Electromagnetic Field 2024
Jun. 4th, 2024 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisFrom Thursday 30th May up until early Monday 3rd June, I did something quite out of character for me: for the first time, I attended Electromagnetic Field (hereafter EMF) held at Eastnor Deer Park, about half-way between Hereford and Cheltenham in the West-South-West Sort Of Midlands. It was probably the single most crazy-in-a-good-way thing I've done for a few years. I'd been aware of EMF for a few years and had watched more than a few of the videos of talks from previous events. When it turned out that a friend of Emerson's had been to the 2022 edition, that pushed me over to deciding to actually go this year. I'm pretty damn sure it was an excellent decision to do so. A blow-by-blow would be not just self-indulgent but probably actually unhelpful, so I'll try to condense into bullet point lists where it could be useful and use prose as required for the more discursive parts.
"Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers. A temporary town of nearly three thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting. ((...)) Imagine a camping festival with a power grid and high-speed internet access; a temporary village of geeks, crafters, and technology enthusiasts that's lit up by night, and buzzing with activity during the day."
Two of my favourite adjectives are nice-mad and geekycool. You won't find them in dictionaries, but I expect their meanings are pretty intuitive, and it should be clear that I use them both as high praise. EMF, and its attendees, scored extremely highly on both fronts. Many of the attendees had come in groups of a handful or a double handsful - there were something like a hundred such "villages", themed by geography or by subject - and many of the groups had installations or other things to share with the rest of the festival, just to add to the fun, and often of an extremely high standard. The extent to which the whole enterprise acts as a gift economy is utterly delightful. There certainly are other sorts of festivals about which you could say similar things, but this was absolutely the right one for me. You can just be wandering through and discover things for real that you'd vaguely heard of or read about, as well as many you never knew existed.
For many - most? - people, the obvious headline feature is the talks. You can look find out about many of the talks from 2016, 2018,2020 and 2022, mostly with videos (at least, where the presenter was happy for things to be recorded). Of course there is also the 2024 schedule as well, but (a) obvs. no videos yet and (b) you miiiight need to select "Include finished events" within the filtering options, because the schedule acted as a living document while the event was in progress.
Talks I attended were, in rough chronological order:
On average, these were very good, with only a couple being merely decent. (One talk was really good and very funny, yet brought the grieving back hard at a few points.) A few were outstanding and I'll come back to them if/when the videos were online, but I think you can reasonably assume a strong positive correlation between how much you think you would enjoy a talk based upon its topic and how much you really would enjoy it. Some assumed more knowledge than I was expecting, but that's OK; a couple left me wanting more, but that too is OK. One talk Went Wrong.
The talks took place in what you might think of as big circus tents and the acoustics were generally very good. More specifically, I would say that the acoustics in Stage A weren't so great on the first day but were resolved from the second day onwards, whereas the acoustics in Stages B and C were great throughout. More specifically still, I would say that the acoustics worked best for live speakers, which the vast majority of the talks had, but struggled a little more with the restricted bandwidth (?) of a live video call for the Boulby Lab talk and the Don't Look Up showing where, like movies in general, the characters talked in a variety of voices and tones rather than trying to communicate a speech directly to its audience.
Games I played were, again in rough chronological order:
...and there was also an arcade of indie games, which were mostly PCs hidden in small bespoke arcade cabinets with beautifully laser-cut bespoke marquees touting their names. I really liked Mathsteroids, asteroids on mathematically interesting 2-D projections of a sphere, and the very funny Desert Bus-like joke game Janey Thomson's Marathon. Jokes in game form are lovely, and apparently a team of two actually proved willing to tappity-tap away for the real-time length of a marathon to eventually win. There was also an incredible mechanical Lunar Lander arcade game and a beautiful playable satirical Rube Goldberg machine by Tim Hunkin, Revolution!, surely destined for the remarkable Novelty Automation.
More about the EMF badge later, but there were at least a couple of games devised that took full advantage of its hardware. I never got around to playing the delightfully cheekily titled and presented Great Camp Hexpansion Quest (for the spooks themselves are based barely twenty miles away) or Badgemon, whose name conveys the have-to-collect-'em-all battling gameplay very succinctly. There were also some drop-in board game sessions, but these only attracted a few tables worth of players to the point where you had to turn up at exactly the right time in order to join a new game that was starting, so my Jumbo Perudo remained unplayed in practice.
The best things I ate were a sweet potato and bean tinga burrito from Cantina El Burrito and some lovely, squidgy lemon drizzle cake from Elke's Kitchen at the Here Be Badgers village. I also enjoyed meals from the volunteer kitchen, which was an impressive and busy undertaking.
I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Lydia, a friend who I'd met a few times at the tail end of the Haberdashery Collective and also at Puzzled Pint. She was kind enough to let me join her team for the excellent and ambitious puzzle hunt; I thoroughly enjoyed the tiny escape room and marvelled at the audacity and ability to put an escape room together for a weekend event. It was also a joy to catch up with Simon, Emerson's librarian friend Caroline's husband.
The name-dropping department would also note that nash trezsh Tim Hunkin himself dropped by the arcade while I was volunteering there, I got to high-five Matt Gray (for I subscribe to his Patreon!) and, mmm, yes, Richard Wiseman. Oh, and I resolved my own question: Alistair Aitcheson is not the same person as Alastair Aitchison. I declare the AA who turned up at EMF to be the one with the third "i" in his name in the correct place.
Other things I saw and observations I made:
After all the things I did, an interesting question that poses itself is what didn't I do? EMF is so big and so varied that it lets you be so many different people, if you want to be. I had what I suspect to be a - relatively speaking - very behaviourally conservative sort of EMF, on the basis that even attending the event was so unlike things I would normally do.
Perhaps I'll be someone different next time who does go a bit further out of my comfort zone to try things that I wouldn't normally try. (I did do that this time, but to a very limited extent. My idea of being daring, and it's OK to laugh at me for this, is... buying coffee. Yes, this is at a pitifully sheltered level somewhat akin to "not having watched Star Wars", but I have always regarded myself as Not A Hot Drinks Person, yet I quite enjoyed the Medium Mocha that I tried one day.) Part of me even has thoughts about some content that I could offer that I think other attendees would enjoy, but I'd want to do a proper job, engaging full metaphorical arse rather than merely a single buttock. Quite a long time to work on it, but not all the time in the world.
One major aspect I haven't mentioned so far is volunteering. EMF is a huge volunteer effort, in line with the gift economy ethos. Attendees are encouraged to volunteer, and I'm going to firmly join in the encouragement. In part, I'd encourage you from the altruistic angle of keeping something wonderful going. In part, I'd encourage you from the perspective of enlightened self-interest; volunteers get guaranteed chances to buy tickets for the next event and also get fed meals from the volunteer kitchen. In a third part, I'd encourage you from the perspective of it just being damn good fun... or, at least, the shifts I picked up were. (All the tasks were very pleasant, as was the company in which I did them, and a silly highlight was getting to don high-vis and ride around in a small utility vehicle to deliver a heavy propane bottle. The utility vehicle in question is an exception to the general and firmly-held principle that gators suck.)
This may all sound as much fun as it really was, and it may sound as appealing as it really was, and yet you may have some questions. I can think of some people who I know would have an absolute whale of a time here, and I can think of more people who would enjoy bits of it and yet find that the overall package was not for them. So, based on a single year's experience, some rather presumptuous answers to some possible questions:
There was one part where I briefly seriously considered packing up and going home days early, and it absolutely wasn't the fault of EMF or any of the people there. The issue was the Tildagon badge. This is a really, really pretty piece of digital jewellery that a lot of attendees could buy and wear. The hexagon of LEDs twinkling colour changes around the outside is gorgeous. A lot of people had them and looked cool for having them. They are very capable of being programmed in exciting ways. They were distributed as a kit with easy-to-follow instructions. The problem for me is that I couldn't follow them. This triggered bad self-esteem, and reminded me of the other ways in which I felt like I was out of place. I won't say that the badge made me feel bad; I will say that I had bad feelings relating to the badge.
Being at EMF on my own, I didn't feel comfortable asking people for help. On one level, I'm intellectually sure people would have been happy to help; on another level, time at EMF is such a valuable and precious resource that I didn't want to use other people's time up in this way. The result is that, in the end, I avoided having a badge, and I admired other people's badges (and the cool things they could do with them) with jealousy because I felt like I was missing out on the fun. This mental bad feeling manifested itself as physical bad feeling (and I do not believe this was coincidence) which manifested itself as - TMI TMI TMI - the worst bout of constipation I have had this century, which in turn led to 40 minutes I'd rather not have spent, which in turn led to... a waste of limited resources, and embarrassment. (Can I claim an assist for this message? I don't think so, but the coincidental timing briefly made me feel like I could.)
Could EMF or the people there have done more to help? Yes, and they probably would have been happy to do so if I had asked for it. Should EMF or the people there do more to help people like me who find themselves in situations like me? Long answer: it may be the bad self-esteem talking, or it may be something different, but the answer feels like there are many non-specific things that EMF could be spending its finite resources on to make the event more awesome for everyone rather than spending them on one person who's struggling with things that most other people weren't struggling with. Short answer: feels like "no".
The high points of EMF were, essentially, everything you would have hoped for from the experience. Between the very frequent and very intense good points, the gaps and the loneliness were felt acutely, in part because you know how good a time everyone else must be having. Part of me cannot be 100% sure that I had been taking my regular antidepressant properly; I have an effective routine in normal life, but the changes from normal life to EMF life might mean that things slip. When I realised that I might have skipped a day, I made sure to remember it after that, and things proceeded on a much more even keel afterwards. So this could be my bad mental health lying to me, or it really could be my own fault.
So, yeah, that was a thing, and I had a wibble, and I got over it, and nothing really went wrong. It did not stop EMF being a massively positive experience for me overall. Many, many thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard, for so long, with such talent, to make an event that was so intensely good for me and for so many people. My memories will treat the event very kindly; the potential and scope for the future that EMF has raised is awe-inspiring. In my case, this might start with the lovely, lovely Dreamcat crew.
If I have convinced you that EMF might be your sort of fun, and I can think of people who would firmly come into that category, and if the problems that I sort of had don't put you off (and, even having expressed them, they're very unlikely to put me off!) then do follow the web site and/or the official fediverse feed about tickets for the next event. Admittedly, getting tickets to come for the first time may be challenging - and the guarantee of ticket availability is a really good incentive to volunteer - because the tickets were released in three waves, each of which sold out in literally a few tens of seconds. That said, when the ticket returns opened, relatively close to the event, I was surprised by how readily available tickets were for days at a time. You'll know if this is your sort of thing; if the idea appeals, the execution is incredibly good.
So one last question. If you're on your own, and if your scissors (literally!) won't cut it: how d'you get that damn wristband off?
"Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers. A temporary town of nearly three thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting. ((...)) Imagine a camping festival with a power grid and high-speed internet access; a temporary village of geeks, crafters, and technology enthusiasts that's lit up by night, and buzzing with activity during the day."
Two of my favourite adjectives are nice-mad and geekycool. You won't find them in dictionaries, but I expect their meanings are pretty intuitive, and it should be clear that I use them both as high praise. EMF, and its attendees, scored extremely highly on both fronts. Many of the attendees had come in groups of a handful or a double handsful - there were something like a hundred such "villages", themed by geography or by subject - and many of the groups had installations or other things to share with the rest of the festival, just to add to the fun, and often of an extremely high standard. The extent to which the whole enterprise acts as a gift economy is utterly delightful. There certainly are other sorts of festivals about which you could say similar things, but this was absolutely the right one for me. You can just be wandering through and discover things for real that you'd vaguely heard of or read about, as well as many you never knew existed.
For many - most? - people, the obvious headline feature is the talks. You can look find out about many of the talks from 2016, 2018,
Talks I attended were, in rough chronological order:
- GPS time, leap seconds, and a clock that's always right
- Let's Party Like It's 1994 - Re-Imagining How to Find Stuff Online
- Live tour of the Boulby Underground Laboratory - a special science facility 1.1km underground!
- The Best Word In Morse Code
- How to make a puzzlehunt
- MathsJam: Lightning talks
- The Tech behind the Tennis - A peek under the hood of a Grand Slam Tennis Tournament
- Exploring and extending the Elite game engine for the BBC Micro
- How to Save a Life
- Magic Your Mind Happy
- An Evening of Unnecessary Detail
- Don't Look Up (movie showing with one of the producers)
- Long Now at EMF 02024: long term thinking, chatting and connecting
- Activism in Games, plus a Hopepunk RPG (Role-Playing Game)
- BIG PIPES! A dive into Scotland's hidden underground hydroelectric infrastructure
- Creation of Number
- Does Robot Wars have a Meta?
- Unlimited Power: An Engineer's Low-Down on Nuclear Fusion Technology
- A country you can't put in a box.
- Being Elliot Carver: How to run your own Cable TV station (or network)
On average, these were very good, with only a couple being merely decent. (One talk was really good and very funny, yet brought the grieving back hard at a few points.) A few were outstanding and I'll come back to them if/when the videos were online, but I think you can reasonably assume a strong positive correlation between how much you think you would enjoy a talk based upon its topic and how much you really would enjoy it. Some assumed more knowledge than I was expecting, but that's OK; a couple left me wanting more, but that too is OK. One talk Went Wrong.
The talks took place in what you might think of as big circus tents and the acoustics were generally very good. More specifically, I would say that the acoustics in Stage A weren't so great on the first day but were resolved from the second day onwards, whereas the acoustics in Stages B and C were great throughout. More specifically still, I would say that the acoustics worked best for live speakers, which the vast majority of the talks had, but struggled a little more with the restricted bandwidth (?) of a live video call for the Boulby Lab talk and the Don't Look Up showing where, like movies in general, the characters talked in a variety of voices and tones rather than trying to communicate a speech directly to its audience.
Games I played were, again in rough chronological order:
- Dreamcat's Who Killed Clippy? puzzle hunt
- Polygen, a RFID-triggered capture-the-flag game
- a home-made laser tag kit originally made by a Dad for his kids, which is very very geekycool
- Digressing: wow, I used to love laser tag, but it has probably been two decades since I had played it. Digressing even further: I'm really charmed by the growth of walking football that targets the over-55 market, and look forward to similar over-55s laser tag before at all long, when the people who grew up with the laser tag boom of ~1989-1992 turn about 55 and want to relive their childhoods.
- Wibblejelly Games' big chunky installation games (basically arcade not-very-video games).
...and there was also an arcade of indie games, which were mostly PCs hidden in small bespoke arcade cabinets with beautifully laser-cut bespoke marquees touting their names. I really liked Mathsteroids, asteroids on mathematically interesting 2-D projections of a sphere, and the very funny Desert Bus-like joke game Janey Thomson's Marathon. Jokes in game form are lovely, and apparently a team of two actually proved willing to tappity-tap away for the real-time length of a marathon to eventually win. There was also an incredible mechanical Lunar Lander arcade game and a beautiful playable satirical Rube Goldberg machine by Tim Hunkin, Revolution!, surely destined for the remarkable Novelty Automation.
More about the EMF badge later, but there were at least a couple of games devised that took full advantage of its hardware. I never got around to playing the delightfully cheekily titled and presented Great Camp Hexpansion Quest (for the spooks themselves are based barely twenty miles away) or Badgemon, whose name conveys the have-to-collect-'em-all battling gameplay very succinctly. There were also some drop-in board game sessions, but these only attracted a few tables worth of players to the point where you had to turn up at exactly the right time in order to join a new game that was starting, so my Jumbo Perudo remained unplayed in practice.
The best things I ate were a sweet potato and bean tinga burrito from Cantina El Burrito and some lovely, squidgy lemon drizzle cake from Elke's Kitchen at the Here Be Badgers village. I also enjoyed meals from the volunteer kitchen, which was an impressive and busy undertaking.
I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Lydia, a friend who I'd met a few times at the tail end of the Haberdashery Collective and also at Puzzled Pint. She was kind enough to let me join her team for the excellent and ambitious puzzle hunt; I thoroughly enjoyed the tiny escape room and marvelled at the audacity and ability to put an escape room together for a weekend event. It was also a joy to catch up with Simon, Emerson's librarian friend Caroline's husband.
The name-dropping department would also note that nash trezsh Tim Hunkin himself dropped by the arcade while I was volunteering there, I got to high-five Matt Gray (for I subscribe to his Patreon!) and, mmm, yes, Richard Wiseman. Oh, and I resolved my own question: Alistair Aitcheson is not the same person as Alastair Aitchison. I declare the AA who turned up at EMF to be the one with the third "i" in his name in the correct place.
Other things I saw and observations I made:
- Lots of people were wearing deeply geekycool clothes and/or had spectacular hair, and that really added to the jollity of proceedings. I do not have such good clothes or hair and this was the extremely rare event that made me want to consider getting some.
- In particular, delightfully many people were wearing dungarees (US English: overalls), cat ears or in some cases both. Whoever's wearing them: I was a fan.
- Let me express general joy at the wide variety of gender presentations on display and the ease with which people seemed to be able to be themselves, when often that might not always be welcome in judgmental life. It's always lovely when people can find their tribe, and EMF seemed to be a very good way of doing so.
- I presume the idea of having some sort of back-channel second-screen discussion while the presentations were ongoing has been considered and deliberately rejected, because it feels too obvious for people not to have thought of.
- An example of very good practice was not having Q and A sessions in the tents themselves, but encouraging speakers to meet with interested members of their audience in a separate Q and A tent afterwards. Smart!
- Of course I encountered someone wearing Powerbocks / spring-heeled jumping stilts. I think I might have seen these used in person maybe a very few times before, but they're still a real rarity in my experience.
- Somebody else had a T-shirt with a 32x24 matrix of full colour LEDs on which they could play a variety of low-res video games. I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but it was a wonderful excuse for the best sort of double-take.
- Other people had hats that were covered with a moderate-resolution screen's worth of LEDs. Very much on brand in an excellent way.
- Six months ago I watched, and commented in deep admiration, at this absolutely top-tier five-minute talk about a journey to roads named after days of the year, and I was gobsmacked to get the chance to see it performed live as part of the MathsJam lightning talks. I creased up with laughter about a second or two in when I recognised what it was.
- Also impressive and pleasing: very high levels of respect and very low levels of littering, as far as I could tell.
- A blessed relief in my view: nobody went around stinking of weed, unlike regular London life. I'm going to guess, based on zero evidence, that some people will have partaken, but quite possibly not many because there was easily enough going on to keep you entertained and mindblown without it.
- Weirdly enough I'm not a fan of Elon Musk (that's OK, I doubt he likes me much either) but there were a whoooole lotta Teslas in the car park. Happily my quite old blue Toyota Yaris seemed to keep parking next to another quite old blue Toyota Yaris, and I choose to believe that the cars both enjoyed the weekend too as a result, even among the snooty Teslas.
- Guessing there'll have been lots of fans of World O' Techno, a robot on a wheeled cart which issued a steady mid-tempo thump but also algorithmically generated techno squeaks responding to the robot's latitude and longitude. Pull it around and enjoy the different bars it spits in different places.(Sound fun? There's a video!)
- A late addition to the schedule for the last day was a Meowing Session. I had to check on Urban Dictionary that this wasn't slang of which I was not previously aware - I've been very late to the linguistic party many times before - but apparently not, just your common or garden meowing. I contributed a few as I passed and got a few back in return. Good. Good.
- Couldn't understand why there were so many Blåhajar around until I was pointed to this Wiki page and suddenly all becomes clear.
- My guess for the piece of lore most likely to endure from this EMF will be the time someone dropped something radioactive off at the swap shop. (The reaction? Quite rightly, NBD - "only a few smoke alarms' worth".)
- I'm sure it must be tempting for there to be some element of trying to one-up previous EMFs but let's not, reasonably literally, get into an arms race over this one.
- There was a clear instruction of "We strongly encourage you to... Bring masks, and wear a mask at EMF if you're in a crowded enclosed area, particularly if people are talking or singing". This was poorly observed; I might estimate the degree of observation as being of the order of magnitude of about 2%. Even if you've somehow been able to get up-to-date vaccinations, even if you believe COVID isn't as big a factor as once it was, the bringing together of people in a convention atmosphere is an absolute infection vector.
- This does remind me of a tangent: in the early COVID days, people bought and wore really fun fabric masks. Then they realised that the fabric masks were, by and large, not as effective as the limited-use clinical ones, and people tended to wear either the effective clinical ones or none at all. Perhaps it would be fun to start decorating clinical face masks, if it's not going to damage their efficiency, in much the same way as we (sometimes!) paint faces.
- The weather was... incredibly kind, overall. I was expecting Thursday and Friday to have long drizzly patches but Saturday and Sunday to be dry; there were heavy rainstorms on the way to the venue on Thursday but, after I got there, not so much as a single splish from the sky.
- Admittedly rain early in the week had had an effect on the titular field itself, but in horse-racing terms, the going was merely soft when it could well have been heavy, let alone outright muddy. I would describe the state of the boots I wore throughout as dusty rather than muddy. What a pleasant surprise.
- This doesn't stop me suggesting that you consider lining the floor of your car with cardboard, because (in a less clement year) getting sheets of cardboard muddy is so, so preferable to getting the actual floor itself muddy. I also have a theory that such cardboard could be useful should wheels get stuck in the long grass of the car park - you might be able to get more purchase from cardboard than grass.
- I am pretty sure that someone went and retrospectively added a Time Travellers' Party workshop to the schedule after its timeslot had concluded. Well played!
- The toilets were considerably less grim than feared. There were something like thirty of what you might consider regular outdoor toilets, and they largely held up very well under intense demand, as well as another thirty or so compost toilets dotted around the site. These were much more manageable than feared. Yes, there were showers, and the advice to consider showering at night instead of in the mornings was very smart and would have cut out queueing.
- The tech infrastructure that kept the event running was hugely impressive and, as far as I could tell, it Just Worked. The people who were responsible for it should feel very, very proud of themselves.
After all the things I did, an interesting question that poses itself is what didn't I do? EMF is so big and so varied that it lets you be so many different people, if you want to be. I had what I suspect to be a - relatively speaking - very behaviourally conservative sort of EMF, on the basis that even attending the event was so unlike things I would normally do.
- With three separate stages, you're bound to miss talks that you'd have liked to have gone to, let alone the workshops, let alone everything else. That's OK. The fact that so many talks are recorded and shared later really soothes the FOMO.
- That said, the first talk where I'm looking out specifically for the recording is Is it me or is everything difficult these days? - for, speaker, it is not you.
- Like many kids growing up with home computers in Generation ZX, I was delighted with what I saw of the demo scene! EMF is probably as close as I'll get to a demo party, and there were demo-related events here. I missed out.
- I also missed out on the singalong from Auntie Shanty, an open folk music session with songs minus problematic elements. Very groovy. I am really glad this exists in the world.
- Part of me was admittedly happy to miss out on Synthecise, a dance fitness class where the music is all chiptunes, but what an awesome, awesome idea. Give me the super-low-intensity version of it and I'm in.
- There's a bit of a running theme here, isn't there? There's a lot of music at EMF, which probably shouldn't come as a surprise as it's a festival at the end of the day, and I didn't engage with it. I'm not a clubber and yet one of the pieces of electronica I've listened to most over the years is Gasman's ZX Spectrum-inspired set from EMF 2014. When I was a night shift worker, that saw me through plenty of hours of the wolf. I thiiiink Gasman was at EMF this year but wasn't performing. Perhaps this could have been the low-stakes, friendly environment to give something very out-of-character for me a try, even if only to confirm that I really am not a clubber.
- There were plenty of workshops going on through the weekend in all manner of exciting topics, and often far more demand for places at them than practicable supply. I entered a draw for one to learn to use Clockwork Dog's COGS immersive theatre tech software, but didn't get a spot. Apparently it really was as good a session as I had hoped for, too!
Perhaps I'll be someone different next time who does go a bit further out of my comfort zone to try things that I wouldn't normally try. (I did do that this time, but to a very limited extent. My idea of being daring, and it's OK to laugh at me for this, is... buying coffee. Yes, this is at a pitifully sheltered level somewhat akin to "not having watched Star Wars", but I have always regarded myself as Not A Hot Drinks Person, yet I quite enjoyed the Medium Mocha that I tried one day.) Part of me even has thoughts about some content that I could offer that I think other attendees would enjoy, but I'd want to do a proper job, engaging full metaphorical arse rather than merely a single buttock. Quite a long time to work on it, but not all the time in the world.
One major aspect I haven't mentioned so far is volunteering. EMF is a huge volunteer effort, in line with the gift economy ethos. Attendees are encouraged to volunteer, and I'm going to firmly join in the encouragement. In part, I'd encourage you from the altruistic angle of keeping something wonderful going. In part, I'd encourage you from the perspective of enlightened self-interest; volunteers get guaranteed chances to buy tickets for the next event and also get fed meals from the volunteer kitchen. In a third part, I'd encourage you from the perspective of it just being damn good fun... or, at least, the shifts I picked up were. (All the tasks were very pleasant, as was the company in which I did them, and a silly highlight was getting to don high-vis and ride around in a small utility vehicle to deliver a heavy propane bottle. The utility vehicle in question is an exception to the general and firmly-held principle that gators suck.)
This may all sound as much fun as it really was, and it may sound as appealing as it really was, and yet you may have some questions. I can think of some people who I know would have an absolute whale of a time here, and I can think of more people who would enjoy bits of it and yet find that the overall package was not for them. So, based on a single year's experience, some rather presumptuous answers to some possible questions:
- EMF is a camping festival, but I don't like camping. Can I still enjoy it?
- I certainly did! A substantial proportion of attendees used camper vans, caravans or the like rather than tents, and many of them clearly had been hired for the occasion. It's definitely an option, but camper van tickets are limited and sell out quickly. The very non-standard approach I took was not to stay on-site but to book a room in a hotel and commute in daily. Ledbury is a very close commute; I actually stayed above a pub in a slightly less close village called Newent. I'd be happy to recommend The George Hotel; £50 a night got me a room with two single beds and a private bathroom (admittedly down the hall rather than en suite) and very good, if slightly basic, service. Continental breakfast is available but £7 extra and has to be booked by 9pm the night before. An absolutely beautiful, brave and friendly cat climbed upon my car at one point, which is an instant huge plus. However, staying off-site does force compromises on you, not least a non-trivial quantity of driving around country lanes in the total darkness, and the need for the driver to stay sober. These were not a problem for me, but could be a problem for some. I think next time I might give the camper van option a try but a hotel is an option which can work. In some ways, having a car as your private space rather than a tent works well; in other ways, the trudge is a bit longer and a bit more noticeable, and the sense that you're doing something different to other people is noticeable as well.
- I would be coming to EMF on my own, rather than as part of a shared tent or a village, and I don't think I know anybody there. Can I still enjoy it?
- Yes, but this could well be a genuine concern for some. It does feel like most people there have found their specific community within a delightful overall community. At first I enjoyed wandering around and soaking in the vibes, but it did feel a bit lonely until I was lucky enough to bump into someone I'd met before who I didn't know would be there. If you don't get that lucky, and if you're on your own, the sense of loneliness could be a bigger issue. If you come on your own, I would particularly recommend volunteering; all the volunteer shifts I did were as part of a small team, and you immediately had people to talk to. All that said, this is an area where I think EMF could do more, and it feels like a "Help! I'm on my own and don't know anybody here!" workshop could help a few. Having identified this need, it behooves me to fill it. If I come next time - and I don't see why I wouldn't, if they'll have me - then I pledge that I'll do what I can to make such a workshop happen. (This isn't to say I'll definitely run it myself, but if I can work out how to do it well, and if there isn't anybody better-suited to making it happen who's prepared to do so, then I would submit such a workshop proposal.)
ETA: subsequently I have been pointed to the existence of the Unaffiliated village which would have helped me out considerably. Hurrah! Well done, I'm glad you exist, sorry that I didn't find out about you beforehand! - Everyone at EMF seems very impressive and I'm not! They have so much to offer and I don't! My mental health and self-esteem are wobbly! Can I still enjoy it?
- Yes, but again this could well be a genuine concern for some. There is more excellent practice on display in that there is a very sensible and benign Code of Conduct, and I particularly like the presence of the line "Aggression and elitism are not welcome — do not belittle people for their knowledge or experience." in there. In my experience, this was impeccably observed, but my experience comes from the top of the privilege tree and the ways in which I deviate from traditional norms are absolutely well-respected here. Could this be a problem for others? I'm not aware of it being the case, but wouldn't want to rule it out.
If you lack self-confidence, I would again particularly recommend volunteering; when I was volunteering, I felt like I was contributing a tiny little bit to making the event better even when I couldn't contribute to the content. Could EMF do more for people with sub-optimal mental health? Maybe - for instance, while there is excellent first aid support on site, it's not immediately clear if they offer mental first aid as well as physical first aid. I did at one point note that one of the villages did have a big sign up saying "mental health", but I didn't investigate further. - I hate camping and I don't know anybody and my self-esteem is bad! Can I still enjoy it?
- Yes, but... and this is a bigger but. Should you get all three together, there may be points in time where you feel that This Is Not For You - or, putting it another way in an attempt to justify your self-loathing, that your personal experience is so different from the experience that you imagine everyone else is having that You're Doing It Wrong. Putting it another way again, you could feel that your particular use case is so far from what you perceive to be the intended way in which EMF was designed to be used, that the way you are using EMF is a bad fit.
In case it isn't clear, I'm speaking from personal experience here. Nobody was at all unkind or unpleasant and my (very non-expert) impression is that EMF puts a great deal of thought and effort into accessibility. The problem is that bad mental health lies to you. There were points where it felt like a certain degree of competence, self-reliance and mental fortitude on the part of the attendees were assumed. Were these things actually assumed in fact? I'm 99% sure they weren't! Does that matter? If mental health is lying to you, it does not! There are some people who think that facts are more important than the way things feel; I do not consider these people to be at all sympathetic, kind or even effective communicators.
There was one part where I briefly seriously considered packing up and going home days early, and it absolutely wasn't the fault of EMF or any of the people there. The issue was the Tildagon badge. This is a really, really pretty piece of digital jewellery that a lot of attendees could buy and wear. The hexagon of LEDs twinkling colour changes around the outside is gorgeous. A lot of people had them and looked cool for having them. They are very capable of being programmed in exciting ways. They were distributed as a kit with easy-to-follow instructions. The problem for me is that I couldn't follow them. This triggered bad self-esteem, and reminded me of the other ways in which I felt like I was out of place. I won't say that the badge made me feel bad; I will say that I had bad feelings relating to the badge.
Being at EMF on my own, I didn't feel comfortable asking people for help. On one level, I'm intellectually sure people would have been happy to help; on another level, time at EMF is such a valuable and precious resource that I didn't want to use other people's time up in this way. The result is that, in the end, I avoided having a badge, and I admired other people's badges (and the cool things they could do with them) with jealousy because I felt like I was missing out on the fun. This mental bad feeling manifested itself as physical bad feeling (and I do not believe this was coincidence) which manifested itself as - TMI TMI TMI - the worst bout of constipation I have had this century, which in turn led to 40 minutes I'd rather not have spent, which in turn led to... a waste of limited resources, and embarrassment. (Can I claim an assist for this message? I don't think so, but the coincidental timing briefly made me feel like I could.)
Could EMF or the people there have done more to help? Yes, and they probably would have been happy to do so if I had asked for it. Should EMF or the people there do more to help people like me who find themselves in situations like me? Long answer: it may be the bad self-esteem talking, or it may be something different, but the answer feels like there are many non-specific things that EMF could be spending its finite resources on to make the event more awesome for everyone rather than spending them on one person who's struggling with things that most other people weren't struggling with. Short answer: feels like "no".
The high points of EMF were, essentially, everything you would have hoped for from the experience. Between the very frequent and very intense good points, the gaps and the loneliness were felt acutely, in part because you know how good a time everyone else must be having. Part of me cannot be 100% sure that I had been taking my regular antidepressant properly; I have an effective routine in normal life, but the changes from normal life to EMF life might mean that things slip. When I realised that I might have skipped a day, I made sure to remember it after that, and things proceeded on a much more even keel afterwards. So this could be my bad mental health lying to me, or it really could be my own fault.
So, yeah, that was a thing, and I had a wibble, and I got over it, and nothing really went wrong. It did not stop EMF being a massively positive experience for me overall. Many, many thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard, for so long, with such talent, to make an event that was so intensely good for me and for so many people. My memories will treat the event very kindly; the potential and scope for the future that EMF has raised is awe-inspiring. In my case, this might start with the lovely, lovely Dreamcat crew.
If I have convinced you that EMF might be your sort of fun, and I can think of people who would firmly come into that category, and if the problems that I sort of had don't put you off (and, even having expressed them, they're very unlikely to put me off!) then do follow the web site and/or the official fediverse feed about tickets for the next event. Admittedly, getting tickets to come for the first time may be challenging - and the guarantee of ticket availability is a really good incentive to volunteer - because the tickets were released in three waves, each of which sold out in literally a few tens of seconds. That said, when the ticket returns opened, relatively close to the event, I was surprised by how readily available tickets were for days at a time. You'll know if this is your sort of thing; if the idea appeals, the execution is incredibly good.
So one last question. If you're on your own, and if your scissors (literally!) won't cut it: how d'you get that damn wristband off?
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-04 09:07 am (UTC)If fun dungarees is something you think you'd like to try, then have a look at:
https://www.runandfly.co.uk/collections/dungarees
while most of them are modelled by women you'll find a few men/non-binary folk in there too, and they also have awesome trousers. (I've not actually got any Run and Fly dungarees myself, but do have some awesome dinosaur ones from Lucy Locket Loves (discontinued) and Popsy https://www.popsyclothing.co.uk/products/jordan-dinosaur-print-dungaree - though they're not as explicitly gender neutral)
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-04 09:08 am (UTC)https://www.runandfly.co.uk/collections/trousers/products/black-purple-striped-skinny-jeans
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-04 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-04 06:10 pm (UTC)Following up to this:
Date: 2024-06-10 09:59 pm (UTC)1) The wristband is off, though I did go to the local dry cleaning store who does clothes repairs to find someone to help me with a much better pair of scissors... and the need not to have to cut the wristband one-handed.
2) I caught up with Simon, as mentioned at the tail end of para 12 (? numbering is weird when you embed bulleted lists) and family for a really tasty barbecue at the weekend and he kindly showed me how to do the last couple of steps to get the badge working. Hurrah!
3) I'm genuinely unsure about whether the ways in which my EMF experience was so different to everyone else's means that I was EMF-ing in a way that wasn't intended, to the point where the properties of my experience are so different to the properties that make EMF what it is. Could pointing out that it can be done in different ways promote doing it in different ways to other people, to the point where it might be encouraging other people to do EMF in these other ways, to the point where it might risk damaging the common experience for everyone?
Alternatively, is taking the parts of EMF that are right for you, and adding them to other parts that might not be right for other people, a valid way to do it? I was very idly looking into Burning Man and their avowed ethos of radical self-reliance - commuting daily from a hotel is far too touristy for them. Well, I wasn't at all seriously thinking about going, anyway, just researching. (I don't know to what extent the two bear comparison, and don't think I know anyone who has been to both.)
I get the impression that EMF is not quite so definitive about what their ethos is and is a bit more liberal about how people choose to interpret it, so long as it doesn't harm other people. With this in mind, I fear and suspect that my commuting approach might have a negative externality on the event, even if only culturally rather than materially, that I haven't considered. (If there were hundreds of people fewer camping and hundreds of people more commuting in on a daily basis, would this change the nature of the event to a problematic extent?)
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-13 02:38 pm (UTC)Re: the badge, fwiw I'm confident that if you'd asked pretty much anyone there they'd have been happy to either help or point you in the direction of someone who could! I understand that it can be hard to ask, but being able to help out other people is one of the joys of being there, and they put a lot of effort into trying to sustain that culture.
Concerning the last question: try any of (1) get better scissors, (2) just pull the metal clasp off (this will wreck the tamper-evident fabric part), (3) apparently scoring the clasp and dropping some gallium onto it works - I've not tried this because gallium is too much fun to play with and I just get distracted. However consider also (0) don't - keep it on as a reminder of a fun time; if you ever spot someone else with one then it's an instant conversation starter. I find you can have up to about six on the go at once before it starts to get unwieldy.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-13 06:56 pm (UTC)Note to self
Date: 2025-03-16 11:16 pm (UTC)