Pumping Station: One

Photo by Anne Petersen

AVAST ME HEARTIES! Belay that talk of a boring Saturday night, the good ship Pumping Station: One is offering fair quarter for jack tars and landlubbers alike on Saturday September 18th. Join us in splicing the mainbrace (a colloquialism for downing some ale) on the eve of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Down ye some grog and eat ye some grub, come away with proper booty, and party like yer going on the account.

Bring yer own rum, or donate your dubloons. Eye-patches provided, costumes encouraged. Festivities begin at two hours past sundown (9:00 p.m.). Fair winds!

Suggested donation: Members 5$, Non-Members $10.

Examples of pirate styles accepted:

• Sea Pirates
• Space Pirates
• Somalian Pirates
• Sky Pirates
• Media Pirates
• Bus Pirates

Heat up them skillets and put on your eating face, Pumping Station: One is once again ringing it’s funny little metal triangles and yelling “Cooooome ‘n get it!” That’s right faithful onlookers, stop your bacon, get eggcited, and stop by PS:One for a pun-themed potluck.

Bring a dish to share and parcake in everyone else’s. While as the saying goes, becoming a vegetarian is a missed steak, it’s inevitable that there will be vegan and vegetarian options. If you feel like bringing some drinks, feel free, but don’t drink beyond the pint of no return or we may require you take a leave of absinthe. More than anything, come relish time to ketchup with friends!

Seriously though, food & puns, Tuesday the 29^th at 8:00 pm, we’ve got a microwave for reheating, but the cutlery may well be up to you. Bring your galores through the red doors! See you there!

My flex resistor jacket is finally finished. After a month and a half of failures and a whole bunch of setbacks, the PS:One logo is finally embedded with twenty big LEDs which are attach to a circuit board and a flex resistor. The LEDs only light up when the right elbow is bent to a certain extent. It runs off of two AA batteries held along with the circuit board in a pocket on the left shoulder.

The jacket was premiered (sort of) at Digital Breakdown on Dec. 18th to help promote PS:One. Bunches of recently printed stickers didn’t hurt either. Luckily, the jacket is perfect for dancing.

Thanks to Jeff Kantarek and Jordan Bunker for their huge amounts of help on this project. Without their expertise this jacket would not be glowy.

Go ahead! The link below this post will take you to V1.1 of the PDF How-To to build one yourself, with step-by-step instructions and a pretty exhaustive materials list. Also some pictures, but perhaps not as many as there should be. Regardless! Is the PDF confusing or vague? Any questions? Go ahead and e-mail me at eli.skipp@gmail.com so that I can update the PDF and so that your questions can get answered. Happy hacking!

Fabric Light Bright PDF

[EDIT!]: This project is under a Creative Commons license!

Fabric Light-Bright by Eli Skipp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Are you charging your lazors? No? Would you like to? Then stop by Illinois Institute of Art this Thursday, November the 19th at 7 o’clock in room 213 for a crash course in internet memes, taught by PS:One members Jim Burke and Eli Skipp. The hour long class will go over what memes are, the history of memes, the origin of the term, and everything else you could ever possibly want to know. Free pizza, free knowledge.

Note: as internet memes are constantly being invented, rising, and falling again into obscurity, this will be the first installment in a series of classes.

Address, times, etc. are listed on the calendar to the right!
(Image via encyclopediadramatica.com)