Posting in this thread is your official entry into Timasomo.

Let everyone know what your actual plans are -- what are you going to make?

Once the date turns over to October 1st wherever you are in the world, feel free to start creating!

FAQs

Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October. This is its fourth year!

If you would like to participate (or simply follow along), make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo.¹

The Roll Call thread will be posted there on October 1st. That is where people will formally commit to projects for Timasomo.

1: All previous subscribers of ~creative have been automatically subscribed to ~creative.timasomo. However, if you're interested in participating, it's worth double-checking, just to be sure!

FAQs

This Thread: Planning!

Post your ideas.

Give feedback to others.

Set up collaborations.

Ask questions.

Everything in this thread is non-commital! Bounce around ideas and figure out what you'd like to do in our communal brainstorming session.

Also, please do NOT start work on your project yet! Stage setting, planning, and other preparations are allowed (e.g. getting supplies/materials, setting up workspaces, etc.), but save the creation initiation for the 1st.

Get excited for another round of awesome projects!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Today is day three of my "war against writer's block"!
As I keep fighting with my proverbial pen, I hope that some day I'll be able to get out of my block and be able to write some real stuff like research paper or novel or story book.

What I realized today is that Word Power is a very important skill. A writer is essentially a Wordsmith or someone who carves and arranges the words and phrases into sentences, just as a sculptor or carpenter would do with wood or other raw materials. To be a better writer, you must learn to fall in love with words which is probably easier said than done - especially for us non-native speakers!

Having a regular habit or routine helps with this. Each time you come across a difficult word, you open the dictionary software or app and learn its meaning. It hardly takes a few minutes but it's a very useful skill as each new word you know of acts like a raw material or building block for your writing. Better still, develop linguistics as a hobby as mastery of grammar is equally important and so is learning about how languages, cultures and people basically work and interact at the core.

Apart from that, noting down right ideas as they come is also very important. For example, the idea about the Wordsmith thing occurred to me yesterday when I was having a cup of tea. I noted it on time (before it could vanish into the depths of that dark matter called subconscious mind and become irretrievable again!), and made a note of that on my computer so that I can write it in today's proverbial pen.

Even after having these basic tools and ingredients, you may not be able to write anything at all if you lack that focused energy or passion to write about a particular topic - be it a research paper, novel, story book or something else. You need to have that energy to write which I feel I'm lacking right now. I might be able to feel that energy some day as I continue with my battles, at least I hope so! Thanks for reading this and staying with me in these challenging times.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

The concept

It's a box that contains a receipt printer and an interface with several buttons. A user would press a button that reflects their emotional state (happy, sad, anxious, etc.), then the machine prints out a more-or-less appropriate poem on a receipt printer, beautifully formatted and embellished with simple artwork.

It could be occasionally repurposed for certain themes, like Pride Month to print out queer poems.

I want to place it someplace public and well-trafficked, like Dolores Park or on Castro Street.

Feedback

I like poetry. The idea of a (free) vending machine that gives me a poem to uplift my day excites me. But I wonder if this appeals to others enough to be worth fully realizing. I don't want to spend time and money building something that'll go totally unloved.

Also curious about anti-vandalism measures or ideas. I'm sure some jerk will try graffiti-ing it or peeing on it.

Lastly, anyone interested in collaborating?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

I've posted this before, but it's been a couple years. It can be a hobby, a good deed, something simple, something complex, or anything in between - mainly, whatever doesn't fit into the more niche topics that are posted about this here (such as the weekly technical projects thread in ~comp).

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

I bought a colour eInk screen last summer and had a bit of fun getting it to talk to my shared Google calendar that runs our house. Recently I finally got around to making a frame for it so it can sit somewhere prominent and tell us about upcoming events. It's basically just a raspberry pi zero hat, so it's debian underneath. There's some slightly hacky python to make it (a) talk to Google, (b) mung their API output into something useful, which turned out to be HTML which is then "screenshotted" to create a PNG which can be sent to the eInk display. Updating takes about 30 seconds in total, partly because the pi zero is slow and partly because the refresh rate of the screen is in double-digit seconds. Works in full sunlight though, which is nice, and it's a much nicer screen than it looks in photos.

Screen is this one here. Pi Zero is a pi zero, the frame is flamed oak, the base is beech, the copper is copper. If there are no events in the next week, it shows a random picture instead (and boy, if I thought rendering html was slow on a zero that's nothing on 7-colour dithering a jpg!)

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Recently I got for free an old Zeiss Super Ikonta 531/2, it's a medium format foldable camera from 1936. It was in decent shape but the lens was very foggy. Fungi can grow on lenses but I think it was just general dirt. Opening it was a bit tricky (I had to get watching-making tools, because the screws are very tiny) but I managed to clean the lenses quite well. I shot a first roll but the focus was off, so I had to make sure the front lens element was at the right distance, using some semi-transparent tape on the back of the camera to see the image.

Then I shot a second roll and developed it myself, which was also a first (it's not super hard though), I had no idea if the images would come out good, or even at all (wasn't even sure I loaded the developing tank correctly). Seeing the images come out of the tank for the first time is quite magical, and they came out great (some of them at least...) :

https://imgur.com/a/bF817x9

Even with my crappy development & scanning I can get high-res images that compete with my expensive digital camera. The lens (Tessar 105mm, f3.8) is quite sharp wide open (statue shot) and I even took a long exposure shot at night using a release cable. The process is very slow and focusing is hard, but it's quite fun and rewarding. These kind of cameras are very cheap but the rest (film, accessories, development, repairs, ...) not so much.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

I want to share with all of you a gift I've been preparing. I love finding good gifts and seeing people's reactions when they get something that truly blows them away. But this is the one I'm most proud of yet.

First, some backstory! Early February 2021, something amazing happened in Belgium. The winter cold wave hit hard and all over the country, lakes froze.

In the middle of an intense and frustrating lockdown, after a 5 months lull during which all ice rinks were closed and travel was impossible, Belgian skaters all across the country put on their boots and went to skate outdoors on lakes.

On February 12th, that's exactly what I did with my (at the time) friend from the rink. I posted about it here before. We had a blast of a time; truly a day you don't forget, and it came at a time where both of us were seriously depressed.

Today, that friend and I have gotten very close and she has become my skating partner. Recently, she moved in to her new apartment close to the ice rink, and I needed a housewarming gift for her! I settled on a keyring. It's very on-brand for a housewarming gift, and I myself have skate boots keyring ornaments kinda like these which are pretty cool. But this is someone I really like, and I wanted to personalize it a bit.

I then thought about a skating figure ornament that could represent her. And what better than my absolute favourite photo of her from our day on the lakes?

So I got to work, and a friend helped me trace the initial silhouette as vector since my tracing skills suck. I did clean it up in Inkscape, and I now needed somebody who could turn this digital silhouette into a real physical artifact!

I found this shop on Etsy, but they did not respond in time when I asked them about cutting that figure for me. So I asked my ex girlfriend (who is doing a Ph.D in metallurgy, soldering and metal printing) for some advice. To my surprise and delight, she volunteered to do the laser cutting herself!

And so we got to work. I turned the SVG into a DXF (thanks Inkscape for being able to do that!), and she helped me clean up some of the edges. We calculated dimensions, stress spots, and added an attachment anchor. Here is the final contour for the cut, and here is the first trial sample!

So, after fixing a couple more minor issues, she gave me eight samples. We engraved her trouser's pink stripes into two of them; they're very representative of her skating attire.

One final issue to deal with was the burn marks. The back of the samples had very burnt edges due to the laser. Today, I found a jewelry workshop which was able to polish that away. I then added a small chain and a cute little snowflake ornament.

And so, here is the final result:

• Front: https://imgur.com/TqKLCzU
• Back (after polishing): https://imgur.com/7OdItjf

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/SW7Sqdm

She's currently sick and in quarantine. Once she recovers, we are having dinner at her house. I cannot wait to see her reaction :)

Update: By a friend’s suggestion: Added a print of the original photo with a cute note on the back. Looking nice!
https://photos.app.goo.gl/d5gvZEqx3eRZgN5dA

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.