User:Tommi/T2 Assessment

The everlasting and all-encompassing challenge of my (artistic, academic, professional, emotional) life boils down to a perpetual multidimensional tension among different practices, obsessions, principles. Most essentially, every single daily choice poses a threat to my mental health, especially being a curious and enthusiastic person in a world that is full of opportunities but also burning at the same time.

The perfect metaphor to represent this struggle is a scale. Here is where Marina comes into play.

The puzzle of identity

I consider my identity the summation of different elements, a puzzle. Pieces falling into piece or barely fitting together, and in a dynamic tension among all of them.

Our Digital Home

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Threads

Recurring thematic threads

• Metaness
• Knowledge management and interoperability
• Tension of creativity vs organisation
• gossip unlocking
• Metaphors
• Pirate

XXPUB

XXPUB: Extra XPUB, but also XL XPUB.

• FediForum
• Local-First and its meaning in gossip
• 39C3 federated knowledge
• ILoveFS
  • Frieda
  • IAE
• DWeb and DWeb Camp

Learnings and failures

• I ended up being alone for SI28 event
• How to deal with being more acquainted with some technical skills with respect to the rest of the class

The tension → The equilibrium

This is a meta-balance: a balance that reflects about balancing itself. The equilibrium is dynamic, not static.

listening
advanced individual learning
technical solutions
bodging
impulsive intuitions
crafting
making
doing
working
vertical approach
thinking
self-referential

notetaking
collective learning
social practices
useful software
long-term planning
documenting
absorbing
reflecting
researching, brewing
horizontal “mingling”
metathinking
meta

What did not make it into the puzzle (because I made the puzzle before thinking of these):

serious, thoughtful
conceptual, theoretical
creativity

fun, entertaining
practical, crafty
production/organisation

The making of

The making of my T2 assessment is also a meta-assessment (or metassessment of simplicity), because of a combination of two factors.

• In a way, it is how I assess myself. By preparing the assessment presentation I am reflecting on what I am proud of and where I failed, inevitably evaluating myself.
• Most importantly, it is about the making of the assessment

⚖️ Marina the scale

As I kept thinking about the way to best present my reflections over the first two trimester of XPUB, I was looking for a device to represent a constant, precarious, dynamic equilibrium, or better juggling with many different thoughts crowding my head. I started looking for an old-style scale, also in honor of my grandma’s passion for antiques.

I started telling this to all my classmates. In a quiet Saturday afternoon, during a walk with Lea, she brought me to De Majum, an adorable thrift shop in Delfshaven. Not five minutes since I was inside the shop, I found exactly what I needed.

I sent Nonna Gorix this picture, and I called her to ask her the maximum price she would put on this scale. She told me not to pay more than 20€, and that I could negotiate the price down to 15€. Eventually, I managed to buy it for 10€, especially because it did not have any plates. Victory!

I cleaned it and I added some pieces of wood at the bottom to calibrate it, as it was totally off-balance.

The only step left was to find a name for it. I named it Marina as my godmother and former scout chief, as historically she has been my reference point for pondering decisions and finding the right equilibrium, both spiritually or not.

🧩 Making the puzzle

+++TTODO add images!

Inkscape

I first created the shape of the puzzle in Inkscape, taking advantage of [github.com/Neon22/inkscape-jigsaw the inkscape-jigsaw extension], kindly suggested by Michael. I changed the colour of the stroke to red, because it is what the laser cutter interprets as a path to cut.

I wrote the key words in each puzzle piece, in black (what the laser-cutter interprets as path to be engraved) and I converted the text to a path, to avoid potential inconsistencies.

Engraving and laser-cutting

The thickest material the laser cutters at the WdKA Digilab can cut is 6mm. In the WdKA’s shop I could not find anything with that thickness, so I got a 5mm-thick MDF slate of 600×600mm. Big mistake, because MDF contains a loot of glue and it is not possible to cut it with a laser (probably because it would get on fire). After learning this, I bought a 600×600×5mm plywood slate.

I imported the SVG in the software, and the laser-cutter did everything by itself.

I realised that the default settings for plywood (65% power, 100% velocity) of that thickness made the engraving very light, but I wanted it more visible, so I changed the engraving settings to 100% power and 60% velocity.

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Using the leftovers

The final puzzle is 600×400mm, so I had a leftover slate of 600×200mm. I used it to make a promotional banner for the Fediverse I am very proud of.

Meta-procrastination

By documenting this process and writing this very page, I am meta-procrastinating.

Meta-procrastination is to procrastinate by exploring and reflecting on the act of procrastination itself. It is the highest and most poignant form of procrastination, as it is potentially endless, and it self-reproduces.

Alejandro

Alejandro is a Bash script made to quickly and simply parse a Wiki page in a plain standalone HTML, and add some styling to it.

Actually, not particularly quickly: I planned to spend a few minutes working on it, but I ended up procrastinating and refining it for several hours.

Naming

This tool is named Alejandro because it is the title of the song by Lady Gaga I was listening to while I was creating it.

Code

#!/bin/bash

PAGE_TITLE=User:Tommi/T2_Assessment
TITLE='Tommi’s T2 Assessment'
BASE_URL=https://pzwiki.wdka.nl
WIKI_API=$BASE_URL/mw-mediadesign/index.php
PAGE_URL="$WIKI_API?action=render&title=$PAGE_TITLE"
OUTPUT=~/public_html/t2.html
STYLE="@import url('$WIKI_API?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Tommi/T2_Assessment/style.css');"
PAGE=`curl --location $PAGE_URL` # Using curl is better than wget to store the content in stdout. Nevertheless, absolute links to resources must be transformed at a later time.

# The following is a very basic HTML template from which data is read.
CONTENT="<!DOCTYPE HTML><html lang=en><head><title>$TITLE</title><meta charset=UTF-8><style>$STYLE</style></head><body><main><h1>$TITLE</h1><article>$PAGE</article></main></body></html>"

# Saving the HTML content parsed by MediaWiki to a local output file
echo "$CONTENT" > "$OUTPUT"

# This regular expression goes through the output file and prepends the wiki’s BASE_URL to all absolute links
sed -E --in-place 's/("| )\/mw-mediadesign/\1https:\/\/pzwiki.wdka.nl\/mw-mediadesign/g' "$OUTPUT"

Improvements

• Some variables should be passed as arguments, instead of hardcoded
• Some variables should be stored as environment variables, instead of hardcoded
• The HTML content template could be read from a template file

This page was originally generated using Pöuli, and it’s part of PaJamas.