Mastering Margaritas
“Whatcha reading?”
“The Master and Margarita. It’s pretty cool.”
“Wait, aren’t you under 21?”
“What? No, I turn 21 next January.”
“How are you going to make margaritas if you’re not 21?”
“No, why would I want to make margaritas?”
“Then why are you reading ‘Mastering Margaritas?'”
“Dude no, I’m reading THE MASTER and Margarita.”
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Some people say that beggars can’t be choosers. Those motherfuckers have never been to Berkeley.
It’s Wednesday morning, 3 AM. I’m walking with Rodney, just hanging out. Just hanging out at 3 AM. We eventually end up walking through People’s Park. This is a very bad idea. People’s Park is sketchy during the day when there’s a bunch of hippies and drifters shooting up on the grass, but at night, when the crazy feral hobos roam the park talking (and sometimes shouting incoherently) to themselves, it’s absolutely terrifying. It’s a good thing we’re both wearing sneakers, because there’s probably a ton of discarded syringes on the grass.
Rodney and I are pretty big guys. We’re both around 6 foot 2. He’s a pale white guy with spectacles who’s moderately buff. I’m a smiley Asian kid who’s pretty much just skin and bone. So I’m moderately confident we’ll be fine until some guy in the dark about 20 metres away starts screaming “GIVE US MONEY” and we start hurrying the fuck along before we get shanked by a dope fiend.
And out of nowhere, a hobo lady suddenly appears in front of us. I recognise her. She has fuzzy, short brown hair, is a bit fat, and has stark blue eyes that look far-off, as if lost in memories of innumerable sorrows and hardships. She looks wise. She also sits on the ground by Asian Ghetto and yells obscenities at people: I was getting lunch one day when I walked past her and she told me that I “looked like I was sucking a dick.”
But now she’s here, hands in her pockets, walking towards us. “Excuse me sirs, could you spare a quarter?” Her eyes, pale halogen searchlights in the morning darkness, move from Rodney and settle on me. “Not you,” she tells me. She tilts her chin at Rodney. “The nice American boy.”
We walk past her, around the corner, and down a block before we burst out laughing.
“Holy shit, dude, that was like, damn…”
“Yeah, I know, right? 'Fine! Don’t take money from the people who own your country.'”
And that was that.
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Captain’s log, stardate 31415.9. Morale is low. The end of the semester is three weeks away, and my “Fucks To Give” reservoir is near empty. I am running on Fucks fumes.
In the process of acquiring coffee, I have managed only to spill it all over myself. My arm stings from the burning hot caffeinated liquid, but my pride stings immeasurably more. My last clean shirt, pristine white only a few minutes prior, is now stained dark brown from the right sleeve down to the left waist. I am wearing a white shirt because I like wearing white clothing, and I like wearing white clothing because nobody can tell if I’ve stained it with toothpaste. While the same principle applies to coffee and dark clothing, I am reluctant to walk around all day smelling like espresso or, god forbid, rancid mocha milk.
Not that it matters. I was out of clean black shirts anyway. In fact, I have no clean clothes left at all. My shirt was one of the white Dropbox T-shirts with the blue logo that’s ridiculously soft. Though its super-soft qualities are uninhibited, I cannot suffer the shame of showing up to class with such a huge stain on it. There is only one positive outcome from this deplorable state of affairs: if I feel myself falling asleep during lecture, I can always put the stained part of the shirt in my mouth and suck on the coffee to wake me up. This fact is of little relief to me.
As I trudge back up the hill to Cory, I pass an advertisement displayed prominently on the side of a bus stop. “AVOIDING EYE CONTACT IS ONE SIGN OF AUTISM.” Thank you for telling me, Bus Stop Sign. It seems that 75% of my friends, my immediate family, my girlfriend, and I might be autistic.
Shit.
Plan of action is as follows. Go home. Do laundry. Watch Adventure Time. Look up whether the phrase “Fuck Bitches, Acquire Currency” refers to disregarding said females or copulating with them. Then, I shall eat some ice cream, and my sorrows with it.
End Log.
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I started going to hackathons my freshman year of college, mainly because of a new club at my school called Hackers@Berkeley. Hackathons back then were fun, low-stress affairs: though they tended to last for a full 24 hours, people would go there and work on side projects or build something cool, whether it was hardware or software. Everything was really laid back. People would talk with each other, eat some free snacks, and code to the dull thuds and electronic growls of Daft Punk playing in the background. For about a day, we would move fast and make things. And at the end of a hackathon, each group would demo their projects in front of everyone and the coolest groups would get modest prizes, usually stuff like mechanical keyboards or tablets. I met a lot of the early H@B members at a Facebook hackathon, where we rode around on little plastic toy bikes in the middle of an auto garage that had been converted to a workspace. One of the Berkeley kids got a prize for making a webcam that displayed ASCII instead of images, which he build for (and I quote) “shits and giggles.”
Some time later, I went to a hackathon in Palo Alto at a startup incubator expecting the same sort of chill herp-derping with code that I was used to. Instead, it was a grueling 3-day-straight slog, a first-world white-collar sweatshop. Because the prizes weren’t just keyboards and iPads anymore: the prize was cash and a meeting with a group of high-power venture capitalists. So people went crazy. They brought their startup products and demoed them as hacks, while others were frantically building pitches of startup ideas so they could get funded and live the dream life of a legit Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. At the end, we built a little bracelet that hooked up to your smartphone and vibrated turn-by-turn directions so you wouldn’t have to look at your smartphone while driving. It was a crude little Arduino contraption that was held together by duct-tape, solid-core wire, and crushed dreams, but it worked. And the judges asked us questions like “Why does it look so ugly?” “Will it make money?” “Can you mass produce this?” We left as finalists, which was nice. But the winner of the hack (was there even such a thing as a “winner” of an actual hackathon?) didn’t actually make anything. Their presentation was a slide deck with wireframes and a pitch for their startup.
Hackathons have transformed into flashy, ultracompetitive startup pitch competitions. Organisers try to get more and more money from big corporate sponsors to pay for extravagant food, entertainment, and prizes. When a hackathon has a first prize of a million dollars in cash, the people you are sitting next to become competitors, not colleagues. Many hackathons now invite ridiculous amounts of people to attend despite not being able to reasonably accommodate them; college hackathons compete with each other month after month for the title of “biggest hackathon in the world” in a race to nowhere. WiFi fails under the weight of so many people. Attendees come and work ridiculous amounts of hours because of a financial reward rather than any sort of legitimate interest in making things. Then so many hacks are made that there’s not enough time to go through them all and judge them on their merits, and when hacks do get judged, they’re evaluated on how much money they can potentially make rather than their novelty or coolness.
I’m not saying that the first hackathons I went to were perfect. Subsisting solely on Red Bull and junk food is probably not healthy, and people would probably be a lot more productive if they slept more. But hackathon organizers today fundamentally misunderstand what makes a hackathon great. It’s not about the glitz and glamour, or about having the most attendees, or even staying up all night. Hackathons are about having a bunch of creative people coming together to work on something cool, and I think people who run hackathons have forgotten that.
duchennesmiles reblogged this from pgao and added:
this is awesome
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