Want to skip Amazon and support independent artists this holiday season? Head to the online market put together by the good folks of the XOXO festival. They've curated some really cool stuff made by enterprising members of their community.

These are just some of the things I have my eyes on:

The XOXO festival (previously) is one of the best events I've ever attended; and this year's was the biggest, most inclusive one yet, but one of the things that makes XOXO so special is the cap on attendance, which means most of us can't attend; that's why it's such good news that the organizers have begin posting videos from all the presentations for your delectation. — Read the rest

Described as "an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet," Andy Baio and Andy McMillan's internet-fest baby XOXO will be back in early September.

And according to this tweet, they're making it bigger and more inclusive (be sure to check out their "living" inclusion policy):

We're moving to a new venue, and growing so we can offer significantly more free subsidized passes, prioritizing underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals.

XOXO is the much-loved culture and tech conference in Portland, organized by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan; they took 2017 off and would not confirm when or if the conference would be back, but a year later, it's back!

Last June, the founders of Portland's XOXO Conference announced a new co-working space; now they've formalized it, calling it "XOXO Outpost" and promising "something more than just a place to sit on your laptop—a supportive community of amazing people you're genuinely excited to see every day, and XOXO's extended network of friends and advisors to help your project succeed."

The Portland, OR conference celebrating indie tech and creativity is inspiring, invigorating, and utopian in the very best way, and they're open for registration for the Sept 10-13 event in their new community space.

The brilliant, Portland-based festival is now a year-round phenomenon, housed in a 13,000 sqft refurbed WWII ship-building factory that will incubate and nurture independent art and technology and house events year round.

Justin describes his life as an early Web writer, why it made him happy and how it nearly destroyed him, and who it turned him into. It's a talk that's uplifting and sad and funny and absolutely worth your time.

(via Waxy)

Glenn Fleishman reports from Portland's beloved arts and technology festival, where a darker sense of mission and meaning took hold in the event's third year.

In September 2013, I interviewed at the XOXO conference and festival the four lead editors of Boing Boing, this fine publication, a descendant of zine culture that is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, on the occasion of its 25th continuous year in existence. — Read the rest

Last month our friend Andy Baio, co-organizer of the incredible XOXO Festival in Portland, invited Xeni, David, Cory and me to be interviewed on stage by Glenn Fleishman. It was a blast! Here's the video.

In 1988, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair launched a print zine called bOING bOING, "the world's greatest neurozine."

Glenn Fleishman heads to Portland for the second XOXO festival, where a maker's heart can leave the body, be shared among kindred spirits, and know that it will be cared for.

On Saturday, September 21, 2013, a "first": Four of the Boing Boing editors will be on stage, all at the same time, at the XOXO festival in Portland, Oregon.

Mark, Cory, Pesco and I will be speaking with Glenn Fleishman about the past 25 years (yep!) — Read the rest

I have fallen in love with a building, hundreds of people, a MakerBot, a portable toilet trailer, food trucks, and two men each named Andy. Is it possible to fall in love with a conference? If so, I have. The organizers named the conference XOXO for hugs and kisses. This was presented without hipster irony or marketing-speak. They meant it. They delivered.

Every once in a while, a new project comes along that makes you go "Hmmmmmm." Like a horror movie in which the method of terror is social media. Good news! Such a movie is now in the works! George Nolfi, who wrote and directed The Adjustment Bureau, is on board to direct XOXO, and he'll be supervising the screenplay by Mark Heyman, who co-wrote Black Swan. — Read the rest

Andy Baio and Andy McMillan have announced XOXO, a SXSW-like "disruptive creativity" conference in Portland. They're pre-selling the tickets on Kickstarter, and if they don't sell enough, they're not going to do it. They've made and shot through their targets already — don't worry! — Read the rest

A Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis' A Kind of Blue was released 15 years ago and remains one of the finest and most profoundly blasphemous chiptune tributes to popular music ever made. Andy Baio, who organized and crowdfunded the project, today announced an anniversary edition vinyl. — Read the rest

Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest

On January 15th, Google will disappear all Youtube annotations, which have lots of structural problems (spammy, don't work well on mobile or big screens), but which have been a font of creative inspiration that spawned whole genres of interactive Youtube projects, from games to interactive films to branching narrative adventures to musical experiments, to collaborative art projects to deep context and annotation.