Maker Faire 1 – SFIFF 0
I went to [Maker Faire][1] over the weekend with [Tantek][4] (and ran into [Nicole][5], [Brandon][6], [Leonard][7] and many others). We didn’t arrive until quite late due to a number of circumstances (including some protesting on [Bill 42][8]) and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. Not in the Faire but in myself for not having arrived earlier. Imagine your typical county fair with booths of knick knacks and cotton candy and replace all of the booths with people who love to tinker and you’ve got Maker Faire. There were great displays of inventions ranging from the artsy to the useful. There was a garage where they were converting a Prius from a hybrid to a plug-in hybrid. A swap-o-rama where you could screen print your own shirts or bring stuff to trade with others, workshops for kids, a place with a ton of old computer parts where people just put together whatever they wanted, and more geeky inventions than you can shake a bread board at. Yahoo! also had a sweet center booth which I was happy to see. A great community to have a presence with.
Photo by George
After the fair, a bunch of us checked out Cock Byte: Masters of Machinima, a feature of the [San Francisco International Film Festival][2]. I knew it was featuring the people from [Red vs. Blue][3] but wasn’t sure what to expect. As it turns out, there was nothing new and they showed the first season of RvB which, as they so helpfully pointed out, was copyright 2003. Most of us were pretty annoyed at having spent $11 and an hour and a half watching something we’d seen, at worse quality and then listening to two of the members of the team basically insult the audience and have nothing intelligent to say. At least the film fest can only go up from there.
[1]:http://www.makezine.com/faire/ “maker faire”
[2]:http://sffs.org “san francisco international film festival”
[3]:http://redvsblue.com “red vs. blue”
[4]:http://tantek.com “tantek”
[5]:http://neekole.com “nicole lee”
[6]:http://thegeekout.com “brandon hanvey”
[7]:http://randomfoo.net/ “leonard lin”
[8]:http://www.joshwolf.net/blog/?p=173 “Simpsons Did It”
