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LIVE: Nerd Nite S2025E10

https://fortcollins.nerdnite.com/2025/10/26/november-20-the-state-of-the-art-in-fashion-and-technology/
fashionthe weblocal
2900 w ; 14 m
  1. 2025-W47
  2. 2025-W48
Notes were made contemporaneously, but are not an objective recreation of the event. Typographical errors are more likely in this format. Loose bullet points and parenthetical remarks are especially from the author.

Wolverine Farm The Publick House is a great location. It has history, and books.

This panel is a little different than the others I’ve attended lately, but Andres’s face is familiar. I know a little of what he’ll be talking about tonight, because he let me approve one of his slides.

After dark, a two-story exterior is viewed at its long side. In the second floor, several windows show the illumination of the meeting taking place inside.
Wolverine Farm The Publick House, viewed from the sidewalk.
A warm interior of a bookshelf on the wall, an arched path behind to more, and an isle stand with yet more books.
Patrons of the shop downstairs will await their turn to order while lined up along these shelves.
A sign posted inside, wearing the names Colorado Sun (a local state news operation, and Perelandra Bookshop. The sign indicates that interested parties can take a dangling strip to read for two hours per week at the venue and be compensated with coffee and a book stipend.
Notice: None of the slips remain for new interested persons to take with them.

The Bosses here at Nerd Nite are as these:

In 2003, Chris Balakrishnan was studying Indigobird as part of his doctorate at Boston University. An NYC event began, and the rest is history (that I can barely abridge because they’re going through it fast!)

Chris Pruneski

Freelance artist.

Chris Pruneski stands in her hand-made Victorian-inspired costuming, with hands behind her back. Her glasses have a long chain descending by her face. There is a large broach at her high-necked collar, a small gold amulet, and a pocket watch hangs over her long dark skirt. Her outer layer is fastened by two dark buckles at her middle.
Chris Prunseksi, after her presentation.

Fashion-ism

Historical and Political Influence on Societal Expression

“History (why did anyone invent bras anyway?)”

Clothing has been around for as long as we can trace our fully lineage. 800,000 years ago, we have furs and leathers with tool marks in them.

Warmth was paramount during the Ice Age. 19,000 years ago, the ice went away in force.

Complex garment have to form-fit around your body. These show up by 40,000 BCE. They needed to be sewn, have cut pieces from larger sheets of material, fastened, etc.

We have evidence of homosapiens in regions where the cold would have made it impossible to survive without complex clothing.

The genetic diversification of head lice coincides with human migration.

Abundance of Artistry

Fashion appears with dyes. New technology for clothing, like weaving, growing flax for linen, cotton, sheep farming and breeding. By 30,000 BCE, we see turquoise, pink, black dyed flax fibers.

Beads become sewn onto items, and buried that way. Ivory was used.

Tattoos become visible as well. Scans show Pazyryk tattooist probably used several tools on a woman’s arm.

Scarification is likely to have appeared here too.

Cultural exchange lead to the establishment of the Silk Road trade route. ~300 BCE to mid 1400s. Chinas establishes it, the Ottomans ended it via boycott. Exchange of silks, linens, cotton, batik, screenprints, clothing styles from far and wide.

Fashion as Language

“Talk shirt-y to me!”

This becomes a self expression. Strong examples are Japanese clothing and tattoos. Even now-extinct groups like Ainu had a style of fashion. Other strong groups include Matadors, native Moroccans.

Exploiting Cultural Authenticity. Why does fashion matter in culture?

We start to see the concept of appropriation in modern times. Signs of parody, coding of good and bad.

The Frankenstein movie is a very fashion-forward film, serving the character storytelling.

Fashion as Status Quo

A slide of various feminine figures and illustrations.
Colors, shape and new vibrance. The 9/11 photo embedded in the middle is the punchline to a set-up that Americanization has been pushed back upon.

Who determines what is in Vogue? What “should” you wear? As things goes in cycles, things come into clear phases of demand and rejection.

Mass-produced cars instantly changed the way clothing was used. Hemlines get much longer when times are hard.

Fashion as Rebellion

A slide of several historical photos, and a typewriter adornment featuring a woman in a cap, long-lived evidence of one such hat featured to that photo's right.
Colors, defiance and pride.

Counter-culture arises. Monoculture diverges.

Hitler hated red lipstick. He thought it was for SLUTS!

Freddie Mercury is impossible not to mention here.

Fashion as Stigma

I bet she has pronouns!

(It’s funny.)

Fashion and Dominance

Fashion reflects primary culture, religion, expectations. It becomes a law of a kind.

Laws against wearing natural hair, shaved, cut. Western clothing has supplanted, more than become adopted naturally.

Marie Antoinette was accused of acquiring a necklace (though she didn’t) and she got killed for it. Vibes.

Mass production and enslaved labor.

40% of clothes are never worn.

Wages.

Consumerism: The Final Boss of Hyper-Capitalism

Microtrends are this extreme end of capitalism and consumerism. It moves faster faster faster faster.

Clothes are getting cheaper.

A beach in Ghana is full of clothes that have washed up.

A top-down view of a beach, where the tide is soaking an existing widespread deposit of abandoned clothes washed in from the ocean.
A shocking number of fabricated clothes are never worn, and whether or not they are, many end up abandoned in nature.

Imitation is flattery. We see only a snippet of of the lives of people, and fashion is dense with the way it communicates to us. Self-image, how you appear. Body shape, style, hair color. “To change your life, you need to have what I have.”

The Makeover. Desire.

The Hunger. Diet culture is a spectrum. Ozempic Chic. Keto, Paleo.

21 Forever. Cosmetic plastic surgery is a form of ashion. Augmentation, vanity. Noses.

Mormon-adjacent plastic surgery culture.

The way you dress.

It indicates who you are, which in-groups you are part of. Your morals, your sexuality. Laces and hats and anything.

You can tell who these people if you just look at their clothing.

(She admits she lives and breathes this stuff, but she’s right, even if you don’t have words for the things we see in the collage photo.)

Don’t let anything–internet or body shape–dictate what you wear.

YOLO. Support your community.

A vintage coppery hairpin with a slightly rosy stone pierced at the end. Small metalwork folds in on itself, the full shape perhaps conjuring an image of a flower, atop the long thin stake. This photo has my hand in it, and behind it is a blurry view of the iPad used to take these notes.
This hairpin was passed around. I like it.

Q&A

Favorite style? Victorian stuff.

Any underrated colors in history. Brown gets a bad rap but it doesn’t wash things out and mixes well.

Politically, having more business-shaven clothes on planes. That’s dumb because not everyone is flying for business. (I think the idea is that this forces culture via clothing. She discusses colonialism as performing this role.)

Do you see the rise of conservatism influencing fashion? Hemlines, (tradwife), Reaganism and feminized silhouettes, high necklines, long sleeves, hyper skinny feminine form. The banality of evil expressed in conservative fashion.

What’s the periodicity of fashion as a top-down cycle? Fashion is picked by people and trickles down. (I believe this trickle-down more than any monetary policy version of that phrase.)

What is the significance of the 80s/90s neons? Part of this very exciting and bright era of American culture, where people were excited to be Americans again. Huge patterns, vivid colors.

Is there a band or an artist you’d love to have wear one of your creations? Would love to dress Chappell Roan, she’s got a really great butt.

What has been the most impractical fashion trend? Venetian women in the 1200s would wear these insane platform shoes so that their long gowns would not drag in the road and the manure. Things that get used don’t survive, things that don’t get used survive instead. (Survivorship bias story, very interesting way to use this.)

I know a lot of stupid stuff about a lot of stupid shit.

(I love her.)

Andres Sepulveda Morales

Creative Technologist

Six individuals stand together for a photo, captured from one side while they look ahead. Andres is wearing a floral shirt, fourth from the left. Andres and Chris occupy the center of the lineup, with four event organizers distributed on either side.
Andres poses together with Chris and the organizers after his presentation.

I’m Tired Grandpa

The rise of the indie-web resistance.

Inspired by Evelyn McMichael (sp?)

Laid off as a software engineer 3 times in 2 years–If you’re starting your career, good luck!

Impact makers and barrier breakers. Rocky Mountain AI 501(c)(3) in Colorado. The guiding mantra is that we want people to understand how this technology works without barriers attached.

This past Monday, they talked about how to protect creativity in an era where AI makes “everyone” a creative.

It’s very (read: too) easy to create stuff.

“No Prompt Needed.” December 5th, exhibit & market.

A slide advertising events put on by Fort Collins AI for Everyone.
This is part of the Fort Collins 'Art Walk' initiative, which has various locations around the city made available especially for people who want to see things in public.

It Wasn’t Always Like This.

Remember When The internet used to feel like a frontier. Personal websites with blinking GIFs. Forums where people actually talked to each other. A place where you could stumble upon something weird and wonderful. Now? It’s an endless scroll of the same content, repackaged and regurgitated.

What Changed? Corporate consolidation turned the web into a handful of walled gardens. Social media platforms became attention extraction machines. And now, AI is flooding everything with synthetic slop. The internet became less about connection and more about conversion.

A slide of two defaced XKCD memes. On the left, one version indicates Furries might be what hold up all modern architecture.
These jokes are derivatives from ://xkcd.com/2347/ (Dependency). As recently as the day before, Cloudflare took down much of the web, including various 'is it down' detector websites. This came weeks on the heels of a prolific AWS outage affecting the web, including a 'smart bed' company whose home products embed AWS keys and cease basic functions during an outage.

Things are becoming weirder than what the Old Weird used to be.

A Marsh of Slop

A lot of the internet is ugly. Too much video. It’s so loud. You can be out with friends who flip from video to video instead of interacting.

Hoax footage, no guardrails. Watermark removal is effortless.

Generative Ai is everywhere. An authenticity crisis. The corporate takeover.

Is it just slop?

Is it genuinely harmful?

Hoaxes: Natural disasters. Sharks in a pool.

Why Would Someone Make Up A Fake Disaster?

The sanctity of the dead. (Ponder this hard.)

Why People Are Freaking Out

You have to deal with all the bullshit associated with it. Cuts, hustles, corporate takeover, struggling to breathe.

The Breaking Point

A slide describing the projected share of text articles authored by humans vs AI. The line for AI rises sharply after ChatGPT's launch in 2022, and now vies for 52%. The inverse zero-sum nature of the graph conveys that human-made content is eclipsed, if not necessarily diminished. To the right, multiple quotes convey that engagement and the reliability of information is deeply questionable today.
While AI-generated content appears to plateau, it holds a threatening position for 50% of all content. Source: Graphite.io

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average .15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau.

Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as “mostly reliable”—down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s.

The Resistance Is Rising

Indie Web Movement. This is Cyclical:

People are starting to connect to each other directly again. (We sense the lack of value.)

Principles of the Indie Web:

A snapshot of the indie web.

A slide of conjecture about the composition of the indie-made web, presented as a three-circle Venn Diagram of truly Indie Web, the Old Web Revival and the Small Web. At the center are the scheme protocols gemini:// and gopher://.
Many philosophies compete the in space of indie-made projects, which is part of the nature of decentralized passion projects.

Neocities, free hosting for static sites. It makes a community, but ToS and centralization can radicalize things overnight.

Open source revolution

Getting off of Windows, Linux has been making large strides into gaming, which is a gap in the ecosystem.

Anecdote

(This is my project: ://github.com/tiliv/anecdote)

A slide of core goals and technology promises using QR as a medium for distribution. It purports decentralization, privacy, an offline-first model of operation and interaction.
I'm in this photo and I like it.bmp

AI can be Open Source Too!

Strange use-cases where value is ambiguous and speculative. Running things locally, if you want that, is possible.

You can get some stuff down without having to pay anybody.

The Linux Problem: You need to have a high pain tolerance.

Some of the fringe stuff is hard to get guides for. (The lack of ecosystem is such a strong problem.)

Don’t go to your job and just say “We should open source everything!”

(True, though.)

Though:

It’s a very exciting time to try things out.

How to Host AI Locally: Ollama and the Open Web UI Linus Torvalds: Speaks on the State of Open Source If you use Linux, learn how to troubleshoot Paying for software is stupid.

Lack of Ownership and Accountability

Ownership: When you build on someone else’s platform, you’re a tenant.

Freedom: No terms of service to violate.

Creativity: The constraints of corporate platforms kill creativity.

Legacy: Platforms come and go.

If I wanna break it, that’s my prerogative.

Consent matters.

If you find that Manchego blog, let ME know.

Get information from your own spaces.

The Economics of Independence

I can give a whole separate talk about Spam and how it affects Hawaii.

The Challenges Ahead

A lot more things are being built on Linux now. Flatpak. Companies are starting to do it for you.

Discoverability, sustainability.

I’m already busy.

Your Next Steps

Create Something. #damage

Tech property surplus.

A slide of a flowchart suggesting you should 1) Explore, 2) Create, 3) Connect and 4) Share.
Do Something.

Q&A

CUDA vs ZLUDA

Where would you get started with Linux

How far away from Skynet are we?

Looks to Yann LeCun, soon-to-be former Meta engineer:

I don’t think we’re going to have Skynet anytime soon. Don’t quote me on that.

(I agree about this, LLMs are not the medium this will take place in.)

How do the economics work with Neocities?

(People are remarking that the hustle culture is not cured on this platform.)

Do you think the AI bubble is bound to burst soon?

He invites us to look at the quarterly business calls from Enron. They’re not being as open about what they’re doing with their investments. Even OpenAI is getting grouchy about some questions.

Valuation of data centers is rough with the lifecycle of processors.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.