The Best Weekend You Can Have

I’ve started and scrapped this twice already. I think I was attempting to describe the whole of EMF, which doesn’t really work because (a) there’s too much of it, and (2) most of it resists description anyway. So let’s just pull some things out of a bag and see where that takes us…

Hat Village

The core of what is now Hat Village have been EMFing together since 2014, but this time felt extra special, for at least a couple of reasons:

The First-Timers

We had a few first-timers with us, and it’s a rare treat indeed to watch people’s minds being blown in real-time as they realise where they are and what’s going on all around them. They told me later that they had expected that we would all go off and do our own thing during the day, and just come back to camp to sleep (maybe this is how they roll at music fesivals these days? I have no idea, my last Glastonbury was 1995) - I think they were pleasantly surprised to see how The Village is as much as part of the EMF experience as the wider festival.

The Kid

One of our villagers brought their 13-year-old son along. It’s safe to say that he had a substantially different EMF from the rest of us, in the best possible way. He discovered the PolyGen game early on, and then for the next three days, every time I saw him, I got running updates on how his team was crushing the opposition. He was tearing around the site, causing all kinds of (game-related) mischief, appearing with The Potato, or using some of us to run interference while he tried to capture The Potato (which I still don’t understand), and having the absolute time of his life. In fact, when I came back to camp on Friday lunchtime and asked him if he was enjoying himself, he said “How could I not be?“. He’ll be back.

The Suit

Dressing-up has long been a theme of EMF (at least for me), but if you’re trying to optimise for The Number Of People Who Want To Stop And Talk To You, I can highly recommend a test card suit, a glowing hat and a solarpunk network improvised cravat:

If you wander about EMF dressed like this, it can take you up to half an hour to get fron Null Sector to the Robot Arms, because so many people want to ask you questions about your outfit. I’m not often particularly gregarious, but it was a real treat to speak to so many lovely EMFers. Special shout-out to the man in the Night Market who asked me “Which test card is that?” (he reckoned it was probably Test Card F), and the lady outside the Karaoke who asked me if I’d made the suit myself (I invited her to take a closer look at the fire-hazard polyester construction.)

The Vibes

“What’s the best thing you’ve seen or done?” is a fairly standard EMF question, I think, and one that’s basically impossible to answer, but let’s try anyway:

The Design

Seeing the beautiful Solarpunk Network design on everything really made EMF feel whole in a way it maybe hasn’t before. Some of our first-timers said it felt like a properly-established festival (which I guess it is now, but I drank beer and watched Dr Who under the M1 in 2012 so it might be difficult to see from here), and I think the unifying power of the design is a big part of that.

Sunday Afternoon

“Ambling around the site on the Sunday afternoon (as long as the weather plays ball)” is a very particular (and beautiful) vibe that exists only at EMF. There’s no way to adequately capture that in words, but if you know, you know.

Just Being There

Maybe this is hopelessly naive, but EMF feels like a slice of what life could be if all this other shit didn’t keep getting in the way. There’s something very liberating about a few thousand nerds getting to be fully themselves in an environment where nobody will judge us, where people will ask all kinds of interesting questions, but rarely “Why?”

Some of our Hat Village first-timers know me only from work, where I have to be (at least a little) restrained, but at EMF they got to spend time with me being 100% Sam, and one of them told me, as we were drunkenly turning in on Sunday night, “I’ve never met anybody quite like you”, and I can honestly think of no higher compliment.

I’m seeing a lot of excitment and energy on Mastodon, and in our groupchat (another of our first-timers said something like “I have found my people” when he noticed that the group was called Hat Village Idiots), and if we can maintain this, EMF 2026 is going to be something incredible.

In conclusion, then, here are some things we Overheard at EMF.