An open source sketchbook
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![Funtime is over.](/image/drawing-funtime-is-over.jpg)
Today, while doing a bit of sorting through old stuff, I stumbled across some pages from notebooks I’d kept during my time at secondary school. The notebooks are part of a series I contributed to with my friends. I think there are about 4 or 5 in total, I have one, my friends have the others. I guess this was my first open source project. Everyone in my small group of friends contributed to them, writing, and sometimes drawing what happened throughout the day.
![A collaborative drawing](/image/drawing-im-getting-scared.jpg)
Most of the pictures annotate conversation threads, but on one page there is a collaborative abstract drawing. In some, we used different coloured pens to show the branches the picture takes.
![the woman who shouts](/image/drawing-the-woman-who-shouts.jpg)
The themes vary wildly from dinosaurs, to reasons we hate a particular subject, to various ways the faulty science equipment will kill us. There’s even a bunny suicide themed section on what form of suicide would be better than reading poetry in a double English lesson. (All very light-humoured, we weren’t that emo!)
![Drawing of my friend with the lurgee](/image/drawing-lurgee.jpg)
I went on to create my first website for my friends with a guestbook and visitor counter which was an extension of the sketchbooks, and as a result of the books getting confiscated a number of times. Unfortunately, the place I hosted my site (freewebs!) was eventually blocked by the Great Firewall of RM, which encouraged me to seek alternatives and build a real website using HTML with a forum and chatroom.
Not long after, I began making sites for other people and by the start of A-Levels, I’d quit my weekend job and was building sites whenever I wasn’t at school.
And to think it all started with some doodles in a sketchbook.