Little Brother encoded in microdots on a papercraft desk-pot
Flickr user Oschene created this papercraft compass rose jar on which is printed the entire text of my novel Little Brother, encoded as "1.7 gazillion microdots": "One has only to unfold the model, scan it and reconstitute it into a readable text."
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And if you put it in a large container of room temperature water, over the span of 10 days it will grow to 600 times its original size!
That's damn cool.
One can imagine the comedy of a zealous IT manager trying to ban printed papercraft, along with ipods and memory sticks, as a risk to workplace data security.
This just in: TSA bans polka dot clothing due to potential copyright violations by terrorists.
Not to belittle the surely fascinating feat, but just one question...
WHY?
"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness."
- William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic
Does that really work? I was under the impression that "microdots on paper" are something that only works in the movies - inks soak into paper, destroying any fine detail on that scale. Real microdots are made on metal or plastic.
Note on the program download page the author's comment that this is his 'latest open-source joke'. :)
I tried out Paperbak and it works surprisingly well. You'll just have set the DPI to be well below your printer's and scanners resolution for it to work.
does this mean I no longer have to knit the coded names in wool?
Did someone say microdot?
This may be a silly question, but what's the difference between "papercraft" and origami?
It sometimes seems to me that "papercraft" just means "a word for origami preferred by the kind of people that also like steampunk."
Is that far off?
origami has rules
Papercraft also extends beyond folded paper items to those that are cut, glued, painted, stamped etc.
It's the difference between "painting" and "watercolor."
Oragami requires one square piece of paper that cannot be glued or cut. Anything beyond that is papercraft.
The last time I saw 1.7 gazillion microdots was Phish's 3-day run at the Hampton Coliseum in January of 2003.
they still make microdots?
Enochrewt @14, it's still origami if it uses more than one piece of paper, as long as they are attached by more folding rather than with glue, tape, etc. Most quadruped animal models are two pieces, one for the head and front legs and one for the tail and back legs, with bits that slide into each other in the body, for instance. And other basic shapes are ok too - I have a book somewhere with designs made from various triangles, rectangles, etc. And actually, either that book or the other one I have (they are stored at my parents', sadly) cites one of the oldest books of origami, which was all about cranes, and deals with pieces of paper cut and then folded to create cranes attached by wingtips/tailtip/beak. So the restrictions aren't *quite* as clear as all that. Cutting out some funky shape to start with is definitely papercraft-which-isn't-origami, though.
Hmm I just tried this and ended up with much much denser dots. I wonder what I did wrong?
Talia: Because it's cool. Possibly because she wanted to decorate the piece with microdots, and Little Brother was an available and appropriate text.
I hope that the Posey boxes are featured as well. This is a great little photoset!