Announcing Tildes' Make Something Month (Timasomo) for 2024!
Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October.
The best way to get a feel for Timasomo is to check out our previous Showcase topics, where creators share their creations with the community at the end of the event:
There are no hard and fast rules on what you can create. You can make anything!
All of the Timasomo topics will be over in ~creative.timasomo, so if you're interested in participating or following along, make sure you're subscribed there.
All people who respond to this topic will be added to a notification list that I will ping each time I put up a new Timasomo topic. If you do not wish to be added to the list, or you wish to only be notified for the final Timasomo showcase, please let me know.
The Roll Call thread will be posted in ~creative.timasomo on October 1st. That is the official beginning to the event and is where people will formally commit to their projects for Timasomo.
FAQs
What is Timasomo really though?
Timasomo is a chance to create something/anything!
There are no restrictions on what you can choose to make.
Can I participate?
Yes! Timasomo is open to anyone on Tildes! Please make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo.
The greater Tildes community is also encouraged to participate in discussion threads even if you are not actively working towards a creative goal. This is meant to be an inclusive community event -- all are welcome!
If you are interested in participating but do not have a Tildes login, please e-mail the invite request address here for an invite to the community.
If you do not want to create something but still want to check out the showcase, let me know in a comment here and I will add your name to a separate notification list that I will ping for the showcase topic only.
How do I sign up?
Make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo and/or are included in my notification list (simply comment on this topic to be added).
On October 1st, there will be a Roll Call thread. By posting your plans to participate in that thread, you have formally signed up for Timasomo!
Didn't it used to be in November?
Yes. Timasomo was originally inspired by NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November.
Initially, I wanted people participating in NaNoWriMo to be able to share their work with Timasomo as well. In the entire time it has run, however, no participant has publicly submitted any work from NaNoWriMo to Timasomo. Instead, Timasomo has gained its own identity independent of NaNoWriMo (which, after recent events, is probably for the best).
Many participants from previous years have shared that October would be a better month for them personally, so we moved the event to October.
Also, the event was so fantastically popular that it regularly upstaged American Thanksgiving, thus we only felt it fair that Canadian Thanksgiving be targeted as well.
What are the rules?
Timasomo is self-driven and its goals are self-selected.
On October 1st, participants will commit to a creative project (or projects) that they plan to complete within the month of October.
There is no restriction on the methods/products of creativity: writing, painting, code, food, photos, crafts, songs -- if it's creative expression for you, it works for Timasomo!
Though most will be participating individually, collaborations are welcome too!
What is the schedule?
Timasomo begins October 1st and ends October 31st.
All creative output towards your goal(s) should be confined to this time.
This week prior to the start of October is for planning. There will be a few days at the beginning of November given to "finishing touches" before we have our final thread, which will be a showcase of all the completed works.
Below are the dates that I will be posting weekly threads:
Tuesday, October 1, 2024: Roll Call Thread
Tuesday, October 8, 2024: Update Thread #1
Tuesday, October 15, 2024: Update Thread #2
Tuesday, October 22, 2024: Update Thread #3
Tuesday, October 29, 2024: Final Update Thread
Tuesday, November 5, 2024: Timasomo Showcase Thread
Do I have to share my creation(s) publicly?
Tildes is a privacy-respecting site, and you are not obligated to share your creation here if you do not want to. We'd still love to hear about it though, if you're willing to share process and details!
Is it Timasomo or TiMaSoMo?
Either.
I personally use "Timasomo" because I think it looks cleaner and because too much time on the internet has made my brain incapable of reading "TiMaSoMo" as anything other than sarcasm, but go with whichever you prefer.
The best option, however, is “𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶” for reasons that are self-evident.
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 GREAT Timasomo!
I wasn’t planning to, but I think I’ll give it a go. My goal might be different than the usual fare since I don’t know if it is actually possible.
I really like baking bread. I haven’t been able to bake much over the last few years. I would like to get back into it. But I am currently living in college housing, so I don’t have an oven. I do have an electric stovetop burner, but it isn’t very good. Based on some light internet research, I should be able to bake decently in a Dutch oven on the stovetop.
I am also an ocean away from all my baking supplies and my nice le creuset and lodge Dutch ovens. So I also have to acquire all the supplies I need to hopefully make this work. And I have to do it cheaply since I don’t have an income for the next year.
So here are my goals:
I am planning to cheat a little bit. I get back into Bordeaux this weekend, and the weekends are the best time for flea markets, so I am starting step 1 this weekend. Please don’t tell the Timasomo police 🙃
I'd say gathering the necessary equipment is part of preparations, so I think you're good. Please report back with how it turns out! And maybe share a recipe if you fully succeed at Step 4 so we can try to capture the tastiness for ourselves~
Yeah I will definitely share the recipe I end up with. I haven’t a basic white bread recipe in Paprika already. I’ll probably stick with that until I get the baking figured out. Then I want to try some overnight sourdoughs. This is the first time I don’t have a roommate to annoy if I leave dough rising for a long time, so it’s definitely something I want to try.
I also have some other experiments I want to try. I am learning winemaking right now, and there is a large variety of yeast used in winemaking to emphasize or extract different aromas and flavors. Baking uses the same species of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In theory winemaking strains should leaven a dough just as well as bread making strains. I would like to try some different winemaking strains and see if they turn out different flavors in the bread. I don’t think it will actually make any meaningful difference, but I hope I am wrong.
Quick note on the yeast - strains for bread-making are not the same as for wine-making. Wine yeasts work on the accessible sugars in grapes. Bread yeasts need to be able to digest some of the grain starches into fermentable sugars.
If you want to start a tasty wild sourdough culture, your best bet is to use a heel of bread from a loaf that's been exposed to the air of your favorite bakery for a while. Sourdough cultures aren't just yeast; they also include lactobacilli and other organisms for the characteristic lactic acid sourness.
This is a good source for very reliable sourdough cultures including ancient and heirloom French.
If you want something to read while executing, I highly recommend T. Kingfisher's A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. It is a fun read and features a semi-sentient magical sourdough starter.
I second this book! It's great fun. And it somehow still made sense why the kids had to do what they did.
Very fun book!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5QpQ9Kd3t5I
It's an oldie and very silly but this is about the easiest no knead crusty white bread recipe you can make. I still use it when I'm not interested in going more complicated with a sourdough starter, etc. It also is easy to use a variety of flours or seeds to mix it up.
I have some half-baked app ideas that I am considering:
EDIT: Or I could try to finally write the article about learning Spanish without classes or textbooks, memorizing, and mostly without talking to people - I think I have learned some interesting things while doing that.
The YouTube game idea is really interesting. I wish I had some suggestions on mechanics but I don't, so I'll just leave encouragement for the idea!
Ah, how exciting! I can't wait to finally participate this year.
I've been working on an album for about five years ago, and its centrepiece is this one huge song, many parts, sixty-one minutes long. I may sound a bit silly for saying this, but I'm starting to realise that this song was missing one thing to say what I want it to say, and that's a build-up section between the quiet opening and its climax, to actually convey journey, acceleration, the approach to what's to come.
It's going to be very different to anything I've made before, very traditional instruments, and the plan I have in my head has it sounding like a steady snowballing motorik driving a melodic progression that will likely end up poorly aping Philip Glass. We'll see!
This Timasomo, I'll be making that. :)
I've not been in a mood conductive to creating anything for a very long time, but I think doing something like this is probably very good for me. So I think I'll do something a little bit different and draw a picture.
Yes, just one picture.
I'm terrible at drawing and art. But I thought to myself that I'm going to use this as a learning experience and take the time to learn how to draw and spend what little time I will be able to spend concentrating on this to learning to be better and basically refine the one picture to look as good as I possibly can. It'll be a fun experience for me to work on.
I'd say record the entire process! From all your sketches where you're learning how to draw and things like that to the final product. It's very satisfying when you see all the behind the scenes work you've put into it.
Guys, this was the last Tildes thread I read before bed last night and I proceeded to have a bizarre dream involving creating a horror game. I have no experience making games whatsoever.
Which means I'll stew on it and realistically settle for making something more ambitious with polymer clay. I've only ever made small pieces and usually don't even get as far as painting them. Any time I try to get more ambitious with the sculpting itself I end up disappointed and toss the pieces into a box...
some stuff I've done in the last year, bonus for any who recognize these critters from FFXIV. The last one was painted on with resin by my gf to be sent to a mutual friend of ours.
You could make the pieces of an as-yet non-existent horror game out of clay.... I guess I'm assuming you meant board game, so I'm thinking player pieces, but models for a video game could be cool too. Either way it would be neat to see if the game reveals itself more clearly through your sculptures.
Last year I ended up not participating with a comic like I'd planned. I'm thinking this time I might try to work on a story instead. I write a lot of fan fiction, but it's been a while since I attempted a long-form original story.
I've had this story concept bouncing around my head for a while and have been working on refining the details in a google doc. It's a light sci-fi piece I call "City of NPCs", in a post-apocalyptic setting where cities are largely populated by artificial humans called "NPCs" to keep them functioning. So basically, humans have no clue who's actually a human or NPC, and some people can go years without knowingly meeting another human.
For now I need to figure out some finer details (namely the exact mechanics of how NPCs work, the initial "apocalypse" that led to their creation, and how to kickstart the plot) and a good place to post it, like Royal Road or some other site.
Sounds a little bit like the Metaverse meets the Dead Internet Theory. I like it! It feels like a great setting to explore some of the questions about where we're headed technologically, and if there is a meaningful difference between a natural person and a close facsimile.
Hope you're able to find your start and get the story rolling. Please share when you're ready to!
Thanks! Funnily enough, part of the challenge with figuring out the specifics of NPCs is that I don't want to have as much of a focus on the line between humans and artificial intelligence, like most stories in this sort of setting tend to do. It's more about the experience of being a human in such a setting, so essentially living in the dead internet with the assumption everyone you see are bots. Some people are more bothered by that than others. Though I will tackle that too, just not as the main theme.
I'll definitely share it when I'm ready!
I'm out of town the first week of October and then again the first week of November so it's not fantastic timing and I may end up not participating, but I 100% have a project that I want to work on:
For /r/fantasy bingo this year I am reading 25 books that fit into 5 themes, but the themes are not correlated to location on the card. I also have been playing a LOT of Connections (NYT) game. Maybe you can see where this is going...
So I want to build a React app (for now a static site with my books hardcoded & you could cheat by checking react inspector if you wanted) so people can play "Connections" with my bingo card :)
Exciting, I think I have a project that lines up pretty well, since October is just a few days away.
For Halloween, my daughter wants to be Princess Leia, so we are going for this look: white robe/silver belt/side buns/E-11 blaster. Before starting to research, I did not even know that gun has a name. It has been an interesting rabbit hole to dive into the fairly large amount of information about the weapons that is online.
I am going sew the robe from a white bedsheet and come up with a reasonable silver belt. I think the big challenge will be making the blaster.
I might rather have gone with the elongated pistol, but my wife thinks the E-11 is less "gunlike". Not probing that one too deeply. It at least gives me a clear starting point.
My daughter wants the blaster to make sound and light up. My plan is to cannibalize a toy ray gun for the light and sound electronics. I got this one, and it seems like it will do the job. I hope I can take and reuse the whole trigger mechanism.
I found a lot of reference photos and pictures of the E-11, so I'm planning to model it myself, make interior carve-outs for the electronics and routing the lights, then 3D print the blaster. Probably it will be two halves put together with screws, much like the toy ray gun linked above. The spec for the E11 is 26" with the stock folded, so I'll likely scale it down to 1/2 scale for her.
Given the timeline, I'll be happy to get the costume made and the blaster modeled, printed, and assembled by the week before Halloween. If I'm very far ahead, I might try dry brushing in some silver on the details, but I'm not sure how well that will work if I don't sand/fill/paint it first, so I'll probably do tests on a scrap or test print before I dive into that with the final product.
I have some qualms about giving my kid a gun (even a toy gun) to walk around outside with, but I'm going to do the orange tip on the barrel, and we'll be going around with her for trick or treat in our suburban neighborhood.
Any other voice actors here? I have an idea for an "actual play" RPG podcast that I'd like to get off the ground.
I'd need 3-4 others with quality microphone setups and RPG experience who can perform multiple voices and are hopefully entertaining/charming/funny. The main action every episode is between two characters. They are the lowest-ranked guards of the Sewer Gate in a large city, something like the Samarkhand of old--a giant walled center of commerce set on an analogue of the Silk Road, with travelers arriving from every corner of the world.
The entirety of the show is the two guards on duty, deciding who gets to enter and leave the city from this gate that is so filthy and unwholesome that only the poorest and most desperate try. The two guards are inseparable. It's a buddy story more than anything. They hear stories, meet people, get embroiled in all kinds of plots, survive riots and wars and sieges, and get dragged into the petty politics of their sergeants and the commanders of the towers.
There are several other core characters, like in a sitcom, as well as a slew of one-off and cameo roles that need a whole spectrum of voices. I'm a character actor and game master of many decades. With a few skilled individuals we can bring the entire city to life. My goal would be to get ten episodes in the can and posted for free without ads online. I can handle game design and audio production. I've been producing weekly/monthly content for years now. So I've already figured out how to do the hard parts. Now let's just have some fun and try to make each other laugh.
Who's with me?
This feels like a very un-SMART approach to TiMaSoMo, but I think I'm going to pour my creative energies for October into fleshing out the world that my ongoing D&D adventure takes place in. There are a bunch of different aspects that I want to develop, including world history, myths and legends, and languages. On top of those, there are bunches of NPCs and factions in the game proper that need backstories, and timelines for their actions in the event that the players don't interfere.
So there's a lot open to me, but I don't know that any of those have anything sufficiently presentable for the showcase at the end? I don't know. I'll have a think prior to the first and will hopefully have decided on something deliverable!
Yay, it's Timasomo time again!
I am definitely going to participate again. I have an idea of what I might do: Ludum Dare 56 is happening the first weekend in October, which I am definitely going to participate in. If I end up liking the game I make during it, I am thinking about doing a similar thing as last year and just making it into a full fledged game. If I end up not liking the game, I might instead just start making a different game or maybe I'll record some music or something.
I really want to do something creative though, doesn't matter whatever it is. For almost this whole year I've struggled with actually making myself do anything creative, so I hope this event can help me do something cool again!
Would potentially like to participate! I didn't join last year, although I did start conceiving of a short horror film last October that didn't get much past the spitballing stage. Maybe I will revive it and actually follow through! Will have to see if I can get my partner and a friend to help me out. I haven't made a film since the documentary I made for an independent study project shortly before I dropped out. Would love to get back into filmmaking now that I'm at a more stable period in my life.
Tentative ideas:
Easy bet is making the new category lists for November’s Backlog Burner. It’s something I have to do anyway! This is the most likely choice because work has me swamped and drained on a daily basis and is showing no signs of letting up.
Slightly harder bet will be dusting off my personal blog, which hasn’t seen an update in years. I have a few longstanding idea kernels that haven’t left me for months, and I figure if they’ve stuck around in my head that long, the only way to get them out is to write what they’re wanting to say.
Pie-in-the-sky project will be picking back up Beat Saber custom mapping. I started it this summer but didn’t fully get it off the ground. I very much doubt I’ll do this, but maybe if inspiration strikes?
Thank you for this, I was struggling for an idea and this reminded me of my half-hearted attempt to "port" Space Channel 5 to StepMania charts years ago. Maybe I'll try it again...
I was just about to start on a game, so I take this thread as a sign to actually go ahead and hopefully stay motivated :)
Last year I tried to be generally creative and I failed. I do wanna try again but this time focused on music, yet I think I'm actually gonna do something else entirely.
I will write a comprehensive guide for one of my favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! decks, because right now the game changed a bit and the resources the community had are out-of-date.
I think I'll use mdBook for it, but I don't know how well it supports images because ideally I'd have some images and video as supporting material.
All of my cars, and my knee mill, are still being held captive in Texas so my 𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶 this year won't be car related. I do have all my blacksmithing supplies and am going back to Texas shortly for to see friends and to pick up a few things, along with a visit to my old blacksmithing teacher/class. So may find some inspiration for what I'd like to do there.
(non-committal stream of consciousness below, open to opinions/inspiration)
Spoopy season is upon us, so maybe something along those lines (and my wife would always appreciate more spoop). I do have some vampire flamingo lawn ornaments that need legs (I hated the spindly wire legs they came with and want something more sturdy and possibly realistic).
I'd like to replace the railing on the back stairs of the new house, but that might be too much to get planned and done on short notice (just moved in and still living out of boxes) and I have thoughts of making rain chains to replace the downspouts, but also haven't planned out what I'd like those to look like and will likely replace the gutters at the same time so that's outside the current scope.
I've been intending to build a pneumatic power hammer for blacksmithing, but need my knee mill to get that done.
There's a ton of projects around the house (as happens when you move into a century old home that you actually like in a climate that doesn't try to kill you for doing so), but nothing that'll take a month to do or is in the immediate want/need column. Maybe... When are you supposed to plant stuff in Colorado? I do have some needs to replace sections of lawn with pollinator friendly plants and a few other plant-based project ideas; some larger than others that I may not be prepared for at the moment.
Might update with more ideas later, but right now I got nothing.
I have been quite unproductive about cross stitching of late, so maybe if I participate here I can change that? I will stitch a bookmark I think - seems like a small enough project to get going again. Or maybe finally take the jump from cross stitching and into 'proper' embroidery. Will see!
This is my first time participating since as of right now I have the time and energy to actually create something. So I have two ideas, the first I will do and the second I want to do, but may be limited by finances.
Try to edit one picture a day from my backlog of unedited photos. I have a tendency to go out and take pictures, but tend not to edit them as much as I want. So I will work through some of my backlog and start editing photos more this month. It also works well as this weekend I am going camping, and every time I go camping I leave my phone in the car and use my DSLR camera instead. So that will also help build up more of a backlog to edit.
I want to try and make a DIY mic preamp. There are tutorials online, so if the cost is low enough, I will make one myself. Long term, I want to program electrical components to do the analog to digital conversion, so that I can create an audio interface from scratch with the hope of being able to expand it out into a multichannel audio interface. However, for timasomo, I will probably just get the mic preamp part completed as I will not have the budget for the micro processors to get it working as an audio interface
I didn't think I'd have anything to work on at first. But I'll try to join in!
My idea is to decorate my shower curtain somehow. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it. It's either going to be with acrylic paint or with printed vinyl stickers.
My shower curtain isn't fabric.
Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh it is only now I remember that I filmed and edited a video for last year's project and then my mic broke so I didn't do the v/o and by the time I got a new mic I'd forgotten all about it.
No ideas about what to do this year but will have a think. I must remember that half term is right in the middle of October so I have to budget around NOT having one of the weeks.
This might be the kick in the pants I need to actually sit down and write for a project with my buddy. Extremely original superhero comic that's mostly an excuse to cajole him into drawing and generally enjoy working with a friend.
Was this always a rule? Also, why?
It's always been like that. The event is a month long, so I encourage everybody to fit it in between the 1st and the 31st. I've always done the week before as a planning week, and (most of) the week after as a "finishing touches" week. That said, there are no Timasomo Police (I don't have the budget!), so I'm in no place to stop anyone should they work outside these parameters. 😂
In all seriousness, I've also always said that Timasomo has guidelines more than it has rules. Ultimately, the purpose of the event is to spur people to pursue their own creativity, and if a rule like that is standing in the way for someone, then I officially say: ignore it!
Yep:
https://tildes.net/~creative/iq4/timasomo_post_0_roll_call_and_planning
https://tildes.net/~creative/spo/announcing_tildes_make_something_month_timasomo_for_2020
https://tildes.net/~creative/yyn/announcing_tildes_make_something_month_timasomo_for_2021
https://tildes.net/~creative/12sq/announcing_tildes_make_something_month_timasomo_for_2022
https://tildes.net/~creative.timasomo/1aqd/announcing_tildes_make_something_month_timasomo_for_2023
It's a pretty common rule in other events like game jams or NaNoWriMo to have all "non-foundational work" (or however you want to describe it) only happen within the timeframe of the event, especially if that event is a contest.
As for "why?" for Timasomo specifically, I'll let someone else answer that.
But also, why not?
October is a particularly busy month at work and I've got a couple of go-lives plus a week of travel. It's painful because we finished up the utility room, so I've finally got lapidary/jewelry-making workspace.
If I can find the time, spouse got me a lovely piece of Koroit opal that needs setting. I also made contact yesterday with a local retiree who has an enormous collection of rare materials, like Marra Mamba tiger eye, so I'm torn about whether to cut more cabochons or start carving fire agate.