Crafting

I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft. I had heard about it but wasn't much interested until I saw an article about how WoW was like the new golf in tech circles. The meme was started (I think) by activist/enterpreneur/pioneer blogger Joi Ito, who touted his guild (called "We Know") in a bunch of articles around the net. I thought I'd give it a try. I'm skipping over a lot here - I could spend pages describing what I loved about WoW, but what finally was the most fun for me was the crafting.

A lot of the most interesting tools, weapons, armor, decorations, and food in WoW are made and sold by players. Your character can have several professions, like Alchemy, Herbalism, Engineering, etc. - you train in your profession and collect recipes that let you make cool, powerful, or obscure stuff, which you can then use or sell. Some of the recipes can be learned from trainers in the city, while others have to be learned from odd characters in obscure locations, or from monsters. There are entire sites devoted to collecting these recipes, their ingredients, and where the ingredients are to be found.

For instance, a Magic Resistance Potion is made using 1x Khadgar's Whisker, 1x Purple Lotus, and 1x Crystal Vial. A Philosopher's Stone requires 4x Iron Bars, 1x Black Vitriol, 4x Purple Lotus, and 4x Firebloom. Collecting the materials meant going on long quests through Azeroth, during which you picked up items or other recipes that led to still other quests... Anyway. Except for the monsters and obscure names, crafting was really another form of kitbuilding. And when I finally kicked my WoW habit, one of the things I replaced it with was kitbuilding.

Kitbuilding

I remember looking at old Sears catalogs and seeing kits. You could mail away your two bucks and get a bicycle kit or the parts for a butter churn, or whatever. My dad and I used to make model rockets and even tried to build a model boat once. Radio Shack and Heathkit had electronics and simple computer kits. At the time I never really got into kitbuilding though, and it seemed to fade away, or maybe it was just because I lost interest or maybe I just got too enamored with shiny pre-built objects.

A lot of really important stuff happened around kitbuilding though. A lot of the major players in the whole personal computer thing hung out at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club - the Steves (Woz and Jobs) were both members, and the original Apple was a kit.

Kitbuilding is making a comeback lately. O'Reilly started publishing Make Magazine a couple years ago. It used to seem way too technical, but I ordered a couple kits and built them without too much trouble. I saw Lady Ada's talk at OSCON 2007 and have been lusting after her x0xb0x kit ever since.

DIY blogging and personal content management

In yesterday's post I mentioned James Bennett's article as an inspiration for this blog. Django (and to be fair, some other web frameworks too) give you a bunch of code lego blocks that you can assemble pretty quickly into a working app.

Jeff Croft also describe the possibilities really well in his article on personal content management that came out last year. Not too long ago, if you wanted to put your content online you had to either write your own app from scratch or cough up LOTs of dough for a huge content management system (CMS) like Interwoven, after which the setup and customization was almost as much trouble as writing it yourself. A couple years later, we got apps like PHP-Nuke and Drupal that started out as bulletin boards or blogs and tried to expand to become CMSs. But they tried to force all your data into page-sized chunks, even when that wasn't appropriate.

In his article, Jeff describes how Django can be used to assemble exactly what you need to manage your data, without all the sidebars and other stuff that you don't need (though you can add that too if you want). I've been using it at work for just this kind of sub-CMS work - or maybe it's "right-sized CMS". And a case in point is this blog app, assembled from a bunch of pre-built parts glued together.

It'll be interesting to see what the future holds.

I didn't do a zine really, but the Nara Handbook, a book for other JET participants in Nara Prefecture, had a kind of zine flavor. It contained info on how to navigate the local trains, decode your electric bill, lists of English-speaking doctors and dentists, and directories of cool restaurants, shops, and other stuff that I and my fellow AETs discovered and wanted to share with each other and later generations of JETs.

At the end of my first year there, I somehow let myself get volunteered to edit the Nara Handbook, and ended up doing it twice more. The handbook I received when I arrived was, frankly, a mess. It was cool, but it was basically a very haphazardly photocopied zine. Over the next couple years I and a couple other AETs worked hard to make it easy to read and use, while keeping as much of that underground zine flava that we liked about the first edition. We researched cool places in the region, wrote about our travels, figured out how to make Microsoft Word (it wasn't evil yet, back in 1995) create an index, and had lots of fun with photocopiers and scanners. Each year we started out with a whole team of sorta-interested volunteers, and each year it came down to myself and another fanatic, racing to get everything proofread and edited before the deadline. I'll never forget the time when Eric Swanson turned to me as we walked down the stairs after a long editing session and said, "Someday you will understand that everything in this book is true." It was such a cool line that we stuck in the handbook in tiny type.

I haven't really kept up with the zine scene for awhile now. After my years in Japan I pursued a masters in Library and Information Studies at UCLA, worked at the Japanese American National Museum, went out into the dotcom industry, got laid off during the Bubble, and landed back at JANM, doing web development and system administration.

Then I had a couple back-to-back zine encounters. Cory Doctorow blogged about Small Beer Press's winter sale, and I ended up ordering a copy of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, which looks like it has that ol' zine flava. A couple days later, James Bennett's article about blogging with Django appeared on the Django community list. And the next day Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot led a tour of the GR50 exhibit at the museum and talked about how GR started out as a zine. Bennett's article got me thinking. Over the next couple days I bolted together a basic blogging app using Django, and here we are.

Don't know if I'll ever write as well as Eric, and I don't intend to try and start my own publishing and art empire, but I'll try putting my thoughts into words once in awhile and see what happens. Hopefully it'll make interesting reading, and maybe it'll even be useful for someone.