FOSS and Crafts

62: Blender

2024-03-03T14:40:00Z

Blender, the absolute powerhouse of FOSS 3d (and increasingly 2d) graphics! We give an overview of the software's history, some personal history of our relationships to the software, what it can do, and where we're excited to see it go!

Links:

Blender
Blender history
Grease pencil
Some historical Blender videos from the NeoGeo and Not a Number days: Did It, Done It, Not a Number commercial, Come and See
Elephants Dream, aka Project Orange
Big Buck Bunny
Previous episodes on blender:
- Blender for open movie productions and education
- Sophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease Pencil
Blender Conference videos mentioned:
The MediaGoblin campaign video (well, the second one)
14th anniversary animation gift to Morgan
In Unexpected Places
Seams to Sewing Pattern (a Blender plugin for making clothes and stuffed animals!) (could we make Free Soft Wear patterns with it?)
Wing It!
Wing It! Production Logs and Blenderheads
Episodes about lisp, because obviously Blender needs more lisp (who's going to do it):
- What is Lisp?
- Lisp but Beautiful, Lisp for Everyone

61: A Textile Historian's Survival Guide

2023-12-10T14:25:00Z

How do you survive in a world that is no longer optimized for making your own clothing when you suddenly find that modern conveniences no longer accommodate you? As a textile historian, Morgan has been ruminating for years about women’s contributions to the domestic economy, the massive time investment of producing clothing for a family, and the comparative properties of different textile fibers. These research interests were informed by a lifetime of sewing and other fiber crafts. None of this experience, however, properly prepared her to face the reality of needing to rely on her own hands to provide large portions of her own wardrobe.

Guest co-host Juliana Sims sits down with Morgan to talk about how, in the wake of a recently developed allergy to synthetic fabrics, she now finds herself putting that knowledge of historical textile production to use to produce clothing that she can wear.

Links and other notes:

Morgan presented this as a (much shorter) talk at the Dress Conference 2023
Slides from the presentation
Morgan's Dissertation, which we also covered
RSI Glove Pattern

The quote that Morgan somewhat misremembered about a woman preparing wool before the winter:

"A thrifty countrywoman had a small croft, she and her sturdy spouse. He tilled his own land, whether the work called for the plough, or the curved sickle, or the hoe. She would now sweep the cottage, supported on props; now she would set the eggs to be hatched under the plumage of the brooding hen; or she gathered green mallows or white mushrooms, or warmed the low hearth with welcome fire. And yet she diligently employed her hands at the loom, and armed herself against the threats of winter." -- Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714

60: Governance, part 2

2023-09-30T23:10:00Z

Back again with governance... part two! (See also: part one!) Here we talk about some organizations and how they can be seen as "templates" for certain governance archetypes.

Links:

Cygnus, Cygwin
Mastodon
Android
Free Software Foundation, GNU
Software Freedom Conservancy, Outreachy, Conservancy's copyleft compliance projects
Commons Conservancy
F-Droid
Open Collective
Linux Foundation
501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6)
Stitchting
Free as in Freedom
LKML (the Linux Kernel Mailing List)
Linus Doesn't Scale
Spritely Networked Communities Institute
Python and the Python Software Foundation, PyCon, the Python Package Index
Python PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals), XMPP XEPs, Fediverse FEPs, Rust RFCs
Blender, Blender Foundation, Blender Institute, Blender Studio
Blender's history
Elephants Dream
Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
Debian, Debian's organizational structure, and Debian's constitution
EFF
Oh yeah and I guess we should link the World History Association!

59: Governance, part 1

2023-08-31T21:40:00Z

Governance of FOSS projects, a two parter, and this is part one! Here we talk about general considerations applicable to FOSS projects! (And heck, these apply to collaborative free culture projects too!)

Links:

58: WebAssembly

2023-06-15T20:10:00Z

WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heck is it? Is it just for C and Rust programs? Can you write it by hand? (Do you want to?) And wait, how is Spritely getting involved in WebAssembly efforts? Find out!

Links:

57: F-Droid (featuring Sylvia van Os & Hans-Christoph Steiner!)

2023-05-14T21:30:00Z

F-Droid, a repository of free software for your Android devices! Christine interviews F-Droid developers Sylvia van Os and Hans-Christoph Steiner as well as F-Droid board member and chair... Morgan Lemmer-Webber!

Links:

56: Make your own dehydrated meals

2023-02-28T22:00:00Z

In yet another deep dive into yet another weird hobby of Christine's, we talk about how to make your own dehydrated meals! Why the heck would you want to do this? Well, maybe you want more consistent or dietary needs friendly travel food! Maybe you want to go camping or hiking! Maybe you're sick of deciding what's for lunch and you just want to scoop a cup of meal out of a jar on your desk every day! Maybe you want to weird out your fellow conference-goers as you turn a dry powder into a fully cooked meal with hot water and hot water alone!

Links:

Making dehydrated meals overview (Christine's Kitchen 0): [YouTube] [PeerTube]
Backpacking chef
Dishwasher cooking (yes it is a thing)

55: Free Soft Wear

2023-01-31T22:05:00Z

Morgan talks about "Free Soft Wear": textile processes under free culture licenses!

Links:

Morgan's talk about Free Soft Wear at the Creative Freedom Summit
Elena of Valhalla’s repository of CC BY-SA sewing patterns
Morgan's blog
Kat Walsh or @[email protected]
Tall Dog Electronics face mask (You may recognize Dan and Tall Dog Electronics of TinyNES fame)
Wikimedia Commons
Project Gutenberg
Learning the sewing machine
RSI episode
FreeSewing (an open source software project that creates made-to-measure creative commons licensed sewing patterns)

54: Oops!

2022-12-27T19:20:00Z

Everyone goofs sometimes. Today we talk accidents... some happy, some not!

Links:

Decaf coffee and history of penicillin, your pop-sci "accidents of history" stories of the day. Look, this is admittedly kind of a fluff episode.
Have we linked to Worse is Better before? We did? In the lisp episode?
And here's the Terminal Phase episode

53: Fediverse reflections while the bird burns

2022-12-01T14:30:00Z

Twitter is burning, and people are flocking to the fediverse. Is the fediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we be going? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primary protocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to get Christine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car as we talk all about it!

Links:

ActivityPub, the protocol which wires the federated social web together, of which Christine is co-author! Be sure to check out the Overview section... it's actually fairly easy to understand!
Some of the implementations discussed (though there are many more):
A lot has been written about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Here's a pretty decent timeline (though it's missing the transphobia stuff).
W3C Social Web Working Group is where ActivityPub was standardized
OcapPub (while not complete, it lays out a lot of the core problems with the way the fediverse has gone)
The Spritely Institute
Previous episodes on Spritely: What is Spritely?, Spritely Updates! (November 2021), and sorta kinda the Terminal Phase episode
The Presentation of Self on a Decentralized Web (PhD dissertation by ActivityPub co-author Amy Guy, partly covers its standardization)
SMTP and XMPP can be seen as decentralized "social networks" before that term took off
OStatus
pump.io is where the pump.io API came from, which is the direct predecessor to ActivityPub
StatusNet / GNU Social
Diaspora
MediaGoblin
APConf videos
Context Collapse
Early writeups from Christine some of these ideas, but are old:

52: Terminal Phase: a space shooter that runs in your terminal!

2022-11-13T17:05:00Z

Terminal Phase! A space shooter that runs in your terminal!!! Who wouldn't be excited about that?

Not to mention that it shows off cool features of Spritely Goblins... like time travel:

Well, Terminal Phase has been Christine's fun/downtime project for the last few years, and one of the bonuses you can get for the reward tiers of donating to this podcast! And yet we've never done an episode about it! Given that a brand new (and much easier to install) release of Terminal Phase is coming out really soon, we figured now's a good time to talk about it!

Links:

Terminal Phase!
Blogposts about Terminal Phase!
FOSS & Crafts' Patreon
Spritely Goblins, a project of the Spritely Institute
Blast off! A tour of Spritely Institute's tech
Racket
Guile
Guix
8sync (Goblins predecessor). See also the Mudsync video, on that very page.
Raart
Spacewar!
A bit about how Spacewar lead to UNICS (later renamed Unix)

51: #vanlife...?

2022-10-01T15:00:00Z

Morgan and Christine walk through their (well, Morgan's) renovation of a cargo van into a campervan. This is a very crafty episode, but we do work in a few analogies to some FOSS (and open hardware) things!

Show notes at the end, but how about a quick visual van tour?

Back of the van, wide open!

A closer look...

Actually, let's move that solar panel aside...

Here's a better view of the cabinet with all the equipment attached:

Here's what the van looks like if you come in the side door:

Another, more diagonal view:

Safety first!

Window covers, custom fit! Reflectix goes out, fabric goes in.

The cabinet with the cargo net off...

And one more view!

Links:

50: The Spritely Institute

2022-08-21T16:25:00Z

The Spritely Institute (of which Christine is CTO) just announced its multi-year grant by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and gave a tour of its current tech! This is a big moment that's been in the works for a while, as Spritely moves hands towards real stewardship by a real nonprofit!

Also also! The video recording of the Lisp/Scheme workshop (based on A Scheme Primer) is released! Unlock Lisp / Scheme's magic: beginner to Scheme-written-in-Scheme in one hour! (PeerTube, YouTube, )

Links:

Spritely Networked Communities Institute
FOSS & Crafts episodes about Spritely:
- The What is Spritely episode, where Morgan says "get in the car Christine you need to talk about your project", is the first time Christine laid out the broader (early) plans for Spritely in depth! (In that sense, FOSS & Crafts has been here for much of Spritely's journey, as many of our listeners know!)
- Spritely Updates! (November 2021)
- Less directly, Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 talks about much of the tech that informs Spritely's design!
- Spritely Institute's jobs page which will have jobs posted on it like, real soon now
- Spritely Institute is also the org that published A Scheme Primer, which we've talked about before
Free as in Freedom has talked about how the IRS has been more cautious about granting nonprofit status to FOSS orgs in Episode 0x4E (IRS Refusal Redux)
Some background about Randy Farmer (Spritely Institute's Executive Director):
- Randy co-founded Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first graphical massively multiplayer virtual world, which ran on the Commodore 64 in 1985 (!!!)
  - Revival over at neohabitat.org
  - See the hilarious marketing video
  - The Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitat is one of the most cited papers about virtual community designs of all times, and still holds up today
- Electric Communities Habitat was Habitat's followup.
  - Hard to find information on, but here's a Randy demo'ing the system from 1997!
  - The E Programming Language, on which much of Spritely is designed, came from EC Habitat. See Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 for more on that (and hey, when are we getting out part 2?)
- Randy co-hosts a podcast called Social Media Clarity which has some interesting episodes.
See also Spritely Institute's brilliant engineer Jessica Tallon writing about her experiences and especially her pebble bank design!

49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for Everyone

2022-07-14T21:40:00Z

Morgan's out sick! And yet Morgan is still in this episode! And that's because this episode is the audio version of a talk by the very same name from FOSDEM 2022, co-presented by Christine and Morgan! But since Morgan isn't here, Christine fills in, and also gets a bit silly.

HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS! The last live scheme tutorial went really well! And relatedly, Christine and the Spritely Institute just published A Scheme Primer, which is more or less the text version of that presentation! The next live verison of the sheme tutorial will be hosted at Hack & Craft! Come this Saturday, July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC)! We're planning to record this one!

Oh, and bonus Fructure gif:

Links:

The video version of this talk
Episode 47: What is Lisp?
Wisp and its associated SRFI-119
Fructure!!! Watch the amazing RacketCon talk!

48: Sophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease Pencil

2022-06-30T13:40:00Z

The amazing Sophie Jantak joins us to talk about how she makes pet portraits (including one she made for us!) using Blender's Grease Pencil. Hear about Sophie's process, why Grease Pencil is the right tool for her, and what her collalboration process is like on pet portrait commissions! (And yes, you can commission Sophie tool!)

BONUS FREE CULTURAL SOURCE CONTENT! We've collectively decided to release this artwork's source code as a free cultural work! Get the .blend (CC BY-SA 4.0)!

HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS! Also a reminder, we'll be hosting two versions of a "Intro to Scheme" tutorial during the two Hack & Craft meetings this month!

July 2nd, 8pm-10pm ET (12am-2am UTC): First trial run of Scheme tutorial!
July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC): Second version, we're planning to record this one!

Links:

Sophie Jantak!
- YouTube channel (lots of great grease pencil tutorials!)
- Pet commissions
- Patreon
- Sophie's beginner grease pencil tutorial: 3d bonsai painting
Blender and Grease Pencil (hybrid 2d and 3d artwork)
Christine's cat comix (these were made for Morgan when she was finishing her dissertation, but maybe you'll enjoy them):
HERO, a Blender Grease Pencil Showcase
There are a lot of good Grease Pencil tutorials online... we'll let you find them, but this Grease Pencil Random Tips and Tricks is a nice thing to know about!
FOSS & Crafts Episode 16: Bassam Kurdali on using Blender for open movie productions and education

47: What is Lisp?

2022-06-23T12:25:00Z

This episode is all about the Lisp family of programming languages! Ever looked at Lisp and wondered why so many programmers gush about such a weird looking programming language style? What's with all those parentheses? Surely there must be something you get out of them for so many programming nerds to gush about the language! We do a light dive into Lisp's history, talk about what makes Lisp so powerful, and nerd out about the many, many kinds of Lisps out there!

Announcement: Christine is gonna give an intro-to-Scheme tutorial at our next Hack & Craft! Saturday July 2nd, 2022 at 20:00-22:00 ET! Come and learn some Scheme with us!

Links:

Various histories of Lisp:
- History of Lisp by John McCarthy
- The Evolution of Lisp by Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel
- History of LISP by Paul McJones
William Byrd's The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written demonstrates just how easy it is to write lisp in lisp, showing off the kernel of evaluation living at every modern programming language!
M-expressions (the original math-notation-vision for users to operate on) vs S-expressions (the structure Lisp evaluators actually operate at, in direct representational mirror of the typically, but not necessarily, parenthesized representation of the same).
Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2... well, rather than give a simple link and analysis, have a thorough one.
Lisp machines
- MIT's CADR was the second iteration of the lisp machine, and the most influential on everything to come. Then everything split when two separate companies implemented it...
- Lisp Machines, Incorporated (LMI), founded by famous hacker Richard Greenblatt, who aimed to keep the MIT AI Lab hacker culture alive by only hiring programmers part-time.
- Symbolics was the other rival company. Took venture capital money, was a commercial success for quite a while.
- These systems were very interesting, there's more to them than just the rivalry. But regarding that, the book Hackers (despite its issues) captures quite a bit about the AI lab before this and then its split, including a ton of Lisp history.
- Some interesting things happening over at lisp-machine.org
The GNU manifestio mentions Lisp quite a bit, including that the plan was for the system to be mostly C and Lisp.
Worse is Better, including the original (but the first of those two links provides a lot of context)
The AI winter. Bundle up, lispers!
Symbolics' Mac Ivory
RISC-V tagged architecture, plus this lowRISC tagged memory tutorial. (We haven't read these yet, but they're on the reading queue!)
Scheme
- There's a lot of these... we recommend Guile if you're interested in using Emacs (along with Geiser), and Racket if you're looking for a more gentle introduction (DrRacket, which ships with Racket, is a friendly introduction)
- The R5RS and R7RS-small specs are very short and easy to read especially
- See this section of the Guile manual for a bit of... history
Common Lisp... which, yeah there are multiple implementations, but these days really means SBCL with Sly or SLIME
Clojure introduced functional datastructures to the masses (okay, maybe not the masses). Neat stuff, though not a great license choice (even if technically FOSS) in our opinion and Rich Hickey kinda blew up his community so maybe use something else these days.
Hy, always hy-larious
Fennel, cutest lil' Lua Lisp you've ever seen
Webassembly's text syntax isn't technically a Lisp, but let's be honest... is it technically not a Lisp either?!
Typed Racket and Hackett
Emacs... Lisp?... well let's just give you the tutorial! The dreams of the 60s-80s are alive in Emacs.
The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language is a nice little tour of some well known Lisps.
Actually, we just did an episode about Emacs, didn't we?
Digital Humanities Workshops episode
We guess if you wanted to use Racket and VS Code, you could use Magic Racket?! We dunno, we've never used VS Code! (Are we out of touch?!)
What about for Guile?! Someone put some energy into Guile Studio!
Hack & Craft!

46: Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1

2022-05-31T22:50:00Z

Calling all programming language nerds! Distinguished computer scientist Mark S. Miller (presently at Agoric) joins us to tell us all about distributed object programming languages and their history! We talk about actors, a bit of Xanadu, and little known but incredibly influential programming languages like Flat Concurrent Prolog, Joule, and E!

Actually there's so much to talk about that this episode is just part one! There's more to come!

Links:

The actor model (the core of which is sometimes distinguished from modified variants by as being called "the classic actor model"). Long history; Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actors is maybe the cleanest writeup
The Agoric Open Systems papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into the underlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objects
markm-talks and markm-more-talks which are mostly about object capability security topics
APConf keynote, Architectures of Robust Openness by Mark S. Miller (YouTube copy)
Mark diagraming a (certificate based) object capabilities flow at Rebooting Web of Trust 2017 (when Mark and Christine first met!)
The history of Mark and company performing civil disobediance to make cryptography available to everyone is discussed in When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in Software, part of a four part series
RSA
Xanadu, Ted Nelson, and Computer Lib/Dream Machines
Xerox PARC, which is where the Vulcan group happened (which is hard to find information on, sadly).
Mark mentions some of his colleagues who worked with him in the Vulcan group, including Dean Tribble (who worked on Joule, see more below) and Danny Bobrow who is famous for his groundbreaking program STUDENT (Natural Language Input for a Computer Proglem Solving System is an incredible read, detailing a program (written in lisp!) which could read algebra "word problems" written in plain English and solve them... in 1964!).
Flat Concurrent Prolog... it's tough to find things about! Presumably here's the paper Mark mentioned that Dean lead on Flat Concurrent Prolog from the Vulcan group which lead to Joule's channels. A bit more on (go figure) erights.org!
The Joule manual is still a very interesting read, if you can find the time. Talks about channels in depth.
Here's the Communicating Sequential Processes book by Tony Hoare, quite a nerdy read!
On capabilities and actors... we'll get to this more in the next episode, but for now we'll leave the Ode to the Granovetter Diagram paper here (it's a truly amazing document!)

45: A high level introduction to cryptography

2022-05-25T11:30:00Z

In this episode we give a very (very) high level introduction to cryptography concepts. No math or programming background required!

Links:

Crypto 101, probably the BEST book for learning about cryptography concepts. And a relevant talk from PyCon!
We mentioned RSA, which is the first publicly published algorithm for public key cryptography. These days most public key cryptography uses elliptic curves instead. It's possible that in the future, something else will be recommended instead!
Playing around with GnuPG can be a great way to learn about cryptography as a user, but... it's also not the easiest thing to learn either, and we don't personally believe that GPG/PGP's web of trust model is a realistic path for user security. (But what we recommend instead, that's a topic for a future episode.) Still, a useful tool in all sorts of ways.
Mixing and matching these things at a low level can be tricky, and unexpected vulnerabilities can easily occur. Cryptographic Right Answers has been a useful page, but the cryptography world keeps moving!

44: Celebrating a Decade of Guix

2022-04-30T16:25:00Z

Guix turns ten! We celebrate Guix's first decade by highlighting ten great things about Guix! Hear all about functional package management, time-traveling operating systems, and why "Composable DSLs" are great!

Links:

Guix
Stories about 10 years of Guix, from the Guix blog
Nix
Cool Guix features highlighted in this episode:
Nonguix (Proprietary! Nonfree! But sometimes some users need these things to get their computers to work...)
Reproducible Builds
Bootstrappable Builds
Mes (see this video for an introduction)
Reflections on Trusting Trust (aka the "Thompson Attack" described in the episode)
virtualenv

43: Repetitive Strain Injuries

2022-03-31T16:30:00Z

This week we’re talking about Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI). Christine and Morgan tell their stories bout over-using their wrists from programming (prodded along by an injury) and writing academic papers respectively. We discuss what you can do to treat or minimize the effects of these injuries then cap it off with a discussion of RSI gloves including Morgan's Free Soft Wear RSI glove pattern.

Repetitive Strain Injuries
Morgan's RSI gloves article
Your Wrists Hurt, You Must Be a Programmer
It's Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome book (there are probably better resources out there now, this is what Christine read a decade ago)
Workrave
Some RSI exercises that Christine thought were effective (old, but archived on internet archive... Christine still uses them sometimes)

42: Learning the Sewing Machine

2022-03-06T18:00:00Z

Christine finally overcomes her fear of the sewing machine and we talk about Christine and Morgan's respective experiences learning it, and how you can pick it up too!

Links:

Morgan's article on Basic Sewing Patterns. Includes pictures of the dicebag and skirt! (More tutorials coming soon!)
You probably know what a sewing machine is, but isn't there always more to learn?
A Cultural Perspective on Gender Diversity in Computing and Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization: The Carnegie Mellon Women@SCSAction Plan (On that note, when Christine was in college she attended a presentation by Lenore Blum about women in CS, which is where the potluck anecdote comes from.)

41: Learning Emacs

2022-02-05T12:40:00Z

Morgan finally overcomes her fear of Emacs and we talk about Morgan and Christine's respective experiences learning it, and how you can pick it up too!

Our talks tomorrow at FOSDEM's Declarative and Minimalistic Computing room:

Switching capslock and ctrl stuff: (it's a great idea even if you don't use Emacs; many keyboards used to have ctrl key where capslock now is, and much advanced program use benefits from keyboard shortcuts):

Switching on GNU/Linux
Switching on Windows 10 & 11
Switching on OSX
On Guix: (keyboard-layout "us" #:options '("caps:ctrl_modifier" "shift:both_capslock")) in your system configuration both makes capslock a ctrl and allows you to press both shift keys at once to enable capslock behavior (should you want such a thing)
And actually there's a whole EmacsWiki page about it

Links:

Emacs!
Git and Magit
Org-Mode
Spacemacs
Mousemacs
Emacs Themes… find one that's right for you!
The Emacs lisp reference manual
emacsconf
Org-mode and Org-Roam for Scholars and Researchers
Sacha Chua, whose blog is full of awesome emacs and emacs news posts, and who also releases lots of great videos about Emacs!
Emacs Rocks!
Episode 14: Digital Humanities Workshops
Episode 15: Scribble and the Open Document Format
mu4e, ERC, crdt.el (video)… many more emacs tools mentioned, not all linked! Trying to be comprehensive would result in a trip to the M-x doctor for sure…
wireworld-el, Christine's (minimalist) implementation of the wireworld cellular automata (cellular automata circuits!)
And yes, it turns out you CAN annotate PDFs in emacs, using the pdf-tools package!

40: Interdisciplinarity and FOSS (SeaGL Keynote)

2022-01-09T23:00:00Z

Morgan and Christine talk about the skills they’ve learned in their humanities backgrounds and how those have translated into their work within FOSS communities and projects. They’ll then discuss the benefits of seeking out varied skillsets within your communities, the value of looking at problems from multiple lenses, and how to use all of the tools we’ve got to promote our projects. (This episode is the audio from our SeaGL keynote of the same name!)

Oh yeah, and as we said in the intro, the TinyNES campaign is going strong (see our last episode)! We met the minimum goal which means it's happening! Still a couple of weeks left (at time of writing) to get yourself an open hardware NES, but over half of the "genuine chip" ones are now sold out, so get yours while you can!

Links:

SeaGL, and a video of our keynote of the same name
Spritely
Okay here's Christine's old comic Lingo from nearly two decades ago, don't judge too harshly pls
Emacs
LaTeX
Racket and Racket's picture language
MediaGoblin
Digital Humanities Workshops episode
Music Production on Guix System
Jessica Tallon and Spritely interview
FOSS Stitch episode of F&C, and ih!
The Liberated Pixel Cup
Deb Nicholson
Urchn Studios

39: The TinyNES: An Open Hardware "Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square"

2021-12-16T20:10:00Z

Dan Gilbert of Tall Dog joins us to talk about the Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square (or TinyNES for short)! The TinyNES is an open hardware system compatible with the compatible with original Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom cartridges and controllers. Instead of being just an emulator or FPGA-based implementation, the TinyNES uses the original 6502-derived chips and a custom circuit board, preserving and carrying forward computing history! Oh yeah, and it's also running a crowdfunding campaign, so you can order your own and support open hardware in the best way possible: by playing video games!

By the way, we mentioned that FOSS & Crafts Studios would be launching its first collaboration... we're helping to run the crowdfunding campaign on this one (and couldn't be more excited about it)!

Links:

TinyNES crowdfunding campaign (launch announcement, sources will be on tinynes.com when campaign succeeds)
Tall Dog, Dan's company (they do some other cool open hardware stuff too, check 'em out!)
Tall Dog's statement on supporting open source
The 6502 chip and its specially modified version for the Nintendo Enetertainment System, the Ricoh 2A03
FreeCAD and KiCAD
Visual6502
Nova the Squirrel
Everdrive (proprietary hardware, but lets you run custom ROMs, including Nova)
Robot Finds Kitten on the c64! Written in Racket!

38: Spritely Updates! (November 2021)

2021-11-28T12:15:00Z

It's time for some updates on Spritely, the project Christine founded to advance decentralized networking technology! A lot has happened since our episode about Spritely from last year (which is really where Spritely got its main public announcement)! Most notably, Jessica Tallon has joined the project thanks to a generous grant from NLNet and NGI Zero! But there's a lot more that has happened too, so listen in!

ALSO! As mentioned at the end of this episode, starting with the NEXT episode, we'll begin signing off every episode by thanking donors to FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! By donating you both support this podcast AND Christine's work on Spritely!

Links:

The Spritely Project
FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! Donate to show up in the thank-yous for upcoming episodes!
The previous "What is Spritely?" of this podcast
Jessica Tallon joins with a grant from NLNet/NGI Zero! Plus an interview!
Spritely Brux, Spritely's identity and trust management framework, which Jessica is working on (and Morgan dressed as for the costume contest)
Goblin-Chat (mostly a prototype to demonstrate the underlying networking tech)
Spritely Goblins, Spritely's distributed programming environment framework (and which Christine dressed as for the costume contest) (code, documentation)
Work in progress port of Goblins on Guile! It's getting close!
Spritely Aurie, Spritely's security-preserving runtime serialization and upgrade framework
Safe Serialization Under Mutual Suspicion by Mark S. Miller
Pickling, Uneval, Unapply by Jonathan Rees
OCapN, the new generation of CapTP and friends (see also What is CapTP, and what does it enable?)
Coroutines, Goblins' scoped suport for them. As for why they aren't prioritized in Goblins, read up on re-entrancy attacks, including this ancient e-lang email thread
Goblins' integration with Racket's asynchronous programming stuff via sync/pr (will be documented in the next tutorial version)
SeaGL, where Morgan and Christine keynoted... and performed in the costume contest as the Spritely Brux and Goblins mascots!

37: Salt on Resilience in FOSS

2021-11-02T21:00:00Z

Wm Salt Hale joins us to talk about his dissertation on resilience in FOSS communities (especially after crisis events), the kind of impacts founder decisions can have on long-term community development, especially as seen through reactions to software vulnerabilities and license decisions.

Also! Salt mentions that we're keynoting at SeaGL this weekend! It's an online conference, so maybe we'll see you there!

Links:

36: Topics of interest!

2021-09-11T17:22:00Z

Lightning round! Morgan and Christine blast through a bunch of snack-sized topics they're currently interested in, ranging from an actual FOSS video game made for the NES, to "Free Soft Wear" clothing, to compiler towers!

above image from Morgan's blogpost on "free soft wear"

Links:

This episode's title was inspired by Ian Bicking's 2009 PyCon talk, "Topics of Interest", but it's bitrotted off the internet so we can't link you to that one. Boooooo!
Nova the Squirel by... Nova the Squirrel
- Source code!
- upcoming SNES sequel!
- You might need an NES emulator... Mednafen is good and can play games on a lot of systems
Mark Bitman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" First edition and no I'm not linking you to the second edition which is good but not as deeply instructive
Elena "of Valhalla"'s blogpost about tie-on pockets
- see also
- see also (see also)
Episode 17: Gardening, from seedling to seasoned
Guile's compiler tower
Kat Walsh's awesome necklace she made during Hack & Craft
Jim's Big Ego's song Mix Tape from the album They're Everywhere!
- If you like this song, you might really like the album free* which Christine would argue tells a collective narrative very relevant to this podcast
Robo Rally! Program robots!
Morgan's blogpost on "free soft wear" (term coined by the great Kat Walsh!)
Morgan's tablet weaving pattern for the "html strap" (Partly inspired by this pattern, but honestly mostly different. Bonus question for the reader: what constitutes a derivative work for weaving patterns?)
Eat the Weeds is a great resource to learn about what kinds of weeds you can eat, and which ones you can't, but even then, be careful. Really, seriously, be careful. Poison hemlock looks almost just like its more innocent cousin Queen Anne's lace except that it will kill you quickly and painfully. There's lots of great wild stuff out there, but be careful, and maybe take a class or instructions or help from someone who knows what they're talking about, or only eat the stuff that's generally agreed upon as "there's nothing dangerous you could mistake this for". And even then, be sure!

35: Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, Part 2

2021-08-30T15:45:00Z

In Part 1 of Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, we discussed the practical matters of textile production in domestic and commercial contexts. In this second episode, we look at the performative ways that textile production was used to construct women's identities. This includes the incorporation of textile tools and production into rites of passage such as marriage, childbirth, and death as a symbol of the virtuous matron. We further discuss religious use and association of textile production through the stories of the Fates, Arachne, and the Virgin Mary. We then come around to weave the rest of the narrative together: could the piece that fits in the women-shaped hole of textile production in ancient Rome be... women?

This episode is dedicated in loving memory of Laura Callahan-Hazard and Sigrid Steinbock, both enthusiastic supporters of Morgan's dissertation, themselves both textile artists, and who both had wanted to read Morgan's dissertation but left this world too soon.

Links:

Morgan's dissertation
Episode 34: Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, Part 1
Trinkl, Elisabeth. 2004. "Zum Wirkungskreis einer kleinasiatischen Matrona anhand ausgewählter Funde aus dem Hanghaus 2 in Ephesos." In Jahreshefte des Österreichischen archäologischen Instituts in Wien. 73:281-303
Roman version of the Arachne Myth by Ovid, The Metamorphoses VI Content Warning: suicide, oblique mentions to rape, gods being jerks to mortals
Roman description of the three fates or Parcae by Catullus, 64, scroll down to line 305.
Roman version of the Europa Myth by Ovid, The Metamorphoses, II, 833-875 Content Warning: abduction, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals
A summary of the mythology of Leda and the Swan, very brief Roman summary in Hyginus, Fabulae 77, scroll down to § 77. Content Warning: rape, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals
Roman version of the Danae Myth by Hyginus, Fabulae 63, scroll down to § 63. Content Warning: rape, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals

34: Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman Empire, Part 1

2021-08-19T10:05:00Z

In the first of two episodes on Morgan's dissertation we introduce the topic of women and textile production in the Roman Empire. Scholars have often viewed the domestic and commercial divide in textile production along gendered lines, associating domestic production with women in the context of the ideal of feminine virtue and commercial production with men working in centralized production centers. Here we use the cottage industry model to contextualize the role of women’s labor in the Roman textile industry, exploring the links between domestic production and commercial distribution.

Links:

Morgan's dissertation
Episode 26: Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber, an academic journey talks about the process of getting a PhD (from Morgan's personal experiences, your mileage may vary)
Episode 3: Textile production and a nostalgic past discusses Augustan propaganda and textile production and gives a summary of the stages of textile production from sheep to sweater.
The two Augustan versions of the Lucretia myth by Ovid, Fasti 2.722-751 and Livy, History of Rome 1.57.9 (Content Warning: rape, suicide, revolution)
Another instance of a woman's labor from Ovid, this time a more modest country woman who must weave cloaks etc before winter to protect her family from the cold: Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714.
Hitchner, Robert Bruce. 2012. "Olive Production and the Roman Economy: The Case for Intensive Growth in the Roman Empire." In The Ancient Economy, Taylor and Francis. Partial text available on Google Scholar.
Barber, Elizabeth. 1994. Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York : Norton.
Lena Larsson Lovén has written extensively on both the iconography of textile production and the performative relationships between women and wool work in the Roman Empire.

33: Which Color Should We Paint This Episode?

2021-08-01T17:50:00Z

In this episode, we discuss "bikeshedding" (also known as the Law of Triviality), the famous proposition that complex contributions and ideas (such as plans to build a nuclear power plant), often of high impact and importance, move forward with relatively little interference, whereas simple contributions and conversations (such as which color to paint a bikeshed) get caught up in committee and high-volume debate, and how this tends to impact FOSS communities. We do a (slightly dramatic) reading of the original email, hold a conversation about it, and then come back to the topic with a twist right after everyone (including ourselves) thought the episode was over.

Links:

The original bikeshed email hosted at shed.bike
But wait! Use bikeshed.org instead!
Wait! You should link to the white background page! No, the green one! No, blue! No, purple!
Poul-Henning Kamp's page on the subject
But wait! Brett Glass (and others) respond!
yourlogicalfallacyis.com, but be sure to read about The Fallacy Fallacy before you start linking to these to try to win an argument on the internet

32: Happy FOSS & Crafts anniversary!

2021-07-20T17:45:00Z

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 ;)

31: Talking Pressbooks and OER with Steel Wagstaff

2021-07-11T17:00:00Z

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

30: Gender and Sexuality, A Personal Perspective

2021-06-27T21:05:00Z

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)

29: Building Blocks for User Freedom

2021-06-12T16:10:00Z

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

28: FOSS Stitch w/ Elana Hashman and Katie McLaughlin

2021-05-23T16:17:00Z

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:

27: Nerdout! Game Design and Social Systems

2021-05-06T14:12:00Z

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..."

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

2021-04-23T10:45:00Z

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!

25: Governance, Leadership, and Founder's Syndrome

2021-03-28T19:05:00Z

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"

24: Get Organized!

2021-03-12T14:20:00Z

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.

23: Nerdout! Fuzzy and crisp systems

2021-02-13T12:15:00Z

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

22: Crafting the past... or trying to

2021-01-29T17:52:00Z

There's all sorts of reasons to pursue historical crafting techniques: for the experience of recreating them or learning new techniques, for education, or for entertainment and immersion. Morgan and Chris explore these paths under the terms "experiential historical crafts", "experimental archaeology", and "historical reenactment". What is important, useful, and fun about each of these? What pitfalls might we want to avoid? What can be gained by what we might find, how might we bring more people in... and what do we risk by what (or who) we might miss or leave out?

Links and references:

Colonial Williamsburg
Afroculinaria, Michael Twitty’s blog
Twitty, Michael. The Cooking Gene : a Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York, NY :Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.
Outram, Alan K. “Introduction to Experimental Archaeology.” World Archaeology, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–6.
Janet Stephens’s YouTube channel, with tutorials for re-creating historical hairstyles
Stephens, Janet. “Recreating the Fonseca Hairstyle.” EXARC, 2013/1, https://exarc.net/issue-2013-1/at/recreating-fonseca-hairstyle
The journal EXARC is a peer-reviewed online journal for experimental archaeology with articles released under CC BY-NC-SA
Strand, Eva B. A, Marie-Louise Nosch, and Joanne Cutler. Tools, Textiles and Contexts: Investigating Textile Production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015.
Society for Creative Anachronism/SCA
New Yorker* article about the Townsends episode on “Orange Fool” (* Not the New York Times, as Chris misspoke in the podcast)
Townsends episode on “Orange Fool”
Townsends episode in aftermath of the “Orange Fool” outrage (where he specifically states that his channel does not link historical topics to modern politics)
Michael Twitty making Kush on Townsends (“Exactly how you expect stuffing to smell … this is what you expect it to taste like”)
Michael Twitty making Akara on Townsends (the fritter/falafel-like dish)

Special note here: we aren't saying Townsends is bad; we enjoy the show and from a standpoint of production, what it does present is very good. But it does seem like the show makes an intentional dodge on important issues or chooses to only present a limited and fun subset of history... which can be disappointing at the least and at the worst can result in a kind of nostalgia that erases real problems. All history is suffused with things to celebrate and things which are disturbing and disappointing, but recognizing only the former sets us up to repeat the latter.

21: Vicky Steeves on Reproducibility, Open Research, & Librarians (... and game modding)

2021-01-17T22:40:00Z

We're joined by Vicky Steeves, a hyper-talented librarian specializing in data management, open and reproducible research, and the overlap between FOSS, free culture, and library sciences! We dive into all of that... plus a bit of crafting... and even... what's this? A discussion of what the FOSS world can learn from the world of game modding (and vice versa)!

Links:

ISAGE (Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience) and, to be a bit meta, ISAGE's own data as open and reproducible research!
Sherpa Romeo
ReproZip
Related F&C episode: Stefano Zacchiroli on preserving source code at Software Heritage
bwFLA - Emulation as a Service
Stardew Valley modding page (note: Stardew Valley is not itself FOSS)
Programming owes its strength to our long legacy of knitting by Carrie Stokes
Project Jupyter
Git, git-annex, and git-lfs
Docker
The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work by R. Stuart Geiger

20: Hygiene for a computing pandemic

2021-01-03T17:40:00Z

Chris and Morgan, driving in the Covid-19 pandemic, reflect on lessons of hygiene and a separation of concerns from the past (seen through the retroactively surprising struggle for handwashing acceptance) while analyzing how to bring safety to today's computing security pandemic via object capability discipline.

As said in the episode, there's a lot of research and evidence for the object capability security approach! Please do scour the links below (with significant commentary attached).

Links:

Ignaz Semmelweis and two excellent podcast episodes with more:
- Ignaz Semmelweis and the War on Handwashing on Stuff You Missed in History Class
- The fascinating, inspiring, and infurating story of Ignaz Semmelweis on Sawbones
The mailing list post by Chris that prompted this episode (largely the same stuff, a bit more particular to the targeted audience): Hygiene for a computing pandemic: separation of VCs and ocaps/zcaps
POLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident, by Kate Sills. Examines how malicious code inserted into a library designed to steal programmers' private information/keys/money could have been prevented with capability-based security.
An interview with Kate Sills about object capabilities; contains some of the same information presented in this episode, but with more focus on the basic concepts.
A Security Kernel based on the Lambda Calculus explains how these concepts apply to programming language design (using a limited subset of the Scheme programming language).
Ka-Ping Yee's PhD dissertation, Building Reliable Voting Machine Software, demonstrates the difficulty of finding intentionally obscured security vulnerabilities through code review (see "How was PVote's security evaluated?"). This demonstrates that FOSS is necessary but insufficient on its own for security.
A backdoor which was inserted into the official Linux kernel source code (and actually distributed on the official CVS server, briefly!) all the way back in 2003. Note that the vulnerability was initially discovered not through code review, but through discovering a server intrusion. The code is well obfuscated in a way that might be difficult to observe through visual inspection of a significant body of code.
The zcap-ld spec has a subsection on how to safely and hygienically bridge the worlds of identity/claims/credentials with authority/ocaps. (Note some bias here: Chris co-authored this spec with Mark Miller.) It also has some other useful subsections: Capabilities are Safer contrasts with ACLs, and ZCAP-LD by Example shows how capabilities can be constructed on top of certificate chains (an approach not even mentioned in the episode... but yes, you can do it!)
So why are ACLs / an identity-oriented approach so bad anyway? ACLs Don't explains the problems caused by an identity-oriented authority model:
- Ambient authority, ie "programs running with too much authority"... think about the "solitaire running 'as you'" part of the podcast (and contrast with the POLA/ocap solution also explained in-episode)
- Confused deputies, which are notoriously kind of hard to describe... Norm Hardy provides a capsule summary which is fairly good. But also:
  - The Browser is a very Confused Deputy is an excellent and fun video introduction.
  - Norm Hardy's original Confused Deputy paper is still worth reading, and there is more to read here
  - An example of a confused deputy attack against the Guile programming environment (which Chris helped uncover): Guile security vulnerability w/ listening on localhost + port (with fix). Note the way that both the browser and the guile programming environment appear to be "correctly behaving according to specification" when looked at individually!
  - Another way to put it is that identity-oriented security approaches are also generally perimeter-based security approaches and (I'm paraphrasing Marc Stiegler here): "Perimeter security is eggshell security... it seems pretty tough when you tap on it, but poke one hole through and you can suck out the whole yolk."
Capabilities: Effects for Free shows nicely how capabilities can also be combined with a type system to prove constraints on what a particular subset of code can do.
What we haven't talked about as much yet is all the cool things that ocaps enable. A great paper on this is Capability-based Financial Instruments (aka "Ode to the Granovetter Diagram", or "The Ode"), which shows how, using the E distributed programming language, distributed financial tooling can be built out of a shockingly small amount of code. (All of this stuff written about a decade before blockchains hit the mainstream!)
You might need to know a bit more E syntax to read The Ode; Marc Stiegler's E in a Walnut is an incredible resource, and has many insights of its own... but it's a bit more coconut-sized than walnut-sized, in my view.
An enormous amount of interesting information and papers about object capability security on the E Wiki's Documentation page page (snapshot). Honestly you could just spend a few months reading all that.
In particular, if you're mathematically minded and say "yeah but I want the proofs, gimme the proofs; I mean like real math'y proofs!" there's a whole subsection on Formal Methods (snapshot)
But maybe you're worrying, is it possible to build secure UIs on top of this? Not One Click for Security does a lovely job showing how ocap principles can actually result in a more intuitive flow if done correctly... one smooth enough that users might wonder, "where's the security?" Surprise! It was just smoothly baked into the natural flow of the application, which is why you didn't notice it!
And if you really want to spend a lot of time getting into the weeds of how to design ocap systems, maybe look at Mark S. Miller's PhD dissertation, Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control. Chris is pretty sure they're the only one with an autographed copy sitting on their desk.
Finally, have we mentioned that Chris's work on Spritely is pretty much entirely based on extending the federated social web based on ocap security principles?

19: Mallory Knodel on bits and bytes and human rights

2020-12-17T15:50:00Z

With computing technology becoming integrated with every aspect of our lives, many issues are simultaneously human rights issues and technical issues. Thus, how are organizations concerned with human rights and social justice engaging with technological authorship and policy-making? Mallory Knodel, presently Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology, explains her work as a Public Interest Technologist. Mallory is also heavily engaged in a wide number of technical standards-making organizations, and explains not only how technical standards are of interest to human rights organizations, but how the origin in work to define human rights overlaps with the emergence of standards-making efforts.

Links:

Center for Democracy and Technology
The Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group (of which Mallory is co-chair)
A whole bunch of mentioned standards-making organizations: W3C, IETF, IRTF, IEEE, ITU, ICANN, ISO
Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880
[http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/](Rebalancing How the Web is Built) by Manu Sporny
The slew of Google-related stuff, both good and bad:
Governmental battles over root DNS split
Russia blocking TLS 1.3
IETF RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users

18: Sumana Harihareswara on sketching, standup, and maintainership

2020-12-06T10:10:00Z

We're joined by Sumana Harihareswara, a FOSS advocate yes, but also a person of so many other talents! We talk about sketching, standup comedy, and maintainership for the long life of free software projects. (Did you know you can hire Sumana to help on your FOSS project maintainership btw? Sumana runs Changeset Consulting!) We also talk about representation in the FOSS community within the arts (especially narrative arts), and about learning new skills within "no big deal" contexts.

Links:

Changeset Consulting
Sumana's LibrePlanet 2017 keynote: Lessons, myths, and lenses: What I wish I'd known in 1998
Producing Open Source Software
Vidding and some of its origins in the slideshow form (in particular with Kandy Fong's early works)
More on fanworks and fan communities and their history at fanlore.org
Vid: Pipeline by, as it turns out, Sumana Harihareswara!
Vid: Only a Lad by Laura Shapiro
Vid: Straightening Up the House by eruthros; also see all this other great commentary!
The Bug by Ellen Ullman
Halt and Catch Fire
The Internet's Own Boy, a film and play about Aaron Swartz, which you can watch here in movie form CORRECTION: Actually Sumana pointed us in the correct direction... the play was Building a Real Boy, a separate thing from the forementioned film!
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and also the critical response Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic by Allison Parrish
XKCD
Julia Styles in Ghostwriter
Software Freedom Conservancy, who is doing a fundraiser right now!
- Sumana's fundraising vid for Conservancy in 2015
- Chris's animated ascii art card for Conservancy in 2019 (source code)
If you're interested in Sumana's upcoming book on long-term maintenance of FOSS projects, you can contact her for more info! UPDATE: Sampler released!

17: Gardening, from seedling to seasoned

2020-11-28T09:50:00Z

We're joined by our friend Tristan to talk about gardening experiences, from newbies (us) to the wise (Tristan and others who are not us). We (Morgan and Chris) have just started seriously gardening this year, and have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. And it turns out that people who have been doing it for years (such as Tristan) still have a lot of successes but also a lot of failures. But those can be fun too!

Links:

Stocking Up (book on preserving)
No dig sheet mulching

16: Bassam Kurdali on using Blender for open movie productions and education

2020-11-12T14:50:00Z

Bassam Kurdali (Fediverse, Twitter) talks about using Blender (a free and open source software suite for making 3d artwork) for open movie projects such as Elephants Dream (the world's first open movie project, which Bassam directed!) and Wires for Empathy, as well as use in teaching it to college students studying animation.

Links:

Blender
Urchin studios
Chicken Chair (we need a better link for this... check back later!)
Elephants Dream
Wires for Empathy (aka "Tube")
OpenToonz
Boats Animator
Natron
Hampshire College
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
Blender splash screens gallery

15: Scribble and the Open Document Format

2020-11-05T21:30:00Z

Morgan and Chris talk about the Scribble document authoring format, with Morgan talking about authoring her dissertation in it and Chris talking about writing an OpenDocument Format (sometimes shortened to "ODF" or "ODT") exporter. (That code is now a merge request which will hopefully become part of Scribble itself!)

Links:

The Digital Humanities Workshops episode... this is kind of a continuation of those topics.
Racket and Scribble
Racket 7.4 release notes, where Morgan is mentioned as a contributor.

Clarification: At one point we talk about whether or not Scribble includes support for "image lists". It has the relevant building blocks with support for images and figures, we were talking a bit more specifically about fitting a particular document formatting and organizational pattern used in art history papers.

14: Digital Humanities Workshops

2020-10-31T14:30:00Z

Morgan and Chris discuss the Digital Humanities workshops they ran introducing non-programmers to Racket and Scribble.

Links:

The flier (post-LibrePlanet 2018 edition)
Course material
- Building a Snowman with Racket
- How to Use Scribble to Write your Academic Papers: A Reference Tutorial

13: ActivityPub Conference 2020 with Sebastian Lasse

2020-10-15T13:45:00Z

This week we are joined by Sebastian Lasse, author of the Redaktor ActivityPub powered CMS, and co-host of both ActivityPub Conference 2020 and ActivityPub Conference 2019 along with Morgan. Lots of retrospective, especially on the difference between APConf as an online conference in 2020 vs an in person conference in 2019.

Links:

ActivityPub Conference 2020
- ActivityPub Conference videos
- The Running a FOSS virtual conference meta-talk/panel
ActivityPub
FOSShost
"Some singing"
Redaktor
The Hackathon at APConf 2020
We have a few more recordings related the petnames discussion and the hackathon demos to link here, but we'll have to wait until they're ready to go up to link them here!

12: [Theatre] The What Goblins Saga, Chapter 2: Trees, Friends, and Static

2020-10-08T16:00:00Z

On this episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre, we continue the What Goblins Saga. The What Goblins saga continues as the characters continue to learn about themselves and their ever-changing environment. If you haven't listened to Chapter 1, maybe stop reading now to avoid spoilers from that episode!

Having discovered that they are are sapient beings emergent from a networked video game, and having accidentally stumbled into administrative powers, the What Goblins discover the consequences of using those powers without knowing how the world around them might react to that.

Links:

FOSS & Crafts Episode 1: Collabortive Storytelling with Dice introduces the idea of RPGs as a way of making narratives together.
See also Freeform Universal (the RPG system used for this episode, explained in depth in Episode 1)!
And of course, see Chapter 1 of the What Goblins Saga!

11: An Ethics of Agency

2020-10-01T11:59:00Z

Chris and Morgan discuss an ethical framework Chris has been workshopping for the last few years, "An Ethics of Agency", with the foundation of maximizing agency "for you, for me, for everyone" and minimizing subjection. CW: Note that Chris talks about an incident involving them experiencing suicidal depression at one point.

Links:

Other philosophical systems mentioned:
Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation, and the argument for Equal consideration of interests. (Note that Peter Singer gets criticism from some disability circles; this is a good summary. In general it's our position to focus on "raising up" rights, including those of animals; pitting animal rights vs disabled rights need not be done in a society with as many resources as ours presently is.)
Amartya Sen, whose book Development as Freedom had a bigger background influence than Chris probably realized in its treatment of the agency of people as the primary index by which we measure a country's development
The GNU Manifesto. Search for "Kantian ethics" on the page. (Curiously its preceding sentence is described in an example that appears consequentialist! By the way, pretty much every decent ethical system claims that its foundation is the "golden rule", this isn't unique to Kantianism.)
The Free Software Definition. Also note the pun on another speech called The Four Freedoms.
Free as in Freedom episode with the AGPL panel discussion
A FOSDEM talk in 2014, The Road Ahead for Network Freedom, where "freedom for developers, but not for users" is mentioned as a phrase
Libre Lounge's subtitle: "a casual podcast about user freedom", including mentioned episode with Karen Sandler
Some talks in 2018 by Molly DeBlanc (and Karen Sandler) using the term "user freedom":
- That's a free software issue!
- User freedom: A love story
Molly DeBlanc has a wonderful article giving a personal definition of "user freedom"
Declaration of Digital Autonomy
OCap conference 2018, source of the mentioned dinner between Chris, Mark Miller, Kate Sills
Chris's ActivityPub Conference 2019 keynote, ActivityPub: past, present, future

10: [Theatre] The What Goblins Saga, Chapter 1: What Are Goblins?

2020-09-24T13:30:00Z

On this episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre, we begin exploring "The What Goblins Saga". While the claim of "our goblins are different" is hardly new, these goblins seem to stand apart more than most... even their fellow goblins seem to think so. What is the nature of goblins, and what about The What Goblins in particular? Through little planning or foresight, our motley crew is about to find more answers than they expected... which only opens up more questions, of course...

Links:

FOSS & Crafts Episode 1: Collabortive Storytelling with Dice introduces the idea of RPGs as a way of making narratives together.
See also Freeform Universal (the RPG system used for this episode, explained in depth in Episode 1)!

9: What is Spritely?

2020-09-10T13:30:00Z

What is this Spritely project that's taken up most of Chris's time for the last several years? Something about advancing distributed/decentralized social networks, but what does that mean? Chris and Morgan talk about it while they drive to the bank!

Links:

Spritely
- Spritely Goblins (repo), the distributed programming language environment
- The distributed storage demos: Magenc, Crystal, and Golem. Currently being explored as the Datashards project.
- Where's the website? Not up at the time of episode release yet. Get on that, Chris!
The E programming language
Rare video demonstrating Electric Communities Habitat
CapTP
Goblins demos
- Terminal Phase time travel demo
- A discussion about the distributed chat demo mentioned in the episode
Interview where Chris first announced Spritely on We Distribute
Spritely IRC channel

8: Stefano Zacchiroli on preserving source code at Software Heritage

2020-09-03T09:45:00Z

We are extremely excited to have on our first FOSS & Crafts guest: Stefano Zacchiroli! (Also known on some corners of the FOSS world as just "zack".) Stefano has a long history of FOSS advocacy, most famously for his role in Debian where he served three well-regarded terms as Debian Project Leader. These days zack works on Software Heritage, an archival institution for software source code. We talk about how Software Heritage plays a role in common with other GLAM institutions (which stands for "Galleries, Libraries Archives and Museums").

. o O (Could we possibly have a more appropriate FOSS & Crafts first guest episode?)

Links:

7: [Theatre] What Escaped from the Demonic Z.O.O.O.O. (part 2)

2020-08-27T15:45:00Z

Leaving off from part 1, the office demons of Styx, Hexia, and Gummy Bear (or is it Gerumphy or perhaps Gzeumphi Behr?) track down and confront the mysterious lampmorel creature directly. What dangers await them? And just what secrets are the corporate overlords of Demonstrative Industries and Plentimint Industries both keeping (perhaps even from each other)? Find out in this thrilling conclusion!

6: [Theatre] What Escaped from the Demonic Z.O.O.O.O. (part 1)

2020-08-20T13:20:00Z

On the first ever episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre (a new subshow of FOSS and Crafts), Chris and Morgan are joined by veteran role playing game players Nick and LP to bring everyone a story of three demonic employees of the international conglomerate, Demonstrative Industries. Something has escaped from the Demonic Z.O.O.O.O. to the human realm, and its up to our demon heroes to clean up the mess before anyone finds out. Can they succeed in their mission and keep their corporate overlords pleased with them, or will things get dramatically out of hand... or perhaps something in-between? Find out on today's episode (part one of two)!

Links:

If you haven't already, perhaps listen to FOSS & Crafts Episode 1: Collabortive Storytelling with Dice which introduces the idea of narrative RPGs. (That's also where we floated the idea to listeners of doing live RPG episodes as a way of generating new free culture content, to which we got an enthusiastic response, leading to this new sub-show!)
See also Freeform Universal (the RPG system used for this episode, explained in depth in Episode 1)!

5: Milkytracker, chiptunes, and that intro music

2020-08-13T17:40:00Z

Chris's journey of making the intro music is used as a backdrop to explore how to make music in Milkytracker, a FOSS program for making tracker music, as well as to explore a bit of sound theory, what chiptunes and tracker music are, and even a bit of exploring what it's like to learn something new even when you aren't necessarily very good yet.

Links:

Milkytracker
sfxr
drpetter's sound theory and synthesis page
musagi and the musagi tutorial
The Impulse Project
The Commodore 64 computer and its famous SID chip
c64.com, an archive of Commodore 64 games/programs (pretty much all proprietary though). Many of these have interesting cracked demos that are as interesting as the programs themselves.
Monty on the Run with its music by the famous Commodore 64 composer, Rob Hubbard
- Listen to the Monty on the Run main theme
- Rob Hubbard's Music: Disassembled, Commented and Explained
- Not shown in the podcast but you really also ought to listen to the Commando theme for the Commodore 64
Moments by Mr. Lou (mp3) and the original XM file (zipped) Really worth listening to the XM in Milkytracker so you can see how things work.
More cool music on the bottom of Milkytracker's downloads page and especially on The Mod Archive.
The demoscene
Chiptunes
Music trackers
Famitracker (Free software so why the heck is it Windows-only still? Someone finish porting it!)
Milkytracker's documentation page has of course its own manual but also a number of interesting historical music tracking guides
Brandon Walsh's milkytracker / chiptune tutorials (Content warning in that he does say an ablist slur somewhere in those videos.)
Music theory stuff
- Open Music Theory
- 8-bit Music Theory
- Learn music theory in half an hour (well, some of it)
freesound, amazing commons of useful samples for your music composition needs
I guess maybe you want to look at Chris's sound file sources (but probably not) (All CC BY-SA 3.0, like the show)

Made it all the way to the end of the podcast and this blogpost? I guess you really did stay awhile...

4: The Eight Kinds of Fun

2020-08-06T11:00:00Z

Morgan and Chris look at the domains of FOSS and crafts from the lens of the Eight Kinds of Fun, traditionally used to analyze game design. What kinds of ways do different people enjoy participating in creative activities? How can examining those help us understand how to grow our communities to accomodate different participants with different styles of interests?

Links:

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
An article about the Eight Kinds of Fun, oriented at RPG GMs
Ludology episode about fun in board games, including the Eight Kinds of Fun
Chris's keynote from last year's ActivityPub conference: ActivityPub: past, present future

3: Textile production and a nostalgic past

2020-07-30T09:45:00Z

These days textile production is mostly automated aside from some niche markets and craft production. Craft production of textiles today taps into a vision of a nostalgic past, often evoking memories of a time the audience member wasn't there for. It turns out this potent imagery has been used not just for inspiring hobbyist crafters everywhere to pull out the drop spindle and knitting needles, but also by political participants going back all the way to (at least) Ancient Rome to try to steer a particular narrative. Follow some of that history from past to present, and hear from Morgan about how the whole process of textile production works starting from raw materials... from sheep to sweater!

Links and references:

Suetonius, Life of Augustus; scroll down to section 73 for the secton on his humble furnishings and home-made clothing.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Or a shorter article sourced from this book.
Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi's Nation : Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington :Indiana University Press, 2007. Or a shorter article sourced from this book.
Obniski, Monica. “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (June 2008)
Washing Fleece
Carding Fiber
Combing Fiber
Spinning, Spinning with a drop spindle and distaff
Yarn Bombing
Pussy Hat Project's official website. The Wikipedia article addresses the raised issues of transphobia and racism and links to further sources.
Tiny Pricks Project
The mask pattern that Morgan uses, made by our friend Dan Gilbert, who makes cool open things, check them out.

2: The impact of machines that "learn" and produce

2020-07-23T12:10:00Z

The results from machine learning have been getting better and better and the results seen so far from OpenAI's GPT-3 model look stunningly good. But unlike GPT-2 (which was publicly released under a free license), so far GPT-3 is accessible via API-only. What's the reasoning and possible impact of that decision? For that matter, what kind of impacts could machine learning advancements make on FOSS, programming in general, art production, and civic society?

Links:

The OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin article
- The quoted comment on Hacker News
Auto-generation of legalese and auto-web-design GPT-3 demos
GPT-2
GPT-3's API and FAQ page
Tensorflow and PyTorch
(Artificial) neural networks and machine learning
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Google's Deepmind and Agent57 (be sure to watch the Agent57 videos, they're's impressive)
Mozilla's Common Voice project
AlphaGo
Bayesian spam filters; see also Paul Graham's highly influential a plan for spam writeup
Markov chains (we miss you, X11R5...)
The Postmodernist Essay Generator
Postmodernism
Neural networks' difficulties in explaining "why they did that" and an overview of attempts to make things better: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning
Chris had a conversation with Gerald Sussman about AI that was related to the above and influential on them. "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court."
The Propagator Model (by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman, largely): Revised Report on the Propagator Model. See also: We Really Don't Know How to Compute!
Three Panel Soul's Recursion comic (cut from this episode, but we also originally mentioned their Techics comic which is definitely relevant though)
Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, and the Realism movement (Obviously there's also a lot more to say about these art movements than just lumping them as a reaction to photography but... only so much time on an episode.)
AI Dungeon 2 (nonfree, though you can play it in your browser)
Episode of Ludology about procedural narrative generation
Implicit Bias and the Teaching of Writing
Machine learning's tendency to inherit biases
- Rise of the racist robots -- how AI is learning all our worst impulses
- Machine bias (and its use in deciding court cases)
- Google's Vision AI producing racist results
- When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (Content warning: this is due to an extremely harmful form of synthesized racism from the biases in the datasets Google has used)
- Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.
Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms and the subdiscipline of Learning to Learn
Hayao Miyazaki's criticism of an AI demonstration not considering its impact

1: Collaborative Storytelling with Dice

2020-07-16T15:55:00Z

You've probably heard of "tabletop Role Playing Games" (or, tabletop RPGs) before, but what are they? In this episode, Chris and Morgan introduce a subset of RPGs called "Narrative RPGs" whose mechanics are focused primarily around storytelling (as opposed to tactical combat).2 Hear about how narrative RPGs can be used as "collaborative storytelling with dice", some of the narrative RPG systems that exist, as well as an in-depth look at one particular RPG system, Freeform Universal. Freeform Universal is so simple and easy to pick up that by the end of this episode, you should have enough information to use it for weaving stories with your friends!

Links:

Freeform Universal (or FU, pronounced "Foo")
Fate (published by Evil Hat)
Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder
- Look, you can find enough info about these on your own
- The internet is full of articles about them
Open Game License (OGL) (... it's a weird license, but we'll talk about that some other time)
- Wikipedia article about the OGL
- Open Game License 1.0 (Wayback machine copy, RTF file)
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
Dark Dungeons (CW: 1980s religious satanic-panic propaganda... but for a fun time, find the 2014 live-action film somewhere)
Rory's Story Cubes (we called them "Rory's Story Dice" on the episode, oops)
Donjon RPG tools (Don't have enough time to come up with your own materials? You can use these as long as you don't mind leaning into a lot of auto-generated tropes.)
RPGs as therapy
- Please Don't Punch the GM: Adventures in Gaming Therapy (Role Playing Public Radio episode)
- Negotiating with the Dragon: Role-Playing Games as Group Therapy
Mary Robinete Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey (first book in the Glamourist Histories books mentioned by Morgan as inspiring one of her game themes)
Libre Lounge (Podcast Chris used to co-host, still ongoing)
- Episode about history of Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder and the Open Gaming License

Still reading this? Wow, okay, some bonus content...

We mentioned that Morgan did a class assignment for her intro-to-German class about needing to make a German fairytale... here's the assignment, as turned into the class: Hilda die Hexe (be nice enough to remember this is an intro-to-German class). Additionally, Chris simultaneously wrote a slightly-more-elaborated-upon version called The Witch and the Carriage. The process of playing the game and then writing up both of these took about an hour and a half so set your expectations accordingly.

Still want more? Okay, not claiming this is a "great" story, but here's a kind of fun writeup of a session called Santa's Little Uprising. (Not very serious, could use more polish.)

Maybe we'll take up our own advice and more seriously publish some of the stories we've constructed together sometime!

Episode 0: Welcome to FOSS and Crafts!

2020-07-15T10:30:00Z

Here it is, the very first episode of FOSS and Crafts! Co-hosts Chris and Morgan introduce themselves, their backgrounds, and give some sense of what to expect from the show.

Links:

Wikipedia summary of the Arts and Crafts movement