Phone/PDA? Mobile version!
I’m going to have severely reduced net access for the next little while, and will be posting here very little / not at all.
During that time, however, I’m going to be contemplating something rather large (at least, it’s a big deal to me) that I’ve been putting together, and that’ll wind up being posted once I’ve had time to think it through, write it up and had a chance to get it online.
in a window on Ossington, north of Queen
Well, this photo got taken down, but I found one from my area that is visually nearly identical… although obviously the Ajax fauxhomes are rather a bit larger than these Jane & Tretheway fauxhomes.
If you’re the people I met outside Honest Ed’s, take a look around and then drop me a line via the e-mail address to the right if you’re so inclined. Make sure you put ‘ scir ‘ in the subject line to get it through my spam filter, and then I’ll give you my actual address instead.
July 27, 28 and 29 I was in the backwoods of Ontario’s Kawarthas region, near the small but friendly and more-progressive-than-you-might-expect town of Bancroft & its surrounding communities, for Northtek teknival 2007.
This is the 6th consecutive year of this festival (here’s my post on last year), which is a free, open, mandatory-DIY event held on crown land and comprised wholly and solely of the coming-together of whatever number of autonomous groups show up to take part in the temporary decentralized community.
Absolutely every aspect of the organization and occurrence is handled by whoever gets together and picks up the slack, including date planning (don’t get me started), location scouting and selection, and promotions / information dissemination.
That flyer up top was just one person’s artistic interpretation, and this one’s my own:
The only rules are: no vending allowed whatsoever (dually enforced by Canadian crown land law and anti-capitalist mob rule), leave no trace (same dual theoretical/practical enforcement situation), and don’t be “that guy,” i.e. don’t be obnoxious, unable to take care of yourself, or stepping on anyone’s toes… or find out what genuine response means in an essentially lawless scenario. (The answer: we kinda freestyle it, but power in numbers is always key.)
Introductory info on the festival is at Northtek.net and more detailed stuff is on the wiki at free23.net, however both of those are dynamic sites and if you’re reading this post too long after its post date, the content of the sites might have changed dramatically.
I could be said to have been some part of three of the soundsystems that set up, while also being little to no part of them at the same time. The one I was most involved with in the lead-up to the festival was the Slutek stage, a collaboration between Chicken Sluts (Toronto, ON) and Abitek (Abitibi, QC).
The Slutek, ahem, ‘teamwork’ banner
I contributed no gear or decor to the stage, nor did I in any way help set it up (I would’ve, but I was coming up on the bus and we only got there late Friday night when everything was already kicking).
Chicken Sluts banner, produced by a collective painting at the previous week’s Toronto drum circle
Lots of helping hands were pitched our way, however, and the stage came together pretty awesomely. Here’s the two main organizers, though:
Of all the stages, Slutek had the most classical teknival soundsystem construction, although we’re sadly unable to put together speaker walls like this in Ontario.
Chicken Sluts vs Abitek ‘Slutek’ stage
I think of everything I heard, Ghost Television’s mosh pit-inducing set was my favourite. I did play a Sunday-morning set at the Slutek stage (starting off with an obnoxious happy hardcore smack across everyone’s 10 am… while wearing a Hanson shirt at that) but the stage I played the most at was the Operators of Overload stage, brought up by my friends from Waterloo, ON. In the lineup pictured below, I was right before the first set listed. I also played again later, and later again still.
Assembling Friday night’s O of O lineup as a doggy wanders by
My computer had been out of commission for two months leading up to the festival and I turned it on for the first time actually in the woods after getting the parts I needed the same day we came up… so I went all over the place and had lots of fun with the music collection I’d been locked off from in that time, playing from grime and dubstep to acid jazz, soulful house, Swedish hip hop and all sorts of other stuff.
Marta sleep-styling at her Decoration Station
Here’s Marta from Waterloo, who came up with the O of O crew. She set up a Decoration Station area for people to create pretty things to wear on their hair, clothes, etc. Once people were done with that, we converted the Station location to the Free Market that me and Mintjellie set up, where things could be donated or taken on a gifting-based (rather than trading-based) system.
Though the lack of a central message board (and the fact that no one had any clue what time it was at any point) prevented some planned workshops from coming together, those two spaces were successes, as was Icecream’s Northtek Cafe.
Relaxing and chatting over tea and soup at the Northtek Cafe
One other thing that I wanted to have people work on communally was creating a piece of art on the back of a confiscated Toronto advertisement, which was then going to be replaced backwards into an adframe when we got back to Toronto in order to display the art instead of an ad. We brought two up, one broke (they’re rather fragile plastic) and the other was needed to make this sign.
This bit of signage was painted on the back of a common Toronto “public service” advert-order…
…putting it to a much more constructive use.
I was satisfied with that use, though, and when we all got back to the city it wound up in front of an ad-bearing garbage can. (Expect to be hearing more about this sort of project.)
The most heart-warming stage had to have been the MiR/ghEttoblAst/subtransit collaboration under the Association of Autonomous Astronauts name. Though the stage was lower-power and more chill than the pounding O of O PA or the squawking Chicken Slut speakers, it was powered by solar-charged batteries and playing through home-built speakers and thus did the best job of capturing the DIY and sustainability aspirations that the festival tries to aim for and align itself with.
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts setup with solar panels and home-built speakers
Though that big metal subwoofer is MiR’s, most of the recent speaker construction work was being done by the Batman, who was working on some while in the forest and showing whomever happened to be interested in learning.
The Batman building speakers
This really is my idea of camping… way crazier, more memorable, more educational and ultimately more environmentally friendly than the way that the average person would handle camping.
Pretty far removed from Boy Scouts, though, and I’m not sure I’d trust these three to take my daughters on any Girl Guides overnights.
Knives and malt liquor on the forest floor
Actually, these girls were pretty cool, though I got the impression they were generally watched with a touch of suspicion as they were, and came off as, ‘teknewbs.’ They held up their end just fine, though, cleaning up their site well without having to be asked and putting in responsible work to ensure that they secured a way out early on as they didn’t have one (as opposed to the freeloaders who crammed into the bus we’d all paid $50 a head for after leaving litter on the ground).
Some folks called The Quanta from the Wasaga Beach area set up another stage for Saturday night, and the fifth and final stage on the list was the 10000 Creatures live band & independent film setup. I didn’t hop on any instruments, although they’re pretty open to people doing exactly that, but I did bring a number of movies for them to screen.
Despite having owned it for three years, I’d never actually watched my copy of Baraka, as it was given to me by a girlfriend who told me to wait to watch it with her and then permanently stopped speaking to me. I waited on it, knowing I needed the right time and environment/social setting to watch it in, and this provided the perfect opportunity. A very good film, to understate it.
I also brought Nothing Shocks Anyone Anymore, One Second Before The Big Bang (an experimental graphic design impression of the timeline of the universe from then to now, put together by this Belgian crew and mailed free of charge all the way to me so that I could show it at things like this - very cool of them!), and a Magic Eye VHS tape containing animated 3D stereograms. You can see some of the Magic Eye video being projected in the two clips below, but good luck getting the 3D thing to work through these!
I didn’t encounter any Californians this year, the majority of the approximately 200 people present were from the Toronto area, with some from Quebec and some from New York / New Jersey, and a few occasionals from further away, like Jacob from the UK and this guy MashyP from Australia (though they weren’t here just for this festival).
Photos: Njjunglist’s, evil9mm’s, rottenvegetable’s, TalixZen’s, #FF’s, Wakka’s
In case you’ve ever wondered where I got the handle ‘Orbz’ from (I bet it keeps you up at night, right?), here’s the explanation.
I can’t guarantee you will find this the least bit interesting, but the more time goes on, the more appropriate it seems.
I never wanted to be called Orbz. I mean that in two ways - I never actually came up with the particular four-letter combination, and I also never intended to have anybody actually use anything like it to refer to me to my face or in actual, real-world conversation with anyone.
Around ‘94/’95, I first started using the Internet via a 1200/2400 bps text-only dial-up connection, jumping from the highly-restricted (AOL-like) Toronto Freenet to the National Capital Freenet in Carleton, which granted access to the Lynx web browser, as well as to the gopher networks.
If you’ve never connected to another computer over a 1200 bps connection, let me try to convey the speed to you: I have memories of countless hours on these old computers literally watching screens of nothing but text load character by character. Completely literally, and I’m talking over a direct connection, not routed through a global network of servers like web traffic is.
Back then, the web wasn’t really any more meaningful or impressive than simply using gopher. Heck, back then, we still didn’t think anything of writing something like ‘94/’95. Crazy days, crazy days.
Anyway, someone on the NCF IRC (chat) told me about MUDs, the multi-user text-based games that were the predecessor to and which have largely been extinguished by MMOPRGs like World of Warcraft. You can look up any of these acronyms you want for yourself, I’m not gonna bother linking to stuff when you’ve got the same Google search box at the top of your screen as I do.
They told me how to get to a list of MUDs hosted on some gopher server, I think via MIT, and I chose one at random.
This MUD, a Swedish one named IgorMUD, is the game I’ve played more than any other video or computer game in my life. I’ve almost certainly spent more hours on it than every Mario game I’ve played put together. There is no other game that I played consistently (though to significantly varying degrees, from addictively to infrequently) for so many years… and occasionally flipping on a random NES to play Mario Bros 3 doesn’t compare at all to logging into this multi-user universe as the character whose stats, social network and, well, character I’ve been developing for so long.
I haven’t really played or even visitted more than a handful of times in years, though, and since the rise of MMORPGs I only ever find the place deserted. But hey, considering it was founded in 1990 (see IgorMUD’s early history), was rocking solid well into the 21st century, and is still online and running now, over a decade and a half later… not too shabby at all. I’m betting the big MUDMeets that used to happen around Europe and the States ain’t too common these days, though.
Anyway, the nerdy Swedish game isn’t the point, the point is that I had two characters there, the first named Bullet, later to be replaced by Orbitz.
I dunno where ‘Bullet’ came from, like I was 10 years old and made something up. Bullet With Butterfly Wings, perhaps.
‘Orbitz,’ on the other hand, was directly taken from the name of the Clearly Canadian soft drink which was famous, and infamous, for its gimmick of containing edible gelatinous balls (much softer than bubble tea tapioca) that were of equal density to the surrounding liquid and thus would stay suspended no matter where they happened to be in the bottle.
While most people reacted to these products with distrust, disgust and dismay, my mind was fucking blown.
For the first time in my life, I experienced a feeling that I’ve since come to encounter more and more, but the unprecedentedness of this experience when I had it makes it irreplaceable.
I was living in the future! This product, the ultimate in post-modern refreshment, really sold me on futurism.
And if anything really sums up post-modernism for me, I think this is it.
No one else bought them and Clearly Canadian discontinued the product line.
“Future’s over! Everybody go home.”
Orbitz became the name of a discount travel agent instead.
Well, I still played Igor sporting the name, and the people that I got to know from around the world in that game universe would tend to call me Orby or Orbz as we became closer friends.
From that, I started to use it around the Net as a handle / username. This just served as a screen name for a while, until I started joining rave and party networking sites and message boards.
Now, many people would get to know me online before actually meeting me in person, and when meeting in person I would clarify who I was and that they already knew me by giving them my online name in addition to my real one.
By no means was I intending for them to stick to calling me by it, but people would go on to introduce me to others by it. In order to distinguish me from others who shared my generic real name, Chris, I would be referred to in third-party conversations as Chris Orbz.
As well, people began directly calling me Orbz rather than Chris, most especially when calling out to me, trying to quickly get my attention.
When I started this blog, at first I just didn’t bother moving past anonymity, but eventually decided to throw up an e-mail address, and used my default username again. When I started with blogTO, I decided to just go with it and let myself finally accept the name that had grown onto me, Chris Orbz.
If the crazy Europeans who I used to run around slaying monsters with could see my business cards printed with this name and everyone around me referring to me by it, they’d piss their pants laughing, I’m sure of it. I really doubt Garlix or Muckypup would want their character names becoming integrated into their actual names, and those aren’t even close to being the weird ones.
This bizarre new license plate, now available in Oklahoma, has been bouncing around the blogosphere:
via World Criminal - Letter to America, which, as it turns out, is a pretty awesome blog/podcast/yankabout:
News Clippings
