FOSS & Crafts Studios

Hello Everyone!

Since our last update we have released nine episodes of FOSS and crafts ranging quite a bit within the themes of our show (from Christine learning to sew , to a deep-dive interview with Mark Miller on distributed objects). Our most recent episode, an interview with Blender artist Sophie Jantak, discusses why Grease Pencil is the right tool for her and what her collaboration process is like on pet portrait commissions.

We hosted our first Hack & Craft community event in June 2021. We’ve billed these bi-monthly virtual meetups as something between a user group and a stitch and bitch. For the last year, we’ve done informal meetings where attendees bring whatever craft project they want to work on while we have discussions about free software, free culture, and making things together. In July 2022 we are testing a new format for these events. Christine will be giving a tutorial on “Intro to Scheme” in the first half of the event with the second half open to discussion.

Since we alternate our schedule to accommodate participants from different time zones, we typically get a different group of people on the first Saturday of the month and the third Saturday of the month. We decided then, that we will do the tutorial twice in the month to allow broader audience participation and we will record the second tutorial in order to have an asynchronous option as well. You can join the events from on Big Blue Button. We hope to see you there:

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!

As always, thank you all for your continued support. You make this show and these events possible.

Hello All! It has been a while since we posted an update here, so this post encompasses many things including our SeaGL Keynote, Spritely updates and news, and a new mode of patron recognition!

 Christine and Morgan presented a keynote titled "Interdisciplinarity in FOSS at SeaGL 2021. In this talk, we discuss our own backgrounds in the humanities, how those foundations have impacted the way we approach FOSS, and why having contributors and community members with diverse backgrounds and skill sets is an asset to your project. (https://seagl.org/archive/2021/interdisciplinarity-in-foss)

 In the last year, Christine has made a lot of progress on Spritely including work on Spritely Goblins, porting Goblins to Guile, and completing the last NLNet/NGI Zero grant. You can find a more detailed summary of the past year of Spritely in our recent episode of FOSS & Crafts (https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/38-spritely-updates-november-2021.html). Looking forward, Jessica Tallon is joining Spritely with a grant from NLNet/NGI Zero! You can find a blogpost on this complete with an interview with Jessica here: https://spritelyproject.org/news/interview-with-jessica-tallon.html.

 As part of the migration of this patreon to FOSS and Crafts Studios, we want to include our recognition of your support in the podcast. Therefore, starting with our next episode we will begin recognizing your generous support by reading the names of patrons who have selected a rewards tier at the end of each episode of FOSS & Crafts. This will be in addition to recognition in the credits of Terminal Phase. If you would prefer not to have your name read, please message us to opt out.

As always, thank you all for your continued support. You help make all of this happen!

You may have noticed that the name on Patreon just changed!  Previously this Patreon was labeled as "Chris Lemmer-Webber", and well, this is still the right place to support Chris Lemmer-Webber's FOSS work (including Spritely, Terminal Phase, etc)!

However, this Patreon has been renamed to "FOSS & Crafts Studios" for a couple of reasons:

 - It's been the Patreon for Chris *and* Morgan's work on the podcast FOSS & Crafts

 - We've now launched a little umbrella organization which covers Chris's existing work on various free and open source software projects, but also includes the podcast and some new and upcoming projects that one or both of Chris and Morgan are working on.

Additionally, Chris has been pretty bad at a few things on here (like responding to messages from patrons and remembering to review and add people to the Terminal Phase credits in a timely manner... oops) and Morgan is coming in to help with those things.

On that note, we just hit one year of FOSS & Crafts (and just released a corresponding anniversary episode)!  We are now 33 episodes in (note that the show starts at episode zero) and we've been quite happy with how they've come out and how they've been received so far.  Maybe give a listen to the podcast archive!

Anyway, thanks for all your support so far!  We'll be pushing hard to keep doing good work... more updates soon! :)