This video made its debut on my main YouTube channel four days after the October 18, 2025 No Kings 2.0 rally (protest, demonstration -- I wouldn’t say riot). As a Portlander, I have my own angle on what’s going on with “Frogtifa” and so on, a cosplay versus cosplay farce on many levels. Silly inflatable Halloween costumes versus kitted out soldiers of fortune aka hired guns from The District.
In this twelve minute plus narrative, I start with my missing hat, a way of showing there’s a YouTube channel (with over 600 videos and counting by this time), and move on to No Kings, looking through my tunnel vision at August 18 plus two months to the day. August 18? The Alaska Summit: what was on the table to discuss? We get more details. As World Gamers, we’re already familiar with such plans.
Lastly, I allude back to my Symposium deck, a kind of “master key” into a set of Google slide decks shared in viewer mode such that I retain control of editing them, adding polish, fleshing out speaker notes, but don’t control who projects them to whatever audience. I’m effectively making them creative commons because I don’t want to be some bottleneck where people think they need my permission before organizing their own Synergetics Symposium around these interconnecting decks. I’d imagine other presenters weaving in their own content and likely contributing to our growing commons, our inventory or stash, of presentation-ready materials.
Question: so have I presented these materials at BridgeSpacePDX?
The talk goes to my photo chronicling of my locations scouting just a few days earlier. I’ve been a geek on the Portland scene for a long time and well remember CubeSpace (2nd floor of an east side US Bank building, elevator accessible), the birth of Open Source Bridge (the unconference, in the Oregon Convention Center) in response to O’Reilly’s OSCON leaving town (trying out Austin and San Jose — I made it to the latter), but then returning to the Silicon Forest… but then came covid…
We’ve had our ups and downs, and I’m not forgetting my stint with FreeGeek during its experimental branching out into the consulting business. FreeGeek’s main line has been recycling and refurbishing computer equipment. Likewise I experienced O’Reilly’s experimental branching out into running a code school, with me on faculty as a Python mentor. O’Reilly’s main line has been publishing (I’m still a subscriber to their stash online, whereas the code school experiment got shelved for various reasons, certainly not for lack of students).
Answer: no, as of this posting I’ve not further explored renting out BridgeSpacePDX for a Symposium.
But then again, I’ve tacked on the tagline: you don’t have to wait for me i.e. if you’re in that particular coworker space and want to share some of those slides peer to peer, as an example of our Silicon Forest and/or Cascadian indigenous curriculum, go right ahead. The same goes for whatever coworker space (e.g. some coffee shop) you mind find yourself in: feel free to import what we’re exporting.
