Swap Meet
Piracy – Karaoke – Conviviality
Saturday, June 30
9pm until late
Free
So how about that iPhone, huh? You can talk to people, listen to music, watch videos… how nice.
But there’s this other thing where you can do all of that for free. AND you can share music with whoever you want. AND you can do it while singing karaoke. AND it gets you drunk. It even comes with Steve Miller pre-installed. What is this amazing thing called??
It’s called Swap Meet, my friend.
Welcome home.
About Swap Meet
Swap Meet is a monthly gathering where you can come with your favorite music files and trade them with other physical human people. Then, holler along with the dulcet tones of handcrafted MIDI karaoke. It’s like the Internet, but with people and beer.
Here’s the (outdated and incomplete) house karaoke list, so you can prepare yourself. If something you’d like to sing is not on the list, you are welcome — nay, encouraged! — to bring your own hand-crafted .KAR files. They’re MIDI-tastic!
What to Bring:
- bring: drinks, or a kindly donation (optional)
- bring: your singin’ voice and dancin’ shoes (optional)
- bring: some storage media and/or a Swap Pack (optional)
- bring: a defiant sense of joy in the face of our eroding cultural freedoms (required)
Swap Pack Themes:
The supercomputers produced the following themes for this month’s Swap Packs:
My Way or the Highway and Time Keeps on Slippin’ Slippin’ Slippin’.
Apparently the supercomputers were not in the mood for brevity. But we’ve found that it is generally a good idea to just go with whatever the supercomputers tell us. Really, that holds for all computers.
Swap Pack how-to:
- 1. Take note of the one or two themes chosen for a given month’s Swap Packs
- 2. Pick out 128 Mb of music (roughly 25-40 MP3s) which interprets, tangents, or ignores one of said themes
- 3. Put the music into a folder
- 4. Put the folder onto portable media (flash drives are handy)
- 5. Take your portable media to Swap Meet
- 6. Swap
- 7. And then we sing!
- (For more details, see the Swap Pack FAQ.)
Some questions you might have and some answers we might have:
Do I need to have an iPod to come?
No. Many people come with hard drives, flash drives, or other alternate file storage devices/media.
Must I swap files at all?
No. You don’t have to swap to sing.
Wait — must I sing?
No. You don’t have to sing to swap. Indeed, you don’t have to sing or swap and you can still be powerfully entertained by the singing and the whatnot. (But beware the power of MIDI karaoke. Maybe you didn’t intend to sing Phil Collins…)
Swap Meet is presented by Superbunker and The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts.
For more information and helpful links, please see the Superbunker Swap Meet project page.
Please note:
According to recent legal decisions, inducing anyone to use physical space for the purpose of sharing music may render the space-time continuum illegal. Use the space-time continuum at your own risk.
Make Swap Meet your friend.