# TOWN CON 2024 trip report _published Sat Nov 2 02:41:26 UTC 2024_ In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson coined the term "soul delay." It describes the sensation brought on by jet lag of your physical self being in one place but your inner self feeling distantly stretched somewhere far away. Your inner self is drawn back to you, slowly, as you adjust to being in some far away time zone. I don't think jet lag is the only way to experience soul delay, though. I'm 11 days past TOWN CON 2024 (though publishing this post much later) and feel like my inner self is still behind me, somewhere, mingling in that venue with townies. In fact, it doesn't just feel like soul delay, but like an entire soul effects line. Perhaps soul distortion, then soul delay, then finally a shimmery soul reverb. I'm not complaining. However, I need my soul to snap back in so I can focus on other things (chiefly, a pretty rough time at work). I feel this beckoning backwards to think on TOWN CON and process it in the hopes that it pulls me back into myself. ## background TOWN CON was not the first physical meetup for townies. There have been regional get-togethers and one on one meetups intermittently since town's inception. This was the most official and, as far as I know, the biggest event of its kind. I'd been kicking an idea back in forth in my head about maybe organizing some online thing to celebrate the town's tenth birthday throughout 2023 but was largely incredulous that it would be a success. Then, the topic came up on our mailing lists--people wanted to do a conference. Seeing such an event come up organically on the server fueled me. I talked it over with my wife with whom I've run significant events (Code For Good once and Django Girls workshops several times, not to mention our wedding) and she was enthusiastic about the idea. Ever the coward, the support of my wife and internet friends was what I needed to bolster me into saying TOWN CON was real. I announced it with no firm plans but the will to see _something_ through. My initial vision was to compute the airport closest to the geographical center of the continental USA and book its hotel for us. Normalize the borders into a rectangle, find the actual middle of nowhere. I saw us all inhabiting the drab, musty convention center of a probably Nebraskan airport. We'd create something beautiful there in defiance of the great gray ghost filled chambers which were certainly not designed for a community like ours to use for celebration. This particular notion didn't last long. I imagined sitting on scratchy furniture picking the meat out of an uninspiring sandwich in the yellowed light of a cut glass chandelier. No--I wasn't ready. I wasn't up to it. I wanted to feed us all nice food. Toward the end of 2023 my wife and I learned that she had been extended the offer to do an internship in a suburb outside of Chicago. There was our location. Chicago is well connected by air, rail, and highway and covers a huge geographical area. I made a more detailed announcement about the event and started the important work of anxiously procrastinating acquiring the actual venue. ~spinecone, who recreationally looks at housing, volunteered to pick something out with me. We first had the idea of getting a big suburban house not far from the O'Hare airport. I wanted to recreate a 2010s style "happy hacker house" environment which seemed to necessitate a house. We picked out a beautifully hideous McMansion but in going over the house rules saw one about how wearing shoes inside was "absolutely forbidden" and if evidence of shoe wearing was discovered bad things would happen. We moved on. The ultimate venue was a converted warehouse called Loft 606--not in a suburb, not next to an airport, and not a drab spartan place for us to rebel against. I caved to the big, communal space and the convenience of being in the city proper for things like food and sundries. I just had to plan an event, now. I had a lot on my mind: - what kind of event even is this? - is this a tech conference? - oh god do i even like tech conferences anymore? - are we a _technical community_ - what would an artist squat do? - how to include people not coming to the physical venue - how to ensure people who came from far away felt it was worth the trip - some kind of schedule to make it _a real event_ - quiet spaces for people to calm down in - noisy spaces for people to party in - where everyone's going to sleep - how to organize information about and for attendees - what the hell are we doing - what the hell is tilde.town - twenty people said they wanted to come in person - they're all going to look at me - there is going to be a moment when twenty well intentioned far traveled people all turn and look at me for direction, guidance, or assurance and in that moment I might not know what to say and I will just have to avert their gaze and exit the building and walk until I reach Lake Michigan and then stare at Lake Michigan whose ebbing and flowing will proceed with or without me and whose depths teem with safely forgotten things I can contemplate as I try to imagine myself safely hidden inside a lake cosplaying as an ocean I had collected initial, tentative, water testing interest in TOWN CON via a Google form. For actual, real RSVPs I wanted to be able to tie people's form submissions indelibly to a user account on the server. I've made plenty of TUI forms so I figured I'd make a new tool to track who was coming in person and to disseminate information about the event. I decided to use the tool as a gathering mechanism for proposals, as well. I did want people to be able to submit "talks" like you might find at a tech conference (say, PyCon or RubyConf) but, given that I think of the town as an artists' squat more than a user group, didn't want people to just submit talks. I also didn't want a fully synchronous schedule of live content that would be hard for people across timezones to attend. In the lead up to TOWN CON I dusted off the current version of my now years-old attempt at making my own MUSH. I had grand plans of finishing it in time and then modeling the physical venue in the virtual world to thin out the veil between meat and cyber. This did not come to fruition; however, thinking in this way did lead me to the idea of a virtual art gallery. I'd take whatever people submitted and slot each thing into a "viewing period;" some of these things would be live talks, but they'd get scheduled alongside of things like writing and music and software. I've never heard of or attended anything like this but it felt right. Thus, the `town con` command on the server could give you information about the event and accept an RSVP or submission. I'm quite pleased with how that worked out. The tool emailed me form inputs and I manually added each thing to a spreadsheet for further processing. I had grand plans for the people coming in person. We'd go out in nature or take a big school trip style outing to a museum. I'd have it all planned out with transportation. This didn't happen. I couldn't really design the perfect outing and I figured a bunch of seasoned computer touchers would not all be on the same page at the same time about going out into the sun squinting world of loud meat together. So I thought of a few options that didn't require much advance planning and left it for the day of. Similarly, I mapped out an elaborate catering plan. The only remnant of this to survive was the deep dish pizza night on the 11th. I felt like I was failing; but in retrospect this was the right call. TOWN CON is about celebrating creativity, chaos, and diversity. Railroading us all into a set schedule with meal times would have been inappropriate. ## day 0: humans appear The first human to appear came early on the 10th: ~kingcons. ~kingcons is not a very active member of the town itself but is both an old friend of mine and active on tiny tilde website[0]. The thing about ~kingcons is that he is relentlessly dapper. True to form, though sleep deprived and subject to much air and bus travel, my friend appeared at my place in a tasteful linen blazer and his signature, infectious, glowing Cheshire smile. We dug in and rambled and reminisced as I pushed on con prep. I stood at my kitchen island and delivered my hastily written keynote[1] for the assessment of ~kingcons; without it, it would have been a far weaker talk. A truly satisfying and fortuitous beginning to the event, I decided. The next arrival was ~m455. It was my second time meeting him in person. ~m455's is a soothing presence. He is supportive, kind, attentive, and liable to bring me delicious Sichuan snacks. The three of us loaded up my car and we drove to the venue. A major factor in the selection of the venue was the massive disco ball suspended from the ceiling of the main room. Its controls were inscrutable but after prodding and begging and cajoling the sphere began to slowly spin. Success. Everything else could fail, I thought, as long as the disco ball doesn't stop spinning. ~kindrobot, ~ivycreek, and ~archenoth all arrived as the evening wore on. ~m455 bravely climbed furniture to flip a set of curtains around and make a white screen for projecting on. We put IRC up and ~nebula entertained us with ascii art. Even though I did not manage to complete my MUSH project in time I still wanted some kind of connectivity between the cyber and meat parts of the event. My brain clumsily combined some ideas that have been sitting in the back of my brain fridge since I wrote up the patreon "rewards" for tilde.town's funding. One of them was a fully terminal/ssh based teleconferencing solution for the town. I'd idly designed some combination of asciified video and text chat but never followed through. Since shelving that, though, there have been significant advances in both asciify'ing video and in automatic voice transcription. I successfully prototyped the local ascii-fication of a video feed combined with voice transcription using `whisper.cpp`. Being all text in a terminal, I realized I could use `netcat` to shunt it all onto town. Users could then watch over SSH by attaching to a read-only tmux session with panes set to receive the `netcat` output. I'm still astonished it worked as well as it did. ~kindrobot, in a true demonstration of their eponymous kindness, schlepped a desktop computer all the way from Canada and helped me recreate my prototype. Since I wanted cyberfolk to be able to call in and talk, the setup ended up like this: - a Google Meet call - a desktop dialed in to the call - OBS running on the desktop, recording the browser window with the call - a virtual camera created by OBS - the program `tplay` reading the virtual camera and converting it to grayscale ascii - a pipe from `tplay` to `netcat` - an M3 macbook pro with a nice microphone and a webcam attached also on the call - `whisper.cpp` running on the macbook listening to the microphone - a pipe from `whisper.cpp` to `netcat` - a script on town called `watchcon` that attached read-only to a tmux session A beautiful contraption and one so precarious and fragile there's no way I could have done it without ~kindrobot's help. It's possible this ended up being no more than a novelty--anyone really desiring to see live talks called in to the Google Meet call. For me, it was a very town appropriate centerpiece to the event. It was also fertile ground for future text based teleconference inspirations. In a running theme for the event, I realized that night was approaching and I hadn't eaten in something like seven hours. As if bearing manna from heaven, ~kindrobot and ~ivycreek appeared with burritos. I consumed the food tube like a bank drive through inhaling a plastic pneumatic vessel. More people arrived: ~signalnine, ~noelle, ~grendel84. Townies settled in for a night of, I assume, playing a lot of smash on ~kingcons's Wii. I thought I would need to sleep back at my place due to car logistics but was able to work things out with ~spinecone such that we could return and stay the night at the venue. I'm glad that worked out and thankful to ~spinecone for adjusting her commute during an intensely busy week at work. ## day 1: 11 Nightmares. Vivid and real. In my dreams I woke for the con. Somehow, over a hundred people had shown up while I overslept. They packed the venue and had brought kids, dogs, cats, piles of food, boomboxes, picnic blankets. They all looked at me. I struggled to get the A/V setup together and kept forgetting what time it was or what was supposed to happen first. Pockets of rebellion erupted into their own miniature conferences. A dozen simultaneous talks began. I was so hungry and tired and didn't know if I wanted to be looked at or forgotten in this sea of strangers and their kids and their dogs and their cats. I woke up for actual real and things were quiet and fine. I wanted to be able to provide something for breakfast and went to Cafe Umbria down the block with ~spinecone. We arrived just as they opened and got boxes of coffee plus a big box of pastries. ~spinecone went on to work and ~m455 and ~grendel84 appeared to help me get objects back to the venue. We started on time. I improvised some opening remarks and did not think to record them. The main thrust was that TOWN CON was not supposed to be a one-to-many event but a many-to-many event: a maximally connected, cyclic graph of community and collaboration. I encouraged people to get in front of the webcam as desired and talk to other townies online or off. Unless I have carefully excised it from my spotless mind, nothing really went wrong. We did decide to give up on the projector--turns out a massive skylight makes any kind of daytime projection impossible. The A/V setup rotated to the TV mid-day in time for live talks. I updated the topic for `#con` in IRC as viewing periods for works went on. There were last minute changes to the schedule but nothing too serious. Once again, I found myself at a meal time on a cavernously empty stomach and once again ~kindrobot and ~ivycreek appeared with tubular alimentary salvation (though subway sandwiches this time instead of burritos). I gave the first live talk: a survey of tooling I use to administer the town. It also occurred to me to show off the current state of my MUSH lest anyone (fairly) disbelieved that I had actually made a bunch of progress on it. ~kingcons and ~m455 spoke about identity, life paths, and computers. Townies arrived throughout the day: ~hush, ~polyrtm, ~duckbilledwren, ~mikewilsonstl, ~spinecone, ~insom. I gave my keynote[1] and cried less than the two times I practiced it. The big catering order was supposed to have been delivered but the restaurant decided they "couldn't get anyone to do it" despite being a mile away (and promising delivery). I sent two very brave townies into the waning light to acquire our massive pile of deep dish pizza: ~grendel84 and ~archenoth. They were not unscathed in the endeavor but succeeded none the less. We ate; it pleased me to perform the cultural ambassador task of introducing people to giardiniera and deep dish (they already got into the malort the night before). ~spinecone had appeared bearing two surprise cakes and celebratory candles to go with. One was for the town (chocolate) and one was for me (carrot). We sang happy birthday to the town and all blew air symbolically at the candles. It was very cute. We had our last live talk (by ~spinecone and sadly only partially recorded because I plugged in the camera wrong). I shut off the A/V at 22:00. I probably did closing remarks. I can't remember. We chatted and wandered and whorled. People constructed badges out of the dead media and crafts ~spinecone and I had assembled. Music was made and people played games. Of special note was the joy of getting to hear ~m455 and ~mikewilsonstl both playing acoustic guitar. My final fret for the night was making sure ~nebula could make it in late with both a parking spot and a place to sleep. ~duckbilledwren graciously went and unblocked the venue's parking spot by helping me push a big dumpster out of the way. It felt like a puzzle from The Last of Us. ~spinecone discovered a cache of air mattresses and we set up a bed. I slept, and with far fewer nightmares. ## day 2: is this an arboretum? Saturday the 12th had no cyber component and was a day for the in-person attendees of con to do whatever they felt like. Pastries appeared once more from Cafe Umbria as well as not just a box of coffee but one of their actual, branded coffee urns. I know ~m455 was involved in that adventure because he joked that he stole it (thanks to whoever else helped with that!). I did some loud dad yelling to get everyone informed about options for the day. We ended up coalescing around: - a field trip to the arboretum - a field trip downtown to see _the bean_ - just chilling at the venue. I really needed to see some trees and helped lead the arboretum expedition. Two car loads of townies (thank you ~noelle for driving car #2!!!) headed to ~spinecone's place of work in a far flung suburb. The trees were good. Many people learned what an arboretum is for the first time. We learned first hand that ~m455 has a secret talent for improvising completely fake yet utterly convincing latin names for plants. Ask him to identify a plant sometime. I hear the bean was good, too. A week later, I went out for a bike ride and found myself there staring at it. ~insom said he appreciated the bean; that it was at once a familiar thing (a mirror) and yet a very confusing thing since it was hard to find yourself reflected in it. I stood for a long time at the bean unable to find myself and instead looking at the reflection of the assembled tourists mobbed closer in. I found a new appreciation for the bean. By Saturday evening I was quite tired. Not unhappy; just naturally exhausted. I couldn't quite focus on smash or music jamming or programming and just floated from human cluster to human cluster. I stood alone for a bit and just listened. People were talking, laughing, making pretty sounds, tapping on keyboards. It was exactly what I hoped for and I wish it was still going. ## day 3: bye I woke on the 13th to find that people had already done a tremendous amount of cleaning and prep for our departure (thank you :')). We wrapped up without issue and resolved to have a final brunch before dispersing. This was somewhat unwise, though I probably would think that less if while waiting for my food to appear I didn't panic about a surprise reboot of the town being a possible security event. I was too exhausted to think and had a rough day after that, but by the evening we were all good. It put a pallor on the final moments of con and I regret that. I got a good ~m455 hug before he went to the airport, though. ## so ~spinecone, at some point, described TOWN CON as feeling "like college except I like all of these people." I agreed. Communal existence, with the right set of people, is an immensely satisfying thing. I'm so grateful to everyone who gave it a chance that weekend in person and to everyone who hangs out on town doing it digitally. I'm so grateful to all the people who jumped up to help out and volunteer throughout the event. I talk about it in my keynote[1], but originally TOWN CON was going to be a chance for me to announce my retirement from running tilde.town. However, in the lead-up to the event, the idea of retirement vanished from my mind. Not only can I imagine departing this community, I can't imagine not having another con in 2025, too. I hope to see y'all there. h[0]: tiny tilde website http://tiny.tilde.website h[1]: keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeXS_bxOFCM h[2]: keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeXS_bxOFCM h[3]: keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeXS_bxOFCM