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Works Entirely Too Well

And by this I mean it works as well as any dip pen I’ve ever played with, which is to say not great (but it’s fun at least).

We even wrote and sealed letters, fancy!

Turns out most ballpoint pens’ tip & ink reservoir fit perfectly inside a turkey feather. So the kids will be able to rock their turkey pen at school.

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Massive Stove

I almost didn’t run this one, it ended up being my magnum opus. It took ~180 hours and 8 pens. Unfortunately, even though I have strict protocols for marking pens which aren’t full, I had it go over the week end with one that had been used before and ran blank for a bit. It’s ok, these monster plots come with imperfections.

The detail is great, and the AI coded inset fill algorithm really shines. It’s the first time I find a non living subject that projects a compelling presence in the room. But maybe that’s only because I’m a sucker for old stoves.

I found the image in a 1902 edition of the Sears catalog where they sold it for $14.95. I consider it an expression of culture, from a time when anything we created came with ornaments. It shines all the more in a modern building with very clean and sanitized architecture.

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Freedom & Unity

I have a penchant for Vermont seals & coats of arm, and I found some good ones in some old books. I really like turning old engravings into large plots, these look great in person.

The new recursive inset fill algorithm is incredible and making me want to revisit previously hatched plots.

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Plots

I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.

I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.

I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.

Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.

A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.