Introduction

 Welcome to my arts and crafts collection. For most of my life, I thought of myself as an engineer. A guy who builds and fixes computers and other technology items, rather than someone creative. While I was married to a very artistic person for many years, I always thought of her as the creative one, and not myself. Even when I became a writer in 1998, after starting my website PCPhobia, I still didn’t think of myself as creative, even though I created a significant amount of content, which (when I became a national-level journalist around 2000) was consumed by hundreds of thousands of people.

My first creative streak came about age 17, when I started getting deeper into photography. My high school had an art department, and even though I wasn’t in it (I was a Chemistry major), I was well known and liked by school staff, and so I was allowed free access to their studio, where I practiced developing film. I practiced various techniques for photo effects, some with just my camera, others with external hardware (like filters) and yet others in the lab, like double-exposure techniques. From then and until around 1995, I took thousands of photos and created some interesting stuff (there’s a story about that in my main autobiography). Looking back at what I made back-then, I don’t see it as particularly creative or artistic, but it was something for sure. Here’s one of them, a photo of an electricity tower from below, which I took in August 2007:

Here are a few more, taken around the same timeframe:

Later in life, as computer software improved, I started learning more about computer graphics, which led to creating hundreds of humorous and sarcastic images, known today as “memes”. I still do that occasionally, when inspiration hits me. These are much more creative, but then again…not particularly artistic. Also, memes come and go and I’m pretty sure no one ever saw them (I share them on social media, usually) and went berserk. There are a few items I created over time, which were more of a real-world version of a meme, like the Needle Keyboard I made in May 2015, but most of these have been lost to the vast pool of fun stuff that is my social media feed.

Another form of creativity would be cooking, I suppose. I’m somewhat hesitant to call it that, because ultimately, the majority of cooking (at least mine) is just following recipes I got from someone else, like my mother, or online. I follow the directions, and even though it requires some skill, I feel anyone who can read and has basic motor skills could do it at least as well as I did. However, there are several dishes that required refinement over inherited or online recipes, and that does require some skill. One such example would be my Chili Con Carne. After having some at a restaurant in Israel in the early 2000s (at “Beit Ha-Pancake”), I tried to make it on my own, since the restaurant was far-away. It came out well, and over the years and about two-dozen adjustments, my receipt is now an award-winning one (as in, I actually won numerous Chili-making competitions with it). Another recipe I developed was one for home-made Shawarma. Some think Shawarma is about the spices or marinade, but in my opinion, it’s much more about the process of grilling the meat and slicing it off that matters, and the method I have has received much praise from fellow Israelis. Here’s my shawarma:

Ultimately, what I think is the most creative is making things. Real objects you can touch and feel, and ideally, use. I’m uncertain when it was that I first started making things. Based on my social media feed, the first thing I made was probably this Pewter casting of a Lego Han-Solo in carbonite, which I made in March 2014

While this was a creative idea (and since then, many others started making them and selling them online), the technique was quite simple, as I simply bought a Lego piece of this design, cast plaster on it to make a negative mold, and then cast pewter into the plaster. You can see the result is fairly crude, both generally in the details, and visibly in the top-left corner. Since I didn’t have a centrifuge, which is used to pull the molten metal into the mold’s crevices, it didn’t always flow precisely into the mold, resulting in imperfections. In this case, however, these were actually beneficial, giving the final piece a “rustic” look.

In the 7 years since, I’ve explored dozens of types of “making”, from simple gluing and screwing stuff together, through paint techniques and to advanced laser-cutting and 3D printing. Over those years, I’ve created hundreds of pieces, some more utilitarian, and some more appearance-focused. This book contains photos and descriptions of most of them. I was fairly meticulous in taking pictures of most of them, so I believe this covers pretty-much every thing I ever made. Looking back at the range and quantity of the items, I’m pretty proud of the body of work I made. If I put-up a gallery of all of them, it would fill up quite a space. Who knows….maybe one day, this corpus of photos will be recognized as something more than just random acts of creative flare. GeekWire of Bellevue did recognize my work at some point in 2015, and published a story about it, which was quite flattering!