Last year Nolon Ashley hosted an “Astral Convention” at EsoZone, and I helped out by providing a soundtrack of binaurel beats (generated with SbaGen) and live Psychetect noise noodling. We’ll be doing the same thing this year. Details:
6pm PST, October 10th
If you can’t make it at that time, astral time travel as well.
Here’s the EsoZone blog entry from last year, I’ll update with any more information Frater Zir provides me:
It hasn’t been promoted much, but yes – EsoZone Portland 2010 is happening. And it’s happening next weekend. I haven’t been involved in it much this year but I will be there.
EsoZone Portland 2010. Mutant unconference. Psychopomp as the wrap party. Consider what you’re contributing, contact us, and stay tuned.
Friday – 9pm til close
Saturday 2pm til close
Sunday 2pm til close
With outfits ranging from skimpy to salacious, some 30 bleary-eyed runners completed the first-ever Burning Man Ultramarathon, proving that arid weather and late-night parties weren’t enough to derail even the most dedicated Burner athletes from slogging 30 miles through sand, sun and dust.
After months of planning, organizer Cherie Yanek and 36 other competitors kicked off the race at 5 am on September 1. Temperatures hovered around 50 degrees and onlookers included party-goers who hadn’t yet called it a night. There were no dust storms — a frequent concern during the annual gathering at Black Rock City — though temperatures did climb roughly 40 degrees by the time the final runner crossed the finish line shortly after 12:30 pm.
Join the hundreds of fans coming from all over the the United States (and beyond) to gather in the Southern California desert. Set up camp at our wasteland compound, surrounded by specially-built sets. Costumes are required and post-apocalyptic campsites and vehicles are encouraged. Live for three days in a world pulled straight out of the Mad Max movies, beyond the grip of so-called civilization.
Top DJs from all over will provide the soundtrack, fire dancers and bonfires will light up the night, and modified vehicles will shake the earth with their engines. Don’t miss it! Tickets on sale now.
This is an ADULTS ONLY event.
Libertarians who couldn’t afford to insure their “Burning Man on the water” type event… just do it anyway, sans insurance:
A small group of libertarians created their own, floating vision of the future in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta recently. It was, as organizers billed it, a little like Burning Man on the water — minus the giant, flaming effigy and with a fraction of the number of event-goers.
The festival was almost canceled due to insurance problems, but in true libertarian fashion, the would-be attendees created a do-it-yourself substitute in its stead.
The would-be event, called Ephemerisle, was sponsored by The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to creating independent micro-nations in international waters.
“I heard about the cancellation and said, ‘In the spirit of self-organized nation-building, let’s get together anyways,'” said Matt Bell, who spearheaded the effort without any central leadership or organizational backing.
In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Turns out there really isn’t anything illegal going on at the renegade art event called Lost Horizon Night Market, an ongoing participatory project with an elegantly simple idea: “Proprietors” rent a truck and do something creative in it, with public interactivity a central element.
There are no admission fees. Participants mainly provide enthusiasm (or homemade jam, or lap dances, or ukulele serenades), and get to soak in a hot tub or share a smoke in the Jesus Christ Hookah Bar. The proprietors exchange their time, money and artistic energy for the distinctive euphoria of seeing people interact with an environment of their own creation.
“For one night, we make an autonomous neighborhood,” said Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk, who enjoys spurring people to act on their creative desires. “I get a kick out of seeing people do stuff. I’ve got 40 people into the game … got people who’ve never done installation art before to do it.”
Part 21st-century street carnival, part Burning Man-style artgasm, the Night Market is an empirical example of the participatory culture movement. To potential proprietors, the scale of a project in a 10-foot by 14-foot or 24-foot space is liberating in its constraints. It’s small enough to visualize a project, big enough to do something with impact, and open-ended in a way that seems to immediately spark flurries of ideas from those who hear of it.
Vincent Ocasla claims to have “beaten” SimCity by creating an amazing city with population of 6 million and no roads (only subways) that lasts for 50,000 years.
I’ve a quote from one of your Facebook status updates here: “The economic slave never realizes he is kept in a cage going round and round basically nowhere with millions of others.” Do you not feel that sums up the lives of the citizens of Magnasanti? (And you might want to set your Facebook to private by the way.)
Precisely that. Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.
Heavy.
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Actually, I don’t fully understand why they are called squatters if they pay rent and are authorized to live there. But the photos are cool.
Nearly a century old, and looking every day of it, Yoshida-ryo is very likely the last remaining example of the once common Japanese wooden university dormitory. This building was built in 1913. Organized from the very beginning to be self-administering through a dormitory association (????), the students themselves have been responsible for selecting new applicants for residency. This autonomy, however, came under full-scale assault in 1971, when the Ministry of Education began a policy of regulating or closing dormitories, which were seen as “hotbeds for various kinds of conflict.” University authorities first tried to close Yoshida-ryo completely in 1979, and after failing to overcome opposition over the next 10 years finally closed the Western Yoshida-ryo across the street.
With the death of Japan’s violent student activism, the campaign to close the dormitory subsided for a time, but in the aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake there were new calls to replace the poorly aged building, which had already seen its maintenance neglected for decades by a university that had wanted to demolish it.
At present, the future of the dormitory is unclear.
