tear-out. I think if the paper is tear-resistant enough, machine stitching should be ok. The stitching on the sachs notebook is not awesome, but the thickness of the paper and notebook itself protects the seam. I think machine sewing is probably doable.
Interior paper should be good quality.
We should make an expensive one using a water-resistant cover and rite-in-the-rain interior pages (8.5x11 32#). I wonder if we could use birch bark for this... maybe too brittle, but maybe we could treat it with something. KOALA paper on amazon makes tear-proof waterproof paper. We could try it. Also TerraSlate paper.
The RitR paper is made of cellulose with a coating/resin that makes it waterproof. The other waterproof paper is polypropylene or polyester.
Another idea: a mushroom leather case that you can use for different notebooks. I wonder if the mushroom leather is water resistant... it should be oiled/waxed/conditioned if not.
Sweat the details.
New discovery: Watanabe BookBinding Book Note 360 Uses a "lay flat" binding that can be folded back around on itself (the way we want). The Book Note 360 is too big IMO, but the SEVEN SEAS BUNCO is pretty damn awesome. It is A6, which is close to the ideal size (though just a touch large, I think). It's the binding that is really cool though, it's exactly what I want. A stitched binding that lays flat and you can bend back on itself. The paper is intended for fountain pens, so it might be too delicate for what I want, but I think I need to get one of these. Shit, there's one on amazon, I am going to go for it. Then I can maybe figure out the binding. Might need to watch this advertising movie closely...
Ideas for interior content
- Earth Timeline with Eras
- [Incompetech Gallimauphry)[https://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/] Calendar Pages, Crowdsourced Amazon box list, Name Generator,
- Wu Tang Name for the Date, or use the Astrological signs to make wu tang astrological signs: Aquarius -> Lucky Demon, Gemini -> Phantom Warlock, basically put a wu tang name in there somewhere for something.
- Periodic Table of Elements
- Phylogenetic Tree
- NATO alphabet
- Braille & Morse
- instructions on building a bat house
- I Ching Hexagrams
- Astrological Calendar (moon phases)
- List of UUIDs that can be used to identify things in the notebook. Cross off/annotate when used.
- Darwin Core Archive data model / diagrams
- Ruler (imperial and metric)
- weight and volume conversions
- knots (but different from the sachs knots)
- list of the ten bolts
- Michael Kuo's mushroom identification guide
- reward and ID on front cover
- Optical Illusions
- Illusions that trigger a "Gestalt Switch"
- Coffer Illusion
Ideas for the cover
What if we used scrap cloth and the NighthawkInLight method for waterproofing it? We could get scrap cloth from ebay or locally, and upcycle it. Interesting t-shirts and indigo cotton, kimono scraps, denim, etc. That seems fun. We could try embossing and stenciling onto the fabric before waterproofing it. I suppose it doesn't need to be waterproofed, we could use cardstock/cardboard also. I wonder if I could use birch bark and paste onto that...
FUN IDEAS.
Writing Instruments
I freaking LOVE LOVE the color of the Mitsu-bishi Hi-UNI pencils. The dark plum burgundy is just hitting me just right. I would love for this to be a motif of the workshop.
UPDATE: I bought the pencils, and this is not true! While the color of the HI-UNI is nice, it's not as nice as the 9850. But also, the 9000 is stamped with "MADE BY ELABORATE PROCESS" which is so delightful. The green color is nice too. They don't really sit nicely together in the same palette though. The green is nice, the burgundy is nice. We should probably sell both, and come up with a die to stamp them with XBW. I wonder if we could carefully sand off the ugly bar code....
We should provide both... and maybe more!
Game Taxonomy
Use Protege to build and publish a taxonomy of games. Get fun with it. Pol has lots of ideas in his head.
Ten Bolts Almanack
A publication printed entirely on-site which has a page for every day in the year. Each page is filled with trivia and prompts, things that one might or should do with their limited time on the earth.
The occult worldview should combine taoism, astrology, astronomy, all of the tzus (sun, lao, chuang), i ching, lemegeton, history, numerology, and anything else that seems relevant.
Each page will be packed, but specific to that day and that year. No two pages of the almanack will ever be the same. Each item is a thread begging to be pulled, as you do so, you are rewarded with more. Layers and layers.
Puns and jokes, especially referencing the old almanacks are encouraged. double, triple, quadruple entendres and more. To get the full breadth of each page would require something like Genius, which will point out the references embedded all over. The references should cohere to become something beautiful, but that's not required. In the worst case it is the page that is the connective tissue between all of the things, but at best, they all come together in a theme.
At first pass it is a novelty with some weird recommendations and trivia. If you dig deeper, you find the jokes and references. If you go beyond that, you can find the various bits of culture and connected ideas unfurling. All of the references are worth exploring, none should be dead ends (a reference to art that is devoid of interest).
It would be fun to have a legend for each page, hosted online, but to find it you need to do a puzzle. Then you are rewarded with all of the weird references and inside jokes of that one day. WHAT FUN.
No Real Names (everyone who participates uses a pseudonym). All of it should be attributed to a single invented author of indeterminate demographics. Use lots of first-person to get personal, but there should be very little consistency between it all. Every page should be a multi-player creation, and a fun project to disentangle. Also, you could just use it as a nice thing to encounter every day, even if you don't do the puzzles.
Slack Replacement Using Fossil
Idea: Communications application that works like Slack, but under the hood it is a fossil repo.
Why: I want all of the features/functionality of Slack, but complete control of the data. And, do we really need servers? Chat isn't very much data in 2024.
Notes:
- Even if you were subscribed to lots of communities, it really wouldn't be that much data. SQlite is capable of hundreds of TB in a single sqlite file.
- It could probably use the current chat functionality, but add some porcelain over the top of it.
- Use imgui to build the gui: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
- Wonder if we could work from diesel
- came across these today:
- https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream (stream sqlite changes to somewhere else)
- https://github.com/backtrace-labs/verneuil (replicate sqlite data to somewhere else seamlessly)
Consider Turso! It is an interesting re-write of sqlite.
Fossil Notes App
Idea: A set of tools that makes it easy to store notes in fossil. Something like a "Notes" mode for the fossil UI. Why: With just one file you could take your notes everywhere. And the file itself has its own tooling, you just need the fossil binary.
Notes:
- we could use the wiki for this, it might be fine if it wasn't so clunky. We don't ever want to lose notes, and we don't want to run a web browser for a GUI.
- The notes really should be in the repo, with all of the rich versioning you get from the repo. The Wiki would probably be vestigial, or maybe notes about the notebook itself (notebook metadata).
- It could autosave (commit) automatically all the time, but you could periodically make checkpoint commits that represent larger increments of stateful change.
- The wiki is already pretty good at this, since it uses an array of local storage for temporary edits, it's kind of awesome and I have failed to notice that it existed several times.
- It would be cool to have something like NVAlt that used a fossil repo. It just would.
- It would be neat to have a note-taking app that recognized that your time worked in different phases. Like you could select "Work" and under the hood you would be in the work branch, and make a bunch of notes, but then you could jump over to the Personal branch and do things there. Eventually all notes should get merged into the Main branch, but you could track your note-taking day to day as these commits that happen on their own in the branch. It would be a big obvious UI badge so it might feel weird to be making work notes in your personal branch, etc. These are totally lightweight, so making one for a conference or workshop or project is fine. So long as you merge things together, you don't need to worry about dangling resources.
- there should be a little obvious status line that shows the last time a commit was made, and how many bytes it was, etc. Subtle, but you ALWAYS know how much unsaved state you have in front of you.
- there should be a "COMMIT" hotkey that you can hit whenever you want if you feel unsafe.
- built-in functionality to push commits to an offsite archive.
- there is no reason why this can't be multi-player.... It should be easy to sync notes between different note repo or have more than one person committing to a particular repo. Not sure how to connect them to each other.... ?
- Wonder if we could work from diesel
- came across these today:
- https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream (stream sqlite changes to somewhere else)
- https://github.com/backtrace-labs/verneuil (replicate sqlite data to somewhere else seamlessly)
Woodworking Ideas
Build a small house using the Segal Method
More info: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Segal_Method#Principles_of_the_Segal_Method
Build some furniture from Enzo Mari
More info: https://syllabus.pirate.care/library/Enzo%20Mari/Autoprogettazione_%20(221)/Autoprogettazione_%20-%20Enzo%20Mari.pdf
Good outdoor benches...