FOSS and Crafts

FOSS and Crafts

By FOSS and CraftsTechnologyLeisureCrafts
Download on the App Store

FOSS and Crafts episodes

  • 32: Happy FOSS & Crafts anniversary!

    Chris and Morgan reflect on one year of FOSS & Crafts, as well as

    announcing... FOSS & Crafts Studios!

    Links:

    • FOSS & Crafts Studios on Patreon

    (still also the right place to support Chris Lemmer-Webber's FOSS work)

  • Thank you to our guests: Nick and LP, Zack, Kate and Frankie, Sebastian, Bassam, Tristan, Sumana, Mallory, Vicky, Steve, Elana and Katie, and Steel.

  • 3: Textile production and a nostalgic past

  • 28: FOSS Stitch w/ Elana Hashman and Katie McLaughlin

  • 5: Milkytracker, chiptunes, and that intro music

  • 22: Crafting the past… or trying to

  • 9: What is Spritely?

  • 11: An Ethics of Agency

  • 20: Hygiene for a computing pandemic

  • 26: Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber, an academic journey

  • 1: Collaborative Storytelling with Dice

  • 6: What Escaped from the Demonic Z.O.O.O.O. (part 1) and (part 2)

  • 10: The What Goblins Saga, Chapter 1: What Are Goblins? and Chapter 2: Trees, Friends, and Static

  • 25: Governance, Leadership, and Founder's Syndrome

  • 30: Gender and Sexuality, A Personal Perspective

  • 23: Nerdout! Fuzzy and crisp systems and 27: Nerdout! Game Design and Social Systems

  • Shrini's toots about the Hack and Craft:Post1 Post 2 *We did extrapolate a lot more than the posts say ;)

    • 0 min
  • 31: Talking Pressbooks and OER with Steel Wagstaff

    Steel Wagstaff joins us to talk about

    their work at Pressbooks, a FOSS based book
    publishing suite particularly focused on
    Open Educational Resources
    (OER), as well as talking about OER generally, open access, and
    education as a fundamental human right!

    • Pressbooks (git repos)
    • Pressbooks Directory
    • Steel Wagstaff's website, Twitter account
    • 5Rs of open content
    • UN Sustainable development goals
    • [Cape Town Declaration (September 2007)](https://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration + https://www.capetowndeclaration.org/cpt10/)
    • Charles Reznikoff, First There is the Need (Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1977)
    • Achieving the Dream's Art History I, by Associate Professor Emeritus Bruce Schwabach of Herkimer Community College. (CC BY!)
    • Open Music Theory (which was also mentioned in Episode 5: Milkytracker, chiptunes, and that intro music) (CC BY-SA!)
    • Fundamentals, Function, and Form
    • SMuFL: Standard Music Font Layout
    • Inclusive Spectrums ("This exhibition presents the preliminary major research project ideas of OCAD University’s Inclusive Design 2019/2021 cohort.") (CC BY!)
    • White Jaw by Laurel Bastian
    • Rebus Foundation
    • ScholarLed
    • Radical Open Access
    • Manifeold (GPLv3!)
    • editoria
    • Knowledge Futures Group
    • PubPub
    • Scalar
    0 min
  • 30: Gender and Sexuality, A Personal Perspective

    On this episode, Chris talks about being nonbinary trans-femme and

    Morgan talks about being demisexual (and briefly about both being
    pansexual) and how they have both navigated these experiences in their
    lives and relationship.

    Links:

    • There are a lot of resources on the internet about being

    transgender and nonbinary, and opinions about most of them tend to
    run strong. That said,
    Transgender Map has good
    resources explaining many concerns for those who are transgender
    or nonbinary, are trying to figure out if they are transgender or
    nonbinary, and support materials for family and friends.

  • demisexuality.org

  • WebMD article on demisexuality.

    • Note that despite what Chris says on the episode, the page itself
    does not mention narrative components of demisexual attraction, but
    rather emotional ones. The extrapolation of application to narrative
    aspects came more from Morgan and Chris talking through Morgan's
    manifestation of those aspects.

  • Chris's "Alpha Release" post about being nonbinary trans-femme with

    • pictures,
    on the fediverse
    and
    on Twitter
    (and later
    update).
    (These were the first pictures Chris took in a more directly "femme"
    gender expression and do not reflect the current state of the
    development branch.)

  • Morgan's coming out thread about being demisexual,

    • on the fediverse
    and
    on Twitter.

  • That sketchover self-portrait

    • that Chris mentioned (overlaid over photo)

    0 min
  • 29: Building Blocks for User Freedom

    Any skillset has basic foundational elements or building blocks. In

    this recording of Chris and Morgan's
    talk at ÖzgürKon,
    we discuss the way that access to those basic elements is limited in
    modern society.
    This can be seen in any number of fields from actual building blocks
    increasingly being sold in sets to make specific toys as opposed to
    generic buckets of blocks that allow kids to develop their creativity
    to the way that access to the source code and hardware in our
    technology is increasingly restricted.

    Also! In this episode we announce

    Hack and Craft,
    a new companion "stitch and bitch" style usergroup to FOSS & Crafts.
    (Any crafting is welcome... including computer programming, as long
    as it's a fun project!)
    Feel free to bring your own project and hang out at inagural meeting
    on June 19th!

    Links:

    • ÖzgürKon 2021
    0 min
  • 28: FOSS Stitch w/ Elana Hashman and Katie McLaughlin

    Elana Hashman (Python Software Foundation

    Fellow and open source hacker) and Katie McLaughlin
    (Python Software Foundation Fellow and crafter) join us to talk about
    F(L)OSS meets embroidery and cross stitching (FOSS stitching?)
    including a significant conversation about FLOSS vs embroidery
    floss.

    Much is also conversed about ih, a

    project started by Katie with contributions from Elana, a python
    project which helps generate embroidery patterns from images.

    Links:

    • ih!

      • ih presented at PyCon 2019: Katie McLaughlin - A Right Stitch-up: Creating embroidery patterns with Pillow

      • ih, as a service

    • DMC (Dollfus-Mieg et Compagnie),

    the textile company mentioned several times

  • Python Pillow (continuation of PIL,

    • the Python Imaging Library)

  • Linux Conf AU, which has had a lot of

    • "stitch and bitch" type events: 2018 art & tech miniconf,
    2019 knit, crochet, sew BoF,
    2020 creative arts miniconf

  • Cross Stitch Carpentry

  • ginger coons' open color standard work

  • freieFarbe Open Color initiative, appears to be CC BY 4.0

  • Stitching patterns really are a kind of domain specific visual programming language (see the response, "What is this, assembler?")

  • Core rope memory was usually hand-woven by women in early computing days (more)

    • Still here? How about some extra images?

    Morgan's needlework of an alpaca, made with alpaca fiber:

    Kirby quilt that Morgan did for a babby:

    0 min
  • 27: Nerdout! Game Design and Social Systems

    Steve is back, talking with Chris about viewing social systems through

    the lens of game design.
    How do game mechanics, uncertainty, and narrative map onto governance,
    society, and citizen participation?

    Thanks to Kate and Ricky for participating in a pre-show discussion

    which generated many of the ideas explored in this episode.

    Links:

    • The first F&C Nerdout episode on "Fuzzy and crisp systems",

    in case you wanted to hear more of the Chris & Steve conversation dynamic

  • F&C Episode 4: The Eight Kinds of Fun, and the paper it was inspired from, MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research

  • Veil of Ignorance

    • thought experiment by philosopher John Rawls

  • Comeback Mechanic

  • Power Grid

  • The Ludology podcast... if you like

    • this episode, you'll probably like Ludology.

    • Ludology does a "Biography of a Board Game" on Candyland

    • Ludology Episode 3 - Catch the Leader which includes the first critique of Power Grid

    • Ludology Episode 3A - The Defense of Power Grid

  • Conway's Game of Life

  • Emergence (the broad

    • umbrella which includes "emergent behavior")

  • How cats get drunk in Dwarf Fortress, and why its creators haven't figured out time travel (yet) (Note that we cut off the story before it got sad in the episode... the following link tells the full story, including the sad end to this particular form of emergent behavior)

  • Game Analysis: Love Letter

  • Apparently the game about the soldiers gaining PTSD and getting drunk was called "Clockwork Empires" (note, another proprietary game and we haven't played it; it's an empire-colonialist-expansion game, but maybe a bit more consciously so... we don't know really though). This is the closest article we could find about the behavior but it doesn't seem to be the full interview Steve remembered. Note that Steve had a followup email saying: "Also, a detail I apparently forgot is that the alcohol helped them forget (temporarily?) their lost friends, which feels important..."

    • 0 min
  • 26: Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber, an academic journey

    Remember how we've been saying the entire run of this show "Morgan's

    hard at work at finishing her PhD dissertation?"
    Well guess what!
    She finally got it handed in and defended it...
    Morgan is now officially Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber!
    (She still has to wrap up a few edits but hey it's official now!)

    Morgan walks us through her experiences of the graduate school

    process, from applying (and re-applying) to schools, to a masters
    program, to a PhD program, and the many fun steps, bumps, and
    adventures in-between.

    Not much in terms of show notes this episode, but here are some

    pictures!

    Congratulations again, Morgan!

    0 min
  • 25: Governance, Leadership, and Founder's Syndrome

    What story does an institution tell about itself?

    To whom does a governance structure and its leadership serve?
    To what degree are leaders within a governing institution subject
    or exempt to the rules of the governed?
    We use this framework to discuss the unexpected announcement of Richard
    Stallman's re-appointment to the FSF board, by the FSF board.

    Content warning: depression and sexual harassment are both mentioned

    in this episode.

    Links:

    • Founder's Syndrome

    (Wikipedia article)

  • Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board by the EFF

  • An open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions

  • Microblog post expressing lack of foreknowledge of announcement by FSF staff and Libreplanet volunteers

  • Not The First Time We Tried (FSF, GNU, RMS, etc.) by Sumana Harihareswara

  • Kat Walsh's statement of making arguments in opposition to RMS's reinstatement to the board (Twitter version) and announcement of resignation (Twitter version)

  • The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman by Benjamin Mako Hill, longtime FOSS advocate, former member of FSF board

  • Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic

  • Documentation of accusations of women being harassed by RMS

  • Political cartoon between RMS and Chris from when Chris was in college

  • Re: Bug in emacs tetris

  • GNU Emacs and XEmacs

  • 2018 Letter to the board in response to RMS's behavior and the board's lack of response

  • Marianne Corvellec’s Libre Planet 2017 talk “The GNU Philosophy: Ethics beyond ethics” where RMS says "I'm the president of the Free Software Foundation... so I don’t have to follow the rules"

    • 0 min
  • 24: Get Organized!

    Morgan returns from handing in her dissertation! Very topically,

    Morgan and Chris talk about organizational systems which can help you
    stay on track... even when you're working from home or trying to
    finish your PhD during a global pandemic.

    Links:

    • The Hipster PDA,

    including the original
    semi-satirical announcement post.

  • Org Mode, the world's greatest

    • organizational and outliner system (or so claims Chris), if you're
    an Emacs user anyway
    (honestly, Org Mode is a great reason to pick up Emacs)

  • Locating purveyors of excessively priced office supplies left as

    • an exercise for only a very particular kind of reader.

    0 min
  • 23: Nerdout! Fuzzy and crisp systems

    Morgan is in the final crunch of finishing her dissertation draft, so

    Chris's brother Steve Webber joins us for a special "nerdout":
    analyzing the dual nature of fuzzy vs crisp systems! From physics to
    biology, from programming languages to human languages, the duality of
    fuzzy and crisp is everpresent.

    Yes, this really is what Chris and Steve sound like whenever they get

    together...

    Links:

    • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

    (but this version looks better on the web)
    and the 1980s lectures
    (also on Internet Archive
    but the YouTube uploads are more recent and higher quality)

  • Lisp and Scheme

  • Lambda Calculus

  • The Little Schemer

  • The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written by William Byrd

  • Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which also now has a lovely reprint for sale (see Appendix B for Lisp in Lisp, albeit in m-expression rather than s-expression format... m-expressions never took on)

  • Javascript: The Good Parts

  • The narcissism of small differences

  • To Mock a Mockingbird

    • by Raymond Smullyan. Also, presumably not the link Steve had shared with Chris
    back in the day (but maybe it was?) but here's a more math'y breakdown of
    some of the ideas, To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus with Animated Reduction

  • Duality (mathematics)

  • Fuzzy and crisp sets

  • Neats and scruffies

    • (see also our previous episode about machine learning)

  • Alan Watts' lecture on "prickles and goo"

  • Carcinisation

    • (convergent evolution on "crabs")

  • Lisp vs APL: "Mud and Diamonds"

  • Guix

  • Jonathan Rees's website

  • Lojban,

    • and here's a pretty good Lojban intro

  • The infamous Lojban "bear goo"

    • debate

    0 min

About FOSS and Crafts

From the publisher's feed

A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.