Nina Paley

Dvorak Diary #1: Airport

On a recent trip to Trivandrum, India, I decided to try learning to touch-type in Dvorak (after decades of hunt-and-peck in QWERTY). Here I share some excerpts of my “Dvorak Diary”.

Dubai Airport

December Twenty-Fifth, Two Thousand Fourteen….

The airport here has two levels. Lower is a huge confusing mall like Heathrow; upper is one huge business class lounge with its own gates. Lower is a dystopian capitalist nightmare; powerless citizens oppressed by armed guards are blasted with ‘luxury’ images and stores. The more oppressed, powerless, and confused the human, the more vulnerable to advertising. The violence behind capitalism is apparent at airports. Armed guards at the periphery, armed guards at every step, and at the center: shopping. But the business class lounge is ad-free and store-free. ‘Luxury’ goods aren’t for the rich and powerful, they’re for the disempowered middle class. They are the only way to gain a sense of power where all other power has been stripped away.

I started typing that at the Dubai airport but finished it here on the plane. That’s how slow a typist I am.

More Single Line Art

I am a better line processor than any algorithm we currently have access to. Behold what I turned into a SINGLE LINE by hand:

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Many people think we’re using Mathematica to do the drawings of our Quilt Money. We’re not! I am drawing all this stuff by hand. Theo uses Mathematica to route my drawings that contain T-intersections, but I’m learning to make my drawings single lines without T-intersections by hand, because they route much better that way. Everything below was drawn by me, by hand:

Only a few bits (the seals and part of the border) need to be routed in Mathematica. Everything else I drew as single paths. Which is quite a brain-hurter, lemme tell ya. Here’s a screen capture of me working on this same project last week:

I could do this much more efficiently now, using what I’ve learned since then. Which is good, because the better I get at this, the more I can help someone else create algorithms to automate this kind of work.

And yes, at some point we hope to offer an affordable $100 Quilt. But first I have to get the design right, and then our potential partner has to be able actually produce it without losing money. We’re working on it.

Our quilted money is one of the few things I don’t share source (in this case, vector) files for, because currency isn’t exactly like other culture, as I explain here.

Working in Macromedia Flash 8

Here’s a time-lapse screen-capture of me working in Macromedia Flash 8. This little bit of animation is unlikely to make it into the finished movie, as I later decided on a different approach here. This just shows one aspect of how I use Flash; other work videos to come. Thanks to the Blender Institute for posting this and thinking about maybe possibly developing FLOSS vector animation tools.

Miracles and Wonders

Moses casts down his staff, and it becomes a snake!

Sheep and Goats

For your insomniac counting pleasure:

Was Moses a shepherd or a goatherd? I now have both sheep and goats for Seder-Masochism. The sheep design I made a few years ago; the goat I made this week. I much prefer it to this goat design from 2012 (which was just rehashed from Agni’s mount in Sita Sings the Blues):