7: Ukulele.

At the beginning of this year, after watching videos of Amanda Palmer playing the ukulele for several months and hearing about how easy it was to pick up on, I decided I wanted to give it a go. I looked around for a while, trying to find a ukulele that was at a decent price. I eventually settled on this one because it came with a case:

The uke was ordered, and I got excited to receive it. I'd been wanting to play the guitar for several years and tried to learn it but I never really got it down. It just took too much time to learn and was too complicated. Sure, you could say it's because I'm lazy, but really, I didn't want to devote a lot of time to learning an instrument that was meant merely as a hobby. That was what happened when I learned piano as a young girl - I spent several years and my grandparents spent lots of money on lessons, and what did I learn? Pretty much just the basics, and after I quit lessons I lost interest in playing for years until I picked it up again as a hobby.

So the uke seemed like a good balance - kind of like a guitar, can be used to play a lot of the same songs as you could play on a guitar (but not a piano), and apparently very easy to learn. Seemed like a good hobby instrument.

So I got the uke in the mail and by the end of the first day I had it, I could already play probably about ten chords and five or six songs. The first song I learned, naturally, was "Creep" by Radiohead, because Amanda Palmer's ukulele cover of it was what inspired me to play the ukulele in the first place. Four chords, a simple song. But a crowd pleaser, for sure.

I started recording videos of me playing with my webcam and posting them on my YouTube account, which, at the time, had just a few videos of basically random things. The first uke video I posted was this:



All The Small Things, by blink-182 - they're one of those bands that most people kind of got over but I still listen to years later. That cover is not a very good one. At the time, I'd only been playing for a week.

Time went on, and I continued playing and learning more songs. I got better and better, but the uke sounded sort of... well, cheap. It made sense, because it was cheap. I didn't intend to get one that was much better. I put some pretty stickers on it to make it look more interesting.

One day, I got a private message from a guy who went by the username "deach69". I had no idea who he was, but he had been commenting on and rating a lot of my videos recently with pretty positive reviews. The message, in essence, said that I was pretty good but I could use a better uke. He said that if I wanted him to hook me up with a nice uke to just ask.

Confused, I asked if he worked at a music store and could get me a discount, or something similar.

No, he said, he just gives free ukes away to people he thinks deserve them.

Naturally, this startled me. Who does that? I mean, honestly? But he told me to look him up on Ukulele Underground, as proof that he was legit. (Ukulele Underground, by the way, is pretty much the biggest internet forum for ukulele lovers.)

So I searched his name, and found lots of people writing thank you posts and all sorts of other stuff about the ukes that he had given them. I also found videos on YouTube of people opening packages from Deach that, of course, contained ukes. He had become so notorious for these random acts of kindness that the act of giving someone a ukulele became known as "to deach" - so if you get a ukulele from him, you are said to have been deached.

I was stunned. This guy - who knows who the hell he is - he just gives these things away for free. And they're nice ukuleles. I didn't get it. So it was legit, but I was still thinking, who does that?

The answer to that question is, of course, Deach.

We continued our conversation and eventually we had it set so that a Mainland concert ukulele would be mailed to my grandma's P.O. Box (my mom was still a bit skeptic, and didn't want me giving him our home address). The next week, my grandma came over carrying a large box.

And I recorded this video.



I have a really difficult time getting my emotions through to a web cam, but I tried. I was truly touched by his generosity. I knew it wasn't like it was a special case just for me, he'd done this lots of times, but I don't think that's the point. The fact he does it at all just shows that he is truly a kind, generous person with a heart of gold. He still continues to watch and comment on my videos as I get better and better.

The new uke majorly improved my ability to learn and play. The strings weren't loose, so it didn't need to be tuned as often. The frets were a bit wider, so it was easier to do strange finger placements for chords. And, of course, it sounded much better than my old one.

I named it Amanda, after my hero and inspiration. I decided to name the other one Brian, so I would have a matching set.

On the day I met Amanda Palmer, I had both her and Jason Webley sign the ukulele.

Not the best picture of me, or the signatures, really. But that isn't the point. It made the ukulele even more special to me. The ukulele has become my best friend, my inspiration, and my distraction. (My Facebook page says I am dating my ukulele. So it actually says I'm dating "Amanda Palmer," but when you click to go to the profile it's a profile I made for my ukulele. That is how much I love my ukulele.)

A few weeks ago, I did something I'd never really done before, thanks to my ukulele and some inspiration from my cousin. I wrote a song. A full song, with actual chords to back it up. When I was younger I used to write lyrics and tunes, but they weren't very good and they were never actually finished. They also never had instruments to accompany them.

If it weren't for the ukulele, I probably never would have written this song. It's titled "That's What I Said," and it's sort of about a lot of things rolled into one. But it's mostly about Amanda Palmer - both the person, and the ukulele.

6: Papercraft.

I discovered the art of papercraft accidentally one day about two years ago while I was looking on Google Images for a picture of the Weighted Companion Cube from Portal. Instead of a regular picture of the cube from the game, I found this:

I wanted one. I had to have it. So I downloaded the template and went about trying to cut and glue the pieces together with regular scissors, super glue and a pair of tweezers.

This was a bad candidate for a first papercraft, I soon found. It was tiny and complicated. I learned very quickly that papercraft is not as easy as it looks. My first paper Companion Cube was a failure that got thrown out. But I was determined, so I went on my way, looking for other templates. I soon found myself looking at blogs all about papercraft, and finding that there were more than just paper Companion Cubes. There were all sorts of things - characters, food, animals, toys - you name it, there is probably a papercraft of it.

I read different tips and found that an X-acto knife with a cutting board is generally considered the best method for cutting out pieces of papercrafts, and learned that super glue isn't really your best bet when it comes to putting them together. I bought some good old-fashioned Elmer's and an X-acto knife, and I went crazy. Soon the top shelf of my desk was filled with all sorts of characters, all made out of paper. Eventually that was too full and I had to start putting them on my printer. I got more and more skilled and started making more complicated things.

Two years later, I'm still papercrafting. I've had a few failures here and there, mostly due to poor design on the creator's part. But the top shelf of my desk is now a random pile of papercrafts. You can't even see a lot of them. Some of my favorite ones, or the newer ones, are on my printer so that they are more visible. These include a complicated model of American McGee's Alice and a detailed Companion Cube that's about five inches tall. I've given away papercrafts as gifts to several people. Although the work is not fully mine, I think the effort that goes into it makes it special.

Currently, I am working on this papercraft of Osaka and Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh:

It's fairly complicated, and I've run into a lot of problems along the way, both mine and the designer's faults. I've been working on it for a couple weeks now (I do have other things to get done, you know) but I'm very close to being finished. Osaka has been done for well over a week but Chiyo has been going very slowly. I just have to finish up her arms and legs and I can put her on the base next to Osaka and it will be complete.

5: WKAP?

And once again, one blog leads to another. My last post was about Amanda Palmer, and this post is also about Amanda Palmer. It's about a different Amanda Palmer, though - a fictionalized version.

I first heard about alternate reality games a few years back when I was browsing Wikipedia. I read about I Love Bees, which was a promotional ARG for Halo 2. The concept fascinated and frightened me at the same time. I actually had nightmares for a while about the whole idea. It was just creepy.

An ARG, if you don't know, is sort of like a roleplaying game. Well, not exactly; it's more complicated than that. It's a game that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. You have contact with the characters and help them solve a mystery or problem. There are usually lots of fictional websites involved and there are always insane puzzles. It's really part of the whole viral marketing thing, as most ARGs are made to promote something or other.

Right after the Amanda Palmer concert I attended in December, I was browsing the Shadowbox (the Dresden Dolls forum) when I found a thread titled "leaving the light on? WKAP secrets..." It was pretty far in, but it chronicled the mystery from the start. I was late, but the clock was still ticking.

ARGs start with a rabbit hole of some sort. For this one, it was a URL hidden in several places related to the album: on the album's website blinking in morse code, in thank you messages sent out through e-mail to those who purchased the record digitally. The URL was this: lostandfoundthings.tumblr.com.

At first, it just looked like an interesting blog that was a collection of odd art and quotations. Then on September 16, the owner, Laura, made a blog post that changed things and made people realize there was something more going on here.

The post told the story of Laura's walk along the train tracks that day, and how she found a cookie tin in a rabbit hole. She opened the tin and found it full of strange pictures. Many of these pictures featured the same girl (Amanda) who appeared to be dead in every single one. She turned the photos over to the police.

Eventually, other websites were revealed. There was the website for WKAP-FM, a radio station owned by Jack Fox, the last person to speak to Amanda. Alexa Webb Report, a news website that featured stories about Amanda's disappearance from her friend's house in Acton, Massachusetts. Monolith and Sky, the website of Amanda's former Manager, Koosh Nall. Joie de Vivre Salon, a strange art gallery owned by five suspicious sisters. And Fans of Robert Johnson, owned by the mysterious RJ.

There were other characters that came to the surface with MySpace pages later on. Beth, Amanda's real-life assistant, was a character. Melody, a friend of Amanda who is desperately looking for her. Jude, Amanda's ex-boyfriend. Sheila, a hard-partying girl with a rude attitude. Sam, the Guitar Hero addict.

But the most significant, and most enigmatic, was The Stranger.

The Stranger does not have a real name that we know. All we really know about him is what he looks like, and that he was watching the night Amanda disappeared.

He is one of the few characters we actually have direct contact with, and he has given us the most information.

I think when the game became really, really interesting was when he instructed us to e-mail him and request something to be hidden. These so called "secrets" were sentences, quotes, information, that we were to hide in art for someone else to find and share. Initially, these were hidden in the physical world, but that made things move very slowly and so the hiding moved to Twitter, where information got around much faster.

The secrets slowly revealed bits of information about all the characters. The mystery still hasn't been fully worked out, but it's clear that there is some sort of voodoo or other trickery about that's allowing Amanda to die and be reborn multiple times, and that the Joie de Vivre sisters are behind it. It's also highly likely they did the same for RJ, who may have been Robert Johnson himself in a previous life. We're not even really sure anymore if the correct question is "who killed Amanda Palmer?"

But the fascination goes beyond that, even - there may be more philosophical layers than I can chew on. It's amazing, how this game has made people really think. I'm too tired to go and find some of the quotes, but there has been a lot of musing from certain "players" about the true nature of this ARG and the meaning of it. It's not just a game, and it's not just promotion. It's art.

The connections between characters and the mystery of it all have become like a second life for me and several others. The only downfall are the lulls in activity that occur every once in a while, when there are no new secrets, no new messages from The Stranger, and no new blogs from any of the characters. Eventually, though, it will pick up. Things will start moving again, and I'll get sucked in. That's just the way the game is played.

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