Howdy Stranger

Hi! I’m Vee Kennedy (they/them/theirs) and I’m a Visiting Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Central Florida. I’m also a student in the Texts and Technology PhD Program at UCF.

Here’s a very brief list of examples of creations I’m most proud of from Critical Making, and an ugly first draft of what I hope I get to continue to flesh out next week in that optional extra making.

Reflection of Critical Baking

Sometime during week 13, when creating the pulse project for p5.js, an epiphany struck me. Long had I been apprehensive about using CoPilot to help me code, despite reassurances from faculty that this kind of use is not seen as plagiarism by coders and was in fact encouraged as a means of learning. Still yet, I felt guilt, apprehension, I suppose, a sort of impostor syndrome for entering the deeper halls of coding knowledge without being a “real” programmer.

At the same time as I was working on the Pulse Project, preparing for some critically adjacent banking. Ricky Finch, a member of my PhD cohort, had his birthday, and I’d gotten into the habit of asking my cohort members what they’d like for a baked good of their choice around their birthdays. Nicole got chocolate chip cookies, Anyssa, assorted flavors of brownies, Dan Helslep cupcakes with pistachio frosting, and Ricky requested something in the flavor of red velvet.

Despite baking since childhood, I’d never once made a red velvet recipe, and I didn’t even know how. Isn’t red velvet just chocolate with red coloring in it? Apparently not. I know now because I went to google and, just as whenever I’m attempting to bake or cook something new from a recipe, read several of them before I started making decisions about how I wanted to approach the topic. Some were from fancy cook books, others, recipe blogs. I had done something similar when attempting to figure out how to make pistachio flavor for Dan’s cupcakes, and the same a dozen times over for the critical baking process as I took on new recipes from scratch almost every week without ever once feeling of impostor syndrome as a baker, or as though I had done something to be guilty of. Learning from recipes is natural, of course; how is anyone to bake without experience or a guide when one hasn’t made something before?

Therein lies the code epiphany: if it works for baking, it must work for code, too, and the similarities don’t stop. As I was working on my Pulse Project, I asked CoPilot to help me create a background gradient of the trans flag colors (light pink, light blue and white). I already understood the code tags and areas reflected in the content about how to make background colors and add background images, but a gradient was new to me. So, I asked for help. Much to my surprise, I understood what was generated - I wouldn’t have been able to do it by myself the first time, but it made perfect sense once I had an example to work from. Just as over the summer I distilled four or five Russian Teacake recipes into one after numerous attempts to find a ratio of powdered sugar, nuts (or nut alternatives) and fats that created the perfect melt-in-your-mouth crunch of a Russian Teacake before penning my creation down as my own recipe, I was once again looking at examples. After a bit more practice, much like my Russian Teacakes, I feel some confidence that I could create a gradient on my own now.

Experiments

Selfie Cake
Comic
GoogleEarth Map of PokeRegions
The Internet Graveyard of Critical Baking: A Tracery Experiment
Twine Texts and Technology Valentine’s
Valentine’s Images
House Bill 1069 and the 49 in P5.js