Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Local Trivia: Letterboxing

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to post this on my blog, since I'm pretty sure this kind of thing spreads by word of mouth, and I'm not sure this blog counts as a mouth...but since it's been taking up the majority of my non-work (and some of my work) time lately, I'm blogging about it anyway. We'll see if I'm thrown out on my tail for violating the unstated but possible Fight-Club-ian first rule of letterboxing, which is that you do not talk about letterboxing.

Look it up. I won't explain the whole thing here, except that it involves stamps, and making them yourself, and it's fun -- particularly if you're a person who played Castlevania III: Simon's Quest on NES as though it were a game about collecting the most "hearts" instead of actually questing/progressing through the frames and levels to the end. I heart collecting things, particularly non-corporeal ideas of things, and I also heart crafts. It's as though letterboxing was created by a parallel universe version of me.

Like most of the things I like, it tends toward the obsessive and caters to obsessive people, which means it will probably get tiring sooner or later. But it also can be left behind for years without maintenance and then picked back up again (like all of the crafts I do). And whenever you go somewhere new, there's probably a letterbox or two waiting for you to discover it -- and discover places you may never have seen otherwise.

As a carver/planter, my first and current theme is "They Might Be Giants." I carved the particle mans out of erasers with a box cutter and nail file, as well as the birdhouse in your soul and the purple toupee.

But last night I started using the professional materials and copied this creepy James Ensor painting, and it came out pretty well. I'd say I was hooked, but that's a rug-making joke, and this is way better than that.

I'll try not to make this into a letterboxing blog, but seriously -- look into it.

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