#a pattern language

[laughingfate]

I've started doing some minor book repair at work, which means I now have:

1. A marginally better practical understanding of how books function mechanically, and

2. A bunch of tiny book cloth scraps

So I decided to make a tiny version of one of my favorite books!

The text is pulled from an e-book copy that allowed a 50 page download. I figured many more pages might make the tiny book unwieldy at normal paper thickness, and also that 50 pages of a 500+ page book made tiny for ART falls pretty squarely under fair use.

Print formatting was done using the"tiny" option at https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js. It worked well and the instructions were super clear and helpful.

The title is as small as I could manage with the writing implements I had; it would be interesting to try some alternatives with printing or stencils.

I may experiment with public domain works in the future, especially if I can figure out making the tiniest text print more clearly -- but all on all I'm pretty happy for this as a first try!

[feastofassumption]

Ice Fishing Patterns

Ice fishing fulfills the courtyard pattern. You build a little shanty village every day with huts (if you're fancy) or chairs (if you're not) around a central courtyard  that is divided between tipups, and a fox&goose track for the toddlers to run in. Adults are facing in both to monitor the food-gathering, and the 'the kids aren't falling in the hole or getting too cold'ing,  and you pack the whole village out of your truck in the morning and back into your truck after sunset so you get to build a perfect fresh village each day. Fox&goose also a brilliant innovation really: you stomp or scrape a big wheel-with-spokes into the snow, and the kids play tag but the rules are you can't step off the scraped pattern; this means kids will never fall into the fishing gear. It’s especially effective because "don't put your footprints outside the stamped pattern" is the kind of rule that children love and will self-enforce. (I don't mean 'none of them will step outside the lines,' but I mean 'when someone steps out of the lines, the other kids will say HEYYYYYYYYY and stop playing until the defector is following the rules again.)

[literaturha]

...towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself.

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

[parochialaesthetics]

Remember that you can't have pools of light without the darker places in between.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al

[poison-doll]

"If we always build on that part of the land which is most healthy, we can be virtually certain that a great deal of the land will always be less than healthy. If we want the land to be healthy all over--all of it--then we must do the opposite. We must treat every new act of building ad an opportunity to mend some rent in the existing cloth; each act of building gives us the chance to make one of the ugliest and least healthy parts of the environment more healthy--as for those parts which are already healthy and beautiful--they of course need no attention. And in fact, we must discipline ourselves most strictly to leave them alone, so that our energy actually goes to the places which need it."

-A Pattern Language, Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., et al

[literaturha]

'The Timeless Way of Building' says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it.

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

[literaturha]

...when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole...

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

[literaturha]

...no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language