Maker Faire 2013

For those who weren't around for last year's report, the Maker Faire is a huge DIY festival that takes place every year in San Mateo. (They have others around the country, too.) It's put on by Make Magazine. It's a great community of people, and really fun to see the things everyone comes up with. Also, I don't know why this is showing up as all-caps, because it looks like boring, lower-case Times New Roman to me. So, sorry about that.

Anyway, for my birthday, Jonny got me a Wondermark comic book and a really excellent Wondermark print, of a comic that I might as well have written. He got them for me specifically because we had tickets to the Maker Faire, and David Malki (who does the Wondermark comic) had just announced that he would be there with a booth. So Jon got me things to have signed!

(That says "bibliophibians" up there.) We went to the Wondermark booth as pretty much our first activity of the day. He does this thing called a Roll-a-Sketch, where you pay five bucks and roll some dice that correspond with different pictures. He will then draw you a comic of your very own, combining those pictures in crazy ways. So I did this! I was the first one of the day.

The "roll" part of "Roll-a-Sketch":




The "sketch" part:



The outcome:

After that, we explored the rest of the place. Here is "The Imperial March" being played on Tesla coils (this was Jon's favorite part):




And here is art made from piano parts:

And here is a thing where a guy took a piano out to Half Moon Bay and played on it every night for a few weeks, letting it deteriorate in the weather before setting it on fire for the last concert (more). Yay for the Maker Faire!