Bobo_PK 🦄Jan 10

First of all, Congress was a really nice event for me 99% of the time. In this thread I will focus in the 1% that went bad. But first of all background story time.

Storytime: My first toilet party at 32c3 was a wild unorganized event with a lot of sweat and not that muss base. Since I knew toilet DJs from the U60311 in Frankfurt, the idea of partying on the loo was kind of familiar. So for 33c3 I teamed up with the Spieleberatung and brought my Logitech Z623 ->

Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10
I played my first C3 set containing 4-5 songs on the Game Boy. Then people took over with laptops, brought lights and suddenly a whole PA spawned and the rave was ready to go. The "Sendezentrum" was not amused since the music clashed with the stage. But later that day @tasmo rocked the stage there. That's the first time I met him.
After that year we moved to Leipzig and fun went on. We partied in the elevators, outside, in the halls, you name it. All fun and games
Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10
When people heard that Leipzig was over and we would move back to Hamburg, the idea of a toilet party revival came up. I had grown into the chaos family and had much more contacts then before, ordered 1000 FFP2 masks to the LOC and drove to Hamburg. So for #37c3 we threw together our equipment and managed to build up a floor out of trash and leftovers from the build up crew. As always a bigger sound system spawned on day 1 and we had a blast.
Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10
Since 28c3 I have been to congress yearly and GPN and smaller events were my holidays. I never took home my equipment during the nights. It seemed like every nerd had 1-n laptops anyways so stealing was not a thing. Except for 29c3 when a small projector from our assembly was stolen. It was turned off during the night - mine witch run visuals during the whole event was still there right next to it. But since nothing else was taken I brushed it away.
Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10
So back to #39c3. We organized during the year, met a new independent rave crew on day 0 and decided that there is enough equipment and power for two floors. We helped each other during the build up and everything seemed to work out.
The idea of the crews was to open up the stages, fill a few slots and then hand the stage over to the community so that you can DJ for your friends and chaos family. No pressure, no commercial interest, just fun.
Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10

The whole idea is to have a community event. We do the heavy lifting by bringing the decorations and technical equipment and even a few hours of music and then you all can take over and keep the party going. So we leave our equipment there 24/7 so that you can play, have spare cables, adapters, tools and a good sound system.

All of this is sponsored by us - the toilet party crew, a bunch of nerds that love music. We spend our own money on this.

Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10

This is where the 1% of shit happens. On day 1 some one emptied a drink on floor 2 over the mixer. From day 2-3 on floor 1 the recording device of @NikTheDusky was stolen and so was my whole suitcase in which I had spare cables,adapters, tools etc. Our equipment is/was labeled.
@miketango also had small installations in the hallways to the rave that where stolen.

It is very bitter and I still do not understand why. If you are in need of a suitcase - just ask.

Show threadBobo_PK 🦄Jan 10

I do not have the exact number but around 1500€ of equipment was damaged or taken.

The good news, we can earn money and buy things back. The bad news, all community records of floor 1 are gone.

So to the person that took our stuff. Keep the devices but please give us our recordings and next time just ask, I'll lend you anything I brought. Sharing is caring, stealing appealing but only from the upper class. We rave down in the gutters, we are not posh.

Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKJan 10

@Bobo_PK what saddened me most about this, is for 20 years of my life I attended many raves (including the unlicenced ones in warehouses and fields).

There was as you would expect a *lot* of drugs consumed, and these events attracted a diverse crowd from all across the socio-economic spectrum.

until mid 2000s, it was *very* rare for any sound equipment to be sabotaged or stolen (but these incidents started getting worse around 2004/5 onwards, including crews being stalked to their home addresses and entire sound systems stolen from lockups)

I stopped attending/contributing to these events around 2009/10 as everything was getting too out of hand and folk were being harmed, so its a shame to see this starting to happen once again..

Show threadSven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")

@vfrmedia @Bobo_PK This may or may not be related, but there were a lot of complaints at #WHY2025 of there being much more of a 'consumer culture' or 'festival culture' than before, which pretty much matched my own experiences as well, and I definitely heard of more thefts than I normally would at the Dutch camps.

I'm not really sure what is going on, it's not like these events are only just now gaining publicity or popularity, but it is starting to feel like there's a pretty dubious cultural shift happening in the hacker scene around NL/DE in general...

Jan 14 at 10:47pmWeb