We are pleased to announce the monthly “5 Minutes of Fame”, scheduled for this Thursday, July 15th, at 8pm at Noisebridge ( 2169 Mission St. @ 18th ). Bring yourself, your friends, your pet alien, and phallic silicone objects to throw at the speakers.

All speakers have been notified, and the current schedule is as follows*:

Before Christ:
The Strange and Wonderful World of Tentacle Porn (Mario)
On Dumbness (Al Sweigart)
How to talk about the weather to pasty white guys at 108Mbit (dr_jesus)
Puppetry for Monkeys (Miah)
Five Minutes of Flail (Sai Emrys)

Anno Domini:
Help Noisebridge get some Balls (Ani Niow)
Food Hacking at Noisebridge – Let’s Bubble! (Frantisek Apfelbeck)
Resistor Codes (DrShiny)
Calculus for Dummies (John Waters)
And now a word from our sponsors (aestetix)

I want to extend thanks to all the speakers, but especially all the people who have been showing up and make this event a success. Without all of you, it would not be able to happen.

Hephaestus

*schedule is subject to change, although the date/time/location will remain the same.

It’s that time again! We are accepting submissions for the next 5 Minutes of Fame event that will take place on July 15th, 2010 at 8pm at Nosebridge (2169 Mission @ 18th).

Because I cannot make this month due to the HOPE Conference in New York City, our good friend Hephaestus is going to be hosting the July month. To remove all doubt, we put him through a rite of passage last month, and he completed it summa cum laude.

So…. to submit, all you have to do is use our contact form with the name or handle you’d like to use, and the talk title. Please use the drop down selection of “submit a talk” so we can sort it properly.

For more information about the event, check out the FAQ.

Hail Eris,
aestetix

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We are pleased to announce the monthly “Five Minutes of Fame”, scheduled for this Thursday, June 17th, at 8pm at Noisebridge. Bring yourself, your friends, your pet alien, and ping pong balls to throw at the speakers.

All speakers have been notified, and the current schedule is as follows*:

As Above:
“The 7 Habits of Terrible Presenters” (Josh Berkus)
“Fairy Juicer Robot” (davidfinedavidfinedavidfine)
“East African Ge’ez syllabary” (Rachel McConnell)
“Did Eric Clapton Lose His Timing in One or Two Popular Songs?” (Bill Nye)
“Reinventing The Tapestry” (Quirk)

So Below:
“Facial Feminization Surgery: one account” (Mikolaj Habryn)
“Five Minute Press Release” (AJ Cook)
“Evolve or Die” (Christie Dudley)
“Basically an Excuse to Show Pictures of my Robots” (Jonathan Foote)
“Artikulator” (Mike Rotondo and Luke Iannini)

I want to extend thanks to all the speakers, but especially all the people who have been showing up and make this event a success. Without all of you, it would not be able to happen.

aestetix

*schedule is subject to change, although the date/time/location will remain the same.

It’s that time again! We are accepting submissions for the next 5 Minutes of Fame event that will take place on June 17, 2010 at 8pm at Nosebridge (2169 Mission @ 18th).

To submit, all you have to do is use our contact form with the name or handle you’d like to use, and the talk title. Please use the drop down menu of “submit a talk” so we can sort it properly.

For more information about the event, check out our FAQ.

Hail Eris,
aestetix

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This might be my favorite intro video yet. The energy I feel from it is about at the same level as the September 2009 video we made, the first “serious” one. A lot of stuff just fell into the right place.

The first video, “Lord and Lady Douchebag”, is, besides one of the funniest SNL skits I have ever seen, a great satire on notions of tradition, language, and conceptual inheritance. Because my grandmother recently passed, I’d been thinking a lot about tradition, and what family means, and this video hit home in every way possible. Where do objects and ideas get their names? What do names and words even mean? This gets really Matrix-y when you think about it for a while, which is why I feel it’s really important to poke fun at it. After all, if you get too wrapped up in rules, tradition, and regulation, first you start battles, then you forget what they were about in the first place.

The second video was partly me trolling the whole audience of 5MoF, and partly a satire on war (isn’t that what Star Wars is about?). I felt this would reach a lot of people, because it is, to quote a friend, “a female chewbacca taking cooking lessons”. And with this, I can say that I made Noisebridge watch an entire segment of the Star Wars Holiday Special, a film so forbidden that even George Lucas disavows it.

There is a brief message with a “disclaimer”. It actually opens with the words “FOR MADMEN ONLY”, which I took from the Herman Hesse book Steppenwolf. I won’t give too much away about that, but Steppenwolf is an amazing exploration of the multiple selves within oneself. Then it continues with message warning people about potentially intense graphic images, where I tried to imitate Vonnegut’s writing style as much as possible. And of course, the mention of Kilgore Trout, so that if someone saw the video and wanted to know more, they would be able to ask “Who is Kilgore Trout?”

The final video is one of the first “experiment” pieces we’ve done. This started out with me thinking “Wow, I want to find a short film version of Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ and show it to the audience, because it’s such a great story. I mean, I was raised on Vonnegut. But after looking through a good half dozen videos, I couldn’t find anything good enough. It would either be true to the story (and thus not make sense to people who hadn’t read it), or depart enough that it lost its meaning. So I had to look to a more general theme, when I found a “video” of Vonnegut narrating one of my favorite pieces, the opening chapter to ‘Breakfast of Champions’. I then decided that we needed to create our own video, and found a video with images from the Manhattan Project and WW2 that fit perfectly with it. It wound up being an amazing juxtaposition of satire of war against the ill effects of war.

Structure without question leads to war without purpose, which leads to needless harm and death. That’s really the whole point of this, which is why the ending of Dr. Strangelove was so perfect. I’m a huge Kubrick fan, and ending with this 5MoF logo sequence sealed the deal. E Pluribus Unum.

We are pleased to announce the monthly “Five Minutes of Fame”, scheduled for this Thursday, May 20th, at 8pm at Noisebridge. Bring yourself, your friends, your pet alien, and ping pong balls to throw at the speakers.

All speakers have been notified, and the current schedule is as follows*:

Harrison:
“Treatise on the Steppenwolf” (Harry Haller)
“The Dr. Who Postcard Project” (Thomas Lotze)
“What is Cold Fusion?” (Sean Logan)
“!ƧЯOЯЯIM: Through the Looking-Glass” (Jonathan Foote)
“DIY Dongs” (hephaestus)

Bergeron:
“Who’s Talk is it Anyways?” (Alex Handy)
“Strawlenoids” (Darin “DW” White)
“Zip it and put it in your pocket” (AJ Cook)
“A Hardware Love Story” (Nana)
“Wampeters, Soma, and Granfalloons” {The Empty Set}

aestetix

*schedule is subject to change, although the date/time/location will remain
the same.

It’s that time again! We are accepting submissions for the next Five Minutes of Fame event that will take place on May 20th, 2010 at 8pm at Nosebridge (2169 Mission).

To submit, all you have to do is use our contact form, select “submit a talk”, fill the name or handle you’d like to use, and the talk title.

For more information about the event, check out our FAQ

Hail Eris,
aestetix

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This one was lots of fun to make, and helped celebrate our year anniversary as an event! Yippie!

The first video is a scene from the musical “1776″, where all the founding fathers are bickering about who is to write the Declaration of Independence. During this time, Noisebridge was having drama about who would be the next Executive Director. We ran into the classic problem where nobody who should have been it wanted it, and consensus issues abounded. This also lead some people to follow the red herring of “what about the bylaws”, and suddenly we had a ton of useless bickering over who served what role according to what law. At several points I wanted to bitchslap a few people and point them at the sign “Be Excellent to Each Other”, but instead my frustration worked its way into the intro video.

The next video was of a bunch of Disney Sing-a-longs, opening up with Zipadeedodah! I chose this partly because I wanted to see how well the audience would react to an interactive video, partly because I’d been trying to fit Song of the South in (it’s a very controversial movie now), partly to make fun of Hacker Dojo (after some debacle, we pulled David Weekly into the event as a speaker!), and partly because it’s Disney motherfucker! I really enjoyed watching people singing along to the videos, wondering how many were watching the words of the songs and seeing how deeply politically charged this stuff actually is.

Finally, the circles video. This was created by Philip Glass for Sesame Street in 1979. Watch it. Over and over again. It’s mesmerizing. Discovering gems like this make me want to keep producing intro videos.

-aestetix

Ahh, Berlin. What an amazing city. And an inspiration for some personal development which wound up making its way into this video.

The first video is the opening scene from the movie adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial”, directed by Orson Welles. Excellent movie if you haven’t seen it. I was inspired to put this in, partly by my friend Stella, who claims to only watch movies made before 1965, and partly in response to some stupid drama that happened at the December 5MoF. All in all, it’s probably one of the best shorts on philosophy I’ve ever seen, that doesn’t get too preachy.

The next video is really fucked up German porn. Nobody complained about the dancing penis, so Ani and I decided to go as overboard as possible. I think that left a few people’s jaws totally dropped going “what the fuck?”.

The final video is a 1962 short film called “The Existentialist.” Probably one of the best gems I have found in years. I think we actually blew the audience away with that one. When the intro video ended, they really just had no idea how to handle it. To me, that is a sign of success.

Last note: our event had received a Cease and Desist notice from a group that has the phrase “Five Minutes of Fame” trademarked. Once we got this, I went to the EFF and they handled it for us. I’m very grateful to Corynne McSherry for her time and work on this. So we figured we’d homage this by making fun of lawsuits, Prince style. After the event, I was very amused to learn that Corynne was involved in a lawsuit defending a youtube video that got a takedown notice from… Prince.

-aestetix

And here we take a plunge into the avante-garde “stuff nobody but me gets” world. After November, some people asked what the theme of the video was. And given that it was really just some stuff I liked and threw together, I had no good answer. So I thought, why not try to make a video with a theme?

This one combines “A Christmas Carol” with “The Shining”. Notice the music in the beginning: Wendy Carlos’ “Bolero”, the theme song from Kubrick’s “The Shining”. I think there had also been some discussion about using proprietary software at Noisebridge, so we stuck in one of the BoingBoing parody “You are a pirate!” seals. Next, there are three videos, each representing one of the ghosts from Christmas Carol, and each a dark color overtone representing the seasons in The Shining. We tried to pull in the drum boom, but didn’t really have enough time.

Next, each video has specific importance. The Christmas Past video features Robert Anton Wilson (and others) on Bill Maher, talking about Tim Leary. It’s low quality, but it’s the highest I could find (and man I looked…). The idea here is that Noisebridge has roots both in the hacking scene, as well as the “counter culture” political scene. Bob Wilson and Tim Leary represent (to me, at least) an important part of the history which drives people today. It was sort of a suggestion that we should study our roots if we’re at all concerned that we should adhere to any sort of rule of law. Why is Noisebridge an anarchy, a do-ocracy? Look to these people, and those they knew.

The Christmas Presents video is important for two reasons. First, there was a lot of stupid drama going on at Noisebridge, mostly caused by people kind of jerking off to themselves in the mirror. It was pissing me off, so Ani and I came up with this as a subtle attack/parody of it. Second, it’s porn! Sort of. 5MoF was starting to get really big, and I had been trying to feel out whether I could do stuff as edgy as we did in the beginning. One of those rise and fall of societies things (look up the temporary autonomous zone). It’s still an important question: the more people there are, the higher the chance is that you will piss someone off. Moreover, if you keep doing edgy things, people will get used to it, and will start expecting it, thus it will no longer have the same appeal. But the video went over well, nobody complained, and that opened a few floodgates we’ll get to later.

The final video, Christmas Future, holds a special place for me. First, it was saying “Hey Noisebridge, if you get over this stupid drama, we can do cool shit like this!” Second, it was a video of Blinkenlights Stereoscope, a project that several friends of mine (including Milosch and Brita Meriac) were heavily involved in. I met Mitch Altman doing the RFID badge for The Last HOPE conference in NYC, where I also wound up meeting Milosch and Brita. This project took me over the Berlin for CCC, where I met Tim Pritlove and several other people involved in Blinkenlights. I actually almost helped deploy Stereoscope myself, but I had a date conflict and couldn’t make it. Finally, it was an homage and shoutout to the CCC for 26c3, which a bunch of people from Noisebridge wound up going to a few weeks later.

Also, I need to give Ani mad props. With this video, you can tell she’s starting to get really good with animation stuff.

-aestetix