Please note that I am taking the rest of the summer off as a self-imposed vacation from the blog so I can focus on my other work, except for sponsored blogposts (like this one), and the occasional exception. See you in September!
Today I did something that I hadn’t done before: I dropped in to the weekly meeting held at the Localhost Connection Café and Hangout, called Geek Weekly (which I blogged about previously here). One of the hosts, Carsten, describes Geek Weekly as follows:
Geek Weekly is your Monday morning social event, to get to know good people talking about extremely geeky things! It’s a little free-form but every week will be a little geek culture and science and technology news, live Sinespace show and tells, some fun trivia, talk of good books you’ve read or want to read, and socializing. You don’t have to bring anything but yourself. Nor do you have to know Unity or how to roll a D20. Come have fun.
So I decided to take Carsten up on his invitation and pay a visit. Carsten Stark and his partner ArtemisBane, who co-designed this wonderful meeting space, have expanded the futuristic urban area around the café. In previous visits, it had always been at night, but I was pleased to see that the world also had a daytime mode.
The pavement is slick with recent rain. Somebody opened up a nearby fire hydrant, and there is a spray of water shooting out over the street.
We gathered inside the Localhost Connection. I asked how many people usually came out to these weekly meetups, and Carsten told me he gets about a dozen people.
Carsten is host, and we start off with introductions, following by a wide-ranging discussion prompted by various interesting news items Carsten finds. This week we talked about:
- With Pentagon UFO unit in the spotlight, report mentions ‘off-world vehicles not made on this earth’ (Fox)
- U.S. Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants on the Moon, Mars (Time)
- Amazon Just Put Tesla on Notice (Forbes)
- You can now boot a Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom on it (The Verge)
Afterwards, we had was a round of trivia, followed by an opportunity for show and tell about any real-life or Sinespace projects each of us was working on. I found it to be a comfortable, convivial setting, with good company, and I expect to return in subsequent weeks, as my schedule allows.
Geek Weekly is every Monday (9:00-10:00 a.m. PST; Noon-1:00 p.m. EST; 5:00-6:00 p.m. BST) in the Localhost Connection Café and Hangout.
I posted a number of pictures of the Localhost Connection when I first blogged about the café back in May. There’s also the Explore page on the Sinespace website, with a few more snapshots of the interior. Artemis and Carsten have put a lot of hard work into creating and decorating this space, and it is well worth a visit!
If you’re new to Sinespace but want to attend this event, you’ll need to download and install the Sinespace client on your computer (there are Windows, Macintosh, and Linux clients). Here are some step-by-step instructions on how to get started in Sinespace. If you already have the Sinespace client installed, just click on the Explore button and do a keyword search for “localhost”. Everybody is welcome!
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).