Thursday, May 15, 1997

Mining Company, Cyberchill

BUZZBUZZBUZZ! IT SEEMS everywhere you turn The Mining Company is in your face.  Their "spam wear" (T-shirts), posters, and billboard trucks are everywhere. My most recent sighting was at the 19th Cyberchill meeting at alt.coffee on May 15.  This free-form meeting was initially created in reaction to the "boring" Cybersuds. Hmm, yet another happy go-er of early Cybersuds events ... Anyway, people began getting together to show off cool stuff. The group was so successful that another stemmed off from it as well--the WWWAC VRML sig. While folks shouldn't come to these meetings to get jobs, founder DJ Hacker notes that the contacts are valuable. The meeting is very informal: one Bill Gates look-alike was examining a paper airplane fashioned from one of TMC's posters (haha) with such intensity he could've burned a hole in it. Most of the crowd was very Lower East Side-ish (flannel, doc martens, dreds, multiple piercings), there were a large handful of computer looking types (jeans, T-shirts, also in flannel), and one man dressed in a tan suit looking very Clark Kent-ish, tapping away on his laptop. It was mellow and relaxed and coffee coffee everywhere. These events are a cool, low-key, informative alternative for learning about new technologies and meeting people away from the frenzied party scene in our Alley.

(Appeared originally in @The Scene in the @NY newsletter)