last month the SPACE SQUID team presented at the austin dorkbot event. dorkbot describes itself as people doing weird things with technology. i like to think of them as wannabe technomages, or like the digital circus of ZBS’s "the adventures of ruby" (for the three geeks reading this who know what that is).
i would say that nearly everone at the event had either
A: attended the flipside/burningman gatherings
B: subscribed to MAKE magazine
C: or owned a digital multimeter and a soldering iron
the month SPACE SQUID attended there was a guy presenting a screaming robotic baby head (not as cool as you might imagine), a presentation of tele-robotics where a guy used a webbrowser to make a robot bump around the office of some guy in MIT(about as cool as you imagine), and a propane-powered ruben’s tube that made flame dance to 80s music.
i would bother to explain what a ruben’s tube is and how it works, but i’m not that charitable a human being. the above picture links to a youtube video i made, and that links to way too many ruben’s tube science demonstration videos.
the SPACE SQUID presentation itself had a number of technical issues. ranging from a complete MS powerpoint failure to david’s KKK squid costume.
actually, i egged him into wearing the thing. i think it put the entire presentation over the top.
of course, we could not have failed to entertain. not only did we read the jaw-droppingly brilliant story by ryan thomas "cookies have no souls", but we also had our squid grrl teal, the covermodel for issue three, helping with the reading. how could anyone be disappointed?