I gave a five minute talk on this for Noisebridge's recent 5MoF series; it fairly well sums up the task. For those who like words, read on; for those who'd like to see all the pictures, make sure to look to the end.


Essentially, the story is this: a little over a year ago, there was a livejournal meme going around. My friend Quinn responded, and so I was obliged to make her something.



Naturally, I thought of SF0.

Now, my friend Quinn is a pretty amazing Dr. Who fan. She introduced me to Dr. Who, and I think represents a lot of the spirit of Dr. Who: joy, whimsy, adventure, and the desire to do good. SO I thought this would be a pretty cool idea:

First take an image.



Take a postcard-sized rectangle out of that image



Keep doing that.



The idea is that you can then send all these postcards to someone:



And they can be reconstructed into the original image:



I thought that this would be a really cool thing to do for my friend, and might be a pretty cool thing in general. As the head of the SF0 Science and Technology Committee, I thought I should make something which other people could use, too. So the perl code is up and publicly available on github, if any of you want to make your own postcards.

Of course, it took me a while to get the math right...because for a while I was trying to work it out using rotations only from the upper left corner, adding in whitespace, trying to crop and account for added space in going back...



...it was kind of a mess.



But I persevered, got the program working the way I wanted, made a bunch of postcards, printed onto postcard paper, and voila! A successful reconstruction!



But of course, this wasn't all. Because the second half of the idea was this: getting people to write about what Dr. Who meant to them -- something they remembered, something about why it was important to them. I sat in Borderlands Cafe, asking people if they knew Dr. Who and whether they'd be willing to write something for my friend.



It was pretty great. People wrote long, personal things...things that were really amazing!



Some more pithy remarks:


Or pictures:



Over the course of a couple weeks, I mailed them all to my friend Quinn, and this is the end result:



Success!

After that, I was talking about it with some friends, and was convinced to give a five minute talk at Noisebridge. Of course, giving this, I realized this was an opportunity to have another success.



I made a series of postcards using the Noisebridge logo, and at the end of my talk, gave them out to the audience. We sent them to a friend of mine who had been very involved in Noisebridge before moving to Seattle. People wrote about the Noisebridge space, about the value they'd found here. The postcards happened to come on a day he needed some encouragement, and hearing about the impact he's had on people here was was just right.



I was really pleased by this task -- it was really well received, and inspired a bunch of non-players to take part. All the postcards I scanned are below; there are some really wonderful ones in the collection, which you might be interested in seeing. People wrote some really amazing postcards. Thanks, SF0.