“And then he walked past and I was like…[screech]!”

“LOL! What did you do?”

“I just stared. I’m such an idiot!”

Which was fun, but it needed more…red:

Lots more red:

And then a bit of blue and wonder to finish it off:

Over this past weekend hoards of thinkers, makers and doers descended on the gorgeous Xanadu of the O’Reilly Media headquarters in Sebastopol, CA. Invited by Tim O’Reilly to participate in a free-form weekend of focused and unfocused conversations and talks concerning current and emerging ventures in technology, it was a nerd’s paradise. There were talks on Cloud Robotics, The Slow Technology Movement, How to Get a Billion Views on Youtube and Better HTML5 Apps. One participant brought Nao, a $14,000 autonomous, programmable humanoid robot made by Aldebaran Robotics. It danced and entertained us with it’s version of MJ’s “Thriller”:

The Makershed was open for soldering blinking LED pins for our name tags and I took mine a step further by crafting an origami brooch around the light. I used a star box for the base and a modified balloon fold for the covering. After I folded the star box I marked the corners and unfolded it to draw the designs on the arms of the star with pen and ink:

Then encased the light inside the paper structure:

And cut the balloon to hollow out the middle and cover the light:

All in all the project took about an hour to make, and the light from the LED had a stunning effect on the paper folds at night. I met many amazing people at Foo and there wasn’t one person there that didn’t inspire me to keep the bar raised high and continue thinking, making and doing wonderful things. It’s important to have these resources and events for people to coalesce around and understand and appreciate the different perspectives and needs of each other. By meeting face to face it’s honestly the only way that we can gain enough perspective to broaden and deepen the impact of technology in relevant ways for it to contribute to the success and enlightenment of our people. Thank you again Tim and Sara and the whole O’Reilly team- you hosted an awesome event!

Having survived a drop the distance of 500 feet, the monster opened it’s one functioning eye to perceive lamposts and the undersides of two fighter ships descending to street level. It heard a soft shriek and footsteps nearby followed by the high-pitched whistle of missiles launched. There was an acrid sweet smell in the air and it occurred to the monster that there really wasn’t anywhere else better to be than in London after a good rain.

From Wikipedia: The concept of sacred and profane comes from French sociologist Emile Durkheim; the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane to be the central characteristic of religion: “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.^” In Durkheim’s theory, the sacred represented the interests of the group, especially unity, which were embodied in sacred group symbols, or totems. The profane, on the other hand, involved mundane individual concerns. Durkheim explicitly stated that the dichotomy sacred/profane was not equivalent to good/evil. The sacred could be good or evil, and the profane could be either as well.

I had chosen an African head sculpted from ebony wood, a hair comb of my grandmother’s, an unidentifiable translucent shell, a glass ball used to buoy sea nets, the broken top of a guardrail holder and a scarf with alternating silk and matte stripes.

Philosophically, the objects made little sense as being imbued with either good or evil, but the arrangement and atmosphere of the composition gave them a greater mysterious pull. It was the longest life drawing I’ve ever done, taking around 60 hours to complete over the course of weeks of 3-5 hour sittings. I used hot-pressed 300lb heavyweight Fabriano paper (which I highly recommend for any serious drawing) and the finished image measures 18″ x 30″.

And then brought it into Photoshop to divide and invert each individual ring:

As you can see in the inverted image of all rings:

The artwork needed to be composed with both the light and dark values taken into account and each made visually compelling. I chose to use black and white in the composition because I thought it would reduce eyestrain. Here is a shot of the rings inverted and rotated as you might find in the game:

The initial sketch took me around 6 hours to complete and then the Photoshop editing and fine-tuning took another hour. In subsequent levels the images diverge from the organic curves of the first to a more industrialized and geometric composition, with each level image solved becoming the center hub of the next level, until you are brought full circle back into the organic world and re-create the circular forms from the geometric. Part homage to M.C. Escher, part reflective return to a unified self, like most things, this game is still a work in progress.