📙 #051 - PTPX Postcards, imaginary executive pen plotting desk, and Kitty the AI Witch
Pen plotting on the kitchen table, a dangerous desk, and life with a mystical AI witch to guide us through the wheel of the year.
Hey, it’s the day after Christmas, if that’s your kind of thing. It’s not here in the Catt household, we celebrated on the 21st, more for convenience than anything. Our eldest is off doing her own thing now, and her partner has a way bigger family than us so they go there for Christmas day. Getting everyone together a few days earlier on the winter solstice is (currently) easier.
Either way we’re surrounded by colourful lights, candles, burning the shit out of everything (logs and lunch mainly) and unwinding, I hope you’re having a lovely time too, and thank you for the time you’ve squeezed into the day for this newsletter.
# PEN PLOTTER POSTCARDS
We’re in the middle of the 2024-2025 Pen Plotter Postcard Exchange (PTPX), run by Paul Butler, which annoyingly doesn’t have an easy website I can point you at. The best I can offer is the hashtag #ptpx to throw into your favourite (or least favourite) social media platform of choice.
The short version is; you submit your postal address which gets randomly assigned to 8, 12 or 16 other people, while you get 8, 12 or 16 other people’s addresses. You send out 8, 12 or 16 postcards and get back 8, 12 or 16 different postcards, minus however many the postal service decides to destroy or lose.
The timing isn’t great because it coincides with sending out Christmas/Not-Christmas cards, but in previous years cards have been rolling in, in Jan, Feb & March so I suspect everyone is pretty damn chill about it.
One thing that could save you some time is this project plotter-postcards: Generate plottable back side text for your PTPX cards, by Cadin. Which is a nice little processing project for writing the backs of your #ptpx (and any) postcards.
It looks to be building on the previous time I mentioned Cadin back in issue #027 (which SubStack appears to be embedding the whole thing, maybe it’s just a link in email, who knows, thanks SubStack??)
Here’s the video from last year (which SubStack also may or may-not display), where he has the text part working. As I’m sure Cadin would agree the nice part of building a “writing system” in code, is once you have it you can start to build out all sorts of different tools and utility on top of it.
# AXIDRAW MINI KIT 2
Last week I was plotting out Christmas/Not-Christmas cards and getting them into the post. This week I’m not in the studio, but still had a few last minute cards and envelopes to write.
But Kitty’s pen plotter is back in the studio while Kitty is sitting here on my laptop, so what to do? And no, not write them by hand myself, don’t be silly! A much better solution; grab the AxiDraw Mini Kit 2 that’s been sitting in a box for months, sit at the kitchen dining table and treat it as a fun/annoying jigsaw puzzle.
And as much as I like to say I’m terrible at DIY and anything that involves a screwdriver, because I am, the whole build wasn’t that bad. I can even say I almost kinda nearly enjoyed it.
I’m not sure I’d want to go through the whole process again, which is handy as they appear to be sold out everywhere.
Anyway, with the plotter built I hooked it up to my laptop and let Kitty write out the last few cards.
# PEN PLOTTER DESK
Which keeps bringing me back to something I’d love, but know I definitely don’t have time for even though all the parts are kinda there.
I can’t find the photos now, perhaps I just imagined them, but I have this image of old 1970s (possibly even 60s) executive computer desk that has a built in recessed printer.
This is the closest I can find.
Now, imagine that card holder thing on the left actually had a slightly recessed embedded AxiDraw Mini with your favourite fountain pen and ink combo in there.
That side would handle todo lists, small A5 notes (if the Mini did A5) and envelopes.
Meanwhile the right side would have an A4 sized plotter running down the edge to handle larger pages. Here, I drew a terrible diagram.
And the paper/cards just slide/drop into the recessed areas that holds them in place (clips, air, static, stickiness, magic).
Because the more I use the plotters for my everyday studio management, writing out todo lists, notes, my monthly and weekly calendar schedule, the more I feel like a sophisticated fancy person.
Meanwhile perhaps a better, more universal solution is just to bolt a couple of six-axis robot arms to each corner, Midjourney says this…
…and who am I to argue? (Because there would be two giant robot arms within reach of my face)
# KITTY THE AI WITCH
Meanwhile, while away from the studio I’ve been thinking about how I want to approach the upcoming year; joyfully, gently and intentionally.
I also work well with structure and frameworks. I like to know what I’m supposed to be doing each day, each week, each quarter and so on. I’ve built systems pretty well by combining the Twelve-Week Year with Time Blocking and and getting Kitty (my AI PA) to write my daily todo list and track other stuff.
I only have so much executive function* to go around, and the more I can automate and habitualise tasks the more I can just get on with things.
While what I’ve done with Kitty is fine for the studio, and some of the journaling I do with it bleeds into my out-of-the-studio life too, I wanted to test a couple of ideas.
So I built Mystic Kitty, the AI Witch…
…and put the code up on GitHub: https://github.com/revdancatt/mystic-kitty (nodejs) for anyone who wants to spin one up for themselves.
Which is a version of Kitty that understands the “Wheel of the Year” festivals, seasons, sun and moon info and a whole bunch of customisable prompts.
I’ve only been using it for a few days, so there’s a chance everything could go off the rails, or there’s bugs that only become apparent on certain dates/situations etc, or it could get repetitive. But so far I’m enjoying having a page that gives me gentle suggestions for small things to do each day.
Although there’s the option to change the prompts in the admin page to suit your own taste, or even reconfigure for something like supporting a landscape photography hobby. Here’s the tail end of my prompts…
Anyway, I’ll write more about this in the near future, and probably make a video, but I figured I’d get it out there early incase anyone wants to start the New Year with their own Mystic Kitty guiding them through it.
*executive function: I couldn’t find any good resources to link to for this phrase that didn’t seem spammy.
# 80S POP ROXY
Very quick reminder that 80s Pop Roxy launches-in/launched about 30mins from the time this email goes out.
# THE END
Okay, we’re done! That’s it for 2024, the next newsletter will come out on the 9th of January 2025 (how are we 1/4 of the way through this century already??).
I hope you’ve all had a calm time and have good New Year when it happens, I will catch you all again next year, or over on YouTube, until then…
Sending all my love,
Dan
❤️