Creative Output

Creative Output is the blog of Angela Brett, a writer and programmer with a degree in mathematics and interests in linguistics, particle physics, space, and funny music. She has lived in three countries and worked in four (having spend eight and a half years at CERN, where both particles and physicists can be in two states at once.) She usually refers to herself in the first person, but made an exception for this version of page.

In direct violation of the guidelines set out in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Blogging, Angela rarely blogs about what she ate for lunch today or how cute her cat is (she does not have a cat, but sometimes gets excited about how cute her Mac is), and she tends to overexplain the things she links to. This is mainly a blog of things she has created herself. Many of these things were created as part of various projects:

Writing Cards and Letters: Each leap day, Angela gets out her collection of souvenir playing cards (each with a different picture on each card) and resolves to create something inspired by one of those cards (with the card value determined by the week, the deck chosen according to inspiration) each week until she’s through the whole deck. This has been completed twice so far; the first time with strict deadlines and a focus on writing, and the second with slightly looser deadlines and the occasional video, diagram or app. The idea was inspired by Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week and Jostein Gaarder’s book ‘The Solitaire Mystery’, and was the reason for setting up the blog.

The Last Six Months: An attempt to repeat the weekly creation ritual of Writing Cards and Letters but with more relaxed rules, and also (secretly) create a video for Carrie Dahlby’s song ‘The Last Half Birthday‘, during the six months before Angela turned 30. The secret part of this project never got off the ground, due to a badly-timed camera breakage. The other part didn’t go much better; it turns out that while relaxed rules and I get along like a house on fire, we don’t tend to produce much output apart from a lot of smoke and the charred remains of a house.

The Afterlife: Anything that does not fit into the other categories, created after the end of Angela’s life (that is, her thirtieth birthday.)

NaPoWriMo is National Poetry Writing Month, where the definition of ‘National’ is, adj. (of unofficial designations for time periods) having delusions of or aspirations toward officialness (see also ‘official’). Usu. not affiliated with a specific country. This is a yearly event where people are encouraged to write a poem every day of April. Angela participated in it for 18 days in 2014 before realising that a deadline for a short story contest was looming.

Forms and Formulae: An ongoing series of poems about articles in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics using poetic forms covered by articles in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. The aim is to publish one every Thursday.

In the course of these various projects, Angela has developed a few pieces of software which are often used to create other things to blog about.

Haiku Detector: A Mac application to find unintentional haiku in any text. This is available for download.

Robot Choir: A Mac application to sing any text to any tune input via MIDI, UltraStar file, or manually. This was written in a weekend and added to over a few more weekends, but has not yet been cleaned up into a good enough state for release.