2 lbs of stickers
First things first
This year I am again attempting to blog every day of summer. I've done this sporadically in the past (and never very well), but I'm trying again this year. Maybe this time will be different. (This is actually my fourth day of summer, but I wanted some time off. Whatever.)
2 lbs of stickers??
So recently (i.e. within the past year) I've become more active within the local Seattle community. I'm now on the organizing committee for the Seattle chapter of TA3M (Techno Activism, 3rd Mondays), and am actually running another CryptoParty this coming Monday. Now, within the wider Seattle activism/tech scene, there's this bag of stickers. It used to be owned by a friend of mine named Elcaset, who apparently just took home some leftovers one day and then kept receiving more and more, because people associated him with stickers. Sadly, Elcaset had to move away from the Seattle area. And since we wanted to keep the stickers, someone needed to keep the bag. And so I ended up with a giant, giant bag of stickers.
Me being me, I decided to sort them and separate them, so that they were easier to lay out on a table. Then I separated them by category. And then, just for fun (and since there were so many of them), I decided to weigh them.
The heavyweight champ by far is the Free Software Foundation bag, with a whopping 8.25 oz of stickers. Yeah, when I said "heavy" "weight", I meant it. Next we have local usergroups (FreeGeek Seattle, TA3M Seattle, Seattle Privacy and one other whose logo I know is local, but I don't recognize) tied with distributions, both at 5.225 oz. Next up is advocacy groups, namely the EFF and the ACLU of Washington. I'll admit to cheating on this one, since the EFF has some assorted trinkets that aren't actually stickers, but whatever. This bag was 4.5 oz. After advocacy groups is the miscellaneous bag, which has software projects not associated with anything else, activism films, conferences (aka LinuxFest Northwest) and political parties (aka the Pirate Party). Finally, as we approach the bottom, the security/anonymity bag had 2.75 oz, followed closely by the DuckDuckGo bag, which had 2.725. Finally, the LibreOffice/document freedom bag had 2 oz of stickers.
What all this is to say is that I now own a lot of stickers. Specifically, I own an astonishing 2 lbs, 1.625 oz of stickers. Seriously. 2 pounds of what is essentially paper. That's almost unbelievable. (I should point out at this point that I got that number from weighing all of them, not by adding up the above figures, so there may be a slight difference.)
Anyway. I guess I'll have plenty of material to hand out at my CryptoParty.
Other things
Other things that have happened recently-ish: I'm going to be in Advanced Photography next year, which I'm super excited about! Also, I joined the SAAS dance program, which should be really fun. At first it was a bit inconvenient, because even though I really wanted to be in dance, with Advanced Photography and Intermediate Dance, I didn't have room in the fall for a Study Hall (which I'm going to need because of college apps). So I ended up deciding to only do robotics on the weekends. Not only that, but the dance show is inevitably the same weekend as LFNW, so I was going to miss Game Night and the Saturday sessions and the afterparty. But things worked out, because apparently they had so many people auditioning this year that they split Intermediate Dance into two sections, and I'm in the one that has class in the winter and spring. That means that not only can I take a study hall in the fall, but our dance show will be at a different time of year, so I can go to LinuxFest Northwest, too. Whoo!