A few weeks ago I posted here that I was about to go to Open Sauce. I was too tired to give an update right when I got back, but I’m here now and boy, it was incredible. Best convention ever. There was a Smash Bros tournament right as you walked in the door. There was a tesla coil music setup with a Faraday cage that they picked audience members to get up and dance in. There was a booth selling 3D printed Spiderman style magnetic grappling hooks. There was a hexacopter with a 6-foot wingspan. There was a booth demonstrating a piece of open source software designed for flowgraph/node-based procedural generation of vector graphics and written in Rust, thus hitting every single one of my interests simultaneously. There were multiple people walking around in fursuits. There was a celebrity go-kart race where the audience got infrared laser-tag blasters which would make the cars slow down, which I promptly cloned using my Flipper Zero and proceeded to wreak havoc as best I could.

I do not think there was a single allistic person in that building. It was glorious.

I had the time of my life just letting my ADHD carry me from booth to booth of hobbyists showing off cool shit they had made and asking about this and that and how they put it together. It was WAY bigger than Open Sauce 2023 and easily 10 times cooler.

Anyway, I mention that because I met one of my favorite YouTube creators (Zack Freedman of Voidstar Lab) face to face while I was there and he gave me this 3D printed poker chip with his channel logo and a QR code that my phone refuses to scan but that I’m told goes to the Rickroll. He uploaded a video today explaining how he made them, pointing out several subtle design flaws that I never would’ve noticed but that are going to bug me forever now, and mentioned that in every single chip there was an NFC tag. I got the chip from its pride of place on my desk, held it to the back of my phone, and sure enough, was taken (via a Bitly link) to an unlisted video on the Voidstar Lab channel – uploaded earlier that day! Open Sauce was weeks ago. Now I’m also bugged by not knowing what would’ve happened if I’d thought to put the tag in the same pocket as my phone while we were there.

If you meant what’s been happening to me this week, well, not much to report. I’m still off school, had some fun going swimming, got a little self-conscious when I saw 8-year-olds with better upper body definition than me. Finally got back into gaming now that I can do that without feeling guilty about blowing off my homework. I’ve been playing this really great indie metroidvania called Ghost 1.0 which I could gush about for ages (great gameplay, great humor, really neat game mechanic where you can leave your body and possess enemies which they make fantastic use of in puzzles)… but I mostly just wanted to talk about Open Sauce and tag the people who asked me to report back: @rozwud@beehaw.org @megaman_EXE@beehaw.org

all in all things have been going pretty great!