list of documentaries screened at the party

during the party we screened two documentaries. here is the information for further reading. the first one was screened during the afternoon (sorry for the poor sound and early cutoff. we'll try to have a better sound setup next time). the second series was left on loop all night.


What Would Jesus Buy?

From IMDB

An examination of the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America's mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a congregation of thousands - Bill Talen (aka Rev. Billy) has become the leader of not just a church, but a national movement.

7 Billion Others

From the website: 

In 2003, after The Earth seen from the Sky,
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with Sybille d’Orgeval and Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire, launched the project “6 Billion Others”.
5,000 interviews were filmed in 75 countries by 6 directors who went in search of the Others.

From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes:

  What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you?

Forty or so questions that help us to find out what separates and what unites us. 

Questions played (looped not necessarily in this sequence):

• After death
• Being at home
• Differences
• Dreams and renouncements
• Family
• Fears
• First memories
• Forgiving
• God
• Leaving one's country
• Love
• Love stories
• Tears
• Meaning of life
• Nature
• Progress

---

thank you everyone for participating!

Cupboard of Cold gets Coloured

The life of the unemployed is pretty dam hard I must say, going to sleep never before 2am and waking up after 11am everyday... With 3 of the 4 tenants unemployed life is lookin up. Ellen is off gallivanting and making out with people in Melbourne. Tamika and Ash go crazy in the warehouse creating gardens, benches, screen prints, art works and most importantly the crazy fridge!; All with help from CSs n HelpX of course. Joao works like a good boy to bring home the bacon (now that the vegans are gone). So plans are coming along and the place is moving forward in a really good way, more and more is getting done to make life easier to live.

Who woulda thought being unemployed and restless while it rains (all the grass seeds away might I add) that we’d have so much fun around the house. Minus the whole getting ahead in the money situation we’re doing pretty well.

Now for the most important part of this blog...

The fridge! My new small business plan... hahah ok so I was paining a “white” board for a notice board and shortly after opening the tin my eyes deceived me and the paint was blue, a lovely blue bad defiantly now white- thanks a lot there Dulux. So I painted the board anyway with a roller and it worked out sweet! But with so much paint left over in the roller paint holder thingy it seemed such a waste to not paint something and id already closed the tin back up and couldn’t be bothered opening it again.

Asking Mamma Ash about 100 times wielding a paint roller, “Can I paint this?” “No” “Can I paint this?” “No” “Can I paint this?” “No” “Can I paint this?” “No” “Well can I paint the fridge then?” finally the fun sucker that is Ash said “yes” stoked as I began painting...

Then the idea started storming in my head, we could make it retro with powder blue and pink, or draw clouds, or the ocean, we could make it into a television, or add glitter... No no no there all lovely ideas but way cooler (excuse the pun) is as fridge that eats you! And so became the amazing new fridge...

The blue layer first, then the mouth was pretty tricky with my impatiens of not wanting to wait for the paint to dry colours got mixed but its all sweet. The eyes we had to sacrifice a sexy fireman plate but its all worth it and the other eye is an old washing machine circle I picked up one night whilst walking home drunk... it does oright ey...

I think Blue is become a kind of theme for us...

our scrum board

one of the challenges of community living is knowing who does what and
what's to do.

transparency is essential because it prevents the "i never see you
doing anything" type of conflict.

some structure is also necessary to help everyone know how to contribute.

in order to tackle these problems (and prevent the bumming around) i
proposed a stateful task board similar to what's used in software
development. though these are totally different worlds, they both
share the need for a system that promotes creativity and positive
group interactions

each column represents a state of a task: to do, after this bong, work
in progress, done.

each postit is color coded: green not important, pink important.
people are assigned using yellow postits with their names.

as work progresses, new tasks are added and old ones are cleared out
periodically. one side effect of transparency is that it makes clear
who contributes and who doesn't, which in turn encourages
collaboration

it's still not clear if it's going to last, but for now i'm very
pleased with the outcome, and don't mind being the scrum master while
everyone gets used to the idea

gardening

i've spent the last couple of days working on the garden outside. a lot of space was being wasted out there, and with summer here it makes sense to have more things happening outside.

harmen and i started by building some planter boxes for the existing plants we had. this was done by collecting a few of those flat bread crates and raising them with some bricks for drainage. we lined the bottom of the crates with some old cardboard, then pulled an old wooden crate apart to build up the sides and have some depth. we raked the old leaves away and found beautiful, fertile soil underneath. lots of happy worms, slaters, witchetty grubs and scary-as-fuck centipedes (scolopendromorpha variety. thanks Centipedes of Australia). apart from the bugs, our garden is now home to a tomato plant, chili, eggplant, capsicum, passionfruit, basil and parsley. apart from the plants themselves, all of the materials/soil was found or built by us.

the next project was to build a rainwater collection system for the garden. whenever it rains here we have a huge amount of water running off the roof of our warehouse as well as the two places next door. rather than watering our plants with fresh drinking water, we may as well catch and reuse the rain. i found a big plastic barrel at reverse garbage for $20 (about 200L capacity). we bought some second hand pvc pipe and garden hose from the bower for about $15. harmen cut the lid off the barrel and covered the hole with shadecloth to keep the leaves and mozzies under control, then fixed the pvc pipe to the existing gutter so the rainwater flows into the drum. eventually we will have a gravity fed hose punched with holes continuously feeding the garden beds.

i also bought a box of grass seeds yesterday. we spent today breaking up the concrete, digging up fresh soil and redistributing it across the garden. it's a lot of work, but i'm sure it will be worth it once we have a nice green lawn instead of concrete and leaves. we'll finish up tomorrow so we should (hopefully) see grass starting to sprout in the next week or so.

the new sink and lighting

we've been engineeringly busy here. two of our several simple but
useful projects were a working sink and light switches.

one of the challenges of communal kitchens is the clutter and how much
washing up is always necessary. our previous setup was ok, but it was
making people do the washing in the bathroom, since there we had
working plumbing versus the bucket in the kitchen. so we got some
proper plumbing gear, drew up a sink and set it up in a better place.
now our sink has a working drain and tap, which has made our washing
up much easier. the whole setup was made out of scrap stuff, except
the drain connections, courtesy of the bower.

another issue has been the lighting, which until now was all connected
to a single socket. if anyone would get up in the middle of the night
and wanted just to heat up something in the kitchen, they'd have to
light up the whole place. so now thanks to the new switches, we can
selectively turn on lights in the kitchen, bathroom and living room.
in fact, the light is so good in the bathroom now that we had to
double up the curtain, since the light from the inside made the
existing one transparent. not nice if you're showering.

depicted are also the new occupied sign for the bathroom and the
removed doors from the kitchen. the whole space is now much more open
and makes it easier to cook big meals.

another side effect of rewiring the place is that now we have two
sockets on the back room, which until now has had little use, but
hopefully will be turned into a small workshop

end of engineering report. live long and prosper

our first helpxer

our profile is up and running, and i've had a bunch of requests already. i've noticed a pretty big difference between these ones and the cs guests. while a cs request will typically read something like "hi! :):) i'll be in sydney from __ to __ and i need a place to stay", the helpx ones are more interested about the project and what we're working on. helpxers tend to wait for me so suggest dates and length of stay (i haven't had a single person request a particular date yet) and it's just generally more formal. like they're applying for a job rather than a bed in a messy warehouse. i've stopped accepting CS requests, but might still accept them if they're happy to be a part of the project as a helpxer would.

i've gone and broken our 2 week rule for harmen, a dutch engineer who has been staying with us as a tag along CSer. apart from being a generally cool dude, he's very hardworking and interested in helping with the place. i spoke to him about helpxing and he's going to stay on until tuesday doing that. while i respect and agree that we need to have some kind of consistency with our guests, rather than just making exceptions for the ones we personally get along with, i think harmen is a good place to start with my new way of hosting. he understands the place and is willing to be involved while i figure out exactly how i'm going to run it.

one of our guests dorthe is going to run a little house meeting tonight. she's run bigger, functioning communities in the past and is very into the organisational side of things, so it will be interesting to see how she does things. i'll post a rundown of what happens later on.