pdpd.org quarterly news

Hi it's Pete. Was on a photoshoot recently making fun of someone's monthly newsletter when Emily said 'Why don't you make a newsletter?'. I was somewhat justified ridiculing this photographer, though - his newsletter was riddled with very basic typos and he didn't really have much of an eye.

• mozzarella
• Franchise Magazine no. 3
• pdpd.org
• Data Science & Visualization
• Standing Rockers
• Commercial Photography
• Hobbies
• Free Advertising

mozz.site

My independent publishing endeavor mozzarella.website participated in #BABZ2017 (formerly the Bushwick Art Book and Zine Fair). This year it was held at Knockdown Center in Maspeth Queens. We were worried we'd lose some foot traffic not being in Bushwick, but financial returns and our general busy-ness all weekened suggested otherwise. It's really impressive how Sonel expanded BABZ from ~30 vendors to over 100, but still maintained an intimate, open atmosphere across the fair.

more mozz:

• webstore now online
• article published on wikihow (how to publish independently when you live near a home depot)
• Father's Day Campaign
• loosely planning to participate in the MIT garage sale, the 3rd sunday of August 2017.
• launched a half-assed Patreon page

Franchise Magazine no. 3 cover + interview

What is the connection between basketball and ikebana? Honestly, there probably isn't one.

I used to do this thing where I'd give people my complimentary copies of the magazine if they wanted them. I decided to stop because it would always end up that I don't have any copies for myself. Semi-related, I just can't back Kevin Durant.

A set of these pictures were pinned to a wall during Greenpoint Open Studios, the same weekend as BABZ.

pdpd.org

Updated the look of the website, using a small flatfile static CMS. It's nice to be outside the gated communities of out the box web solutions (he says this while writing to you on MailChimp). Other shit:

• writing on Medium
• vigilantly bookmarking on Pinboard
• been throwing up the archive on Google Photos

Datasci and Visualization

• Fossil Fuels & Firearms - while doing some exploratory analysis on Federal Firearms Licenses and National Firearms Act registrations, I noticed a correlation between the number of firearms licenses in a given state and that state's dominant industry. It turns out that explosive/incendiary powders account for more than 90% of firearms registrations in the country, and these licensed powders turn up the most in states where the dominant industry is mining, quarrying, and oil & gas extraction. Datasources: ATF, US Census, American Community Survey.

• Sixteen Bean Soup - I've been sorting and counting the different beans from a bag of Goya® Sixteen Bean Soup, in order to calculate the probabilities of encountering a bean from each specific class. Getting a bar chart as data-object has been easy; actual analysis may follow using USDA Edible Dry Bean data. With this data, acreage and dollar values can be attached to each bean class, and man it'll be a party from there. An intuition tells me though, that there should be more interesting cross-data to be referenced. Fingers crossed. Datasources: self-compiled, USDA.

• Agora Marketplace Year in Review 2014 - I decided to revisit this messy project with the idea to format the summary statistics and findings as an annual report. The bulk of the analysis is simple association rule mining (think 'Customers who Bought this, also bought that'), but also a Poisson regression to predict market growth independent of server downtimes. Datasources: gwern.net via Jeremy Singer-Vine

• was added as a writer to online magazine Towards Data Science.

Standing Rockers

After about a month of staying with me, N and his daughter A of the Omaha Tribe continued their journey. It was a great month, although it's hard to have guests since I have no walls. But a lot of planning got done - A gave a talk at the American Indian Community House and also was instrumental in planning a divestment action that took place at Cooper Union. One night they brought home the Inspire Bank Exits crew, and N made burgers for us all. N kept saying 'Wouldn't it be cool if there was a New York Water Protectors badge?' (among other ideas), so I designed one real quick with N's song on there. It's amazing that we arrived at Standing Rock at the same time, but never met until they came up for a talk with Raymond Kingfisher at Hunter that I helped organize back in the winter. I have a lot of faith that A can become the next Winona LaDuke.

S had been having some trouble with PTSD and had to take off back to a rural location.

Commercial Photography

• Kate Spade - SU17 Core Handbag Campaign shoot
• Lucky Peach - Spring 2017 - Fried Chicken of the World
• Kate Spade - FA17 Wholesale Licensing shoot
• Kate Spade - SU17 Core Handbag Campaign - image licensed to Virgin Australia Duty-Free In-Flight Magazine
• Kate Spade - FA17 Core Handbag Campaign shoot

Sad to see Lucky Peach go, but glad they printed my bio on the Contributors page. Kate Spade continues to be a wonderful client, based largely on the strength of their art directors, strong stylists, and attention to detail on all levels of production. Diversifying clientele would be a wise business decision, but would come at the expense of cutting back on hobbies.

Hobbies

• Stamp collection has grown wildly thanks to $4-$12 100 stamp lots available on eBay. Some highlights: 1960s Naismith Centennial stamp, 1970s Soyuz/Apollo spacecraft.
• One night I was boiling some envelopes to get the stamps, and I was shocked to find the message "Spies on the Devil's Belt" written in Sharpie underneath where the postage was affixed. My mind raced thinking that cult messages were being sent to me via post. Later, Charles googled the message and we found out it's the name of a book. My mind continued to race, imagining a network of clandestine book recommendations being traded among pen pals.
• acquired the Shuttle Tydirium Lego Star Wars set from KC Metro Bricks via brickset.com. Also discovered that one way to acquire prohibitively-expensive Lego bricksets is to simply buy them incomplete on eBay - generally at 10-25% of market rates. There's an obvious trade-off in that the sets are incomplete, but Legos are a lot about using your imagination - so fucking use it!
• Movies & TV watched: Smoke Signals, NBA Playoffs + Finals, Rogue One (2x), Star Wars Rebels Season 3. No one I know watches Disney Channel cartoons, but I want to say that the penultimate episode of Rebels has what I consider to be a top 3 duel in the SW universe - the final face-off between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul. It is nearly flawless, and nearly brought me to tears. The homage to Kurosawa is clear, well-handled, and warranted; the compassion one can have for one's enemies - even in vanquishing them - is an empathic quality I perceive as generally lacking in the world.

Free Advertising

• avant.org - this shits cool, met him at the BABZ
• Not So Standard Deviations podcast - where I stole the idea of 'Free Advertising' from; very R-centric, and great.