On Saturday, October 29th, San Francisco’s week-long Come Out and Play Festival starts with the 3rd annual Halloween edition of Journey to the End of the Night.

San Francisco’s second annual Come Out and Play Festival will transform the city into a giant playground once more with an expanded week long line-up of over 15 real-world games. Showcasing more local designers than ever before, this year’s festival emphasizes creative, site-specific games like Undercover Capture the Flag, and strategic, city-wide games like Journey to the End of the Night. In addition, the Come Out and Play Festival will invite players to sample games from across the spectrum, including street games, site-specific games, smartphone-based pervasive games, and alternative sports.

The 2011 festival will kick off with the third Halloween edition of Journey to the End of the Night, an epic chase through a series of artist-created checkpoints scattered across San Francisco, which last year attracted 1,300 players. This year, Journey organizers will present a new format featuring nonlinear checkpoints and the Chaser Killer, a new character designed to terrify chasers as they pursue their targeted players across the haunted cityscape. Winners will, as always, be feted and praised at the final checkpoint’s atmospheric outdoor party.

JTTEOTN starts at 7pm at Justin Herman Plaza. Check the schedule for all other Come Out and Play games. All the games are free to play.

photo by Sam Lavigne

For the past 5 years a street game called Journey To The End of The Night has been played out in cities around the world. This time it returns home to San Francisco where it all began 5 years ago as an SF0 event created by Ian Kizu-Blair, Sean Mahan and Sam Lavigne.

On June 18th, players will have to navigate through unique checkpoints scattered throughout the city while chasers try to tag them. Once tagged, players join the chasers, hunting down their friends and others. To make things more interesting, players may only travel on foot or by public transportation.

Registration for the free game starts at 6:30 PM on Saturday, June 18th at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco. The game will start around 7:30 PM and will end before BART stops running. Bring some water, your running shoes, and some slow friends to sacrifice to the chasers.

More information can be found on the site: 5yearsrunning.com

Andrew Dalton reports over at local North of Panhandle blog Aggressive Panhandler on a new mural at the old Harding Theater featuring the combined awesomeness of both cats and lasers.

[via SFist]

photo by aggressivepanhandler

photo by Nicole Aptekar

Industrial art groups and large scale projects are no strangers to the Bay Area, but it’s not often that several of these groups collaborate on something so large they couldn’t do it alone. Syzygryd is a 2.5 ton interactive, collaborative musical instrument that breathes fire. This Burning Man Honorarium project is being created through the combined efforts of Interpretive Arson, False Profit Labs, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, and Denmark based Illutron.

Syzygryd is an interactive metal sculpture measuring 60 feet in diameter and 13 feet tall at its highest point. It consists of three giant spiraling metal arms that join into a tornado of cubes in the center of the space. At the outer edges of the sculpture are three touchscreen grid sequencers (think of a giant 4 foot wide Tenori-on) which allow people to visually compose music together. The touchscreens are also connected to DMX controllers which sequence 1.5 kilowatts of LEDs and an array of flame effects, including a 20 foot fire tornado in the center. In short, the music composed by three strangers will be translated into fire, light, and sound.

While Syzygryd is a Burning Man Honorarium project and received partial funding from the Burning Man Organization, it’s not quite enough to build the envisioned art piece. The Syzygryd team will be throwing Syzygy, a Gala Benefit for the Syzygryd Project at CELLspace on Friday, June 4th with live musical and aerial performance as well as a silent auction to help raise additional funds. You’ll also get a chance to get a hands-on preview of the controllers

There is a Kickstarter going to help put the fire in Syzygryd. In addition to helping bring more fire into the art world, you’ll also score some great rewards for your pledge. The goodies range from stickers and t-shirts to a handheld flamethrower and even your own personal Dance Dance Immolation run. After paying for all the plumbing and parts for the flame effects, any additional funds raised past the $8224 goal will be put towards more fuel for the fire during Burning Man.

Most of Syzygryd will be open-sourced. There are currently plans to release the collaborative grid sequencer (written in Processing), the plans for the AVR-based DMX to LED controller and flame effect relays, and Creative Commons licensed sets of sounds for Ableton Live. If the Kickstarter is successful, additional information including the fire tornado CAD drawings, the flame effects ignition system plans, and detailed fuel diagrams will be publicly released.

This multi-disciplinary project is currently in full swing in community spaces across the Bay Area, including NIMBY, Noisebridge, and TechShop. Additional volunteers of all skill levels are always welcome. If you have interest in anything from music or electrical design to lighting, software, or metal fabrication and you want to work on one of the biggest projects at Burning Man this year, send an email to volunteers@syzygryd.com. If you’re a musician, familiar with Ableton Live, check out the MDK to get your music added to the sculpture. For more info on the project you can check out www.syzygryd.com and follow @Syzygryd on Twitter.

In a two part series, an “Industrious Architecture” company named BUILD has collected, analyzed, and graded several wonderful examples of structures built with the most readily available materials for the young aspiring architect: couch cushions.

Their analysis of each structure is highly entertaining even if you don’t know your T-cushions from your box cushions. The rating on the above structure? A solid A+ for it’s “brilliant synergy between the weighted foundation and the light tensile structure” and “attenuation of structure and bright interior spaces.”

Part 1 and Part 2 of “Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis”

Corpus Callosum is a California-based music & performance art ensemble that performs regularly around the Bay Area. In addition to their wide variety of instruments (everything from accordions to glockenspiels to home-made instruments), their performances also include stilts, puppets, moving picture boxes, and various other performance art. Their music is best described as “folk-haunted orchestration” or “post-industrial-folk-noir”. You may have seen them performing at a Tweed Ride or over at Noisebridge.

Last October they filmed the above music video for their song “Lullaby #2″ at the Wave Organ in San Francisco. Utilizing two DSLR cameras they made a stop motion video of the band playing while Avery Burke, the lead singer, was fitted for a blazer. The budget was less than $200 and all filming was done in a single day.

photo by Audrey Penven

Band member, Dax Tran-Caffee explained that in order to film the video they had to first shoot the band playing the song in real-time. They took that video, dropped down the framerate, and displayed it on location via a big screen with live video overlaid on top. In addition to the overlaid video, there were also karaoke-esque cues such as which beat, chord, word or phoneme the frame should be. Then it was a matter of matching up their live-feed bodies (mouths, instrument placement, strums, etc) with their pre-recorded bodies every 8 seconds before the intervalometer fired off the DSLR still cameras. All of this over a 6 hour shoot on a peninsula extending into the Bay waters, with everything running on gas generators.

They are currently working on raising funds for their first full length in-studio album via Kickstarter.

Everyone knows that a large part of SXSW is the parties. Sure we all go to a couple panels during the day, but the true networking happens late into the night at various venues and taco trucks around Austin. This year was no different, except for one new party: the Revolving Door Party in the Hilton Lobby.

As people returned to the Hilton after last call on Sunday night, they were invited to don a party hat and take a dance around the revolving door of the Austin Hilton. Some people took one quick turn, while others spent quite a bit of time dancing round and round. One of the organizers, @efng spent an astonishing 2 hours in the doors, keeping the party going late into the night. Another organizer was SF Shenaniganist Nelz, who handed out hats and noisemakers. I worked “the door” for awhile checking IDs.

photo by Ed Hunsinger

Foursquare and Gowalla checkins plus multiple tweets drew people to the Revolving Door Party and the after party in the lobby. That’s how Robert Scoble heard about it. He got out of bed to come partake in the fun and ended up springing for pizza for everyone. LA Weekly’s Shannon Cottreell has some photos and Chuck Reynolds takes us on a video tour of the party. I also snapped a few pics and video.

Chatroulette Map is a project that is grabbing the IP addresses of users, along with a screenshot, and then using Geo IP tools to pinpoint them roughly on the map. The site relies on the fact that Chatroulette connects users directly to each other (assumedly in an effort to save bandwidth) and in doing so exposes IP addresses. Most of the screenshots are safe and entertaining, but there are a few of those Not-Safe-For-Work ones mixed in. The site is also a great way to see a small sampling of the concentration of users around the world.

Previously on Laughing Squid:

- Andrey Ternovskiy, 17 Year-Old Founder of Chatroulette

- Jon Stewart Using Chatroulette on The Daily Show

- Chatroulette Game, If You Turn Your Head I Win

- Meeting Yourself on Chatroulette

- Catroulette

Many users of Chatroulette have taken creative approaches to using the site that connects you with a random stranger (see previous post: Chatroulette Game, If You Turn Your Head I Win). However Kale has taken it to a new level of meta when interacting with strangers.

Rather than sending her own webcam video, she took the stream of her chat partner and mirrored it back to them. Since there’s a slight delay when connecting video streams she was able to capture people’s responses when they saw themselves. She took several hours of these reactions and condensed them down into the 4 minute video above. However surprise and smiles weren’t the only reactions, also check out the appropriately titled “head bop” and “hands” videos she compiled.

Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace, has a space program now. This past weekend was Spacebridge‘s highly successful first launch. With only a few meetings and a hurried week of building, they sent a weather balloon to almost 70,000ft and successfully retrieved the craft. Their balloon had an attached payload fitted with two onboard cameras which recorded some stunning video and photos like the one above. Also along for the ride was a G1 with custom written software, appropriately named Icarus, that recorded information from the GPS and accelerometer and relayed it back via SMS.

The launch was not without problems, including low temperatures (-21° c) wreaking havoc on batteries, a premature burst of the balloon, and a failed ham radio location beacon, but most everything else went well. Team Member Mikolaj Habryn has a write up of the full experience. Also worth a view is the amazing and nausea-inducing (stabilization is on the list for the next launch) video from the downward facing camera onboard.

images and video via Spacebridge

photo by EDW Lynch

Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest in front of Twitter’s San Francisco office on Thursday, but found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters, including guest blogger EDW Lynch above.

photo by Rubin Starset

WBC’s hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn. A portable stereo blared Lady GaGa, while press and people passing by ignored the WBC signs and took pictures and videos of the more entertaining signs. I was also there and turned on the video camera while holding my sign.

Westboro had scheduled an appearance in front of the Golden Gate Theatre later that evening to protest Fiddler on the Roof. Fellow guest blogger, Burstein!, reports:

Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, Fred Phelps and his followers cancelled their appearance before Fiddler on the Roof. Apparently, they were all hated out from their big day and just had no more hate to spare. Nevertheless, even in their absence a small crowd gathered and gave rise to an elegantly dadaist protest in which accordions, random signs of love and hate, and rick rolls abounded. While many of those attending Fiddler were bemused and confused, the staff and crew apparently loved this counter-protest and the director, stage manager, and choreographer all came out to thank these ridiculous protesters.

photo by sandwichgirl

Here’s more coverage of the protest:

photos by LiveSoMa

photos by Sam

photos by Chad Armstrong

See also: God Hates Twitter, Westboro Baptist Church Plans Protest At Twitter Headquarters

UPDATE: Here’s an absurd sign generator to help you prank the Westboro Baptist Church when they come to your town.

StreetWars is a 3 week long, 24/7 game of assassin played out with squirt guns and other water weapons. It’s been held in New York, Vancouver, Vienna, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, Paris, and San Francisco previously. This year it’s returning to San Francisco for the third time, running April 5th through May 2nd.

The premise of StreetWars is very simple: You receive an envelope containing your target’s name, a picture, their work and home address, and some contact info. Your job is to hunt them down and “kill” them with a water (squirt gun, water ballon, etc) all while evading the unknown assassin that has your envelope. There are a small number of rules to keep game play fair, most importantly you must be over 18 and live and work in San Francisco. After 3 weeks and the inevitable “Sudden Death” period, the last assassin standing will win a cash prize.

If you’re interested in playing, it will cost you $45 and you’ll need to sign up by the deadline of March 27, 3:03pm.

photo by Jim Maurer

San Francisco celebrated the 9th Annual No Pants Subway Ride again this year as hundreds of people dropped trou and boarded BART. The train cars were packed to the brim with record numbers of underwear-clad commuters jockeying for a place to stand on Sunday afternoon. After a crowded ride, the throng exited the Embarcadero Station and continued on foot back to the Powell Street station.

At the Powell Street station, the wide selection of pants at the Westfield Mall was briefly blocked by uniformed and pants-wearing security. Not to be deterred, the crowd wandered up Powell Street, past smiling tourists and towards Union Square, where the Levi’s Store had the promise of pants and a good sense of humor. Many of the pantsless participants enjoyed lingering around the Union Square area for a while before disbanding across the city.

photo by Alan Dejecacion

Several people have uploaded videos and photos of the event:

- Video from @stephane
- AP “raw video”
- Jim Maurer
- Danielle Peña
- Jeff Spirer
- Rendy Lai
- Ralph Nguyen

The event, originally organized by Improv Everywhere in New York City, happened globally in 43 cities this year. Reports from participants in many of those cities can be found on Improv Everywhere’s site.

photo by Seth Rosenblatt

The Post Yule Pyre is an annual tradition put on by the Friends of the Rootless Forest. After logging the sidewalks of San Francisco for the crop of evergreens that regularly appear this time of year, people gathered on Ocean Beach to give these trees the proper send off on Sunday.

The enormous bonfire roared as it quickly consumed several dozen Christmas trees. Not surprisingly it wasn’t long before the police showed up to shut things down. A few smaller fires were started as people dispersed and it appeared that at least one person was taken into custody, perhaps as a result of the smaller fires.

photo by Max Elman

photo by Jamison Wieser

photo by Ed Hunsinger

There is a good write-up over on Dust and Illusions, and several people have posted photos and videos from the event:

My photos and videos

Post Yule Pyre Pool on Flickr

Heather Lynch

Seth Rosenblatt

Barry Lefsky

Jamison Wieser

photo by Thomas Kelley

Inspired by Michael Hughes’ Souvenir project, Jason Powell started Looking Into The Past, a Flickr pool devoted to combining old photos of locations, buildings, and people with the present day scene. The ones with the most impact have the photographer holding an old photo in front of the camera lined up with features in the scene. Since many of these gems are buried in the pool, I’ve created a gallery with some favorites. Paulo Canabarro and Wired UK have also collected some good ones.

If you’re interested in taking your own shots like this there are several online resources for original images.