I was at Stuipd Hackathon. I've never been to anything so unabashedly motivated to be pointless and irreverent.
Workshops included: "3d printed sex toys", "how to be come alan ginsberg in 30 minutes", and "pissing off my landlord".<p>All the projects there were so beautiful because they were liberated from the whole motif in tech of products constantly "revolutionizing field-xyz and solving 1000 major world problems".<p>If we are going to enter into a truly tech-literate, post-internet phase of humanity, we gotta be making dumb, hilarious junk like this.
This is incredible. I think a few things are worth noting:<p>1) these "terrible idea" hackathon projects were so much more _sexual_ than your typical hackathon. This goes with the indications that the sex-tech space is anathema more for market reasons (VCs want to stay family friendly) than because sex-tech isn't fun or interesting to people. With the chance of funding not on the table, a healthy mix of projects veered toward sex. Maybe humor can actually be a way for a few sex-tech startups to take off. :)<p>2) the funniest projects all involved hardware. There's something extra-ridiculous about juxtaposing our own bodies into these stupid projects. I recommend anyone interested in a solid philosophical grounding in humor to read Henri Bergson's early 20th century treatise on laughter (<a href="http://www.templeofearth.com/books/laughter.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.templeofearth.com/books/laughter.pdf</a>). He writes that we find use laughter as a way to draw attention to the rigid, mortal, and physical in all of us. That is why impersonating someone's habits is funny-- because the rigidity of their personality is made super clear. I wonder what it says about us that strapping ipads onto people's faces makes me laugh out loud.
This is always my hacker's-block-breaker. If I'm stuck on something, and not feeling particularly creative, I'll make something intentionally useless, and funny, and it usually cheers me back up and gets me working again.
I wish I knew about this. I wrote a file server that serves your webroot directory over League of Legends chat. Any time you request a file that is more than a few bytes, your chat gets flooded with base64 strings... The extraslow web.
Aw, I should have entered my rotary mobile phone...:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkdWQswpc8</a>
This looks rad.<p>A very similar hackathon I went to a few months back is <a href="http://www.comedyhackday.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.comedyhackday.org/</a>
They matchup comedians and hackers to create beauty.<p>Easily the most fun hackathon i've ever been to/
I learnt some great definitions around creativity and innovation at a conference I was involved with recently. To wit, "Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas."<p>The speaker (Dr David Hall) recommended that the search for Creativity often needs to start with generating something novel and <i>useless</i> - this can then inspire the useful application to emerge. Only when we pursue the novel, however useless, do we really open ourselves up to surprising creativity.<p>This Hackathon seems to fully embrace that principle, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of those who participated take the germ of an idea and develop it further into the <i>useful</i> space.<p>[1] <a href="http://jacobaldridge.com/business/3-blockages-to-creativity-shirlaws-conference-blog/" rel="nofollow">http://jacobaldridge.com/business/3-blockages-to-creativity-...</a>
This is incredibly funny.<p>Just today I was reading i am devloper tweets and just started wondering are there communities for developer jokes? Reddit comes to mind, but it become too mainstream. Anything else?
The rearview mirror one is actually a really cool experiment. I wonder if eventually you'd just get used to it (although you probably wouldn't get used to all of the neck and joint pain from trying to do things so awkwardly).
That "tweet from food" thing reminds me of Vessyl.
<a href="https://www.myvessyl.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.myvessyl.com/</a>