Embedded - 358: Woodturning Influencer

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online) spoke with us about artistic projects, retro-future aesthetics, and scientific communication.  She shows and describes the projects on YouTube: Emily’s Electric Oddities including the Optical Sound Decoder, Port-A-Vid, Hairy Cacti, and the Lissajukebox. Many of Emily’s professional writings can be found on Wevolver, usually redirected to sites where they are published.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. This week we'll be talking about electric oddities, writing, and science with Emily Velasco. Hey, Emily. Hi, guys. Could you tell us about yourself as though we sat down at a table at Supercon and had not yet met? Sure. So I'm Emily Velasco. As a day job, I work as a science writer at Caltech. I work in the press office. So my job is to take the research that we do, because we have a lot of faculty doing a lot of research, and a lot of it is not particularly accessible to the public. And I don't mean like the public can't find it.

It's just that academic writing is not something that is geared toward a public audience. So my job is to take the research papers that our faculty put out, and kind of rewrite them in terms that the news media and the general public can understand. Outside of my day job, I am, I don't like to call myself an artist because it feels weird and pretentious, but people say I'm an artist. I think of myself as more of a tinker. I have a little cottage with a little garage workshop, and I make stuff. I do woodworking and metalworking and electronics, and I work with animal bones. And I kind of put all those things together into a mishmash of strange things that kind of clutter up my house. Okay.

We would like to do lightning round. You're familiar with the show, so are you ready? I am. Trains, for or against? For. Complete one project or start a dozen? Start a dozen, maybe two dozen. VHS or Betamax? Oh, gosh. I have a VHS player in

my bedroom and I like it, but I would love to have a Betamax player. My parents had a Betamax player in their bedroom when I was a kid, and that was like the fancy VCR that we weren't allowed to touch. And I think it'd be fun to have one of those. If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach? Definitely 3D design. There was a period of time when I had dropped out of college and I went back to school at community college and I took a 3D design class.

And I had so much fun in that class because it was so open-ended. It was literally use any materials you want to make whatever meets this week's theme. And it was, you know, if you want to use clay, if you want to use filing cabinets, I had so much fun in that class. It was, no, literally like I, one of my projects, I built a maze out in the parking lot out of all the leftover filing cabinets that were behind one of the administration buildings. That class really just opened up my mind as to what kind of materials you could work with. And

I've always thought it would be really fun to teach a class like that. Yeah. Well, that sort of ruins the next question, which is weirdest material you've ever worked with. Oh, well, I mean, filing cabinets, I guess are, I mean, they're weird in a mundane way, but I don't know. I don't think they're weird, but I work with animal bones, and I know a lot of people think that animal bones are a weird thing to work with. So I guess it depends on your perspective, right? Animals don't. Animals don't at all, right? Waffles or pancakes waffles with the little squares not not the big squares not the belgian waffles the little tiny squares in your wildest dreams what would you want to find on a loading dock waiting to be repurposed oh um something gosh okay it has to be it can't be too old or

i'll feel bad about taking it apart. I don't know, some kind of equipment that has a lot of gears and motors and belts but not just gears and motors, like lights, like a really good control panel. I don't know, maybe like a control panel from a nuclear power plant with all those switches and lights and things. All right.

Weirdest 3D printing medium filament um the weirdest one um i i don't know they don't make a lot of weird ones there's there's like algae based ones but i think those are kind of cool they look kind of organic um people 3D print clay and they 3D print concrete, but I've never heard of anything weird per se. Oh, you know what? I take that back. I have a 3D print here that I didn't do, but someone I know 3D printed me a cat skull and he 3D printed it out of a right um he 3d printed it out of filament that his company had specifically designed to mimic bone on x-rays because they wanted to be able to build um like 3d print x-ray models for for medicine and for veterinary schools and so this filament has a lot of calcium carbonate mixed into it so that it

looks like bone under x-ray. What about hair? Hair? Yes. I've worked with hair. I can't remember where the idea for that came from, but I got an idea one day last winter to... Oh, I remember where it came from. I was 3D printing something. And when my print was done, I saw that during the print, one of my hairs had landed on the print, like a hair from my head, and it got stuck in the print and was sticking out. And I yanked it. I tried to pull it out, and it was like firmly stuck. So I yanked it and it broke off. But then I thought like that would be kind of fun to play with. And I spent one day last winter, like literally nine hours in my garage, 3d printing a flesh colored cactus and laying hair. I, I, I cut my, I cut my own hair, right? Like I, I don't go to the salon. Uh, most of the

time I cut my own hair and I decided to save my hair the last time I had cut my hair. And so I just sat there for like eight hours sprinkling my hair onto this 3D print, like layer by layer. And it was a horrible, horrible project. It looks horrible, but it was horrible to do. But now I have a cactus on one of my shelves with a bunch of my hair sticking out of it. Horrible.

Yeah. All right, one more. What is a tip everyone should know? Use hot glue and don't be a snob about it i know that a lot of people get really snobby about using hot glue and when i use hot glue they scoff but use hot glue like it's great don't use it don't misuse it but use hot glue and this is something i learned last year is that you can make hot glue pop off of something that you've glued with isopropyl alcohol. Like I had no idea, but, you know, hot glue can stick really well. But if you just pour some isopropyl on it, it'll just like come right off.

It doesn't dissolve the glue. It just detaches, which is really cool. That's a good tip. So you have a YouTube channel. I do. How would you a YouTube channel. I do. How would you describe it? uh, it's, it's sort of a, it's not a how to channel. Like some people do how to project channels. I I'd say it's more of a, like a project vlog. And that when I feel like talking about a project I'm working on, then I'll put up a post about whatever it is. And they're never like a

step-by-step thing. It's sort of just like, this is what I did and here's what I came up with. And I think generally the vibe is kind of, uh, there's a, there's a thing in the, in the popular aesthetic these days, that's sort of like a, an occult oddities vibe. And I've, I've leaned into that. I've always enjoyed that kind of thing, but I've really leaned into that with the channel in that a lot of my projects, I try to do something with electronics, but make it like witchcraft. Not all the videos get into the witchcraft thing, but I'd say like overall the vibe is like mad scientist, witchy-ish, I guess. So hair-filled cacti fits right in. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Or like a clear personal pleasure product that has a raccoon spine in the center of it. Please don't tell me any more about that. Okay. And so arts and crafts, supervillain, is that the direction you're hoping for? Yeah, you know, I didn't coin that term myself. One of my coworkers, he called me that in a meeting one day at work. And I was like, hey, you know, that actually fits pretty well. So, yeah, you know, I mean, arts and crafts, I think kind of gets these days carries like a certain connotation of, you know, cutting out craft foam and felt and like scrapbooking. Uh, but I think arts and crafts like to go more back to its roots, you know, whenever it was like at the turn of the last century where it's sort of just working like, like more of like handicrafts, like a craftsman

kind of thing where you like put a lot of care and, and pour some of yourself into what you make. I tend to think of arts and crafts more like that. So yeah, like putting a lot of, a lot of my blood, sweat and tears into projects, but making them evil. It's definitely a kind of a retro future aesthetic vibe that you put into

your projects. Cause most of the things you've made you could have just left as you know like taking the uh the most recent one the optical film decoder thing um which was very cool by the way you could have left that as a pile of parts right that just worked but you spent a lot of time making the enclosure for the the speaker part and and thinking about you know the long pole that the the film traverses and that that had a vibe to it and the port of it had a vibe to it all were kind of like a 50s retro future thing um and i have a question where is it somewhere in my brain. Is that intentional?

Is that intentional? And where, where do you, where does that inspiration come from? And, uh, why don't you just stop at hold it against anyone. You know, everyone's projects are their own thing. Um, it is intentional. I, I, I can't say from where the drive comes because I don't, I don't know. Like a lot of my projects have their Genesis and just like an aesthetic feeling that I get for something. And the, and the optical sound decoder was a little different because I had more of a concept that I wanted to prove. Can I make this thing that turns optical film back into sound?

And then the aesthetics followed. But a lot of my projects do start with an idea of just like an aesthetic vibe I want. And those kind of just grow like weeds in my brain. And I find that I have to pluck them or they just keep growing and sort of cluttering things up. So I don't know why I've settled on this mishmash of, I don't know, I guess it's everything from like 1970s hi-fi stereo units with like that brushed aluminum and big chunky knobs all the way to the 1920s mahogany and Bakelite radios and everything in between and industrial equipment, 1960s industrial equipment. I don't know why all of that appeals to me, but it does. And I really like to make my projects look like that. And sometimes when I start with a concept of, well, here's a thing I want to try,

like the optical sound decoder, I will get it working, but then it doesn't feel complete until I've given it a look. And there's no way to quantify when the look is ready other than I just stop having the itch in my brain, I guess. Do you make it so that your builds are repeatable by other people? Do you have a goal of that for any reason? Or are you building it mainly for your own self and your own aesthetic? Absolutely for my own self and my own aesthetic. I've tried in the past couple years to be better about documenting stuff. So I keep my code on GitHub in case someone says like, oh, I really want to be able to make a video player like the port of it.

But a lot of people have asked me like, well, would you do a tutorial on this? And it's like, well, I would, but where are you going to find a junkyard pressure gauge unit that you can use to make a video console that looks like this thing I made? I tend to use so much salvaged materials and scrap material and things of repurpose that it's kind of impossible to make these things replicable. I mean, if someone was really creative, they could come up with their own housing and just reuse my code. But a lot of these things, they're one-offs because it's a

piece of junk I found in the junkyard or something I found sitting behind the Ralph's grocery store. They're not commodity items that someone can go to AliExpress and buy. Do you ever sell them? I have sold one. Yeah, I have only sold one thing ever. And it was a wooden icosahedron lamp that I made like five years ago. I sold it to the person I was dating at the time. But I haven't sold anything really. I've been asked on occasion, and I typically have found that people don't have a good sense of what art costs. And again, I feel weird about calling when I do art, but when they will say like, oh, I was thinking like $100, and I'm like, well, I spent six weeks on this. I can't sell it to you for $100 because, you know, this thing is kind of precious to me.

And I would sell it to you if I thought you'd really care for it. But I don't think you care for it very much for $100. Yeah, there's the, if I make this and you pay me what my normal salary rate was per hour, it would be very, very expensive. Not counting the parts. Not counting the, yeah. And the idea and all of the things you should be paying for. And that it's unique. And that it's unique and self-designed.

And people often think, well, if I saw this on a Target shelf, it would cost this. Yes, but that's not what this is. Not the same at all. Yeah, it's not. And I don't do it for the money. And so even telling them my rate, like I do freelance writing sometimes and I'll tell them my rate based on my salary rate.

But these things, I do them for the enjoyment of it. And when I'm done, it feels like I've put a piece of myself into it. And so like, that's hard to put a price on that, but I know it's more than a hundred dollars. I'd give it to you for free if you promise to love it, but I won't give it to you for a hundred dollars because there's not enough love there.

You've already declared it. I do think that, you know, some of these would be really cool as installations in museums, like the film thing, the port of it. Those are the sorts of things I imagine seeing in mixed media kind of exhibits and stuff. That's kind of what my living room has turned into. I build display shelves for all these things now. And someone asked me last week if I'm turning my house into a museum, and I guess I sort of am.

Why do you resist the artist title? I don of am. Why do you resist the artist title? I don't know. It's hard because artist carries like a sense of, I don't know what, like, I didn't go to art school. And so it always just feels like this is what I do for fun. And it feels like artists do things intentionally in some artistic way. I don't know how to put that into words other than it feels like this is just a fun thing for me. And it's not an artistic expression, which I know is not true. And it's probably some like imposter syndrome talking, but it feels, I feel pretentious to call myself an artist. And if other people call me that,

like, I don't, I don't tell them no, but I feel weird calling myself an artist because I feel like I'm being too self-important or something. I understand. I really, really understand. It's one of the reasons I wanted to ask you about it because it's, I see people grabbing the artist title for themselves and more power to them, but I couldn't use it. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't. And I don't know, like, I kind of feel like artist is a title that has to be bestowed upon you by others. It feels wrong to take it up as yourself and say, this is what I am. But if other people want to call you an artist, well, then, like, I mean, if the public says you're making art, then cool. But for me to say I'm making art, it's like, no, I'm just having fun in my garage. Like, I don't want to make it feel artsy.

I don't know. Artsy just is, you know, there's a certain, like, snobbishness that oftentimes comes with people who refer to themselves as artists. And maybe the term needs to be reclaimed somehow. But that snobbishness that comes from a lot of people who deliberately call themselves artists kind of turns me off to the term for myself. I like tinkerer a lot. I don't know about artisan. Maker is always fraught for me. Yeah, maker lot. I don't know about artisan. Maker is always fraught for me.

Yeah, maker sounds, I don't know, like it's taken on like some neutrality just because it's so ubiquitous, but just on the face of it, it sounds dumb. I am a maker. I make things. I've never said that, but I wanted to say. And artisan is like, I don't know. I feel like an artisan is someone who makes really nice, like a cobbler who makes really nice shoes or someone who like sells ceramic pots and they've been at it for 40 years. And that's their living. But to call myself an artisan when I don't make a living off of it, I guess like artisan for me carries a connotation of this is what you do for a living and you put a lot of pride into it. And I don't do this for a living. There's even a divide. I remember talking to someone about this years ago about

people in music, you know, are you a musician or are you an artist? And what the meaning of, oh, I'm just a musician is versus, oh, I'm an artist, you know? And the artist was kind of, oh, somebody who writes and produces their own stuff versus somebody who is just an instrumentalist, right? I play bass in a band. I'm a musician. I'm not an artist. And these terms are all very fraught and weird, and I don't like it. They are. They are. I mean, that's the discourse, right? Every field has its own discourse about how you refer to yourselves and how you refer to others. And I guess the arts and crafts maker tinker scene is no different, right? That's true. So I'm going to come back and ask you more about some of your projects in detail, but I want to talk about your other life. You work for Caltech and science writing. Yes. What's a day in the life like? Well, prior to 2020, a day in the life was, you know, go to work and I have an office with my fellow writers.

In some sense, it was not super unlike. So to back up a little bit, I started my career as a newspaper reporter and working in the press office at Caltech in some ways is not super dissimilar from that. There's a few of us writers crammed into a room and we all have our own cubicle and we drink a lot of coffee and we talk to each other all day. But the actual nuts and bolts of science writing is I have a beat. The institute is divided up into beats. And within that beat, so I actually have a beat and like a beat and a half. So my main beat is chemistry and chemical engineering. And so my responsibility is to cover everything that's going on in the division of chemistry and chemical engineering in like a strategic way, which means don't cover everything, but cover the stuff that is important that people will be interested in that will make the Institute look good. And that means cultivating a lot of relationships with these faculty members, some of whom are like Nobel

Prize winners, which is weird to like sit down at their desk and be like, hiya, George, like, how you doing? Let's chat for a minute. But I used to go to their offices and we'd chat and I'd walk around campus and I'd see the Nobel Prize winner and they'd wave to me and be like, hi, Emily. These days with us working from home, you know, I sit at my kitchen table and I set up Zoom calls with them. They'll email me and say, I have a paper coming out February 12th. It's on, I don't know, say ultra fast cameras that can take 70 trillion frames per second. It's going to be in Science Magazine. And would you be interested in covering it? And I'll say like, yes. Or if it's not something I'm interested in covering, I'll be like, you know, let me let me take that to the

meeting and we'll get back to you on that and then try to figure out a way to say like this is not particularly newsworthy without like making them upset. But if they if it's something cool then or something that really needs to be covered, then I set up a Zoom call and I think up questions. I read through the paper and those papers are pretty dense usually. So that usually means just reading the abstract and then skimming the rest. But read through it, come up with questions, talk to them for like a half hour on Zoom. And then write something and try to make it pithy and try to make it understandable. So like, I mean, no knock on my mom. Like my mom's a smart lady, but she, like, she doesn't, she didn't go to grad school. So she doesn't know

anything about smear cameras or, uh, uh, any intense physics. So like write something that my mom will be able to understand without having to open a physics book. So love and hate in the mouse brain. What? Tell me more. Okay. So this was something I worked on back in December. One of our faculty members who his, his push, this is actually something that's outside of my beat. This was something from our biology part of the institute. But his push is to understand how neurons and neural connections in brains make emotions,

which is like a pretty hot topic in a lot of areas. It's like, well, you know, whatever our emotions are feeling, they have to be coming out of the hardware of our brain. So, like, how does that hardware work? So, everything he does is aimed at understanding that better. And he decided to look at mice. And specifically, he wanted to look at mice when they do their mounting behavior, which is like when your neighbor's chihuahua humps your leg, that's mounting behavior, right? And he wanted to look at that behavior because there's two ways that mice mount each other. There's the more expected way of like, hey, you're a really pretty little girl mouse,

and let's have a good time together but there's also like hey buddy like i don't like you very much and uh i'm going to show you how much i don't like you by mounting you so you have you have these two distinct so many titles we can't use right um you have these two distinct like emotions if you want to call them that. There's love and then there's hate, but the behavior is the same. And they decided to look at that behavior specifically because that's like a control right there, right? They can look at a mouse doing one physical action, which takes out some of the variables, but they can determine which part of the brain is driving that action. And in doing so, they found out that there's one part of the brain that when the mouse is mad and like humping out of anger, this one part of the brain is responsible. And when the mouse is humping out of happiness

and, and being turned on this other part of the brain is responsible. And furthermore, they found that like these two parts of the brain are like on a seesaw almost like a, like a teeter totter. So if one part, if like the horny part activates, then the anger part turns off. And if the anger part turns on, then the horny part turns off. And so, you know, now that they've made this determination, you know, it's a mouse brain. It's simpler than a human brain. But these are parts of the brain that are like down in the core of the brain. It's not it's not the cerebral cortex. It's not the higher thinking part of the brain. So we have those parts of our brain too. So it would follow naturally that we have analogous things going on in our brain.

Now, of course, they haven't studied human brains on this, but that's the idea is that there's a little piece of the brain that will make you horny and there's a little piece of the brain that will make you mad and they tend to be in opposition to each other. It's positive for Alicia to compose herself here uh well i mean i knew that some of your personal projects i wasn't going to ask about because i mean it's a family show but uh i didn't expect your work to be the area that makes me giggle. Okay, let's move on to Jupiter, because there's nothing that can be interesting about this. I mean, it's interesting. Let me tell you what Jupiter got up to.

Jupiter's storms behave oddly. I didn't even know that. Yeah, you know, I didn't know that either until I started working on that. And that's something that's kind of cool about my job is that I find out all these things just in the course of my work. But yeah, if you look at the bottom of Jupiter, or it's the top, I'm for sure going to get this wrong. I think it's the south pole of Jupiter. You'll see what looked like a bunch of hurricanes down there, but they're all sort of clustered around each other in sort of a geometric pattern

with one at the center and all of them in a ring around it. And it sort of makes like a, I think it's a hexagon. Yeah. And when they, I think it was the Juno space probe, flew down there and saw that and they were like, whoa, what is going on here? And one of our faculty members, he thought, you know, I think that there's, I have an answer for this. mathematical simulation uh looked at uses some very old math that was proposed by lord kelvin who um he was like a scientist for sure i'm gonna get all these details wrong too he was a british scientist or he could have been irish or he was from the british isles um for sure like british people are gonna be mad at me for getting this this wrong. But he had looked at like the way water swirls. And he found that if you have like an eddy, like a whirlpool, and you have another one in the same like bucket of water, sometimes they will merge into one bigger whirlpool.

And sometimes they'll sort of bounce off of each other. And he investigated why. And there's a lot of math to this. And you have like rotation and counter rotation. But essentially, if you have the right combination of like a storm that's rotating, say clockwise, and another storm that's rotating clockwise, sometimes the other storm can have counter rotation around it. So if the storm is going clockwise, sometimes the other storm can have counter rotation around it. So if the storm is going clockwise, sometimes it can have a ring of fluid around it going counterclockwise and those two will repel each other. And nature and physics being what it is, there, these patterns are also found in magnetism and the way magnets repel each other. It's all very

cool and very weird, but this researcher at work found out that this very old principle from like 150 years ago explains why Jupiter's storms bounce off of each other, whereas on Saturn, they merge into one big giant storm, which is pretty neat. Okay, one more question about an article that caught my eye that made it sound like humans would be good battery sources, thereby proving the matrix was right as long as we get sweaty? Yeah. he's very into wearables and uh he he he works on stuff that you can stick to your skin that will take readings and give you very precise readings about like how stressed are you because i i have this little patch on my skin that can tell how much cortisol is in my blood right now or how much blood sugar do i have so i can monitor my diabetes. But the drawback with all these is that you have to power them and having someone stick a battery to themselves

is maybe not always like the easiest thing to convince someone to do just because it's in the way. So he started looking at can we find a way to power our electronics with something that's already available on the human body. And he built a very thin and flat fuel cell that sticks to your body. And it uses a component in human sweat to generate tiny amounts of electricity, like really small amounts, but enough to power the electronics. So you can stick one of these things to your arm. And the little bit of sweat that collects under it will keep it powered. And then it will charge up a little

battery or a capacitor. And then when it has enough power, it will beam a Bluetooth signal to your phone and give you a reading on whatever it is that you're trying to read, whatever compound is in your blood that you want to check. So could you run a whole matrix off of those? I don't know. We'll give them some time, but you can definitely run a little Bluetooth module, which is pretty neat.

That is really neat. I mean, there's so many wearables that would become more possible if we could get the energy from motion or sweat or combination. Yeah. At the end, a perspirant lobby is going to fill all that. They're not going to be happy. Yeah, you know, I wanted to, like, I got very intrigued about using one of those fuel cells in a project. And I was like, oh, man, I want to ask him if I can have one to play with and tinker with. But I felt like it might be inappropriate to try to mooch off of a faculty member for my projects in the workplace.

So I didn't. But I still think it would be really cool to do something with one of those in more of an artistic way rather than the scientific way he uses them. Does talking to the scientists and faculty give you ideas about your projects or does it inform your aesthetic at all? I guess maybe occasionally, but a lot of times the science is so far removed from anything that I have access to that it's hard to translate those things. and then having to creatively turn what their work into something that people can understand kind of keeps me, like, keeps my brain sharp. There's, there are some similarities between writing a story for work and working on a project at home in that they're, they're both forms of creative problem solving. With, with my projects, it's usually, you know, I have a concept and I need to make it into reality somehow. And I need to find a way to express whatever this thing is I'm feeling in a way that other people will be able to see it.

And at work, it's, well, I need to take this high-minded complex concept from this research and bit from this thing that is hard to understand and slowly like chipping away the marble until you have something that uh you have this this statue of of what it is that you wanted to portray so i think in that sense yes i think in a more direct sense not too often because um you know, it's a lot of my work is, you know, writing about a new catalyst or a new enzyme, an enzyme that generates oxygen in fuel cells. And those kinds of things are not necessarily conducive to turning directly into art, if that makes sense. Yeah. I have a listener question from Svek. necessarily conducive to turning directly into art, if that makes sense. Yeah. I have a listener question from Svek.

Do you have a favorite guide for getting better at technical documentation? Do it. That's like, I don't, I don't mean to be snarky, but there are some things that people will talk about as though, well, if you just follow these step-by-step directions, you'll be good at something. And that's not always true. Like, there are some things that really are an art, and this is more of in the artisan sense, and that and that like you just have to hone your craft. And I know that when I started off doing communications as a reporter like a decade ago, you know, I wasn't very good at it. And the longer you do it, the better you get se. If you want to know how to be a better communicator, like a better writer, look at technical writing or science writing that you like and look at science writing or technical writing you don't like and try to just be aware of what it is that works and doesn't work. You can learn a lot from seeing how other people do things. So, if you're reading a science story and you're not understanding it,

like, step back and ask yourself, like, why am I not understanding it? What have they not explained well? And when you are reading something that makes it clear, like, think about, like, well, how have they structured the story? How are they explaining things? And, like, learn from their examples. And then if you want to write stuff, like, when you write something up for your project or for work, if people are confused, like, take their feedback. I find that people who take feedback without getting offended improve a lot. And that's true of all fields. But, you know, writers as well, if you're willing to take people's feedback

and learn from it, like you're going to learn your own craft a lot better than you would if you have too much ego and you don't want to admit that you could have done better. Okay, so Svek, I think what Emily is saying is that you should get back to work on the blog. Yes, work on that blog.

And solicit feedback from your friends. And solicit honest feedback. I know a lot of times people will say, like, what do you think of my blog post? And, like, friends will be like, oh, it's great. It's great. It's so good. Because they don't want to say, like, I'm not sure about this one, buddy. But tell them like, honestly, like, give me your real feedback on this. And if you really like reassure your friends, or your colleagues that you want honest feedback, they'll usually give

it to you. And they might tell you like, I thought this blog post was too long, or I thought you could have explained this better. So yeah, just be open to feedback and work on that blog and you'll get good. A couple of people asked me to ask more about your CRT videos as they are incredible and very arty. Sorry, it was in the question. I assume that they're talking about, I don't know, the Lisa jukebox, maybe? I think so, yeah. I mean, yeah. If that's what they're talking about,

I don't know, did they have a question or do they just want to say that they thought they were cool? I haven't seen it. What is it? It's a thing that I built. Um, all right. So I'll try to make it short, but I was, I was when we could still hang out with people in public, I had a local maker group I used to go to and we, uh, we had a CRT that we took out of a TV and it was just like the bear CRT. And we decided, can we, can we power this thing without any of the TV hardware? And we did. And I got the idea to try and draw Lisa Zhu curves

on it. And these are these patterns that you get where you have like, if you plot like a sine wave in the X axis and a sine wave in the Y-axis you'll you'll get patterns that result from that and they can look like figure eights and they can look like complex knots uh we did it in the in the maker group and it was like this is cool but i want to make this a thing that people can use so i spent a couple months repurposing a little it was it was like a security camera monitor. So a little black and white TV. I completely gutted it and took all the guts and rebuilt a new housing around it. And I gave it a whole bunch of knobs that change like frequency of the sine wave in the x-axis and the frequency in the y-axis and knobs that you could use to adjust between

sine wave and square wave and triangle wave. So the result was you have this thing with a whole bunch of clicky, good knobs, knobs that have very good tactile feedback, and you get to draw these swirly geometric patterns on a screen. And that thing's actually broken right now. And it's also sitting in my office at work that I can't go to. But that's at least a jukebox. I don't know. It was just another one of my weird ideas that I spent a lot of time working on. That's when you documented on Hackaday.

Yes. So there is some build information there. I was trying for a while to be more diligent about documenting things. And that one was one that at least most of the parts were off the shelf parts. I ordered some little like mini function generators off of ebay i think and uh i i ordered some audio amplifiers all these like little components that you could buy on the internet and i did drop like a wiring diagram and a schematic and there was no code to it it's all just analog hardware so uh there was no code to document fortunately for me because I'm terrible at coding and documenting my code. But yeah, I wrote it up.

A couple of friends encouraged me to write it up. Documenting it was horrible. This is kind of ironic since I document, in a sense, stuff at work all the time for other people. I'm really bad about documenting my own stuff, but I did document that one. And that was maybe one of the ones I spent the most time documenting, and I don't know that I've documented any other projects to that extent since. I don't blame you. I mean, you write for a living at work. At home, you want to do the things you want to do, and having to think about a professional level of writing, I don't know, that would get kind of old. It does. Working in my workshop is like a chance for me to unwind. You know, I go out there and

in some sense, I turn my brain off. Like, My brain gets used for what it's getting used for in the moment, but I turn my brain off and just work. And if I have to stop and say, like, all right, I'm going to write down this step. I'm going to take photos right now. It breaks the flow. And then it's like, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this. When you're reading a book, sometimes you kind of fall into the book after a while. You know, the whole world sort of shuts off around you and you're just in the book.

But if you keep getting distracted, instead of like being in the book and experiencing the book, you're instead reading the words on the page, if that makes sense. And the same thing kind of happens with the projects in that, like, if I have to stop and take photos, then I'm, I'm not falling into the project. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not losing myself in the project. So absolutely. Like, it's just, you know, uh, I don't, I don't want to do it all the time. I don't want to document things all the time because I need that space to decompress, especially when things are like as stressful as they have been in the past few years. It's really interesting to hear you say that

because I think the tendency over the last few years with social media becoming a big stupid thing is that all artists, all people who make things, all people who have a process, it seems like there's a, there's a, uh, almost a feeling like I have to document this. I have to put up the process. I have to take a video. I have to live stream me doing this. I have to have, you know, uh, an Instagram story about whatever, but, you know, I've been thinking about myself i was like well as we

work on the record we're working on should i should i live stream doing a mix would that be cool should i take a video of me trying to play this part so that we have kind of a record of that and maybe i can put that in social media and every time i've tried to do that it's like okay i've just spent 30 minutes trying to get a video set up and now i'm totally self-conscious and I'm not doing the same and I've lost the creativity because it's more about I need to be I need to be something else yeah and you know I think that there's I mean there there is there's a place and a time to do that there are times when I do a live stream but I when I do a live stream, which is not that often, I try to treat it more like a social time rather than a self-promotion time. It's like, all right, well, I'm bored and I'm going to go out and I'm going to go use my lathe for three hours and I'm going to live stream it and people can ask me questions and then I can just have a conversation with them and that's fun. But if I'm trying to just show myself off as like some kind

of self-promotion, I get super self-conscious and it does totally ruin it for me. And I think that some of this insistence that people do that is this modern concept that everyone needs to have their own brand and everyone needs to be their own like agent and you need to be like hustling even in the even in the like art world you should be hustling and you don't have to hustle all the time i think a lot of people think you have to have a hustle and and you don't you can just do things for fun you know there's a lot of pressure to document what we do if we're doing it for fun. If we're being makers, we have to document it.

If we're being artists, we have to sell it. Yeah. And sometimes I just want to make a freaking snail. I don't want to have to show it off. I don't want to have to show it off. I don't want to have to explain it. I just want my head to do what my hands want and maybe turn off my head for a little bit so that I can have what I want. I don't understand why we have so much pressure to make things less fun. Well, it goes back to the question earlier on.

Was it earlier on or before the show? Where we were talking about, why don't you sell things? Right? And that's the same kind of thing, right? As soon as you start turning something into a business, it's a different thing. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, like, if this has always been part of our culture in this country, or if this is something unique to the, like, the dot-com era we live in, that, like, Silicon Valley hustle culture has kind of permeated everything. before that. But there's definitely a sense that people feel like they have to be writing everything down and promoting themselves in some way, or they're not doing enough. And like, that's a bummer because people should have the ability to just enjoy their hobbies for

what they are without being guilted by wider culture. Yeah, that's one quibble I have with maker culture is that there's so much pressure on people to try to make themselves famous and to try to parlay what they're doing into something else and try to get sponsorships. And if that's how you want to make your living, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I think a lot of people fall down the hole of thinking they have to do that or they're not being a real maker. And that's just a bummer. Like, just make things because you want to and enjoy it. I think that's something we've forgotten.

And it's a lesson I've learned multiple times. I remember trying to sell pottery long ago, shortly after I graduated, and it totally destroyed doing pottery for me because I suddenly was far more critical and I had to do the promotion part, which I hated. And I took this lovely hobby and made it into something I couldn't do. And I hate that we do that. And it's not just me and pottery. I see a lot of people doing this where they're like, okay, I'm going to do really cool things. And then they get so submerged into the things they think they have to do

that they forget that they went out to the garage to play on the lathe to do what they wanted, not to show the world how whatever the world needed, thought it needed to be shown. I don't know where I was going with that. You can just, if you want to turn a bowl on your lathe, like turn a bowl on your lathe. You can do that.

And like, that is great. You don't have to be aiming to be the next wood-turning influencer, you know? Okay. Wood-turning influencer. Social media goddess was among your titles at one point. That's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about, but how does one become a social media goddess? That was also a title that was bestowed on me. I don't ever give myself titles, but in my previous job, I worked in the press office at a different university, Cal Poly Pomona. And one of my jobs

there was to run social media for the university. And I fell into that job before really anyone had any sense of what a professional brand's social media was supposed to be. It was an afterthought and they were like, we don't have anyone to do this. Like, please do it. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't really have any like guides to follow. But I spent five years running social media for the university. And I guess people liked what I did. And one day my coworkers showed up at my office door with a gift.

And it was a little like, you know, those little plaques that you'll see like sitting on someone's desk that says what their name and title is. Um, it looks like the little engraved piece of plastic that slides in. And they had brought me one of those that they had custom made that said Emily Velasco, social media goddess, uh, which was really sweet of them. And, uh, so I just left it on my desk and now it's out in my workshop. Um, I, I don't do social media professionally anymore. So it's sort of just an artifact of a previous time in my life. But yeah, I don't know. My coworkers called me that and I thought it was nice and sweet. And so I liked it.

Do you have advice for people who do want to get better at social media? Gosh, don't. I don't know. You know, like social media, I have such a love-hate relationship with social media. It's so good in so many ways, especially like when I can't go out and see people in real life anymore most of the time. is, it is my social lifeline to be able to have my friends online and have people to talk to. Um, but at the same time, like it is absolutely a massive time suck and it is really easy to let it, let it capture your attention. Um, if you want to get better at social media, um, I would say the thing that people do bad most of the time with social media is not producing enough of it, which goes back to the time suck thing.

But if you want to have a good social media presence, you have to have the faucet open all the time. You have to be just pouring out stuff for people to consume. And that's kind of sad, but that's the reality of how social media works is if you want people to pay attention to you, you have to give them something to pay attention to. And you have to give them something to pay attention to all the time. People want a diversion. And if you're putting content in front of their eyes, they're going to pay attention to you.

Don't get. But it has to be good content. You can't. It does have to be good content. It has to be diverting. You can't just say, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. Absolutely. There was a, when I did social media for the university, there university, I kind of had a personal philosophy of that I didn't want to give the audience too much just boring administrative stuff, which is

honestly the main point of having social media accounts was that if today is the last day for AdDrop, let them know through social media. But if all you do is post like today's the last day for ad drop. And then like the next day you post like parking rates are going up to $150 a semester. Like, and it's just an endless stream of like horrible administrative stuff. No one's going to want to pay attention to it. So you have to give people what they like. And you also, you know, if you, if you have a reason to do social media, if like you are trying to promote your business, like mix that stuff in, but like, do you want to see nothing but posts about someone's sales on whatever they're selling? Do you want to see nothing but posts encouraging

someone to sign up for someone's newsletter. Like, no, you don't like that. So, like, don't post stuff on social media that you don't like to see. Think about, like, what do you like to see? What do you find interesting? And, like, post that stuff if you can, but tailored for yourself, of course. Are you telling me I need to post more ocean puns like the Monterey Bay Aquarium does? Absolutely. I mean, I have a love-hate relationship with puns as well, but if you love puns like the Monterey Bay Aquarium does? Absolutely. I mean, I have a love-hate relationship with puns as well, but if you love puns... It looks more like a love relationship when I see it, especially when you and Christopher are going through a pun war.

I usually just attach myself to a pre-existing pun. Right. We have a mutual friend who trolls me with puns as much as he possibly can. And I like good puns, but he deliberately throws bad puns at me all the time. And I just tell him how much I hate him every time he does it. You know, that's what friends are for. Right, right. Of the projects you're working on now or have been working on recently, do you have a favorite? Yeah, I think that, I mean, I just, we've talked about the audio decoder a little bit and I think that's my current favorite just because I finished it like three

weeks ago. But I would say that my project that I have enjoyed the most in the past year was my Portavid, which we've referenced, but we haven't talked about it much other than, yeah, it's like a little video console thing um this was one of my projects that came out of a junkyard trip i went to the junkyard and i found this thing that was a snap-on pressure and vacuum gauge like kit i guess if you're a mechanic you just like grab your thing for checking vacuum or pressure and i really liked how it looked it has a very 1960s like uh there's there was a certain like vibe of stuff in the 60s that was like mid-century modern but but not meant for a home it was like industrial mid-century modern and it has that look it's very simple it has uh it's got like a a brick red case

that's out of stamped steel and i i took it i bought it for ten dollars from the junkyard and i didn't know what i was going to do with it but it had this really big round gauge that was for showing pressure and i took that out and it left me with a big circular hole and i thought like well i could put a speaker in there and make this into a synthesizer. But I do a lot of sound projects. And I thought, like, well, I want to try doing something with video instead. And so what I did was I put a lens in that hole with a 3D printed bezel. And I put an LCD screen behind it.

And inside of this thing, there's just a Raspberry Pi. And the Raspberry Pi does only one thing. And it just shows videos. And I have loaded, I think, 48 videos into this thing now. And some of these are videos that I found online through the Internet Archive. And maybe like half are things I found. And maybe half are ones that I've shot myself. And they're just like short videos, like a minute or 30 seconds or two minutes.

And all you do is you press, there's a big green button. And when you press the button, it picks one video at random out of the selection, out of that whole pool of videos, and then it plays it. And then when it's done, it briefly shows some static on the screen. And then it goes back to waiting and you press the button again. And then it shows another video and i i did that this summer um you know this was an anxious summer uh i think for a lot of people the with you know um all the all the how upset everyone was the pandemic and like the the george flo and here in California, the wild politics.

Yeah, politics and the wildfires. Like, I mean, you guys are here in California, too. So you probably remember we had like weeks of nothing but smoke. I was feeling really anxious this summer and I wanted to like come up with a thing to self-soothe. And I started by shooting videos with a 1980s security camera in my front yard and just making like lo-fi videos of like my cat lying in the sun and put some like nice lo-fi beats to it. And I thought, like, why don't I just take all these videos and put them into an object that I can, like, hold? And so, yeah, the idea was like, you know, I'm stressed out. I'm going to, like, sit down with my little mini retro futuristic TV and press a button and then just watch a video of hummingbirds eating at my hummingbird feeder with like some nice classical music. And, uh, that's

the port of it. I want one. You, you went so far as to write up a, a, what you felt was a period appropriate user manual for it. I did. Um, that, that was not part of the original like scope of what I was doing, but, um, I think I was just, I remember now I had gotten to a point in the project where I was sort of stuck as you get sometimes in projects. Um, and I have found that as I've gotten older in the past, if I get, if I had gotten stuck, I would have just abandoned the project. But now I find that like, if I just take a break, then I can come back to it. And if I give myself a way to like, get out my frustrations, uh, then I find that, like, if I just take a break, then I can come back to it. And if I give myself a way to, like, get out my frustrations, then I won't kill the project.

And so I had gotten to a point where I was stuck on the code because it just wasn't working and I didn't know why. I just, for some reason, the idea came to me that it would be fun to make a fake cover for a manual as though this had been a real consumer product. And so I made up a fake cover. And it looks like it had been photocopied like 10 times, like photocopy after photocopy and photocopies of photocopies and like rumpled. So I made a fake cover and I was like, this is pretty cool. And then I couldn't stop myself. And I made like 12 more pages explaining how the thing works with that very like that very 1960s, 1970s manual language about like, you know, welcome to the being a proud owner of a port of it. You have fine taste in electronics and you've joined and you've joined a growing number of aficionados, yada, yada, yada. I spent two weeks making these pages like from scratch, like just in Photoshop on my computer. And also going in the Internet Archive and looking at old manuals for stuff, because this is something that if people aren't familiar with, like you can find a lot of

manuals on the internet archive and some of them are for things that you have and maybe you want to fix. So like always check the internet archive. If you have an old thing you're trying to fix, cause they might have a manual. Anyhow, I spent a lot of time looking at old manuals just to get a feel for how do the manuals look and how do feel for how do the manuals look and how do they write and what like what's the language and what do the pictures look like and uh yeah i i spent a lot of time making that manual just because the impulse came to me

those are fun to follow it's it's doing stuff like that that sometimes takes your project to this is a complete statement right from okay From, okay, this is cool, but just this one extra thing just kind of like makes it a whole, there's a whole story behind it instead of this is just an artifact, right? Yeah, and what was really fun is that a friend of mine

who runs the Media Archaeology Lab, I think it's at University of Colorado Boulder, which is a very cool thing. It's like a little museum of antiquated and obsolete technologies. And they would bring school kids in and let them learn about, like, what's a VCR? Like, what's a floppy disk? What's an Ethernet port? Yeah, what's an Ethernet port?

What is a touchtone telephone? What are punch cards? How does a sewing machine work? All these things that people maybe don't interact with in their everyday life. Well, they also have a big collection of manuals, old vintage manuals. And she loved the manual. And so I made her a copy. And she put it in with their manuals, even though it's a fake manual.

It's almost worth going to see. I know. I need to get out there when we're allowed to travel again. Motivation, especially right now, has been tough. And you're using some of your projects to self-soothe, which makes a ton of sense. But it's still hard to be motivated. Do you have any suggestions? For me personally. Do you have any, any suggestions? Um, for me personally,

for you personally, uh, well, Chris, um, no, you know, you're, you're right. And that I do use them to self-soothe. I, I guess I find that when I am sitting there like doom scrolling and feeling awful and feeling anxious, uh, I just have to be mindful. And I hate the overuse of the term mindfulness these days. But just try to remember when I'm feeling really awful to just stop whatever I'm doing. Whatever I'm doing is probably making me feel awful. So if I'm feeling awful, stop and remove myself from whatever I'm doing and go do something that makes me feel good. And going out to the garage is a lot healthier than going to the liquor store. So I just go to the garage and work and, you know, work. And pretty soon I've forgotten how awful I feel. And then I realized it's 730 and I haven't eaten dinner and I'm starving. But I've gotten something done. So I don't know. I think it's just a matter of like trying to be aware of yourself and your emotions and redirect that

energy you're feeling because like bad energy is still energy. And if you can just turn it towards something more useful than scrolling through Twitter and feeling like the world is ending, like, I think you maybe would find that you have more motivation than you think. It's a great answer. seems like you aren't afraid to kind of just this is what i want to do and maybe i don't know how to do this piece of it or i'm not an expert in x y or z but i'm just going to push through um how do you how do you learn to do like some of the tactical things that you have to do to finish a project when you don't know them um i guess i guess I just, I don't know. I just, I'm, I'm just ready to fail and to be like, to be comfortable with the feeling that I, the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what I'm doing. Um, I, I don't know what I'm doing on a lot of my projects. And

honestly, like a lot of times I find myself completely frustrated because I'm stuck and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know how to fix whatever's not working. You just have to be willing to accept that this is a learning process and part of learning is frustration. And if you want to try something new, don't go into it expecting you're going to be an expert and you're going to get it right the first time. I think that that, at least for me and maybe for some other people, like, when you get into the trap of thinking, like, I have to do this right, it becomes okay if it doesn't work, you're already going to put yourself in a better spot. Because you can tell yourself, well, I'm learning right now. And like, maybe I'm really, really mad because I've been working on this code for three hours and it doesn't work still. I'm really mad because this thing I was turning on the lathe, I just exploded and I have to start over again um like that's fine like be upset like it's it's natural to be upset but like don't beat yourself up over it like don't say like i'm a

i'm a don't let yourself say i'm a failure don't let yourself say i'm bad at this like it's true you are bad at it like because you've never done it before and that's fine you you like shouldn't expect that you'll be good at it the first time so i think i just have to remind myself that like this is a process and that there are going to be setbacks along the way and that that is fine cool emily do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with um yeah you know do things for the enjoyment of them like please like we have so many things to feel bad about these days like let yourself enjoy something like go out to your workshop today or tomorrow or this weekend and like just do something for the fun of it and like be proud of what you've what you've done because like you deserve it. Everyone deserves to feel good sometimes.

Our guest has been Emily Velasco of Emily's Electric Oddities YouTube channel and science writer at Caltech. She also is a very active and entertaining Twitter. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, guys. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon supporters for Emily's mic. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now an incredibly appropriate quote to leave you with. This one from

Dr. Seuss in The Cat in the Hat. Look at me, look at me, look at me now. It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how.