There was an article in the BBC recently about how the World Health Organisation has classified gaming addition as a disorder. Symptoms of video game addiction include “impaired control over gaming (frequency, intensity, duration);” “increased priority given to gaming;” and “continuation or escalation of gaming despite negative consequences.” I would add a few additional ones based on personal experience over the last ten days: persistent soreness in your dominant iPhone wrist, an ache in the shoulders, and a dull headache at all times.

So yeah. I went down a rabbithole with a few games over the holiday break and I’m starting to think an intervention is required. As part of my self-prescribed treatment, I decided I’d write a blog post about the games in the hope that getting other people hooked will make me feel less guilty. 🙂

It all started when I read this AskMetafilter post on Boxing Day. Someone was looking for a Bejeweled clone for iOS that had no ads, cool-down periods, or in-app purchases. I’m a Bejeweled fan from way back – I wrote a post 17 years ago about my scoring strategy! – so this question appealed to me. The casual games I’ve been playing for the last couple years are Angry Birds Pop and Panda Pop, which are fun Puzzle Bobble-type clones but riddled with all the negatives mentioned. So when the very first comment mentioned two matchy puzzle games with light RPG elements? I was ALL OVER IT.

The first is 10000000 from Eighty Eight Games, which came out in 2012. I was immediately charmed by its retro 8bit aesthetic. You figure out the game mechanics as you go, and I was quickly engaged with upgrading my character’s gear and working towards the goal of 10000000 points (and “freedom”). It was challenging at first to keep my eyes on both the scrolling dungeon at the top and the puzzle board below. That’s not the only difference with Bejeweled – the most important of which is that you don’t want to make matches willy-nilly as you see them. When you’re facing down an enemy, you need to match swords and staves. When it’s a treasure chest, you need keys. (Of course, sometimes you have to make other matches because there are no other options.) Sometimes you find spells and food that help you out, as well as gold, wood, and stone that can be used to upgrade your gear. I loved this game, and I played it pretty straight through until I finished it about 8 hours later. (Yeah.  Not so “casual,” right?)

The second game that was recommended is You Must Build a Boat, which is actually the sequel to 10000000. (It came out a few years later.) The basic mechanics are the same – you still run through dungeons and match tiles to battle monsters and unlock chests. There are additions though – the most fun of which to me was domesticating some of the monsters to become my crew and then summoning them to my aid with a magical kickass horn whenever I was about to die. I also found the dialogue of the NPCs really funny, like the guy who just says “Hmph” and the seemingly useless garden lady. I stretched this game out over two days before I got to the East Wind, and then I accepted the option to start over on a harder level. I’m going slower this time. It’s still fun and awesome. And there are daily challenges to keep you coming back! Highly recommended.

A few days ago I was telling my friend Peggy about these games – again, in a pathetic attempt to hook other people so I wouldn’t feel like such an obsessed loser – and she in turn told me about her favourite casual game: Twenty by Stephen French. “Oh really?” I said. “Maybe I’ll check it out.” FAMOUS LAST WORDS, PEOPLE. This game is so, so addictive. All you do is drag tiles around to match two of the same number together. When you do, they turn into one tile and increment. Over time though, more rows appear at the bottom of the screen, and if you get to the top the game is over. There’s also a diabolical mechanic where at higher levels some of the blocks are “locked” together so you can’t move them around without first unlocking them. It’s frustrating and brilliant. The goal is to get to a 20 block, but so far my highest is only 18. Oh! and there’s evidently a 2-player mode, but I haven’t checked that out yet. And did I mention you can play it online? Goodbye, productivity.

Now that I’ve exorcised my own demons, it’s time go cold turkey for a while… Wish me luck!

A few folks messaged me on Twitter to ask about my assertion that “round foods are lucky for New Year’s.” All right, all right. I was slightly extrapolating there. There are lots of articles online about NYE food superstitions, and many of them link round or green foods to wealth in the new year. Do they specifically mention pancakes? Not yet. 🙂

One thing that many of the articles mention is the American Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas, greens, and pork for the new year. The most famous preparation of this is Hoppin’ John, which is basically peas (which aren’t really peas anyway, but go with it), bacon, and rice. I grew up in Indiana though, and I never knew about this lucky tradition until a few years back. Northern Indiana’s got lots of Germanic folks and Amish, who don’t go in for such superstitious nonsense, I guess.

That said – if there’s one thing I love, it’s a food-based holiday occasion. (Remember when we made a haggis? And a turducken? And a giant Tim Tam? Good times.) So as soon as I heard about this tradition, I was all in. My go-to recipe for the last few years has been this: Hearty One-Pot Black-Eyed Pea Stew With Kale and Andouille Recipe. This is so, so tasty, and it’s not very hard to make* either. (You don’t need to soak the peas or use a pressure cooker or anything like that.) This year I even upped the ante by making my own chicken stock earlier in the day!

Here’s what it ended up looking like. I highly recommend you bookmark this one for next New Year’s Day!

* I’ve never been able to find andouille in Sydney, so I just get whatever smoked pork sausage I can find. This year it was a very nice smoked chorizo! I also leave out the green pepper, as the Snook doesn’t care for it.

We got a Google Home earlier this year just prior to the Aussie public launch (one of the perks of being married to a Googler), and I’ll admit I was skeptical of its usefulness. I mean, I’ve had Siri on my phone for years, but I rarely use it and it always feels more frustrating than helpful. I also saw some tech talks earlier this year on building skills for the Amazon Alexa, and I came away with the impression that “intelligent assistants” are basically just spoken command line interfaces. Where’s the fun in that?

Well, six months later I’m eating my words. The Google Home is very, very useful, to the point where we’ve just bought a Mini as well. (It moves between my office and our bedroom – yes, really! I’ll explain why in a bit.) The Google Assistant seems to do natural language parsing very well, and I’ve often been surprised and delighted with its responses to my test questions.  Since I know a lot of folks got them for Christmas, I thought I’d blog some of the stuff we’ve discovered while using it. This isn’t the crap they show in the commercials; it’s the real stuff we use it for pretty much every single day.

Cooking

Our Home sits in the center of the house on the kitchen counter. We cook a lot, and we immediately found lots of helpful things it can do.

• “Hey Google, set a timer for X minutes.”  Handy!
• “Hey Google, how much time’s left on that timer?“
• “Hey Google, set a timer called X for Y minutes.”
• “Hey Google, cancel timer.”
• “Hey Google, what’s 375 Fahrenheit in Celsius?”  LIFE-CHANGING.
• “Hey Google, what’s 14 ounces in grams?”

There’s also a built-in shopping list that we’ve just started experimenting with. Originally your list was held in Google Keep, which annoyed me. Now it lives in a standalone thing called Google Shopping List, which isn’t too bad. You can view it on the web or in the Assistant app, and you can tick things off once you’ve bought them.

• “Hey Google, add X to my shopping list.”
• “Hey Google, what’s on my shopping list?”

The Snook is (right at this very moment!) experimenting with using it for recipe reading. It’s a little clunky, and personally I find while cooking I prefer to look at written ingredients. (We keep an iPad on the counter for this purpose.) He keeps missing quantities or steps and having to ask it to repeat itself. I somehow doubt this use case will make it into our workflow… (More info and commands here.)

• “Hey Google, find me an X recipe.”
• “Hey Google, prepare ingredients.”

Playing Media

The Home itself is a pretty decent speaker. (I’m not an audiophile though, so your mileage may vary. Even I can tell the Mini doesn’t sound nearly as good.) We play music on it a lot. My default music option is set up for Spotify so we mostly use that, though the Snook occasionally plays stuff on Google Play Music too. Sometimes navigating a playlist based on a mental model is tricky, so occasionally I’ll start it playing and then open up the app on my laptop or phone to fine-tune the choice.

• “Hey Google, play Discover Weekly on Spotify.”
• “Hey Google, shuffle my library on Spotify.”

I discovered one day that you can also play podcasts on it. The default Google support is pretty crappy though, and you can mostly just play the current episode. HOWEVER, Spotify added support for podcasts this year and that actually works much better for playing back episodes.

• “Hey Google, play X podcast episode Y on Spotify.”

We also listen to the radio on it!

• “Hey Google, listen to WSFM on the radio.”

When we got the Mini, we discovered that you can create a speaker group for multi-room playback. Now we can have the same thing playing on both devices simply by tacking “…on Home Speakers” to the request!

Since we have a Chromecast, we can use the Google Home to turn the TV on and off. Granted, this doesn’t sound super useful since a lot of the time you then have to use a remote to switch the input, but it’s great when you’re headed to bed and realise you left the TV on.

• “Hey Google, turn off the TV.”

We watch a lot of stuff on Netflix, and it’s super easy to start something there…

• “Hey Google, play Stranger Things on Netflix.”

I recently got an audiobook from Audible and wanted to play it on the Mini. I ran into a brick wall. Because Amazon and Google are at war, there’s no integration between the two. However, there is a way around it! You can connect to a Home or Mini as a Bluetooth speaker and then just play your audiobook from your device. You can’t control it via voice, but at least you can play it.

Getting Info

We ask about the weather a lot. The cool thing is you can set your location in the Home app, so it gives you the forecast for where you are.

• “Hey Google, what’s the weather like today?”
• “Hey Google, is it going to rain today?”

One day I mused to the Snook, “It would be really cool if the Home could tell me when the next bus is coming.” He said, “Maybe it can!” So I asked it. And it turns out that it can give you real time public transport info! (Well, in cities like Sydney where Maps has that info integrated.)

• “Hey Google, when’s the next bus to Pyrmont?”

We also ask it about random trivia quite a lot. It usually gives us the answer. Recent questions:

• “Hey Google, how old is Marcia Hines?”
• “Hey Google, where is Hewlett Packard based?”
• “Hey Google, what was the name of the computer in Electric Dreams?”

IFTTT Integrations

There’s some stuff Google Home can’t do, but fortunately there are IFTTT (If This Then That) Integrations to pick up the slack. We’ve set up a couple of them. The first is to add a “to do list” item to Todoist, the shared app we use.

• “Hey Google, add a task for Kris.”

Note: We learned when testing this that the Home <-> IFTTT connection doesn’t recognise multiple users based on our voices (as the built-in Google Home functionality does). That’s why we had to add in our names. The command with my name adds it to my To Do list, and the Snook’s adds to his.

For fun, we added a way to verbally poke each other:

• “Hey Google, poke Kristy.”

The Home cannot yet send SMSes. IFTTT has notifications though, which you can use as a sort of workaround. When the Snook says the phrase above, I get a notification on my phone that says “The Snook is poking you!”

Note: Because we want the notification to come to my phone, I had to set up the “Poke Kristy” applet on my IFTTT account rather than the Snook’s. (He has a “Poke Rodd” one likewise set up on his account.) Also, Google Home doesn’t reliably recognise the pronunciation of “Kristy,” so we had to spell it as “Christie” when defining the phrase. 😐

I also discovered you can use Google Home to tweet:

• “Hey Google, tweet ‘Guess who got a Google home mini today?’”

Again, the Home <-> IFTTT integration doesn’t recognise multiple voices, which means the Snook (or anyone else in the house) would be able to tweet on my account via this method. No thank you! I removed it right after. (I was also annoyed that it didn’t use proper punctuation.)

Other Fun Stuff

I was working from home one day when I realised the Mini has a Micro-USB plug, and it works just fine powered off a MacAir. I happily sent the Snook a Hangouts message about this. Five seconds later I jumped when the Mini chimed and the Snook’s voice rang out, “Get back to work!” 😂

• “Hey Google, broadcast ‘Get back to work!’”

The Google Home app has a way of defining shortcuts, which can help you by mapping complicated requests into much shorter and more memorable phrases. Some of the ones we’ve set up:

• “Hey Google, let’s dance!” (plays my “Chair Dancing” playlist on Spotify)
• “Hey Google, night night!” (plays my “Sleep” playlist on Spotify)
• “Hey Google, it’s country music time!” (plays “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on Spotify)

We got the Google Mini for our bedroom because we’ve often found ourselves wanting to ask about the weather or transport while getting ready in the morning. The other night I had a brainwave though while brushing my teeth:

• “Hey Google, play white noise.”

To my delight, it did! Turns out there’s a whole range of relaxation sounds. Unfortunately I don’t like the white noise it provides as well as the app I’ve been using on my iPhone. I also haven’t worked out yet whether the Home sounds will play all night. (The Support page indicates they’ll only play for an hour, but adding “… for 8 hours” doesn’t throw an error. I’ll have to try it and report back.)

And this is just silly, but in the Google Home app, you can change your name.

• “Hey Google, what’s my name?”

It’s “Kris the Amazing,” in case you’re curious. 😜

Annoyances

Not everything is amazing. There’s still a lot of stuff that this thing can’t do. That would be okay, but the marketing and Support pages often imply that you can! That’s really frustrating. For instance, you can change Google Assistant to a male voice… but only in the US. Sorry, Aussies. No virtual dude for you!

Right now the Google Home can’t SMS or make calls. That’s really annoying. Of course, we don’t have Google Voice in Australia either so it’s hardly surprising. I thought I’d be able to work around it with IFTTT’s SMS service, but non-Americans only get 10 messages a month for free. (I couldn’t actually get it to work either, which is why we had to use the notifications service for the “Poke” applet mentioned above.)

On a humorous note, the Home doesn’t always interpret my American accent correctly. It’s pretty good, but it still messes up every now and then. (Rodd reckons if we set it to the US voice, it might be better.) In the “My Activity” section of the Google Home app, you can see your utterances along with its interpretation. Some of the ones it’s gotten wrong recently:

• “Hey Google, listen to Beethoven codepipeline.” (This was “listen to Greater than Code podcast.”)
• “Hey Google, add a task for Kris Auto cat medicine.” (This was “order cat medicine.”)
• “Hey Google, talk synonyms.” (This was “poke Snookums.”)

People are freaked out about the privacy implications of having a recording device in your home all the time. I get that. Given my living situation – partner is a Googler who has the Assistant turned on on his phone anyway – I’m less worried about it. Anything they want to know about us, they probably already do. That said, we’ve turned on sound feedback in the Accessibility settings so the device makes a chime whenever it’s listening. And here’s the thing – sometimes it goes off when nobody’s said the magic phrase. Occasionally we’ve said something vaguely similar to “Hey Google,” but sometimes there’s nobody speaking at all. It’s a little creepy. I’m not sure why it happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another major source of annoyance for me are the apps you use to control the Home and Mini devices. I have an iPhone. There are actually two iOS apps – the Google Home app, and the Google Assistant app. WHY? Why not just one? Some functionality is duplicated between them. Sometimes you click a link in one, and it hands off to the other. Sometimes the same information is accessed via two entirely different UI controls. (For example, to see “My Activity” in Google Home, you click the hamburger button to open the panel on the left. The same info is found in Google Assistant by clicking the random blue tray icon in the upper right, then the three dots icon, at which point a panel pops up from the bottom of the screen. WHY?!)

What’s even more frustrating is that some functionality is available in the Android version of the apps that isn’t in the iOS one yet. For example, shared calendars. The Support page says that shared calendars are supported. No caveats (beyond G Suite calendars, but whatever). The Snook and I have a Shared Google Calendar where we put things like his on-call schedule, the meal plan for the week, and my work travel. I wanted to enable this so I could ask Google Home questions about it. Yet the setting to Add a Shared Calendar was just NOT THERE in my Google Home app. After tearing my hair out, I had the Snook set up an account for me on a spare Android phone he has. And guess what? There it is. I was able to enable it there. GAHHH.

I get that it’s hard to sync functionality across both phone platforms. That’s fine. Why not just, you know, MENTION THAT on the Support page? Just a little asterisk saying, “Hey, iOS doesn’t have this yet, but it’s coming. Try Android in the meantime.” Ugh.

Or better yet – have a web app for doing this stuff! You’re required to have phone or tablet to configure the Home and Mini. WHY? Sure, I get it when it comes to aspects of physical devices. But when I’m just enabling permissions on some aspect of my Google account – which lives in the Cloud – why isn’t that just part of the settings I can access via the web?

In summary

Like I said, I’ve been surprised how much we’ve used these devices. I thought the Home would just be a silly novelty (like the Bluetooth lightbulb I bought at Costco). But instead it’s genuinely useful, and I’ve found myself occasionally delighted by the responses it’s given to my random queries. I’ve even found myself wanting to say “thank you” to an inanimate speaker!

There are still limitations though, and it’s clear that the rush to ship (driven by the intelligent assistant land grab happening between Google, Amazon, and Apple) has resulted in a sometimes inconsistent and confusing user experience. I hope it’ll get better.

There are plenty of things these devices can do that I haven’t mentioned. I’ve just limited myself to the things we mainly use ours for. If you’ve got one, is there some great use case I’m missing? Let me know in the comments!

A few weeks back I discovered freesewing.org – “an open source platform for made-to-measure sewing patterns.” The founder Joost De Cock loves sewing and programming, and he combined them in this amazing platform that allows you to upload your measurements and then generate a custom sewing pattern PDF exactly to your size. Oh, and everything is free, and he transfers all donations to charity. How could I not fall in love with that? ❤️

Most of the patterns would be considered menswear. That said, I love that Joost makes a point of not enforcing a gender binary anywhere. The Measurement docs, for instance, have an option for breasts or no breasts. Boobs make a difference to the shape of a garment, but your gender identity doesn’t. It’s a nice touch.

As luck would have it, when we were visiting my Mom’s fabric shop in the US back in August, the Snook asked if I’d make him a new shirt. He really liked this repro vintage cotton, and Mom insisted that we take it. I warned him that quilting cotton could be a bit heavy for a man’s shirt, but I was willing to try. I’d made him several shirts before using Colette’s Negroni pattern, but I felt ready to try something a bit more complex. When I saw the Simon Shirt on freesewing, I knew it was the one.

After signing up for the site, I had to create a “model” and upload all the required measurements. That was fun. Then I was able to generate a new draft Simon pattern from it. There are a ton of options. We went with the Classic theme with a baseball hem, regular yoke, extra top button, cut-on classic button placket, cut-on French style buttonhole placket, and rounded barrel cuffs. I printed out my PDF, stuck all the pages together, and got going.

I spent a lot of time on cutting. I hadn’t realised until the Snook pointed it out that the fabric is actually directional, so I needed to make sure everything was going the right way. I cut it so that the “vines” were running vertically on the body, back and sleeves; and they ran horizontally on the collar, collarstand, yoke, and cuffs. I spent way too long trying to get the pattern to match up exactly across the two fronts, not realising that because my button placket was cut-on, the point I was using for reference was going to be folded under anyway. 🙃 So there’s my first tip: If you’re using the cut-on plackets, fold your pattern pieces as if they’re the fabric so you know exactly where things need to line up. Don’t assume you can tell just from the lines.

Next I had to sew the cuffs and the collar together. The collar stand is where I ran into difficulty, but I didn’t realise it until way later. I failed to recognise that it’s not symmetrical – the end with the buttonhole is longer than the end with the button. When you sew the collar to it, you’re meant to center the collar over the notches along the bottom edge. I missed this completely and centered my collar along the length of the collar stand, which meant it was ever-so-slightly offset from where it should be. And because it’s asymmetrical, that means you need to make sure you sew it all together so that the buttonhole is on the correct side to line up with the left body front. This all came out when I was attaching the collar towards the end of the process, and I ended up pulling it all apart and starting over. So my advice for the collar would be: Keep track of which piece is the collar and which is the undercollar. When the collar is facing up, it should be attached to the collar stand so that the buttonhole is on the right. Make sure you center the collar over the collar stand notches. (It’ll look slightly off-center.) 

The body construction was fairly straightforward. It has diamond darts on the back, which was new for me in a men’s garment. This is a very fitted shirt. (By contrast, the Negroni is fairly roomy in the back and actually has two pleats under the yoke.) There’s no interfacing along the cut-on button plackets, which I liked, just a series of folds. The instructions have you use the “burrito method” for the yoke construction, which I love. It’s always so magical to turn that burrito right-side out and suddenly have a nice neat shirt!

     

The sleeve placket construction was new to me. Colette uses a single piece for it, but this one has separate pieces for the overlap and underlap. I actually think this version looks better than my Negroni attempts, but it does result in two very small unfinished edges visible on the inside of the sleeve. (I was worried I’d somehow missed a step so I messaged Joost about it, but he confirmed that it’s intentional and shouldn’t be a problem.) The third photo here shows it…

           

Then it was time to sew in the sleeves… and I ran into trouble. I had failed to notice that my armholes were a rather peculiar shape. The top of the yoke and the body fronts were exaggeratedly wide in a way I hadn’t seen before. I figured it would all come together in the end and proceeded to sew in a sleeve. When I had the Snook try it on, it stuck out in a point like a military epaulette. So I unpicked it and looked at the pattern again, and I compared it to other shirts as well as other patterns. It was definitely not right. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to bite the bullet and just lop off the pointy bit. Sewing in the sleeve was easier then, and it didn’t result in a pokey-outtey point.

     

My solution was drastic, and it didn’t fix the issue that the armhole was still more scooped out than necessary. Once I had the sleeve in, I could see that there’s still some weirdness around the armpit. I can live with it. After poking around the Freesewing docs, I’m guessing that one of our measurements around the shoulder area was probably incorrect. The ratio of top of shoulder to back width is probably the culprit. I also discovered that Freesewing helpfully provides a “comparison” preview of your pattern so you can identify these issues before you cut out your fabric. In my case, you can tell immediately that there’s something off about the armholes and shoulder. If I’d seen this before cutting, I would’ve double-checked my measurements and fixed it then. So the next tip: Use the Draft Comparison Preview to check whether any of your pieces look odd. If they do, chances are you had something wonky in your measurements and you should fix it before you cut out your fabric.

 

Oh, and I won’t even go into detail on my issues with creating flat-felled seams. That’s nothing to do with the pattern or the instructions; that’s just my own lack of practice with them. They look fine from the outside, but the inside – especially around the top of the sleeve caps – is a bit bodgy. I’m cool with that. I’ll get better the more I do.

As I headed into the home stretch, I came up against that baseball hem. Hm. Hemming something with such exaggerated curves was not easy. The pattern indicates that I’ve got 3cm for them hem, which should be folded up at 1.5cm twice. That was just not gonna happen, not without making some cuts on the curves that I didn’t feel comfortable doing. So I decided to go with a skinnier hem (1cm folded twice), which was still tricky but slightly easier. It’s still a bit bodgy over the very curvy bits, but it’s not too bad.

The final step was to sew the buttonholes – all 13 of them! I was very happy that my faithful old Janome has a pretty decent automatic buttonholing foot. I bought medium cream buttons for the body and cuffs, and a couple teesy ones for the wrist opening plackets. Final tip: Make sure you sew the buttonholes on the correct (top) side of the cuffs, otherwise you’ll have to unpick everything and flip them around (like I did). 🙄 Then it was just sewing on all those matching buttons… And here’s the finished result!

So as you may have gathered from my “favourite tweets” post of late, I had kind of a weird thing happen. One of my tweets went viral for the first time ever.

It all started when a friend from Singapore shared a link on Facebook to this blog post. It’s about a recent controversy where the CEO of  Make magazine accused a Chinese maker named Naomi Wu of being “fake.” He endorsed an anonymous and sexist rumour that she was merely a front for a group. He’s since apologised, but the damage was done and Naomi is seeing the fallout amongst sponsors and advertisers. The blog post is an attempt to objectively talk about some of the biases at play in the community that led to this situation.

In the comments — and I know, you should never read comments — I read this one from some MRA activist defending Dougherty and smearing Wu. Part of it reads:

4) From Make’s own numbers, 80% of their audience are men. The “lack of diversity” that is complained about here, which we often hear about in STEM in general, is seen as axiomatic, despite now several decades of gender equal policy. Women do not seem as interested, even if nothing is stopping them from being interested. This is the myopic ideology of diversity uber alles, which ignores factual realities of the kind that got James Damore fired from Google.

No. Just… no. Plenty of women are interested in engineering and fabrication and creating cool stuff, just as plenty of them are interested in technology and programming. They’re just not interested in putting up with the techbro bullshit that goes along with a lot of that. And 80%? In what universe? Only going by the narrowest possible definition of “maker.” What about the millions of women (and non-cis men and non-binary folks) sewing and knitting and embroidering and crocheting and cooking? Why don’t they count too?

I actually attended a panel that Dougherty was on during Maker Faire Singapore back in July. It was a small event just aimed at educators primarily, but they had an open Q&A at the end. I couldn’t resist directing a question at Dougherty. I said that I was personally uncomfortable claiming the term “maker,” because I came from a long line of women crafters. Why did he feel the need to come up with a new name for just doing what they’ve been doing for generations? To me, I said, it felt gendered, a way for men to distance themselves from “girly” pursuits. He smiled politely and answered that the “maker” umbrella was very large, and that knitters and sewers and everyone else I’d mentioned were all official makers too. He tried to spin it as inclusivity. But I wasn’t asking to be admitted to his club; I was trying to get him to admit why he didn’t want to be part of mine. He was very nice though. We connected on LinkedIn afterwards, where I messaged him about my motivations in asking the question. He sent a short response that he appreciated where I wanted to go with the question and wished me luck.

So, anyway. I read that stupid comment on Sunday morning and it made me see red. So I dashed off an annoyed tweet, as I’ve done any number of times, and then got to work on my latest sewing project. The tweet got a couple responses from friends, and I noticed throughout the day that more and more notifications started coming through. By 5pm I’d hit 1000 likes, more than I’d ever gotten before. By the time I went to bed, it had topped 2000 and seemed to be picking up steam. I noticed happily that Ysolda Teague (a big name in the knitting world) had retweeted it.

I woke up Monday morning to 10K+ likes and 440 unread Twitter replies. Some sort of critical mass had been reached and it just kept going and going. Several people thought they were being helpful by tagging Adam Savage, asking him to retweet or send a reply. By this point I’d also had a handful of responses from trolls though, and I started to get worried what would happen if it got more visibility. (Sadly, this is a reality of being a woman on the Internet.)

By Monday afternoon it was over 20K likes and 5K retweets. Cory Doctorow retweeted it, which is the closest I’ve ever gotten to Boing Boing. I was amused to see Andy Richter had retweeted it too. (Quoth the Snook: “Are you sure it wasn’t one of his brothers?” 😂) Twitter Analytics told me that it had had over 1M impressions (aka views). I had several hundred new followers. A few of my friends who had replied early were getting tagged in heaps of replies as people read down the thread and chimed in. (Sorry Jane and Lindsay!)

Many, many folks helpfully told me about Jacquard looms and how textiles had inspired programming. Yes, I KNOW. I pointed them to the various talks I’ve done that actually cover that. Many other folks expressed their support for including textile arts and traditional crafts under the “maker” umbrella, pointing out that their local makerspace has a sewing machine or proudly proclaiming that “knitters and quilters are makers too.” (Again, not really what I was going for, but I appreciate the sentiment.) A few folks connected the dots to the Make controversy and weighed in on that topic. Mostly it was hundreds of people saying, “Yes, this. Language matters.” in various forms. It turns out that a lot of us suspect the “maker” label only became popular as a way to market to men.

There were only a handful of people who responded negatively – I’d say less than 25 overall. One guy thought I was clearly just jealous of men who programmed and were DISRUPTING THE WORLD with their COOL APPS and stuff. (He stopped responding when I pointed out I’d also been working in tech for 20 years.) Others were insistent that making and crafting were different, but none of them agreed on what the difference was. Making involves ENGINEERING and TECH, you see. Or crafting involves LOVE. Or it had something to with a level of craftsmanship. Maybe we should look up the definition from William Morris? And why was I trying to foment some sort of gender war anyway? Couldn’t we just embrace both terms, separate but equal? One guy insisted over and over that we needed both terms because how else would people know to direct their enquiries to him (a maker) or his wife (a crafter)? 🙄

Replies have continued to trickle in over the past two days. One of my favourites came from David New, the son of noted knitter Debbie New:

72 hours after the original post, things seem to finally be getting back to normal. Activity has died down enough that my mentions on Twitter are usable again. I’ve picked up about 800 new followers so far. The tweet has been viewed more than 1.7M times, liked 28K times, received 500 replies, and been retweeted 8500 times. I’ve been invited to appear on a podcast about the topic in a few months. That’s all pretty cool! A lot of folks have sent me lovely comments about my knitting talk videos, and I especially liked when crafters would send me photos of their own projects. The whole thing’s been quite a ride!

Earlier this year, Colette announced that they’d revamped their excellent free Sorbetto pattern. I’ve made five different tops using the old version – Dr. Who tank, Wonder Woman tank, Lucky Cats tank, Red Flowers tank, and Liberty blouse – so I was curious to see what had changed. The new one uses a different block (basically: the default body it’s designed for), and they also revised the size range to go a lot higher.

This is a quick project, and I had it finished within an afternoon. I sewed up Version 3 using some mystery fabric I got when my friend Jody’s Mum sold off her stash. (It might be a blend? It doesn’t get very wrinkly, which is nice.) I used some premade navy bias tape to finish the neckline on the inside. I cut a straight 18 based on measurements, but I think I might blend to a smaller body size next time as it’s quite roomy around the midsection. The pleat down the front is wider than on the old one. I’ve got a little tightness across the back of the shoulders, which I suspect means I might need to do a broad back adjustment on the next one.

Still – a quick project that resulted in a very wearable blouse for summer!

A primer on Korean fermented sauces—plus, a look inside a master jang maker’s studio

Today I learned that the Korean government actually designates people as “Korean Food Grand Masters.” Wow. 😮

Wow. 😳

Me to the Snook just now: “You need to up your game!”

As I’ve done for several years running now, I’ll be raising money this “Frocktober” for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. I’ll be wearing a different dress every day of the month, with over half of them made by me personally. Last year‘s total was $1481.04, so this year I’m aiming to top $1500. If you’d like to help, my fundraising page for 2017 is here: https://frocktober2017.everydayhero.com/au/kristine.

This year I’m offering a special perk: for the first three folks who donate $100+, I will personally teach you to sew your own dress (or something else if you’re not a dress wearer)! I’m not going to do it for you, but I’ll walk you through choosing a pattern, picking out fabric and supplies, and every step of the sewing process. If you’re not in Sydney, this might have to be a combination of email and video chat, but we’ll make it work. 😄

Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to give the locknote at DDD Perth 2017. DDD stands for “Developer! Developer! Developer!,” and it’s a community-run conference that happens in locations around the world. The goal is to put on an event that anyone can attend, so it’s held on a Saturday and the cost is just $50. The Perth event attracted 330+ attendees and featured 19 speakers across three tracks.

I actually got to Perth a few days early so I could attend some usergroups and meet with some local contacts. I went to the Fenders meetup as well as the launch of the new Junior Dev Perth group. The latter was incredible – the room was full of 90 energetic attendees, most of whom were just starting out in their careers. Well done to LJ and the JuniorDev team for this much-needed westward expansion!

Then it was time for DDD Perth! The speaker/sponsor/volunteer drinks were held Friday night at the rooftop bar of The Reveley. It was fun but loud.

The day of the conference started out really foggy, oddly. Apparently that’s a thing that happens in Perth every now and then?! The morning keynote was Gojko Adzic, straight from YOW! Singapore. He talked about some of the coming challenges for software quality posed by things like the cloud, AI and biometrics – including amusing anecdotes like the one about the DMV system brought down by a set of twins.

The talks throughout the day were all excellent. My friend Nathan Jones gave a talk called “Death by Good Intentions” that talked about some of the common mistakes and pitfalls he’s seen teams fall into over the course of his career. I especially liked his point about choosing mature technology like PHP over perpetually chasing shiny new things.

My friend Sam Ritchie also gave an informative, pun-tastic talk called “Flying Solo – lifehack your way to a pants-optional workplace”. It was all about how to quit your job and start your own company. My favourite part was the slide with an actual flowchart to answer the question: “Should you put on pants today?”

I was lucky to get to meet Patima Tantiprasut earlier this year on a visit (and then again when she came to Sydney with Localhost). She gave a great short talk called “Web, Wellness and Getting Sh*t Done”, all about strategies you can use to prevent mental burnout. Really welcome advice! (Not to mention a nice tie-in to my own talk later in the day…)

After lunch I saw a few more excellent talks, but to be honest I was more than a little preoccupied with my own looming locknote! I especially liked Donna Edwards’ talk on hiring and retention for diversity, and Christian Prieto’s entertaining presentation on the history and programming challenges of the Atari 2600.

And then it was time!

My talk was called “The Campsite Rule – Leaving the Tech Industry Better than We Found It”. The general idea was that a lot of the time, the tech industry feels like a dumpster fire. The temptation to walk away is ever present (especially when shit like this happens). It leads to a lot of us burning out. One of the things that’s been keeping me motivated and engaged is recent years is mentoring, and I wanted to convince the experienced devs in the room to get more involved with guiding the next generation. I included as much practical advice as I could for both prospective mentees and mentors. Yeah, it got a little ranty at times. (There may have even been an F-bomb in there.) But everyone seemed to take it in the right spirit, and I was gratified by how many folks sent me wonderful tweets or wrote blog posts saying how inspiring they found it.

Some photos from the conference Flickr page:

I had to laugh at that stretch of them. I’m a fairly, uh, expressive speaker, I guess you could say. 😂

My slides are up on Slideshare if you want to take a look, and I’ll share the video when it becomes available. Some of the images are from our recent trip to Yellowstone; some are from Unsplash; and some are from WOCinTech Chat.

Thank you again to the DDD Perth organisers for inviting me to participate in this wonderful event! It was my first ever keynote, and there were many times over the preceding months where I kicked myself for agreeing to do it. (I’m a procrastinator with a tendency towards constant guilty thoughts, so there was some stress.) I’m so happy I did it though! And I can’t say enough about the tireless volunteers and organisers, and how great a job they did putting this event together. If you ever get a chance to attend or speak at a DDD in the future, you definitely should.