Your Script-fu is better than mine

I have recently become addicted to the /r/picrequests subreddit on Reddit.com. This has lead to learning the art of colorizing b&w photographs, improving my photo touch up skills, and discovering more about my image editor of choice, the GIMP.

The GIMP has very nice scripting capabilities built into it. It's original scripting language, Script-fu, is based on Scheme. I have read tutorials on creating Script-fu scripts before, and have played briefly with the GIMP's built in scripting console, but never really figured out how things worked. Last week I was browsing through the /r/GIMP subreddit, and ran across a thread which described a manual process for creating a pixel dot mask for your image--a simplistic version of the early newspaper/print halftone dot look.

The described manual process is pretty straight forward, and as mentioned on the thread, perfect for scripting. I've always found it easier to dig in and learn a new language when I have a problem to solve, and this seemed like the perfect "problem" to solve while learning the GIMP's Script-fu system. My first GIMP script can now be found on the GIMP Plugin Registry website.

Grow Equality

My home state of Maryland recently passed legislation legalizing same sex marriages. This is a happy event, but not without a cloudy horizon. Even as the bill passed the Maryland House of Delegates (with a high degree of certainty that it would then pass the Maryland Senate and be signed into law by the Governor), there were already people stating they would put this up for referendum during the 2012 elections.

While much of the hard work to get this law passed in Maryland is finished, it does appear that a push to make sure people understand what is at the core of this bill will be recognized, and any referendum to repeal it is defeated. In an effort to do a little more than just vote no to any repeal of the new marriage law, I have created a flier which I hope captures the goal of this law. Please feel free to use any or all of the original artwork for the flier. This work is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication , meaning you are free to use it however you'd like, with no need to license or attribute this work or any remix of this work--although it would be nice to know if people find it useful.

* The flyer in PDF format
* The flyer in Scribus format