SPCC A Casa Amarela

we're throwing a hitchhiker gathering flash rave tonight before all of them go to sines

3º Aniversário INDUSTRIAL PT / INDUSTRIAL PT 3rd Anniversary

DJ Bak_teria + DJ Johnny hex + KKSS + Free food + Free booze

hosted on Level 2 / chill out stage

at SPCC city sewage works. but the excess smell, the need for buckets to flush, and personal ecological concerns, led us to look for a better alternative. i would be lying if i said it was our main goal. necessity, again, is the mother of invention.

images from the humanure handbook

humans produce a lot of shit. i think that besides talking and sitting around doing nothing, it's probably one of the things we do the most. but using city sewage implies, in our case, that a lot of the sewage will end up in the ocean, as pollution, in an open loop.

in order to close this loop and make it sustainable, instead of flushing a toilet, one can compost all waste (see image above). so, and thanks to some input by one of our guests, Tori, we started building dry toilets. we now have three dry toilets, and will continue to do so.

we started with an old plastic bucket, a wood board and an old toilet seat.

we cut a hole in the wood board, attached the seat, and made a frame out of pallets. all the wood was found on the streets. the frame was designed to fit the building toilet room perfectly. then, under the frame, we put the bucket. it's not that hard, really, and it looks great. this one is on the chill out level now:

so this is the structure. the shit and pee must be covered with some kind of dust/matter to prevent smell and certain bacteria growth. saw dust, dry grass trimmings, or even shredded paper work good enough.

and what about the waste? human shit is dangerous if not taken care of. you can get all kinds of fucked up diseases from it. in order to prevent this, one way is to have a hot composting pile (which we do). a hot composting pile needs to be hot enough to "bake" the bacteria and the shit (around 60ºC). in our case, we only have a pile outside, but since it's in the sun and it's summer, it's been degrading gracefully into good compost. it needs a lot of time to stabilize, maybe 6 months, before we can use it. we are planning on getting a big black composter so we can keep the animals away from our shit, since that's also a vector for infection (human shits - bacteria grows - animal eats shit - animal spreads it to human).

our dry toilets don't smell, and if the drunks don't miss the hole too much (which they do, too much), they are much cleaner. this is another loop we successfully closed. a smaller footprint for a cleaner planet.

it's R's birthday party, on level 2, free food + free booze

we'll be having a mini rave to begin our celebrations of the 3 birthdays coming up. T's up first! it's on level 2, food and booze included.

we're having a little barbecue opposing the nationalist protest (because of Portugal day). we'll be using our new sound system (kawak kay)

part of our initial sustainability plan was to have a photo-voltaic system to supply the electricity for the house. so yesterday we finally set it up! here's how we did it for under 80€.

though i like to think we're not binary, the recent house issues fit perfectly with phil zimbardo's model for good and evil, which he refers to as the lucifer effect. in his lecture, he emphasizes the fact that if we want to analyze the perversions in people, we have to look at the power structure in the system.

in our house, despite it being an open, non-authoritarian house, therefore with no explicit power, we had implicit power. P was our alpha-male. he was louder, more violent and more imposing than everyone else. so this spread to everyone. more arguments between the people at the house, more disgruntled guests leaving. this fits zimbardo's model for human behavior, which predicted that people would begin to behave according to the perversions of the leadership (implicit in our case). when someone barked louder and forced him out (a power struggle in a very canine way), the perversions changed. i am curious to see what our new alpha will bring as perversions and/or benefits. because there is another side to this: if someone can be a devil, they can be a hero too. any setting has its power structure, and we need to be aware of this power structure and its perversions, so that we create a space that's a hero bat cave, not a devil's lair.

during 1 year and a half, my house had me as the implicit power, even though there was no explicit one. and my perversions were the perversions of the house. but my good attributes were the good things of the house. and that spread through everyone. it made people different. it pulled people to a more tolerant, happy side we all have. anyone that visited knows that.

at this house, we can create the same positive output. but again: people only show the symptoms of their setting's diseases.

godspeed starstuff ☆★☆☆★★★☆☆☆☆☆

we'll be having a communal dinner for Harald's birthday, our German neighbor from the Galp building.

saturday we resume heavy work on SPCC. plans are to finish all current unfinished floors.