Not Wikipedia: Saving Scientology from Itself, a Thought Experiment

A few years ago we did a post on what it would take to save Wikipedia or make Wikipedia honest and worthwhile (a topic we need to revisit after I scan my copy of Myth of the Britannica and convert it into a Scribd document), so why not make plans that will never come to fruition and sketch out how the remaining members of the "Church" of Scientology could seize their organization back and get it growing again (probably a hopeless task). If Mike Stoklasa can make up an entire Star Trek show from the mere announcement that Patrick Stewart is reprising his Captain Picard character for a series on CBS' streaming service, we should be allowed to concoct pipe dreams too.

Preliminary Damage Control

First and foremost, nothing can happen without removing the present spiritual dictator of Scientology, David "Slappy" Miscavige, noted beater of staff members. He quietly took over the church as Hubbard declined into a hermit in Creston, California, then the coup was made permanent when L. Ron died in 1986. Hubbard himself wanted Scientology run by a committee, and not David Miscavige - Pat Broeker and a board should have been running Scientology, not a high school dropout from Philadelphia who had been involved with Hubbard's Hemet film crew. Once Slappy is gone, a lot of executive positions will have to be filled quickly because he abolished a lot of them in the 1990s. Scientology TV is a gigantic waste of time and the 20,000 members of Scientology worldwide are allegedly forced to watch it; it has to vanish quickly because Slappy either introduces or is a part of every video they made for TV. For the actual "publics" (members of Scientology who aren't staff), the big change would have to be the end of "disconnection", which is the nasty policy of keeping ex-members or critical non-members away from "church" members, so families would be put back together after decades of being apart. Everybody would be released from "The Hole", the prison for Scientology executives out at Golden Era Productions in Hemet, California, so Heber Jentzsch would be free after 14 years, and Miscavige's wife Shelly would be released from wherever she is, whereupon she will probably divorce Slappy. If the new operators of Scientology are smart, the Great Building Selloff will begin, starting with all the derelict properties they have around the world which they were attempting to renovate into churches ("Orgs") or Slappy's favorite kind of Org, an "Ideal Org" (a term he picked up from Hubbard; it's supposed to be an Organization that is operating the best that it can - Miscavige thinks it means a building full of Sea Org-made furniture and decorations that the mother church owns outright. David Miscavige is pulling a real-estate and funding scam on his own members.)

Speaking of the "Sea Org". . . . .

It has no legal existence - it was never incorporated. These people are the priesthood of Scientology - they also work as landscapers, handymen, ship's mechanics on the Freewinds (another thing that will have to be sold, probably for scrap), and so on. They make about $50 a week, their uniforms are owned by the "Church", and they signed a contract to repeatedly reincarnate to work their jobs for a billion years (!), and elderly members get dumped on the street ("offloading") with $500 to their name. All of this has to end if Miscavige is gone - no more SOs in the steakhouse waitstaff-style uniforms that replaced their old dirks and reefers (because the first Sea Org members were the crews of Hubbard's three ships as he sailed around the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the late 1960s-early 1970s; L. Ron had been an officer in the US Navy during World War II). There should be a fund for the elderly SOs, they should live in apartments (ex-barracks) on "Church" property under an assisted-living system, if the individuals want it. All of the young Sea Org members who are foreigners living in the US should be given their passports back and either sent home or allowed to be paid staff (I'm guessing most would leave.) The Sea Org needs to disappear, which means the Office of Special Affairs, to which it is joined at the hip, also goes away.

Religion or Self-Help Group?

This is a real sticking point; Scientology is only a religion in the United States because it won a legal war with the IRS in the early 1990s. In France and Germany it is a self-help group. The problem is that it has a creation of this dimension story ("Incident I"), and a creation of the Thetans story (the tale of Xenu) - you don't see self-help groups with their own cosmogonies. However, people do not go to the Orgs every Sunday for a church service - people are going "up the bridge" by taking levels of classes, and that's mostly on weekdays and nights. I really think Scientology should be kept from using their old claim that the lower levels ("Training Routines" aka "the TRs") help people communicate. It should be sold as a trip into self-made psychedelic experiences and other weirdness. I think they should just pay their taxes like everybody else and quit the religious angle.

Our Scientology Plan

Now remember, I'm not a Scientologist and never was - they don't accept people who have worked in journalism (me), that and I never found Hubbard's "revelations" interesting enough to shell out a quarter of a million dollars for them. What I found interesting was how this small group grew this large bureaucracy with their own insane secret police. It also didn't hurt that the area I live in has had repeated run-ins with failed Scientology outlets. That they have vaults with Hubbard's writings on metal plates inside nitrogen-filled jars didn't dissuade my interest. What can I say? I find train wrecks fascinating.

The plan is this: Scientology should give up with the shell corporations, the anti-psychiatry Citizens' Council for Human Rights (including their building on Sunset Boulevard), and any remaining front groups. They need to get back to basics, renting out small storefronts for Missions (bookstores with training areas in the back or upstairs) starting small Orgs* in houses or mall storefronts, and working their way up. Prices need to drop, as the new Scientology should be run as a non-profit. They should be honest about everything that happened in Scientology from the beginning, when Hubbard had written Dianetics and was running Dianetics groups before the term Scientology was reinvented. They need to be honest about Volney Matheson and the E-meter. They need to go back to the original books; after thirty years of David "Slappy" Miscavige, they have been re-edited/partially rewritten more than once so they all fit in the same size binding. The originals varied in size. Also, I'm not a fan of most of the original dust jacket illustrations, but they will probably be used because Hubbard approved them. Above all else, Scientology needs to create systems to keep the next Miscavige from appearing, so it isn't a crazy dictatorship again. A good way to make that feasible is to make all the local Orgs and Missions be owned by the local Scientology group and thus decentralize the system. That also means that each local group runs their own Scientology internet page again. Finally, it will have to come down to a vote to keep or sell off all the Scientology properties in Clearwater, Florida ("Flag Land Base"), including the futuristic Super Powers building. Allegedly the Rehabilitation Project Force, Scientology's punishment work battalions in the black boiler suits, has been or is in the middle of being shut down; it either ended in 2014 or has been slowly phased out since then. If it isn't by the time Miscavige is given the boot to the head, then it will also go.

So Why did you do all this?

Because nobody on the English-language internet, outside of shills for Miscavige's Scientology, thinks that Scientology is worth saving in any way, shape, or form. They want it dead, probably because of all the online wars over Scientology from the 90's to 2012-ish, including the goofy Tom Cruise video which was mocked relentlessly on and offline. Scientology is smaller than Mormonism, and those people baptized Holocaust victims posthumously into being Mormons, when they weren't doing the same to Adolf Hitler and Vlad III, "the Impaler" (and they've done it more than once in Hitler's case.)  Personally I think that nothing can save the "Church" of Scientology, but the "tech" itself will go on through the various independent Scientology movements.

A lot of what I have written could be applied to the WikiMedia Foundation; they have a lot of skeletons in closets, a clueless leadership, overhead on a building they don't need, a declining editor base in their flagship Wikipedia, and more money than sense. Things need to change in both organizations.


_______________________
* I only call them Missions and Orgs by tradition - if things changed new names would be concocted. I also think that many of the Orgs they have now can be kept, if they are willing to do stuff to bring in foot traffic (have raffles, live music, anything more interesting than weird video kiosks that lecture viewers on how things work in HubbardLand.) There should always be more Missions than Orgs in an area by at least a two-to-one margin.

"We're on the Road to Nowhere": Wikimedia Australia in retrospect

Before we can talk about the dual trainwreck that was/is Wikimedia UK, we should reveal what happened to a sister Wikimedia in a former British colony and present Commonwealth of Nations state, Australia.


A short prologue

Before there was a Wikimedia chapter in the country, Aussie Wikipedians posted what was going on to an "Australian Wikipedians' notice board" which was created in September, 2004. Except for announcements of Melbourne or Sydney meetups, it was rarely used from 2004 to 2008, and the main operators were Chris Sherlock and Ambi (Rebecca Leighton), well-known for their "abusive and arrogant behaviour" as Peter Damian put it in the notes I am working from. Beyond the "notice board" they also operated a mailing list called wikimediaau-1 they began in March, 2006. February 2006 saw the first "official Wikimedia Australia" meeting, which was on Internet Relay Chat for two hours. Angela Beesley made the event happen.


2008-2012

For whatever reason, possibly the drama over Essjay, possibly because Australian Wikipedia is as busy as the University of Woolloomooloo, but very little happened to WMAU until January 23, 2008 when an announcement was made that they were incorporating that year; they started a WMAU wiki on April 20th (not realizing it was Adolf Hitler's birthday.) Daniel Bryant (Daniel) was the first administrator, until he quit later that year. For some bizarre reason, Encyclopedia Dramatica has a page on Bryant's former girlfriend Riana (Riana K. Chakravarti). There should be some mention of Lankivail (Craig Franklin) who was a founder of Wikimedia Australia, he died this April. When he was alive he was one of those "deletionist patroller" users (joined Wikipedia in 2004); he ran for ArbCom in 2008 and didn't make the cut, but he was made an administrator in 2008. His Wordpress blog survives him.

By March of 2008 they had begun the incorporation process, which they documented (like everything else) on MetaWiki. They have a rules page, a page on how they voted to be an organization, eleven pages of their IRC logs, etc. We do not know if those rules were actually acted upon after approval. There was a bid for Wikimania 2009 to take place in Brisbane made by WMAU; Buenos Aires was chosen instead.

Things began to heat up in 2012 as "schisms" (as Peter Damian or Eric Barbour put it) began to form - John Vandenberg's protégé Laura Hale ran a slate of officers against Vandenberg's slate of officers in the WMAU elections that year, with Hale and Steven Zhang (Steve Crossin) nominating their slate. They lost on November 25th (34 votes were cast), then Laura Hale and her landlord Ross Mallett (Wikipedian Hawkeye7, who had run against Lankveil for the Treasurer's position) plus Bidgee (Robert Myers) jetted to a Colorado ski competition which would also include a stop at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. Before the election they had applied for a grant of $4,635 for the trip and were in flight when it was turned down. Hale quit WMAU, but somehow became an (unpaid) Wikimedian in residence with the Spanish Paralympic Committee, providing material on the Paralympic Games in London. She also got involved with Wikinews. There was a thread about the farcical election on the Wikipediocracy message board, which also brought up that there was a private WMAU mailing list.


2013

Trouble in paradise: Tony Souter's Wikimediaau-1 email "AGM and new committee appear to have no legitimacy under the law and chapter rules" from November 2013 - Tony1 wrote the following:

At this point Crossin/Zhang was President of the WMAU. Of course there was a WO-MB thread on it. Souter was ignored, even though he tried to bring it up again.


2014

This was where the dam broke, as  recounted in this Wikipediocracy message board thread:

Andreas Kolbe:  Recent disagreements on the wikimediaau-l mailing list seem to have led to a permanent split. As far as I can make out, all three wikimediaau-l list admins (Steven Zhang, Charles Gregory and John Vandenberg) have now resigned, to be replaced by David Gerard.

The March archive of wikimediaau-l is here; the relevant thread is "Apparently corrupt administration of this list".

At the same time, a new mailing list, wikimedia-au-members, has been set up by Steven Zhang, the current President of Wikimedia Australia. The March archive of that list is here.

The flashpoint was Steven Zhang's attempted banning of longstanding Wikipedia Signpost contributor Tony Souter (Tony1 (T-C-L)), who Steven felt was asking too many questions (sorry, let me translate that into newspeak: Steven called it "disrupting the list", "repeated personal attacks", etc.).

John Vandenberg immediately said he did not want to have anything to do with the new list. Steven Zhang on the other hand said he did not want to have anything to do with the old list, and encouraged everyone else to consider unsubscribing from it too.

Down the thread:

Silent Editor: ....I read on the old list that WMAU is probably not going to apply for FDC funds this year, but they haven't really made up their minds yet. Of course, it's likely that time to apply will run out before they make up their minds, anyway.

But of course, Steven Zhang posted the note saying they probably wouldn't apply for funds to the old list several days after he'd posted saying he was unsubscribing from that list...

Great illustration of Sayre's Law.

On Vandenberg and Steve Zhang, Kelly Martin had this to say:

.....I only have vague recollections of Zhang and Vandenberg, but generally thought that Vandenberg seemed less nuts than average for a Wikipedian. Zhang, on the other hand, is a froot loop; I remember him quite well when he was Steve Crossin. I'd say that I don't understand how someone like him got to any level of authority, but this is Wikipedia we're talking about.....

2015-2016

In October, 2015 there was the "2016 annual meeting" and the following people were elected: Gideon Digby (Gnangarra), Pru Mitchell (Pru.mitchell), Tom Hogarth (TomH), Bidgee (R. Myers) again, and Caddie Brain (Tenniscourtisland). Digby is a professional photographer in Perth, made a promotional video for the Wikimedia Foundation that was ignored; Mitchell is a librarian from Melbourne and an Adjunct Lecturer at Charles Stuart University; Hogarth, a "researcher" in Belmont near Perth who used undeclared sockpuppet accounts to make over 100,000 actions; Myers is some sort of aviation tech or pilot for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service and also involved with Charles Stuart University; Brain is an ex-journalist, now librarian with a large vanity website who has only been involved with Wikipedia since 2016 - they were so desperate for people they elected a rank noob. Of course there was a WO-MB thread, started by our good friend tarantino, sniping at how bad the essay Gideon Digby wrote was (it reads more like a rough transcript of spoken remarks than an actual polished document). In the thread Greg Kohs linked to a Business Insider Australia article "Fair use, or free use? Behind the interests and alliances that stand to gain from changes to Australia's copyright law" by Chris Pash. The most important point from the article was this:

"Lobby groups behind a high profile campaign on Wikipedia urging a switch to US-style copyright law in Australia have links to interests, including multinationals such as Google, which will gain substantially from any change to a so-called “fair use” system......The links are undeclared when Australian visitors to Wikipedia, which is run by registered charity Wikimedia Australia, are asked to email their local federal member of parliament......The Wikimedia Foundation told Business Insider: “Google is one of many donors that contributes to the Wikimedia Foundation, and their contributions have not influenced Wikipedia’s involvement in the fair use campaign in Australia.”"

That's the real importance of these national chapters of Wikipedia - pushing for American-style copyright laws so that Wikipedia doesn't have to pay for material. Meanwhile, the people elected to run WMAU have pulled a game of musical chairs and all of them are still there in 2018, with the addition of two people: Sam Wilson (Samwilson) and Robert Whyte.  At least we don't have to bring up Stephen Bain anymore....

Guest Post: Wikipedia's War Against Journalism

As somebody who was chased around the San Diego Public Library by James Alexander's underlings I can agree that the WMF does not want to deal with anybody attempting to do any sort of journalism about Wikipedia at all.

 
Wikipedia's War Against Journalism

by CrowsNest 


Some may remember a prior incident where a Wikipedia Administrator, the rather hapless Dennis Brown (real name), just unilaterally decided one day to reinterpret the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, specifically their rules on disclosure of conflicts of interest, to mean that journalists seeking to contact Wikipedia users via their Wikipedia talk pages are acting as paid editors, either for their publication or themselves if freelance. Therefore, if they do not provide their full contact details, they can be blocked on sight. This was no theoretical exercise; Dennis, a light bulb salesman with a gambling addict wife, came up with this reinterpretation of the terms to justify his block of a user claiming to be a journalist.

Despite this being a gross and obvious distortion of the meaning of that disclosure requirement, which of course forms part of the legal contract between users and the Foundation, as far as I know, this was not an aberration. Attempts to clarify the situation with the Wikipedia community, in whose name this block was placed, to seek reassurance this really was just a mistake, were rebuffed as essentially a case of 'we don't know what you're saying, but regardless, Dennis is a great guy, and we are sure there is nothing to see here, so now only kindly fuck off'.

The person who made that enquiry, on behalf of the blocked journalist, is of course also now blocked by Wikipedia. That decision was upheld by a Wikipedia Steward, the aptly named There'sNoTime (identity hidden), and it has been suggested elsewhere that this means that act has some legitimacy beyond merely being the act of a private individual. In short, she may have exposed the WMF to liability. I am sceptical, but if that information helps anybody concerned by this and looking to take it further, there it is.

Fast forward to today, and in another spectacular example of over-reach which seems to cast Wikipedia as an enemy of the press, yet another Wikipedia Administrator, C.Fred, another pseudonym, has unilaterally reinterpreted a Wikipedia policy, one that nominally stops users issuing legal threats to each other as a way of chilling discussion, as also encompassing any mention of contacting the media.

Again, this is not an exercise in theory, this Administrator issued the following ultimatum to a blocked user, as part of the appeal process for them to gain an ublock, having been blocked for making legal threats. To get unblocked, as well as promising not to make any more legal threats, they also included this condition, to declare that......

	Either that you have not made any statement to the press about conduct on Wikipedia or that you have withdrawn such statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =855241852

The might just be two examples, but given their seriousness, and that it involved different Administrators, and the likelihood neither are seen as mistakes by either other Administrators or the wider editor base who trust these people to enforce their rules for them, I think it is safe to say the Wikipedia community wishes to create a hostile environment for journalists.

They want to make it as difficult as possible for journalists to contact Wikipedians, in particular making investigative journalism almost impossible. You can't feasibly investigate any Wikipedia issue if you are restricted to only contacting people who have enabled email or otherwise posted contact details, which the vast majority do not. And perhaps understandably, being required to announce yourself as a member of the press immediately puts people on guard and potentially denies the public information that Wikipedia editors, be they witnesses or bad actors, might otherwise freely volunteer.

Secondly, they want to ensure Wikipedia editors are frightened of the consequences of speaking to journalists. There's nothing to stop them doing it privately of course, but if they need to get others to talk as well, perhaps to help journalists verify elements of a story prior to publishing, they are in the same bind if those editors don't give any way to privately contact them.

So, why would the Wikipedia community want to be hostile to journalists? Well, it's simple. They got shit to hide. A lot of shit. Read our forum if you doubt this. The thing Wikipedians fear most, is the outside world ever figuring out how it all really works. This ironically leaves the media space free and clear, to be used for the broadcast of the views of Wikipedians who are more than happy to speak to the press. You might get the idea what that entails, when you consider just how closely the Wikipedia community resembles a cult. The ability to redefine your own rules to say whatever you want for the purposes of maintaining internal security and rebuff any protestations from those deemed outsiders or troublemakers, being an obvious and pertinent example.

As far as their external image goes, the Wikipedians would have you believe you can edit Wikipedia without disclosing your identity, as long as you aren't violating the Terms of Use. And they would have you believe editors are never punished for doing something as socially beneficial as explaining to the public how Wikipedia really works.

Try it. Any journalist out there, please try it. If you need story ideas on which to base you enquiries, if you need to know which Wikipedians to contact to ask questions of, or get witness statements from, drop us a private message. We are nothing if not eager to learn of your success. Or failure.

Not Wikipedia: The Astronomer-Nudist of Black's Beach

As long as we are talking about academia in San Diego county and it's still summer, the subject of Lloyd Johnson and his unique website seems fitting. Johnson was an adjunct professor of Astronomy at a number of community colleges in the area; he may have burnt out and quit in 2011*, his Rate My Professors pages end that year. Whatever the case, his 1990s website Nudism Resources by Lloyd (warning, page background is a repeated nude shot of him freediving taken from above) used to be linked to his professors' page at Cuyamaca College back when it was much smaller than it is now, a former "technology annex" of Grossmont College slowly becoming a free-stranding institution.

The URL of the site (http://blacksbeach.org) gives away Lloyd's true love, Black's Beach. The beach (named after the family that owned the land) has been quietly nudist since May of 1974, though a New York Times article from 1976 was noting that tourists from NYC were showing up in San Diego just for Black's Beach - the word had gotten out. Johnson had this to say about the beach circa 2006:

As of July 2006, I have been to Black's thousands of times. There has been recent change, just after July 4, 1999. Signs were posted stating that nudity is illegal. These signs are sometimes missing, due to theft, but the law can still be enforced.  Put your clothes on when on the city beach, which begins somewhere south of the trail head, perhaps 100 meters.  In the past there have been cones with a sign marking the nudity line.  As of May or June of 2003 lifeguards have not been putting these markers up.  Instead there is a square, yellow post with the letters T P C B, marking the boundary for Torrey Pines City Beach.  The yellow post has been missing since about November 5, 2005, but there have been orange cones there lately. New visitors planning to spend time south of the Burro Trail, should locate the northern-most "nudity prohibited" sign and keep it in mind when going for a walk. The southern boundary is marked by a very unofficial sign against the cliff, indicating the boundary between the city and state beaches.  Beyond is the city beach, Black's Beach, where nudity is prohibited.  The rock is near, on the nude side of the boundary.  The post and cones mark the point where you should dress.

The clothing optional tradition is alive and between these boundaries.  However, it is not actually Black's Beach, but rather Torrey Pines State Beach. We still call it Black's. The boundaries for the clothing optional area of the beach stretch from Mussel Rocks in the north to Salk Institute Road in the south.  Salk Institute Road does not actually reach the beach, but the boundary is where it would reach the beach, if it was extended.

The beach is at the base of a cliff, which tends to isolate it. The hike down, and especially the hike up, is "challenging." Children often manage it better than adults.

The beach itself is very flat. The beach can be very wide at low tide and very narrow at high tide. I've been there twice when the tide was all the way up to the cliff. Check the tides before you go and if it gets above 6 feet in the winter, there will be little or no beach left. You can also get an indication of the weather and surf from the Scripp's Pier Cam. It shows an area just south of Black's Beach. Check my weather page.

The waters can be hazardous. Rip currents and sting rays are the most common problems. I see lots of sting rays and guitarfish. Many of my friends have been stung. I have been stung once. Rip currents can take you way out. I managed swim back to shore against a ripe current at least once, but it was tiring. If you find yourself in such a current, don't try to swim against it. Swim parallel to the coast, then swim back. Lifeguards are present, making patrols, but they have only a few posts on the beach. Black's Beach is a pack it in, pack it out place. You will find no trash cans. Fortunately we have a beach cleaning team. These guys go to Black's nearly every day. They arrive early, walk the whole length of the beach, typically filling a dozen grocery bags with trash. They carry it up the trail to the dumpster, then come down to enjoy their clean beach. If you figure out who these guys are, don't offer them your trash. Don't use them as an excuse to litter. Carry your own trash out. Do thank them for sparing your eyes of the horror of a littered beach.

There are out houses at the top, courtesy of the glider port.  There are no toilet facilities on the beach.  Some people pee in the same place as the dolphins.  Others climb a little ways into a canyon.

There is a constant parade of tourists, especially on weekends. Single men tend to be shunned and single women tend to get more attention than they want. I do see single women there and I also see children there. It is easy to fall prey to gawkers. If you follow some simple guidelines, you can avoid those problems. 

Besides being a nudist beach/climbing expedition, Black's Beach is a great surfing area (thanks to a submarine trench offshore) and was known for that in the 1960s before it became a nudist beach. He also has pages on San Onofre beach, Rincon beach (only a partial-nude photo of Lloyd on the sand), Silver Strand beach (all words, no photos; he was not impressed. To be cute he used the Periodic table symbol "Ag" [short for argentum, its Latin name] in the URL.)  And we should mention his "No Disclamer Needed" disclaimer link at the top of the welcome page.

This website is a time capsule for how frameless personal websites looked like from 1995 to 2007, especially if the owner knew how to make webpages and digitize photos. It's also a window into a San Diego community that is rarely heard from. As Indiana Jones once said, "It belongs in a museum!"

The site used to have a photo of Lloyd Johnson standing full frontal, and for a long time as a joke I would take the chorus of Ogden Edsl's "Dead Puppies" and sing "Lloyd's, Lloyd's johnson, dum-dum-dum, Lloyd's, Lloyd's johnson, dum-dum-dum, Lloyd's johnson has a kink." I'm still amazed that he was brave enough to link his private page to his Cuyamaca instructor's page, especially in an era when professional bluenoses like Rebecca Clark were on the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Governing Board.

Thanks to Eric Barbour for pulling the site out of the murk using search engine voodoo.



Postscript

* Truth is always stranger than fiction - Lloyd is still out there, running a diving business in Hawai'i. Eric did some looking and found that somebody else was running another website at that address in the 1990s, so the website I remember was taken down by Johnson in 2001 and when he could get an address with "Black's beach" in it, he just rebuilt he website over there, probably the same day. To make matters weirder, there are two commingled websites at http://blacksbeach.org: the older version whose intro page is blacksbeach.org/welcome.html and the newer page which lacks that fork. Some of the pages are shared between the websites, which can be distinguished by their tab markers: the newer website is called "Black's Beach Bares" the older "Nudism Resources by Lloyd."

Not Wikipedia: Touring San Diego State's "new" Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences building

This is not the first time I've mentioned this place on a blog; last year I discussed the then-forthcoming Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences building on this blog's clone, and it turned out I was right about the place; the first floor is operating on both sides, but sections of the second and third floors are still under construction on the tall wing (South side) and the second story of the short wing (North side) closest to the original Engineering building. The building opened to great fanfare this January, which makes it shocking that they are still getting their act together.

For some reason they still have a construction webcam running on the building, even though the construction is all indoors. Notice that the dome covering the camera is pretty grimy now.

The Thomas and Anne Day quad. If you look up Thomas Day in the Los Angeles Times archives, back in 1992 there was a brutal fight between SDSU President Day and the professorate over proposed budget cuts, leading to a vote of no confidence by them, and Day stepped down in 1996. He had been SDSU president since 1978, nearly twenty years. As far as we can tell, Thomas Day is still alive, but his wife Anne passed away in 2013, making her one of the few deceased people on the building.

The plain soil bit behind the red walkway; if you were facing towards Day quad, this view would be 90 degrees to the right. The building with the arched walkway dates to the 1940s. The table on the extreme right behind the tree is one of the permanent ping-pong tables that sit in the sun.

One of the engineering lab rooms inside the ground floor of the building. All interior photographs were taken quickly.

Elevator to the second floor; this was the one in the front area of the South building.

And this is where the construction starts. The actual engineering labs (which function as lab and classroom) were finished, but all the stuff across from them was unfinished.

One of the unfinished areas; possibly a study area or a space for a computer lab.

Third floor of the South wing; the paper on the floor is there to protect it from heavy dolly wear and whatnot. The white "wall" where the exit sign is in the back is actual more of that white plastic sheeting.

As you can see it's all over the place. I think this might be the second floor.

Clark is the construction firm involved, and that's what the third-story floorplan looks like.

And here is a zone under construction, with one of the workers doing something. Notice that the glass is being held in true by painter's blue paper tape at the corner.

More of what ex-President Hirshman was good at, "selling" naming rights for the EIS. Here is their third-story student and faculty lounge, named after the Meyers.

And here's the Fronius Room on the second floor.

Yes the man himself got something named after him, the second story terrace where students' brains will melt in the sun.

Hirshman's tables and deck furniture (in the back).

Hirshman's benches.

I guess all of this is payment for the names on the building. Hirshman himself is now president of Stevenson University, a private college near Baltimore, Maryland that used to be Villa Julie College, a Catholic women's junior college from the late 1940s to the 1960s that went co-educational in 1972.

They named a terrace on the second story of the North wing, just because they could.

There is a bridge that connects the North wing to the old Engineering building and they gave naming rights to the Doyle family foundation. I didn't get photos of every plaque, but some of them were for local companies, and seeing all these names in metal made it look more like a Good 'Ol Boys club then anything truly academic.

All the stairwells are THX-1138 White and the paint fumes are overpowering.

.....Except for the landings with standpipes. New commercial/institutional fire code thing?

They are using more-and-more LCD TV screens as permanent monitors - here is one that has been displaying the same message since the summer began.

SDSU things that aren't the EIS

As long as we are showing photos of of SDSU, let me show you what they do to the place during the summer.

A large hole behind the EIS, don't ask me why, but you see stuff like that.

Bench made by the Works Progress Administration possibly in 1938 or 1940. Portions of the original college were built by the WPA right before America's involvement in World War II, such as....

This long portico attached to Hepner Hall. Which as I was walking around.....

One of the Hepner classrooms was being gutted and modernized, something that has been happening to the creakier classrooms in the older buildings for the last couple of years. This creeping change will probably take a decade to finish.

They allowed the art students to do university-sanctioned "street art" (so it was mamby-pamby) a few years ago, and now the art is beginning to rot off the boards.

Behind a temporary fence they were replanting this mangy corner garden, possibly to be a Xeriscape. This is near the Life Science building that used to be the SDSU model grade school in the 1940s that was conjoined to the Physics-Astronomy building in the 1950s or early 1960s.

The corner next to that fenced garden. that two way portico leads to the other Life Science building across a bridge. Yes, that is a TV yagi antenna. If you squint at SDSU, you think you are on the Spanish coast.

Worst photograph of Hardy Tower ever, taken from the plants alongside that long portico. Speaking of that space.....

This lamp has been sitting like this for a while now, notice the cobwebs inside.

More of that green fencing. Re-laying paving bricks in front to the SDSU bookstore, probably because it was sinking in at spots.

This has been a thing for two years; the elevator foyer in the Student Services building had been there for twenty years; Hirshman had them enclose it with glass doors and walls and gave the Mack family donors the naming rights.

They really want you to know that this was "gifted" by this Mack family.

This is inside an elevator.

Don't ask me why these cherry picker rigs are in this faded courtyard. The grass was always dying and now it's been churned up.

The same space a few days later.

.....I think I've made my point, which is "the university is always being worked on in the summer."

Bonus: Those @%&*ing Ofo bikes

The urban cancer of mainland China, brightly-colored rent-a-bikes that use a smartphone app to ride, have hit San Diego, and the bikes littered the campus this month.

Ofo has been around since 2014 and they started sending their canary yellow bikes to San Francisco somewhere in the last year or so, and San Diego is now the "sideshow of a sideshow" to quote Donald Wolfit's version of General Sir Archibald James Murray in Lawrence of Arabia, of the Great Undeclared Non-Motorized Metered Transport War. Ofo is one of five or six "bike or scooter sharing" businesses operating in the town. Here the bikes are sitting in the second-floor walkway of Parking Structure Two, which has been around since the late 1960s.

Bike left in front of the Life Sciences building, a hazard for the twentysomething who walks while looking at their smartphone.

This Ofo bike lacks the "skinned" basket frame and the bent fender of a true veteran.

The big plastic yellow dingus on the back forks is the locking mechanism to keep free rides and theft from happening. You pay a dollar an hour to ride this dorky thing. There is a big chance that Ofo might vanish from San Diego as they have from other burgs in other states.

The only guy happy that a mainland Chinese "unicorn" start-up is hitting a wall in America, this blog's Sebastian Gorka, Chris Chappell. 很多运气，最白的家伙！