I am absolutely amazed at how well our Cyberdelia: 20 Years of Hackers party went! Honestly, it was a somewhat last-minute idea: I knew the anniversary was coming up, and we had an open Friday within a week of it, so I sent a three-line email to the usual suspects saying, "Hey, let's throw a Hackers anniversary party, with a movie screening and a costume contest. Oh, and let's build skate ramps."

I thought 150 people were going to show up and we were going to have to cancel the costume contest because the only person in costume was gonna be me. But no! Not only did lots of people dress up, but the damned thing sold out! We also sold all of our table service booths, which usually only happens on New Year's Eve!

The skate ramps -- which, in case you didn't notice, were painted with Wipeout power-ups -- were the most contentious part, but I'm happy to report that A) nobody broke their face, and B) that was because it was so crowded that nobody could really do a lot of skating.

At the last minute, my crew tried to talk me out of building the skate ramps, on the grounds of them being difficult, expensive, dangerous and just a monumentally stupid idea, and they probably would have succeeded if I hadn't just read Steve Albini's screed on punk and capitalism that morning. "A bakery opens because a guy wants to make bread." Why are we here? We are here to do shit like building skate ramps down the stairs.

We had some inspired prizes for the costume contest, if I do say so myself. We included some blu-rays of the movie (donated by our similarly Hackers-obsessed friends at Adafruit), but I also trolled eBay for some great stuff. We had an original Hackers press kit, some original posters, a stack of issues of 2600 from 1995/6, and the best part, the first prize winner walked away with a stack of the books discussed in the movie: The Green Book, International UNIX Environments; The Orange Book, Computer Security Criteria DOD Standards; The Pink Book, Guide to IBM PCs; The Devil Book, Unix Bible, The Dragon Book, Compiler Design; and the Ugly Red Book That Doesn't Fit on the Shelf, NSA Trusted Networks. So he's all set up to learn some things and become Nineties Elite.

So obviously we're going to do it again. Stay tuned. We will probably do a different movie next time, but the conceit will still be that you are watching that movie before partying at the club Cyberdelia as depicted in Hackers, and the music will be mid-nineties electronica. So basically we're hoping to make Cyberdelia be our irregularly-scheduled "Nineties" party. Lots of people have thrown nineties parties, but those folks all seem to think that that means Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys and similar top 40 nonsense. I don't go to those parties because that's not the nineties I gave a shit about: the nineties dance music I remember was Fluke, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, FSOL and Photek. And I guess some of you agree.

Anyway, check out the photos, and if you have more, let me know! There has also been a lot of hacker chatter on the Facebook event.

In Codeword news: I don't have any very interesting photos from the last few weeks, but the windows are in, the stainless steel on the walls behind the kitchen is nearly done, and basically things are pretty close to being finished -- except for our HVAC system (the kitchen hood, and the two runs of ductwork that have to go four stories up to the roof). That subcontractor is being a huge flake and is probably going to be the weakest link who delays our opening date by weeks. Hooray.

Photo dump!