this month I'm not going to post updates in the usual list format, because I have a clear idea of what I want to write here.
June was a month of preparation, and escapes from that same preparation.
For those who don't know, I'm doing a PhD in artificial intelligence, and on July 3rd (yesterday), my doctoral qualification happened. The qualification is a stage of the PhD that can be understood as a "pre-defense": if in the defense you present to the committee what you did, in the qualification you present to the committee what you intend to do, and they approve or not your plan, normally making several comments about what they think the research should include. It's basically a proposal presentation.
My qualification, however, was something completely different -- I presented practically the same thing I'm going to present at the thesis defense, for a series of reasons not worth going into detail here. In general, it's enough to say that everything went very well, and the expectation is that I'll be able to defend the thesis in 3 or 4 months. yipee!!!
I'm starting the text with this for two reasons: first, because it happened yesterday and at this exact moment I'm still enjoying the jubilation and relief that the end of this stage brought me; and second, because the shadow of my qualification at the beginning of July ended up coloring all four weeks of the month of June, and this is a text about what I did in June.
So, what did I do in June?
Well, I don't know how you all do it when facing an evaluation like this, with a scheduled date and all (other examples would be... exams? civil service tests?), but my strategy is usually: put everything else on standby. This means that from the scheduling of my qualification until the qualification date itself, all my personal projects were on hold -- vinícius, you can't have fun until this all passes!! Your free time should be used to "re-read papers" and "prepare slides", and not "create a website with all the names of Brazil mapped by IBGE" or "translate a Japanese game from the 90s that many believe to be untranslatable". It may seem like a strategy that's a bit too rigid, perhaps even infantilizing, but the truth is I really have an incredible ease in being completely absorbed by new things, and if I'm not careful, they can end up taking the reins of my life at a time when I need to focus on something more boring, sure, but also more of a priority.
And that's how I ended up going down two different rabbit holes.
At first, I didn't even notice what was happening. My line of reasoning was: okay, I can't start playing any big game that will absorb me too much, I can't read any book that will colonize my head, I can't work on my personal projects because I'll lose the desire to do anything else... what's left for me? Well, besides watching things with silvia or watching her play Mass Effect (things that don't offer any real danger to the complete domination of my free time), what I can do is... I don't know, read some things on the internet. Read an article or two that appears on Twitter, you know? Read Hacker News... read some tabletop RPG books I had saved here... oh, this book mentions two other books -- I wonder where I can download them? Wow, this repository has several books! What are, after all, the systems that people would recommend most for someone who, like me, hasn't played RPGs in years? Wow, apparently there are several different schools of tabletop RPG-- MY GOD WHERE DID ALL THESE PDFs COME FROM
I don't know how this happened, but in June I devoured dozens of tabletop RPG systems, read piles of different adventure modules, became familiar with a crowd of different indie designer blogs, discovered the optimal ways to acquire PDFs in a completely legal manner, and long-term contaminated my YouTube recommendation system with RPG videos -- all without rolling a single die.
uh-oh! and that's not even half of it!!
In parallel to this, I was trying to prepare for my qualification. Part of this preparation process, in my head, involved rereading some articles I published, to refamiliarize myself with what I wrote and not be caught off guard by the committee members. But everyone knows that reading technical texts on the computer is tiring, right? So I felt like printing these papers, to make it easier to read or take notes on them and such (can you see where this is going?); the problem is I don't have a printer at home, and the copy shops around here charge absurd amounts -- R$1.50 per B&W page, besides being a ripoff, makes my idea of going to one of these stores to print the 50 or 100 pages I wanted totally unfeasible. Then I thought: "why don't I buy a printer?" and my answer was: "haha vinícius, you're not going to buy a printer, for God's sake, just read the paper on the computer and that's it! Can't you see this is just another artificial obstacle you invented to avoid re-reading your papers, noticing mistakes you hadn't noticed, and starting to doubt your own competence and ability? Besides being pure consumerism -- you won't even use this printer!". And then I thought "but if I GM an RPG I'll need to have the books in hand, right? Or do you want me to GM with a laptop on the side, like a coward?", and my conscience replied "you just took my last sentence and ignored everything else, do you think that's nice?" and then I asked silvia if she wanted a printer and she said she'd love one so I researched for 2 whole days about which printer to buy and ended up buying the cheapest one there was -- an Epson L1250 inkjet.
And then I printed my papers, and of course, I started printing some RPG materials. "Did you start printing entire RPG books??" Of course not! Do you think I'm crazy? There are many fascinating RPG materials that have few pages and come in a "zine" format, in which you take the pages and staple them in the center to join them; the practice is so common that these systems usually come with two PDFs: one in "singles" format (single pages) and another in "spreads" format (double pages), to make life easier for people who print two per page and make an A5-sized zine. To experiment with how to do it, I printed some versions of the game "Cairn", and during the process I learned a lot about how to use Adobe Acrobat Reader on my printer to print things in this format, because it's much less intuitive than you'd imagine.
However, an apparently insurmountable obstacle arose: the only stapler we had at home was a mini pink stapler of silvia's, which unfortunately couldn't handle the job properly -- all the staples were ugly crooked, which ruined the entire zines. Annoyed, I bought a stapler on Amazon, and resigned myself to wait a few days -- in the meantime, however, maybe there are other alternatives? I searched on YouTube how people make zines ("printing zines tutorial google search") and saw that there were people who did the binding using needle and thread. Fascinating!! silvia has needle and thread, she can certainly help me! Result: it looked terrible, but the damage was already done, because YouTube had understood "what I was about" and showed me this video, about how to join loose pages...
Words cannot express how much my brain exploded watching this video. You, noble lady, are telling me that it's possible to take loose pages... simply glue them in a stupidly easy way... and make a result that's frighteningly close to a real book?? Look at this video, it came out PERFECT!! I felt like the audience of the caveman who discovered fire for the first time: "so you take this little stick... rub rub rub... and voilà!!" "Wait, IT'S WHAT?? I've been eating raw meat all this time FOR NO REASON?????"
Ran to the room.
"silvia do you know what PVA glue is?"
"yes"
"do you have PVA glue there?"
"yes"
"help me with something here"
And then I made a little cover and glued my papers. And I glued notes I made in college. And I started gluing everything and got drunk on the new power that was granted to me -- the power to take any bunch of crap papers and transform it into something with a regal, noble, somehow official tone; it was a true festival that lasted a few days.
Despite the enthusiasm, there were clearly points for improvement. In the video the Priestess used a simple piece of paper to cover the spine (see how I'm being Initiated into the Mystery?), but there clearly had to be a better way to do this, because the results weren't Good, they were Imperfect and Impure. So I went to the craft store and bought 1 meter of linen fabric, because the Internet said it was Good, but the linen absorbed too much glue and it was Terrible. Then I started looking at other ways to glue a cover + spine, and discovered the DAS Bookbinding channel, and started printing on A5 sheets, and decided that my goal would be... to achieve the Perfect Paperback.
I needed a guinea pig: a book that was small (so I wouldn't waste so much ink and paper in case of a failed experiment), but that was also interesting (so I wouldn't waste so much ink and paper on a book I have no interest in). Luckily, at the beginning of the year I read several books that fit perfectly: The Singing Hills Cycle, a series by fantasy author Nghi Vo. The fit would be even more perfect because it's a series of books: as the books advance in time, my mastery of the techniques would also advance, so there would be a correlation between the two (I love when things fit together!! It's almost like life has foreshadowing!). There are five books, and the results were as follows:
[Video: Book binding progress for The Singing Hills Cycle]
Maybe you can't see all the details properly, but I think you can see there was a considerable improvement, and that each iteration was different (somehow) from the previous iteration. Unfortunately, the series ended and I still hadn't reached the Perfect Paperback, so I ended up moving on to another series of books that fits the same requirements: The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells:
[Video: Book binding progress for The Murderbot Diaries]
The differences are more subtle, but I mainly experimented with a way to make the spine satisfactory, and a way to keep the cover aligned with the book block. The result of the second book was quite satisfactory, the only remaining problem was the margins -- because of the way I'm making the cover (which is also an A4), increasing the number of pages in the book means increasing the spine, which means cutting more of the margin, which means the text is decentralized and thick books are even more decentralized. I still haven't solved this problem, but this led me to experiment with thicker books (that is, I took a break from the Murderbot series), which led me to... this:
[Video: Final book binding result]
Does this iteration have flaws? It has flaws. Is it perfect? Not at all. But with all due respect and modesty, it turned out awesome.
Silvia is proof: I'm so proud of this book that I keep taking it everywhere, and sometimes I just stop and touch it, smell it, feel its pages with my skin -- I didn't even mention this, but did you see that the pages are YELLOWISH??? I discovered that Chamex sells a ream in the color "ivory" that evokes precisely the "book page" color we're used to (and it's practically the same price as the white ream). This ivory paper doesn't have the nice texture of that pollen paper some books have, but still the similarity in color is already enough to completely change the reading experience, and give this more professional air.
I made this book on Monday. Today is Thursday. What does the future hold for me? I have no idea, but I'm excited!
Moral of the story: if you cover your nose, you'll end up breathing through your mouth (or dying in the process)