Home Greeter 2000: The Origins
First post; go easy on me, it’s my first time.
Four things happened closely together in time. My father died, I learned I was becoming a father, I began riding a motorcycle, and Mad Max: Fury Road was released. I like to think of each of these events as entirely independent of the others.
Now, I always was a mild nerd and home automation enthusiast, but this series of events changed me… I became much more interested in exploring areas outside of my education entirely.
The results were apparent quickly. My first child was one month old and needed a Halloween costume, in my mind at least. I knew we were going to a Fury Road themed party, and while I thought the prospect of dressing up like a warboy was awesome, I knew it was both a) low hanging fruit and b) lacking in creativity as a function of probability and the number of men present.
In my mind, in addition to the Halloween costume conundrum, I struggled with a far more pressing conflict: I had a tiny baby that I needed to protect from the world. Looking back, it’s pretty apparent that I was protecting myself from my own fears of being an inadequate father.
The obvious solution to me killed two birds with one stone: make your one-month-old the Doof Warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road. Get her an electric guitar and make it shoot fire. That will make everything okay. You’ll feel like she can protect herself and you will scare away her threats (I’ll discuss my immaturity in a later entry).
If I could find the original link I would certainly post it. Somebody used a caulking gun, a butane canister, and a ukulele to make a fire–shooting ukulele. The incongruity made it inherently humorous, but it didn’t feel right to me. It didn’t feel like it should be actualized. Fast forward an Amazon search, and I had a $99 mini Fender Squire which I continue to think is a very reasonable value. I used a caulking gun, some braided steel plumbing tube, and a mechanical grill igniter. In my first “day off” as a father, after several visits to a Brooklyn hardware store, I succeded in making a mini Fender Squire that shot fire. And the Lord looked down and said, “This is badass.”
She debatably loved it.
I definitely loved it.
The family’s net love of it was definitely positive.
Totally.
That was the first time I made something as what-felt-like a responsible adult. What’s a responsible adult? I have no clue, I just knew I was keeping a small human alive, providing for a family, and somehow just made something awesome. I tinkered and made many things in the past, but somehow balancing a family life with endeavors like this made it much more meaningful. The debatable silliness of the project was negated by the burdens of being a functional adult.
It became a fake-awesome armor to protect me from taking myself too seriously in my chosen field, but it also compellled me to flex my creativity in areas that were drastically disparate from my day job.
Looking back, Gears, Code, and Fire was born that Halloween day.
This is where people will say horrible things.