You know how it is. One day when you’re cleaning up the terrible mess which is your apartment you find all the bills, reminders and last notices you were meaning to get to, and you yelp a little. Or like earlier today, when I couldn’t find my other glove — I had to leave in a hurry to get the voting done — and felt stupid for not having lost a single glove all winter, and waiting until spring before managing it.
Then again, I later found the glove further down in my man-purse, so perhaps the example isn’t valid. An example which is valid, is my realisation the other day that I have fuck-all to do all summer. Being self-employed, this means I got fuck-all income. So, I set myself to task with filling the weeks ahead with dilligent work and ambition, trying to see if any of my almost-competencies can be harnessed for cash and/or grants.
So far, I’ve managed to code a webpage for the Mateusz Saves project (I’ll post it here as soon as it stops blowing squid balls) and today we had an etching workshop at KKV. I managed to etch my first PCB ever, which was somewhat similar to doing my first photographic print, only more corrosive and smelling of chloride gas.
The purpose of todays exercise was to establish a standard process of making PCBs, and with just a few adjustments — and enthusiastic support for building a bubble tank from some quarters — it seems as if we succeeded. Watching paper dissolve from an ironed-on piece of copper and glass fibers might not be the most exciting thing to do, but it sure feels productive in a sciency-sort-of-way. The stuff we tried printing was the control board for a RepRap, which co-incidentally is what I need for the SUMU residency later this fall. I’m thinking of setting up a table in the kitchen and have the RepRap there, come odours or noxious fumes, allowing for the possibility of the following dialogue:
— Y’know, you really ought to get small holders for these chopsticks.
— Oh, why don’t you describe them to me and I’ll FUCKING PRINT THEM FOR YOU!
Because that is what every adult with a 3D printer dreams of saying, right?