In Pursuit of Mysteries

Roller Derby

R and I went to see the Bay Area Derby Girls tonight. This is a local Roller Derby organization. The San Francisco Shevil Dead were playing against the Oakland Outlaws. R has a coworker who is on the Oakland Outlaws team, which was how we found out about the event.

Wikipedia has an article on Roller Derby and it actually features a photo of the Oakland Outlaws right on the main page. The Bay Area is part of a revival of Roller Derby that is currently occurring. Seattle is another hotspot of activity. For myself, I had vague memory of women on roller skates knocking each other down from childhood TV but that was about it. It’s back and we had a good time knee deep in cheap beer and kitsch.

I took a number of pictures but it is hard to get a sense of the action from them. You can look on Flickr if you’d like. Otherwise, you can take a look at the video I shot with my camera. I shot it in 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second but Youtube samples it down a bit so it isn’t quite a nice there.

See the video at Youtube.

Kabbalah Unveiled

My issue with finding a copy of Mathers’ Kabbalah Unveiled for my thesis work have been solved by our friends at Google. They have a full copy of it available online as part of their public domain books program.

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC07835409&id=7X8ZfWvgtQUC&pg=PP5

Bruce Sterling at CCA

I attended the Bruce Sterling lecture at the California College of the Arts (CCA) last night. I recorded the talk and plan to put a transcript up later as time permits.

The talk was quite good and Bruce spoke about the differences and similarities between Futurism and Design as professions or roles. He also spoke quite a bit about visions of the future as a result of this. I quite liked his bit going on about the drearyness of Sustainability and being Green. Not that they weren’t necessary but that they are necessary in the way that you dread doing something that must be done as opposed to something that you joyously look forward to.

Unbeknownst to me, I also met Rudy Rucker, who is a longstanding writer hero of mine as well. Rudy has blogged about yesterday on his own blog. I was getting coffee before the event and saw Bruce sitting in the cafe with his wife and another fellow. Since I was going to record the talk and had blogged one of his talks before, I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t mind as well as say “Hi” to him. He actually remembered me from the Microsoft talk (asking me if I’d had blue hair then, which I had), probably because I transcribed it the same day and put it online. I spoke to him and the other fellow about some of the tech work I’m doing now (as I clearly wasn’t at Microsoft anymore) and I had no idea that the other guy was Rudy. Wow.

More later…