For starters, I think all diets are a crock. You can call them systems, or lifestyles, or whatever you want. But if you’re cutting out entire swaths of food groups (barring a medical issue or political thing), or living off vitamin enriched water, guess what? Its still just a diet. Plus I just can’t take anything seriously that says things like “You can totally eat all the meat, but apples are kind of evil.” Um…what? No. I like apples. Apples are amazing. Shut up.

Second, I get cagey when ppl start rambling off about diets, because it has taken me most of my adult life to be good with who I am and what I eat. When I was around 8, I was put on my first diet. What were you doing when you were 8? Probably not counting calories. Probably not cultivating a hatred of your own body because all of a sudden there was something “wrong” with you. Probably not listening to your doctor say things like “Don’t people make fun of you, it would be easier if you were just thinner.” Yep. Thanks for that one doc.

Third, I’ve had enough of diet culture. When my Mom became diabetic (it runs in my family, don’t even get me started on people’s assumptions about diabetes) she had to go to diabetic school, and I went along with her. I actually learned a lot about food, nutrition, and how things work together. But despite that knowledge, I still spent a good chunk of my adult life running the diet gauntlet. Because I still had that over-riding thought that losing weight would make everything better. That if I could radically change my body, suddenly all my problems would start going away.

Well, a few years ago I had a rather bad brain patch. And once again, I got back on my little loop and said “Ok! I’ll try and loose weight that will make it better.” Instead it made my hostile feelings towards myself even worse. Things were not good. We’ll leave it at that.

Then one day I started cycling with no goals of weight loss in mind at all. I cycled to just enjoy cycling. It was incredibly freeing, and I began to unpack my food and body issues.

My unpacking time lead me to this: Bodies are really complicated and individual things. They are not simple in and out machines. I had been treating my body like a machine. When people post diet and food advice, I feel they are making an assumption that all bodies are the same, and that if it makes them feel great, then obviously its going to make me feel great. But it doesn’t work that way because my body is different than yours. Its how one person can eat well and still end up with health issues, and someone else can eat big macs and nothing really goes wrong. Its how some chart tells me I’m overweight and at risk for whatever, but my doctor says my numbers are so good I’m 10 million miles away from any issues at all.

Finally I think restrictive eating is damaging. I feel that unless you’re working with your doctor to nail down a specific issue, or you are hard core training for some athletic competition, that subtractive or restrictive eating, is more unhealthy than healthy. Cutting out entire food groups, or vilifying them is still just a diet trick. I have a feeling that every food group is probably villified in some diet, somewhere. This is an industry that makes billions of dollars a year off such tactics. Plus being mentally on guard all the time about food is exhausting. It takes its toll on you (I also wish medical conditions where you had to do this, didn’t exist, but they do, and that sucks).

To wrap it up, today I have a good relationship with food. Today I am a healthy, active lady. I love cycling, I swim, I enjoy lifting heavy things. I can honestly say that I like myself, and my body, and all the awesome things I can do with it. Today, I have a good sense of self image, and a good bead on what my body is telling me day in and day out.

It took a really long time to get here, and I think I’ll stay. So you’ll pardon me if I’m not really enthused about your diet advice.

And on that note, today seems like a good day to bake muffins and go for a walk. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some apples to peel.

I didn’t have any hard set plans, besides some already set hiking dates, but figured its a small country, with lots of history, and its easy to get around.

Instead I ended up with a wicked sinus infection that couch bound me (including antibiotics) for 7 days out of 14. Combine that with jet lag, fevers, and sleep deprivation, and let’s just say it was not a good scene. I literally saw Dingle, and Dublin, and nothing else but my gracious host’s couch.

Still I got some good shots of hiking the edge of Europe (it really was like the end of the world), which I’ll share below. Despite being so friggin’ sick for most of it, I am glad I got to do this hike and cliff walk.

However, first, here are some short noted things:

• Ireland is fucking windy. 30km/hr is normal…In the city. Bring gear. I had my wind resistant cycling jacket. But seriously. It was 50km/hr sometimes. It was a god damn primal force. Don’t look at the temperature, look at the wind. No matter which way it blows its coming off the sea, so it’s likely going to be a cold wind.
• Everyone will assume you’re American at first.
• The Irish population is kind of stuck on babies.
• Irish over the counter drugs lack bite for some reason. I don’t know what it is, but it just ain’t as good as home. Bring your own DayQuill, Advil, everything.
• Doctors aren’t free. Nope.
• Dublin is tiny, you can walk everywhere. The river is lovely. Grafton street is meh, avoid the Guinness Storehouse and instead go graffiti hunting and spend time in its excellent parks (when it’s not raining or windy). There’s a pub on every corner and Guinness does taste better there.

Now…pictures:

Decent into Slea Head

Cliff Walking near Ballydavid

River and marsh approaching Brandon

Pretty streets in Dingle

And the rest of my photos can be found on this flickr set.

Will I return to ireland? I’m not sure. I realize my time there was marred by sickness. Which makes me very bias. But I am rather unsatisfied with my experience upon coming home (didn’t get to go to Tara, Wicklow, or The Causeway, hardly went out in the evenings). So we’ll see.

What became of it, is both a game you can play on its own, or as an interactive installation that you can operate with two people. It wasn’t necessarily intended to be a two person player type thing, but in the end, it became a really fun and well received, and discussed experiment. I don’t want to say too much about the game design itself, because I feel Sagan can speak much better too its development and style in her post-mordem (which i will link too once live), but I can say that Sagan is pretty much super woman, and that at its core Long Time Coming is a conversation orientated game, where the spots of stabbing or throwing, are metaphorical.

Also, I feel like we unlocked an artistic achievement of sorts by having cops show up at one of our setups (knives, y’know).

So how do you make a knife throwing interface? Well I figured I’d take a tip from the wearables community and try making something that worked in physical layers.

The knife board operates like a soft switch button. It is a sandwich made of two layers of conductive material (tinfoil) separated by pieces of yoga matt foam (insulator). With a normal soft switch, you would cut holes in the foam, so that when pressed, the two layers would touch, completing the circuit and firing off a keyboard press.

In the case of the knife board, the edges of the throwing knife are conductive. So rather than pressing the two conductive layers together, the knife edge acts as a bridge between the two layers. This is effective because if you hit the board, it does nothing, you actually have to have something pierce it to work.

The output is simple alligator clips and speaker wire, wired to a makey makey with a blue tooth module. Bluetooth proved to be the best option, because its easy to pair to different machines, operates well at many distances, and gets rid of possible tripping hazards like cables and wires.

The downside to this, is that the board will eventually get destroyed after a couple of uses, but its a good base to start building a better contact based interface from, and contact was somewhat more reliable, and a lot easier to get up and going than various range sensors. All in all, the board took less than 3 days from proof of concept to completion, with almost zero coding involved. Plus its fun, hardy, and tactile.

In any case, here’s the past bit in a nutshell:

Personal Things

After 7 months of not being able to ride a bike due to a hip flexor injury, I’m happy to say I’m back to cycling. Its slow going, but I hope to reach a metric century by June. i have a lot of catching up to do, physically, but I’m optimistic. And hey, I signed up for the Ride For Heart this year again! Should be fun.

Travel

I’ll be going to Ireland April 1 to visit my friend Jen, and we’ll be doing some hiking. Excited for that. Its been a while since I traveled, and the prospect of green glens and dark beer makes me want March to fast forward to the end already.

I also scored a ticket to Eyeo Festival in June, and I am really looking forward to it. Its going to be a blast.

Tinkering

Lately I’ve been experimenting with ways to make cheap sensors. I really like the idea of using stuff around the house. So far I’ve found tin foil and nails to be a really good way to make pretty on the mark contact sensors. While that’s nothing new, its nice to work it into projects. For example: this past February, I participated in Feb Fatale where I made a Knife Throwing Interface (out of a board, a yoga matt, and tinfoil no less), for my friend Sagan’s visual novel game A Long Time Coming. Hopefully I’ll have some video soon.

Proof of concept for throwing knife board.

Knife Throwing Board in action

Proof of Concept for a nail based capacitive sensor.

I also put together a pair of input gloves which I’m really happy with, because they don’t look like there’s anything sewn into them from the outside.

Input Gloves: left = pressure and bend, right = Dpad.

Learning

While on peripherals I’m helping teach a workshop through DMG on making peripherals with a MakeyMakey on March 9th. You should totally go. It’ll be fun, and you don’t need any previous experience with electronics.

This past month Vector Game Art and Convergence Festival rolled into town, and thanks to them, I spent a sunday circuit bending. While my results were a little meh, other people found some amazing noises and visuals tucked away in old game boards.

I think that’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll post more in the spring.

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During Novemeber I had the chance to participate in No-Jam, a 2 weekend game incubator put on by Dames Making Games. If you are in Toronto, and interested in game making, you should check them out.

I ended up making a game about squids, mainly about pooping squids. Yes, I made a game with a poop mechanic. Basically, you’re a squid, and to stay alive you need to eat. But the more you eat, the more waste you leave behind, the sicker your eco-system becomes. So you have to balance eating and cleaning up after yourself. You also need to deal with some invasive squid species who just mess everything up.

(Are there spelling errors in here? MAYBE).

I also decided to make a custom controller for this. Since the movement mechanic is a mimic of Asteroids, I figured a tilt / squeeze controller would be pretty fun.

I chose a MakeyMakey for my interface board. I have an arduino, but in this case, I didn’t really need a lot of sensitivity in the controls, and the MakeyMakey is a good item for get up n’go prototyping. This is how it came out:

1. Two tilt sensors and one force pad (the blue foam ball was the first iteration).

2. Connectors wired out the bottom of a foam baseball, with some ghetto tin foil for the aligator clips.

3. Completed with a sock puppet squid cover to hide the wires, then wired into a makeymakey.

Result: Pretty fun.

Note: If this video is being weird, just hit reload.

It was a good experiment. I have some other ideas for peripherals floating around, so we’ll see what winter brings.

Thanks to DMGToronto, all the jam mentors and Maggie for making amazing music. It was a super fun time.

I knew somewhere in mid 2012 that I was burnt out and that it had been going on for a while. I’m not unfamiliar with it, burning out is somewhat cyclical when you do dev or design work. There were signs, but I chose to ignore them. I had started to withdraw from my professional circles, I stopped pro-actively looking for work beyond my immediate plate, I felt either totally adrift or overwhelmed, I lost interest in a lot of personal things, but still felt I needed to do ALL THE THINGS.

Do you know that feeling? I’m sure you do.

I kept telling myself that it was just the season, or a bad day, or my environment, or my cycling injury preventing me from activity, or that I should just be doing some personal work to balance things out. It would blow over, right?

It wasn’t until I found myself on a project, totally losing my shit over a file system hiccup after a double all nighter, that it really hit home: I was burnt out, and it was not just going to get better if I kept ignoring it.

So I stopped. Everything.

For the last bit, that’s where I’ve been…stopped. For a while, I freaked out about being stopped (Oh god! I need to do something! I’m wasting my liiffffeeee…you know that one too, I’m sure). Then, even that ended. I didn’t fill my time with personal work, or travel, or courses like last year.

It kind of sucked, but let me tell you something…did I ever really NEED to STOP.

However, after being stopped for a while, my brain has become restless. So I’m now in a weird position where I know that at some point, professionally anyway, I’ll have to start moving along again. But I’m not too sure where to move along to. Personal project speaking I am doing some things, and they will hopefully be fun. But professionally I don’t want to fall back into that old familiar cycle, because it inevitably leads me right back to the burnout hole.

So what now in that regard? I’m not too sure. I have been making things on the internet for about 10 years, that is a loooooooong time, and I’m good at it. But I’m not too sure where to go with it right now. I feel I have a good amount of experience floating around in my (somewhat fizzly) brain. So the question is, what am I going to do with that experience?

I’m going to let that noodle around for the next bit while I do some personal things.

How long am I going to think about it? I don’t know yet. Do I have a plan? Nope, just the gift of some loose time. Do I know what I’m doing? Not really. But its kind of nice to be able to just say that and be good with it. Will I be randomly baking things to fill some time while I try to figure stuff out? Why yes I will…Yes indeed.

2011 was a year of growth and acceptance for me. For example, I accepted the fact that I don’t have a grand plan. I don’t charge ahead into the night with a plotted course of goals and life plans. No my friends, I drift. I may not drift in the sense of being nomadic, but I drift in other ways.

And for years I tried to fight that natural drifting. Thinking “Oh shit I need to get my ducks in order!” You know those feelings. I probably don’t have to go into detail about them. I don’t know what I was trying to improve myself into, but it obviously wasn’t working.

So I accepted my drift, but I found out that I drift according to some parameters. They boil down to a few words: Autonomy, Curiosity, and Sustainability. The things that seem to inhabit my life, whether they are relationships, work, interests, or education, tend to fall somewhere in that triangle of words. And that was an interesting discovery to make.

It lead me to make some short term plans, and try things like learning about ecosystems (I like plants), or spending far more time outside cycling and hiking. I even did some project tinkering…and I still got something really good out of these things, without the overhanging pressure that it must all LEAD to something. Consequently I was a lot happier than I’ve been in a long time, and at the end of 2011 I find myself physically stronger, mentally sharper, and more in tune with who I am for the good and the bad. I feel like I gained some decent EXP.

Did I make mistakes? Of course I did, but we all do that. Did I have some personal challenges? Yep. That’s part of just being alive…and when bad things came trotting my way, I just rolled through it unapologetically swearing and bitching, knowing that it would end, and I could just get on with things.

But y’know what else I did in 2011? I continued with my distance cycling and hit almost 100km in a day, I saw shorelines and boats and birds, I hiked the scottish highlands, I spent afternoons swimming on the island with friends, I snowshoed, I rock climbed, I cooked things, I refined my scotch palette, I studied plants, I worked, I had a life…and I enjoyed it.

2012? I have some ideas. But in true me fashion, they are written in chalk on my chalk door, because they’ll likely change over the course of winter.

Such is what its like when you drift…and I’m good with that.

He pulled over, We calmed down from being shaken, and exchanged information. Luckily I didn’t hurt anything, and my bike is a hardy animal. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been hit on my bicycle, it likely won’t be the last. Accidents are a reality you live with when you use the road, and in my city…well let’s just say Toronto is not a bicycle friendly town. Most drivers I find however, will stop if something happens, be apologetic, and exchange information freely…or maybe I’m lucky in that the ones I’ve dealt with when something has happened, have been on the level.

What I did not expect was the random guy who stopped his car in the middle of the intersection, who was not involved at all, to yell at me that I was a “Bleep bleep dumb ass cyclist, and that was your own fault, and you shouldn’t be on the road at all.”

…Wait…What? Really? Did that just happen? I have just been hit by a vehicle, the driver and I are dealing with it, and this random dude just decides that this is a good time to voice his opinion?

I should not really be so surprised especially when this happened a little while ago.

Plus as a society we seem to be good at breading ideas like “if you disagree with something you’re a whiner”, “me first”, and “my opinion means everything.”

But I was pretty caught off guard by this action, mainly because it had no grounding. And in a way it was the equivalent of a bully trying to hit you when you’re already down from being punched.

Toronto, I issue you a challenge to not let this mean kind of groundless bullshit take over, we can do better.

PS, this is the aftermath. The rainbow trout of bruise.

So I’m going to publicly talk about something that people don’t really talk about too much. Its called having a case of bad brains, and its a lot more common than I think we like to admit.

Bad Brains is not a bad mood, or a bad attitude, or a bad day, though it can be outwardly interpreted as such by the general public. Bad brains is a scenario where your brain actually refuses to co-operate with you on every decision you make for a given spate of time, for no particular reason. This means that rather being able to identify or tackle it (as you would, say do something for a bad mood, or avoid the things causing your bad day) you are just left mentally turning a circle, because every action or non-action you do becomes fuel for your Bad Brains.

Trust me…This is a real thing.

It looks like this:

You: “I’m going to go do [item 1], and [item 2] today. Here we go…”
Brain: “What? No you’re not, because [insert lame-ass excuse].”
You:“But, I…I mean…Ok fine, I’ll do [item 3] instead.”
Brain: “Wrong again.”
You: “Eff! Ok fine, I’ll sleep, that will clear my head.”
Brain: “Nope! That’s a waste of time, oh and btw, you _should_ have done [item 1].”
You: “Shit. Fine, I’ll just go back and try to do [item 2]…”
Brain: “You can’t, you missed your window for [item 2], because you were thinking about if you should do [item 1], oh and [item 3] can’t be done yet, so why are you starting that?”
You: “Argh! WTF!”

….etc.

What this generally means is that your mental state never gels into a committed…anything. On Bad Brain days, going to the corner store to purchase toilet paper, or deciding on what tea to brew, is a triumph.

Needless to say this can really mess with you. For example it is not the end of the world if you don’t go do X, Y, Z, or accomplish A,B and C, in a day, but on Bad Brain days it feels like it.

I haven’t found a good solid single recourse against Bad Brains, its more like a mixed bag approach. Mostly I let myself just be, knowing I will be a non-comital blubber-head for a day. I put off heavy decisions and responsibilities that require actual thought, and I remind myself that no one takes it personally if you flake out on something when your brain is being a jerk, or that responsibilities can be shuffled around to fit what works. I try not to get bogged down in “should haves” because once something is gone its bubkis, and mostly I watch wildlife clips and drink tea.

I’m serious about that last one, you can’t beat watching raccoons steal stuff to help pretty much anything that ails you, even a day of Bad Brains:

As a freelancer, it is your responsibility to your client to:

1. Work with a contract. I’ve learned my lessons over the years, work with a contract. Once and a while, I will still be tempted with a soft spot for someone…don’t listen to that soft spot. Doesn’t matter if they are a friend, or a collegue, large, small, local or multi-national. Always have a contract it will in the end, protect you and your client from potentially nasty situations and misunderstandings.
2. Make sure everything is outlined. I recently started using a projet planner based on common questions from first meetings, and I’ve found people really like it. It takes a lot of the guess work out of deliverables. Take some extra time to go over those items with your client if they have questions, and explain your late fees, kill fees, deliverables, copyright, and payment options. Outline them all. Its your responsibility to have all the odds and ends in writing and to make sure everyone understands what is on the table, and what they are going to get in the end.
3. Be honest about your skill limitations. We’ve all been there, bitten off more than we can handle or chew, whether its out of pride or fear, or maybe you’re just feeling cocky that week. Don’t do the graceful swan dive into stupidity. Speaking from past experience, it really hurts when you hit the ground. If something is out of your area, or ability, point it out that you are not comfortable handling that item, and leave it out of the deliverables.
4. Be upfront about how you like to work, and find out where they are coming from. Different industry backgrounds will have different ways of working. And this can sometimes create large blind spots in communication and expectations. Example: if you don’t work on-site, say so, lest you get a confusing message monday morning along the lines of “Why aren’t you in the office?”
5. Finish things on time. If you don’t have hard deadlines, make some. If you see a rolling deadline, try and reel it in. Be realistic with your deadlines and timelines. If you promise a cake in 20 minutes and the box says bake for 60, It’ll be a pretty shitty cake.

As a client it is your responsibility to your freelancer to:

1. Reply to inquiries in a timely manner. This does not mean, right away (mostly if right away is something like 11pm). But if you’ve hired a freelancer to do something for you, that freelancer is giving you their time, be respectful of that time. Disappearing for long periods of time, being busy but not informing your freelancer, and leaving people on the hook by not having solid ETAs for things is not respectful.
2. Be vocal if you do not understand something. Ask questions, make an outline. Keep your expectations in check. If the outline says PSDs and you think you’re getting HTML you need to clear that up at the start.
3. Pay freelancers in a reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is cutting a cheque in 30 calendar days or less, or sticking to what has been decided upon and outlined in your payment terms. This is still the single most frustrating thing I hear from freelancers new and old: clients that don’t pay on time. There are a lot of available secure payment options now, to be very late, is to be very rude.
4. Be upfront about what is going on in a project. For example if something outlined is not going to happen, if you are not happy with a project, if you’ve run out of money, if your department has been shut down, or if you want out. There will be kill fees, but in the end its better for all parties to walk away from something in a timely manner, than to sit in limbo.
5. Keep a professional facade when working. Creative industries are built around the idea of being friends. And some people do become quite good friends. But, when you’re working together, having some distance is the best thing, it gives you some perspective when working through hurdles.

Oh and a final note for both parties: Try not to internalize work issues. Its hard. We work in industries that tie the value of who we are into what we do. We all want projects to be successful, but defining where you end and work begins, even if its a soft line, will save you a lot of mental brew-ha in the long run.