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Tech Geek Wonderland

Last night I fell asleep on the couch after watching the first half of Across the Universe.  I think the detail and music and idealism inspired my dreams in some way.  I woke up around midnight after having a really fantastic dream and did my best to write it down right then and there:

I dreamed of a tech-geek wonderland along the side of bear mountain.

A loose network of kids from the country who got together in a big comfortably furnished cabin to discuss their ideas and work on their projects. Boys and Girls, Men and Women banded together in a common goal of making cool things that worked.

There was the gregarious, heavy-set guy and his super lightweight, 6 seater, person-powered tank- offroader vehicle. A central bench supported on columns with wheels at the end in a wide stance, it covered ground in a bouncing motion, its center of gravity very high due to its oscillations, moving quickly and erratically due to low friction with the ground.

There was the shy girl doing the study of the bird species that like to peck out indecipherable messages on keyboards. The messages were never the same or held any repeatable pattern, but somehow this was the method of hiding the message they were so obviously encoding.

The radical non-processed food crusader girls who had seen “Processed” years ago and had given up on any kind of factory-made sustenance long ago. One of them did a presentation on the varying shades of yellow that corn could grow in, and be coaxed to grow in for various purposes. The most yellow corn possible actually causing sparks when it was touched, and the most mildly yellow good for some kind of nutrition deficiency or eating disorder when very finely milled.

The cute girl next to me and the excited, self-deprecating way she talked of their long obsession with not eating farm or factory processed food. Liberating goats and cows from barns in dramatic missions of naiveté and adventure.

The excitement with which I waited for her to get to her presentation about a mobile application she had been working on that involved mapping and GPS. How I excitedly suggested we all exchange contact information and band together our geek pursuits into a larger, more important coordinated pursuit.

And always testing our crazy contraptions and inventions on the steep, dynamic hillside of Bear Mountain. So well-known to us, yet so varied and powerful, always able to throw up the unexpected, to push our ideas and inventions to their edges, to their maximum capacity, where they are fantastically destroyed, or fantastically and unexpectedly succeed.

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RIP Oink’s Pink Palace - May 30, 2004 to October 23, 2007

Oink’s Pink Palace, my favorite site on the entire internet was shut down this week. October 23, 2007 - a sad day indeed.

I don’t think I could give a better epitaph than DJ Rupture did on his blog. A musician aware enough to actually be encouraged when he found his music available on the revolutionary sharing site.

“Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7? on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12?, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…”

http://www.negrophonic.com/2007/defending-the-pig-oink-croaks/

Getting invited to Oink was one of the most exciting and vindicating experiences of my internet life. The black market community of music distribution through file sharing has always been intensely interesting to me; it was at the heart of my initial romance with the internet. In the beginning, there were simply websites with mp3s for download and lists of ftp sites that were traded around on IRC. Then came Napster, which brought the masses into the game, and then came Soulseek, which shared Napster’s user-friendliness and simplicity of use, but managed to stay underground for reasons i don’t really understand to this day.

But Oink was a revelation. It was truly a music lover’s paradise. It was a community based on love of music, sharing, cuteness (avatars were required to be cute in an endearing attempt to foster kind communication), quality, and organization. It remains the benchmark for what a music service can and should be. I guess stuff like that is always destined to come up against the harsh reality of “too good to be true.” Oink, you will be missed.

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