Hank's Hobby Blog: Lily's 3/4 Birthday Book

I mean, I had to top last time.

I'd been wanting to do some sort of typing project for a while. I've never done any sort of creative or poetic writing, so my intention was to create a collection of typed pages that was interesting solely due to the amount of labor that it took to create. This idea was primarily from Van Neistat's retyping of famous novels, though I think I was also inspired by Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds. Essentially, the idea was that once you put a certain amount of time and effort into doing something repetitive and useless, the product holds a certain level of meaning, or is at least somewhat interesting. Like how walking a mile is lame, but thru-hiking the Appalachian trail is badass. Inspired by the Shining, I had a previous (scrapped) project typing the same sentence over and over, but it was never going to be shown to anyone and was, in retrospect, just me tweaking. I still have the papers, but it's only a few hundred iterations and kind of embarrassing. But I digress. Lily matched my pipe bomb replica with an awesome laser-cut stamp, so I figured that I had to up the scale of the gifts to keep the chain going. I was about to go home for break and have plenty of time on my hands, so I figured this was the perfect moment to start a long, stupid, pointless typing project.

I sat down the first day I got home and started the grind. The phrase I used, "Lily Kicks Dogs All The Time", is just something that Lily wrote on my desk one time, I think from a zine she made? I have no clue if there is any story or meaning behind it, but its the only quote I had to work with.

The result of the first session, about 3.5 hours of straight typing.

Final collection, counted twice. I'm pretty sure it's exactly a thousand, but it's definitely in the ballpark. I overshot before I counted, and scrapped 3 sheets I thought were subpar.

I went to the hardware store and bought some supplies to display the pages. I spent an embarrassing amount of money on tools and materials because I didn't bring any home from school. If anyone reading this has access to the Disengineering budget it would be much appreciated.