In case you’ve missed the media blitz elsewhere (thanks, Mitch Cormier at CBC Island Morning, and all the retweeters), I’m hosting an “Open Minecraft Lab” at Robertson Library, University of PEI, on both April 20 and April 27, 2013.
(And they’re Minecraft labs, not camps. I’ve got nothing against camps, but we’re hackers, not canoeists!)
There are, at this writing, still spots open for both dates; you must pre-register to secure one: April 20 or April 27.
The roots of all of this can be found in conversations I’ve had over the last few years with my friend Morgan, a Minecraft early adopter and enthusiastic advocate. From the reaction to the announcement of the lab – 60 people signed up so far – there’s a latent interest in learning more about Minecraft, and I’m happy to be able to leverage the labs at UPEI to this end.
Special mention must go to the ever-helpful Jerrad Gilbert, who oversees the Mac and PC labs where we’ll be playing: Jerrad has been super-helpful in getting me the access I need to set everything up and deploying Minecraft to 50 machines, and helping me test the setup.
Robertson Library will be a busy place for the next two Saturday mornings!
In the Whole Earth Epilog, published in October 1974, Stewart Brand spins a long, rambling, and compelling tale of the “Whole Earth” enterprise over the previous three years, starting from the story of “Demise Party” in June 1971:
So, in June 1971, we had the Demise Party celebrating the self-termination of The Whole Earth Catalog, and all in all it was a rout. 1500 people showed up. The Exploratorium staff had their museum weirding around us at full steam. A band called The Golden Toad made every kind of music from bluegrass to bellydance. A non-stop non-score volleyball game competed for loudest activity with balloons full of inhalable laughing gas. And then at midnight Scott Beach announced from the stage that these here two hundred $100 dollar bills, yes, $20,000, were now the property of the party-goers. Just as soon as they could decide what to do with them.
The party was reported on in great detail for the Rolling Stone article “The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth Catalog” (issue #86) which began:
The Demise of Whole Earth was a wake, and like any good wake it lasted until early morning, what with 1500 people haggling over the deceased’s estate.
The estate – a wad of 200 $100 bills – was a surprise “educational event” sprung by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand on the former Whole Earth employees, contributors, and reviewers who had come to celebrate the publication of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. By the time of the party, June 12th, they had probably all digested an earlier education event, Brand’s decision a year and a half ago to stop publishing his successful Catalog this summer.
The $20,000, however, proved too much to deal in a single night, and by 8 AM the 1500 guests dwindled to 20. In the end the 20 delegated one of their number to hold the money, which itself had dwindled to $14,905, until they could reconvene to decide what to do with it. He stuffed the money into his jeans and drove off into the sunrise.
That article, by Thomas Albright and Charles Perry, was reprinted in early editions of The Seven Laws of Money (itself a compelling read).
The invitation to the Demise Party appeared in the March 1971 Whole Earth Catalog supplement (conveniently available online):
Among those who attended was Richard Brautigan, as related here:
The evening had just gotten started (hosted by Scott Beech, music by The Golden Toad) when all the glitterati of S.F. started showing up, including Richard Brautigan and another man passing out a “free poem” entitled “Lichen.” I tried to get the two of them to autograph the poem, which was printed on legal-sized, greenish paper. Both refused. Instead of stamping the backs of hands (so people could come and go), we had these stacks of self-stick diffraction gratings from Edmund Scientific to put on people’s foreheads. Both refused.
In Stewart Brand’s own tale of the party and its aftermath, he goes on to relate the story of POINT Foundation and its mechanism for handing out grants (emphasis mine):
It was not a bad overture for the founding of POINT, the foundation that took over from Portola the dispensing of Whole Earth’s soon sizable income. Dick Raymond and I appointed a board consisting of ourselves, Huey Johnson from the Nature Conservancy, Mike Phillips from Glide Foundation, Jerry Mander (radical ad-man), and Bill English from Xerox. The seventh director was always a guest, called “Elijah,” different each time we met.
The first thing we did was give up on my “Mountain Fantasy” notion of a bifurcated high hard community - too pushily experimental. Instead we focussed on being a needle in the gaseous foundation world. We ruled that none of us could be with POINT more than three years. We dispensed (Jerry Mander’s brilliant stroke) with group decision about money - each director had $55,000 a year to give out at his unchallenged discretion. We funded quickly and without fuss, usually preferring to do without proposals and such. We held board meetings on salmon boats at sea, in tipis, in Glide’s sex room, at the Black Panther school in Oakland. And our grants were maybe no worse than other people’s - they’re listed in entirety in the Summer ‘74 Co-Evolution Quarterly if you’re interested.
Huey Johnson and Jerry Mander, who fought constantly, were the best funders. Dick Raymond and I were terrible. Now there’s mostly a new set of directors, whose qualities we shall see. The main lesson I learned was: it’s not enough to give money to someone who’s very good. They must also be in the grip of an overwhelming idea which is very good; otherwise a hideous paralysis will take them over and, in addition, freeze your friendship.
My parents owned copied of the Whole Earth Catalog, and I’ve accumulated my own collection over the years (to the point where I’ve had enough extra copies that I’ve been able to share them with fellow travellers); I was a Whole Earth Review subscriber in later years, and a Well member too. If there’s an underlying rhyme to my reason, its roots can likely be found somewhere in the Whole Earth enterprise, for which I owe Brand and his coconspirators a great debt.
In the printing trade, one of the letterpress’s unique superpowers is the ability to print on irregularly-shaped things. Like coffee bags. And so, after picking up and afternoon coffee at Youngfolk & The Kettle Black every afternoon this winter, eventually the conversation was bound to come around to “so, what about printing up some coffee bags for us.” So I gave it a try.
It’s a tricky job because the folds in the coffee bag create a limited area of “flatness” and I need to accommodate room for the 3-times-fold and seal, so I’m left with a relatively small area to print on, and even within that area some folds I need to work around. I’m only halfway through right now: it’s a two-colour job, and I’ve only printed the black. But here’s what it’s looking like:
In red, between COF and FEE, will be some variation on Y&TKB or Youngfolk & The Kettle Black. Still working out the details. But I’ve got to wait for 150 coffee bags to dry, so I’ve got time.
The lab is now full. There may be cancellations during the week. There is, however, a second, afternoon lab that might still have spaces.
About the Lab
An informal opportunity to come and play Minecraft, the popular world-building game, with other people.
The emphasis will be on sharing what we know, on learning new tips and techniques: so please come with questions and answers, and your curiousity.
Who can attend?
You can be an absolute beginner, or a longtime player: we want to create an space for players of all skill levels to teach each other.
There is no age limit; people under 18 are asked to obtain permission from parent or guardian to attend, and parents are welcome to attend too, either to play or just to learn and help.
The lab is limited to 25 attendees, and you must register a spot in advance if you want to attend (parents or guardians accompanying player do not need to register).
There is free parking on the UPEI campus, and the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market is just across the street and is a good place to stop for breakfast before or lunch after.
The lab is equipped with thirty 20” iMacs and a SMART board. We’ll be running our own Minecraft server in the lab so that players can play together.
How much does it cost?
The workshop is free.
You do NOT need to have a Minecraft account (but you can use your Minecraft account if you have one).
What do I need to bring?
If you have a Minecraft account already, please bring your username and password.
We’ll have 5 educational licenses to use for those that don’t already have a Minecraft account; if you’d rather get your own account before you come, you can purchase from Minecraft.net (and the account you buy there can be used both in our lab and at home).
Question from Parents?
Minecraft is being used by educators to teach everything from technology to engineering to math to architecture. The MinecraftEdu website is a good clearinghouse for information about the use of Minecraft in schools.
This lab is being organized by Peter Rukavina, Hacker in Residence, University of PEI. You can phone me at (902) 892-2556 or email prukavina@upei.ca is you have any questions or concerns.
There’s a raft of renovations here at The Guild this spring, from a new wood-like floor in the gallery to a new electronic signboard that will be going up shortly on the facade. My favourite update, however, is the basement washroom, which has been transformed from a frightening, smelly hovel into a bright delight. Here’s a tour by video:
It’s nice to know that my city is capable, on occasion, of living up to its inspired city propoganda. Witness this sign, spotted on the way to work this morning:
It’s such a great initiative: it encourages people to walk by defeating the perception by all Islanders (myself included) that to go more than a few blocks will take an hour to walk so you’d better take the car. Bravo, city, bravo.
I’ve been intrigued by the word-building game Minecraft since my friend Morgan turned me on to it a couple of years ago. I’m not a devoted player – I need to preserve my hands and forearms for revenue-generating typing – but I recognize a lot of potential for creativity and exploration and learning in the game, something that’s being focused by the MinecraftEdu project.
To help stimulate the Minecraft community in Charlottetown, I’m hosting an Open Minecraft Lab at Robertson Library, University of PEI, this Saturday, April 20, 2013 from 10:00 a.m. to Noon. There are 25 spots, and you must pre-register. It’s all ages, all abilities, and parents and guardians are encouraged to attend.
An informal opportunity to come and play Minecraft, the popular world-building game, with other people.
The emphasis will be on sharing what we know, on learning new tips and techniques: so please come with questions and answers, and your curiousity.
Who can attend?
You can be an absolute beginner, or a longtime player: we want to create an space for players of all skill levels to teach each other.
There is no age limit; people under 18 are asked to obtain permission from parent or guardian to attend, and parents are welcome to attend too, either to play or just to learn and help.
The lab is limited to 25 attendees, and you must register a spot in advance if you want to attend (parents or guardians accompanying player do not need to register).
There is free parking on the UPEI campus, and the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market is just across the street and is a good place to stop for breakfast before or lunch after.
The lab is equipped with thirty 20” iMacs and a SMART board. We’ll be running our own Minecraft server in the lab so that players can play together.
How much does it cost?
The workshop is free.
You do NOT need to have a Minecraft account (but you can use your Minecraft account if you have one).
What do I need to bring?
If you have a Minecraft account already, please bring your username and password.
Question from Parents?
Minecraft is being used by educators to teach everything from technology to engineering to math to architecture. The MinecraftEdu website is a good clearinghouse for information about the use of Minecraft in schools.
This lab is being organized by Peter Rukavina, Hacker in Residence, University of PEI. You can phone me at (902) 892-2556 or email prukavina@upei.ca is you have any questions or concerns.
So you can see the entire city, with each properly colour-coded by zone:
Or you can zoom in and turn off all the zoning other than “open space” to see where there’s parkland downtown:
What’s really nice is that because Google Earth is being used to view the information, all of the other Google Earth layers, from 3D buildings to Wikipedia annotations, can be overlaid:
There’s nothing worse than someone hijacking their own blog for weeks after returning from a trip with tales of their adventures: travel tales wither quickly on the vine. And so I’ll shut down the Japan-trip-travel-tale operation with a final few observations:
I continue to be facsinated by the fact that in Tokyo metro escalators people stand on the left and walk on the right, whereas in Kyoto and Osaka they stand on the right and walk on the left. We never really did figure out which side of sidewalk to walk on, nor the proper pedestrian-yielding technique at scramble crossings like Shibuya.
Because so many people have asked me: we had no problems whatsoever with language. Outside of “hello” and “goodbye,” we didn’t know any Japanese; through a combination of English-speaking Japanese people (in hotels, trains, larger restaurants, and on street corners) and effective pointing, we made our way without incident. Almost every restaurant we visited had some semblance of an English menu, and it’s very common to have pictures or models of food in restaurant windows.
If you’re looking for a clean, relatively inexpensive, well-located hotel in Tokyo, we recommend The B Akasaka. We paid about $110 a night for a twin room (the rate varied from night to night), which included a very nice buffet breakfast (number one tip for successful travel: eat a good breakfast every day). The staff was friendly and helpful. The room was clean and well-equipped (robes, toothbrush and toothbased, shampoo, soap) and had a space-age toilet. There’s a coin laundry on the first floor. The key to accessing the hotel is to walk out of the metro (Akasaka station, exit 3B) and around the back of the Akasaka Theatre beside the TBS building and then take the outdoor TBS elevator up to the fourth floor: this saves walking up the hill to the hotel, and makes the hotel about 5 minutes from the metro. It’s really easy to get anywhere from The B Akasaka: it’s within 15 minutes walk of three different metro lines. And there are a lot of places to eat in the neighbourhood, from fancy restaurants to the 7-11.
Speaking of the 7-11: many Japanese ATMs don’t accept North American cards, but all 7-11 stores seem to have machines that do, and it’s always really easy to find a 7-11 store, as they’re everywhere. 7-11 is also a good place to pick up a quick bite to eat, especially if you’re catatonic after a trans-Pacific flight and you’re not prepared to decrypt a restaurant experience quite yet.
We snagged a last-minute weekend rate of $123/night, which included a lavish buffet breakfast, at the Hyatt Regency Osaka, and it was a great hotel, the likes of which we could otherwise never have afforded. The hotel seems out of the way, as it’s located in the port district and to reach it from the Cosmosquare metro station requires a 15 minute walk or a free hotel shuttle (every 15 minutes from the top of the escalator at the metro); for all practical purposes, though, it’s as central as anything else in Osaka, and we found the location suited our purposes well. The ATC mall across the street (take the pedway for easy access; ask the concierge for directions) has a good selection of outlet stores and restaurants, and you can also catch the “new tram” metro line there if you’re heading south.
To pay for something in a shop or restaurant, place your money on the tray you’ll find in front of the cash register. Your cashier will take your money, count it, ask you to confirm the amount, and then give you your change in two parts, bills first (counted in an interesting reverse-over-the-hand move) and then your change. This ritual makes the Canadian way of paying for things seem barbaric and prone to error.
Make sure you visit a so-called conveyor belt sushi restaurant; you can get a filling meal for a good price, you can see what you’re going to eat in advance, and the technology (race car models that deliver special orders placed on a touch screen, for example) is very neat. Each has its own particular system for special orders – sometimes it’s on a touch screen, sometimes you order from a server who’s roaming around – but in our experience the payment system is common: plates on the conveyor belt are colour-coded and when you’re ready to go they are tallied up and you’re given a receipt and take it to the cashier.
There are vending machines everywhere: metro platforms, building lobbies, street corners. It’s easy to tell what you’re buying because there are models of the cans or bottles displayed and you just press the button under what you want to order. You can get both hot and cold drinks (look for the word “hot” on the bottle in the display).
It’s very easy to find public washrooms: every public building and restaurant has them, they are universally clean, and generally have modern fixtures. We only encountered the older “squat” toilets in a few metro stations and at a mountainside shrine; you’ll figure out how to use them (and note that in some older buildings you’ll find a few stalls with squat toilets and a few stalls with modern ones). In facilties catering to children there are often excellent diaper changing rooms, special in-stall highchairs in one or two stalls if you need to take a baby in the stall with you, and tiny toilets for kids.
If you’re going to take the metro — and you are — then invest in a Suica or Passmo card. These are pre-paid rechargable cards that you wave up against the “IC” logo at metro and bus turnstiles on both the way in and way out. If you’ve got sufficient balance on the card to cover the cost of the trip you just took then it’s deducted; if you don’t then you can top-up at a touchscreen that’s generally located right beside the turnstiles. We found the staff in the metro stations very patient and helpful in explaining the ins and outs of all this. Note, too, that transit isn’t the “pay one price to go anywhere” that you might be used to from North America or Europe: you pay a different fee depending on the length of your trip. Which is another reason why having a card is helpful, because it saves you from the burden of having to calculate this in advance: just keep 1000 Yen or so on your card at all times and you’ll be set to go anywhere.
This might be obvious, but it took me a while to figure out: if you’re searching the web for something – a cinema, a restaurant, a museum, whatever – use Google Translate to find the Japanese word first, and then search for that. If you search in English you’re artificially limiting your search to information that happens to be in English; you’ll find a lot more if you search in Japanese.
There are coin lockers in every train station and in a lot of metro stations (post 9-11 they’ve been removed from almost everywhere in North American, so this was novel for us). They’re not cheap – $4 or $5 seemed to be the rule – but they’re a great place to stash your stuff if you’re between hotels. Most museums also have lockers at the entrance, and it seems common to have “umbrella lockers” too public buildings.
People take pictures of their food in restaurants even more than they do here in North America, so you won’t stick out if you do this. And everyone has a mobile device. Just be sure to turn off the ringer in the metro.
We found poster advertising – in metro stations, mostly – to be a really good source for information about things to do. It’s how we found our way, for example, to the “House Vision 2013” exhibition. And the “Design Ah!” installation. And the “TECHNE” digital art show. Posters were generally in Japanese-only, but we just jotted down the web address or took a photo of the poster and then Google Translated the result back in our hotel.
If you’re looking for airfares from Canada to Japan, look at routings that go through the USA, as you can avoid $500 or so in fuel surcharges that you’ll pay on Air Canada. They routings this way are a little less convenient, but you can save a lot, especially if you’re flying a family.
I loved Japan, and I regret not having visited sooner: the country was a feast for the senses, and a wonderful fountain of new ideas in design and behaviour and culture. As I’ve mentionedelsewhere, it’s a very child-friendly place to travel, and it’s hard to say whether it was me or Oliver who enjoyed the trip more. We only scratched the surface of the country – we never left the big cities, and even then we only visited a small cross-section of neighbourhoods. I think you could happily spend years in Japan and never lack for something interesting to see or do.
All told it cost us about $4000 for two people to spend 13 days in the country: $1500 to get there and back (assisted greatly by having 100,000 Aeroplan miles to contribute to the cost), $1300 for hotels, and about $100/day for food, entrance fees, metro fares and sundries.
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