This is the TLDR version.
Steemians mentioned in this post: 
This video will give you a taste of a lot that happened in Crypto SXSW:
(in this video you’ll hear the story of how
My trip to SXSW in Austin, Texas started with Sommer telling me, “You should go to the Decentralized Art Show in SXSW. We have a condo there and you could stay there for free.”
My answer, “hmmmm…for free? Uh, i guess I don’t have any reason to say no.”
Sommer, also known as
The crypto people mostly did the “unofficial” SXSW, meaning, we didn’t pay the outrageous $1K fees to gain entrance to the events. None of us had the SXSW badges, LOL, but we didn’t need them to gain entry to the Crypto Summit or afterparty. Our first night arriving in Austin fits into the category of “purely insane”, as I headed to the Santa Cruz Theater where I hung the art I had brought with me.
At the Santa Cruz theater, there were a number of crypto art pieces that were associated with the Decentralized Art Show. I will do a separate post about the Decentralized Art Show because there’s too much content. I had gone straight to the Santa Cruz theater from the airport, so I still hadn’t been to our hotel room. After the art party was done, Steven and I headed to Wyndam, where we were to stay for the week. Thanks to Sommer and Lauren, the founders of Decentralized Art Shows, who had arranged this for us in advance. These guys made a lot of things happen at the art show, including shock from his blue Decred jacket:
Ryan, owner of Santa Cruz Theater shown in middle:
Here’s where things get crazy.
When we used our room keys on the door to our hotel room, the light flashed green, but the door was still locked. We both tried our keys many times, and it was very confusing because we heard a loud click each time, but the door still would not open. After we were about to give up, the door opened, and a blonde woman was standing right there, told us that we had the wrong room number. We apologized, and were about to head back to the front desk, then the woman said, “Well, you’ve got the wrong place…….well that is, unless you know Lauren……”
Photo of Adryenn Ashley
Adryenn is one of those type A personality people, super driven and on top of a thousand moving parts in the blockchain tech, film/tv and business worlds. I had sort of wanted to get one of my articles into Venture Beat, and I guess she would be the one who could get it there since she’s already a contributing writer….ahhh…….my drive for standard fare success is not as strong as my drive for love……as my life has changed dramatically since finding this Naval Ravikant tweet some months ago:
“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.”
“The house full of love” part was a particularly disturbing smack against the hard floor of reality. This one tweet changed my life and forced me to re-evaluate my Vulcan-based non-relationship system. But I am side-tracked, back to the trip.
The next night was the Crypto Summit where I learned I had missed a bunch of speakers…..I was too wiped out from the night before to make it in time. However, after the Crypto Summit speakers, there was the first crypto party where I met Jane Lippincott, co-founder of Zencash, Kenneth Bosak, Susan, founder of MKR.AI, Harrison Stahl and a lot of other crypto people who are Crypto OGs (original gangsters). The party had the usual fare of loud dance music, jiggling butts of strangers (sandwich dancing with asses shaking YU) and lots of power problems throughout the set. My favorite part happened when all the power went out, the music got cut, and some random guy started beat rapping without any backup sounds.
At some point, I got inspired by this couple and started following them around until I got my nerve up to ask for their photo. I felt like I was entering the Age of Aquarius:
I discovered that the woman with the massive afro is a violinist from Los Angeles, but I didn’t get the name of her group. After meeting a bunch of people who all had been set free by crypto, I did feel that perhaps we are in the first phase of the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius, or something paradigm-shifty like that, but set to bad pop music. It kind of felt like we picked up where the end of the sixties left off….being around a lot of free people is some feeling that is hard to explain. It’s almost like all our blocks have been removed and we can freely decide how to interact with each other, and to what extent. And we can choose our trusted friends to do business with. This is the real beauty of living the crypto life: getting to spend a lot of time with friends instead of lame co-workers not of our choosing.
There is a lot more that happened. A lot of confusion caused by me drinking too much, and not reading enough, and a lot of me thinking about the importance of investing in people. More than anything else, crypto life is making me aware of who authentically values me as a human and who has my back.
Crypto makes it possible to really value friendship in a way that is not possible in a 9-5 corporate lifestyle.
Special thanks to
Stay tuned for my SXSW Decentralized Art Show post, coming very soon!
Taking a week off writing and reading……wow, I can become confused so easily!
Cheers,
Stellabelle