it already has made itself clear. the 7 years of bad luck from smashing that mirror are in fact backwards *crosses fingers*. i am all done now. already yesterday i have so much luck. luck to be here. luck to hang out with alfie. luck to meet some wild and crazy people. this is one lucky duckie. *squeeeeeek*
actually the biggest bummer about smashing that mirror is that i completely forgot to take a photo. so, no mobloging it. smashed mirror glass everywhere is actually kinda beautiful. just aesthetically speaking here. cleaning it all up is so not at all beautiful. especially if you cant find the appropriate cleaning gear. i pick most of it up with my bare fingers. just few cuts. nothing major. *grml*
half an hour later than planned i make my way down to king’s cross. the easiest of busrides. i decide to check out one of several alternative autonomous events around the ESF. they are not happy with some of the policies the ESF has adopted and they critizise that the selection processes on what events actually got scheduled for the big forum are not made transparent enough. so several groups have organised autonomous spaces. the one i am going to is organised by indymedia.org.
i figure that with the recent scandalous seizure of their servers this is gonna be an interesting place to be at. the programme does look way cool. some of todays topics are: “infowar: media deception & disinformation vs. dissent and direct democracy”, “intellectual property and electronic commons”. this is the right place for me. the attending crowd is kinda small however. plus for some strange reason there are tons of security guys swarming the place. why? one of them actually asks me to not sit on the floor later during the day, “for hygenic reasons”. say what?
in the back room there is a cafe with computers set up everywhere. some way old machines here. all of them online. they are running on knoppix. a bootable linux cd, if this works on a mac i must get that (i am told debian.org has one for mac). people are encouraged to create the media. that room is in constant buzzing use. the main hall with the panels and speakers remains often oddly empty.
the most interesting part for me is all the information about the seized indymedia servers. the implications of this are just too huge. i mean, an american government agency can just barge into a british isp and seize 2 servers? thats outrageous. its still not entierly clear who did it and why they did it. but slowly things are getting revealed. one of the hugly important immediate reactions on the indymedia side is that they now have their website mirrored on 5 servers. this way a next seizure, should there ever be one, would already be much more complicated. so in a way radical politics will benefit from this in learning much about distributing and protecting the actual hardware better. plus some people predict that on the legal side this will have a huge afterplay. and i sure hope it does.
in the evening i go back to tabb/alfie’s and expect to get at least tortured by tabbi shouted at by tabbi for breaking her mirror. but she is all nice and smily and bubbly… as usual. great human being tabbi! she is getting ready to go out with the girls. apparently alfie has planned a boy’s night out for us. hmmm. interesting. i am scared already. sounds like a drunken fixture.
i actually had announced all through the week, that i wanted to invite tabbi and alfie for dinner for letting me stay here. but alfie “forgot” to tell her, so tabbi leaves, and i end up going for thai food with just alfie. more for me then. after the somewhat gay excellent food and conversation we go to a bar, where according to alfie they play classical music all night. nice.
but instead there is a dj, who is challenged on treble. very shrill music and quite loud. we meet navid *chuckle* and khanh from montpellier, who brings a group of outrageously drunk girls to our boy’s night out. so that worked well. what is it about the australians that makes them be drunk in a really cool way? these two australian girls, gina and vrina, both of them nurses mind you *niammm* have teh utter most weirdest dynamic. they constantly fight, or mock-fight, and it always ends up in the hugest giggles. very funny. full-on drunk, but in a away i can appreciate. khanh ask vrina what here interests are and she says alcohol and partying. cool. time for me to go to bed. after a good heart to heart talk with tabbs i fall asleep for my last night here. ’twas great… the misery, i was just making it up. and already the process of glamourising this vacation starts.