Tag: Christmas

Posted on

Stashing Christmas

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and this week I did not complete my intended project for the week, but I did finish something interesting nonetheless. Let’s get started!

Red or Blue?

God has blessed my family to the point where when we pull out the Christmas decorations in November or so, we ask ourselves, “Do we want a red Christmas or a blue Christmas this year?” We then set up our artificial tree and garlands and adorn them tastefully from our “red” or “blue” bucket.

In fact: God has blessed us such that we could surprise my aunt some years back by getting a skinny artificial tree for our Christmas party. Circumstances dictated this tree as now our main tree this year, and we were able to bless a school run by our church with not just our large tree, but also some smaller ones for a few classrooms.

But Christmas is over. It’s time to put things away.

Let-There-Be-Christmas Boxes

In the likely event we are with the school next Christmas, my mother, Annie_8472, wanted to re-organize our buckets into our usual red/blue/both categories plus a number of classroom kits with our tiny trees and decorations for them. For each of red and blue things, we have a bucket for shatterproof balls, a case for smaller themed ornaments, etc.

Most of my contribution was hauling buckets between the living room and garage. I spotted a few buckets in comparatively poor condition, and arranged for them to end up at the bottom of the bucket stack. Annie clearly marked each bucket she used and had me aim them out when shelving them.

Takeaway

The same sorting system can be used with anything. Fabric –for example– can be sorted by color or material. Rank your items’ most important qualities, and store the most similar stuff together. This way, other people can find things (and put them away when done).

Final Question

Red or blue?

Posted on

Merry Christmas 2023

Good Morning and Merry Christmas from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project. Let’s get started!

My church has a still life Nativity we’ve been helping with since I was a kid. In our production, the story of Jesus’ birth as read in the books of Matthew and Luke is broken up into several scenes with a matching audio track lasting around a minute each. After years of my scene director calling dibs on me as a wise man searching for Jesus, I wanted to see the production edited up as a video.

It’s been another five or six years, but we finally managed to get our camcorder and tripod on the set. My father was kind enough to film all the scenes on our breaks between shifts.

For an open source video editor, I found OpenShot to be around my skill level. I took a video editing class in high school, so I’m comfortable moving things around between layers on a timeline. While I could have done with a better visual representation of the audio, it was heaps better than when I tried Windows Movie Maker.

I only had a couple technical issues this time around. The old version in the Ubuntu repositories didn’t run once installed on my father’s new computer. I found an appimage file which both has a newer version and actually launched. My second problem was how my father’s fancy new (probably still drop damaged as it turns out) computer was struggling with the preview. I found a recommendation aimed at Windows users about bumping up the audio sample rate to match a new native frequency, and that helped me.

Editing itself took a bit longer than I expected. Long story short, I couldn’t edit out all the chimes meant to tell visitors when to advance to the next scene, the addition of two scenes to the audio track last year was rushed, the lighting was poor more often than not… The list goes on. I did the best with what I had. And for the effort invested, I’d say it did pretty well.

Takeaway

My original vision I still wish to pursue is to have a special session where attention is given to the lighting and the same actors play the same parts when they show up in multiple scenes.

Final Question

Creative writing prompt: How would you infiltrate Santa’s workshop to plant the plans for a new toy?

I look forward to hearing from you on my Socials!

Posted on

The Relatability of Christmas

Merry Christmas from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a few thoughts on what Christmas means for me. Let’s get started!

Many a Christmas tale stars a jolly, old man who lives at the north pole making toys to hand out every year using his sleigh and team of magic reindeer, but even Santa is rarely portrayed as anything more than a steward of the holiday attributed to the birth of Jesus Christ.

How does a self-existent God relate to His created beings? How CAN He relate? The Old Testament records a long line of flawed human beings locked in a try/fail cycle when it comes to obeying God, starting with our choice to reject God by eating the forbidden fruit. For around a millennium and a half of history, God is seen in story after story, book after book at work in the background connecting with people by framing his love through contemporary imagery. He fashioned one chosen family into a powerful nation, preserved them from extinction at the hand of the undefeated Assyrians and through Babylonian exile, and ensured their reinstatement into the land He had promised to their ancestors even as a parade of foreign empires conquered their territory.

It is one of the darkest chapters in human history. Israel has been without God’s prophets for hundreds of years, and the religious leaders are corrupt and self-important teachers instructing their students in falsehoods. Furthermore, the region is clutched by the iron fist of Rome. Soldiers from the occupation force can order you to carry their packs for up to a mile, enemies of the state are publicly executed nailed to wooden crosses along the highways, which are left in place as reminders not to rebel. Meanwhile, a movement of zealots work in secret to liberate their homeland, storing up supplies for when the pharisees’ messiah would show up in the temple and permanently reestablish Israel as a sovereign kingdom. If ever there were a time it appeared God had abandoned the world, this would be one such time.

Amid this landscape, Jesus set aside whatever job perks come with being Creator God and Master of the Universe to relate to one of us AS one of us. He was born as an otherwise normal baby into poverty. In a town crammed to the walls with people, the only visitors who took note of Him were lowly shepherds who received a special invitation and some unknown number of scholars from the east who were paying attention. His earliest memories would have been from living as a refugee from a regional king who murdered His peer group looking for Him. When He moved back home, his family landed in the regional ghetto, where He grew up with the stigma of being an illegitimate child learning carpentry.

If anyone were ever entitled to everything, it would be Jesus; if anyone ever went to the most extreme lengths to be relatable to everyone who’s ever lived – again, Jesus. He went through the absolute worst humanity had to offer and didn’t back down. Many details of the analogies He used to reach people in 1st century Judea are lost on us today, but the core message shines on. And it started in a town called Bethlehem just over 2,000 years ago, where God took on human form to experience our worst and to carry our end of the contracts He made with us where we failed.

Takeaway

While the date of December 25 was originally chosen to displace one or more Pagan celebrations, today it represents a unique opportunity for Christians as it is in this season that a general audience is primed to hear about Jesus’ most relatable story. He was born.

Final Question

What does Christmas mean to you?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Socials.

Privacy Policy