North Edinburgh will soon have its own film society, aiming to screen documentaries monthly. The launch event is planned for the 25th of june, and the members will continue afterwards to watch documentaries in conjunction with invited guests such as film makers, grassroot groups, campaigns or other “experts” discussing the featured topic, giving presentations or respond in questions and answer sessions. Mike Sheils, secretary of the film and video society says: “This will be a great opportunity for people in North Edinburgh to see exciting films from around the world, which are never shown on TV. We invite all local people to attend the events and participate in the discussions, and also to get involved in choosing the films we show.

Indymedia Scotland finally works again, surprisingly after another upgrade. There are still some difficulties with the media gallery and there is a lot of code flyig around admins when using the site. Obviously not visible to ordinary users, I hope. I drowned my keyboard twice in tea last weekend. The Indymedia UK subsection for Scotland also works fine, but slowly as usual. Indymedia Birmingham has now launched, too, and Indymedia Nottingham is preparing for its start, too. I hope people involved in these two new collectives are as nice and practically constructive as the people from other collectives. As here, I was persuaded to go to a gig featuring Rory Mcleod, who is quite a political folk singer, and it was quite good fun.

Runing around like crazy for about a week, with today morning the first time for a breath of a break. However, on the other side it is good fun to be busy – especially with a variety of tasks, so every day is interesting and exciting and successull in one way or another. On Thursday I finished the “Women Vs. G8” video finally after about 3 months. Not that I was able to edit every day, but good thing will take a while, because of the time neeed in between to reflect and create a distance to be more able to see the flaws, especially if the video-making experience is limited and it is only my second video anyways.

It’s getting hectic here. The weekend will be full on, with Mayday Carnival, the Camcorder G8 video premiere, the radio debate, the Beltane fire and performances, the official mayday march, the Indymedia lecture at University, and a conference with entertainment. Alongside this a family member is visiting, so are some friends. Finding accomodation for G8 protesters is still an important issue, as Edinburgh Council continues to ignore the problem of maybe some hundred thousand skint protesters in the city – Make Poverty History at least says they would expect as much, but we here are a bit doubtfull – the biggest demonstration Scotland has seen in a long time was the anti-war demo in Glasgow with 80 000.

Oooops, long time, no blog. Quite a lot happening. Equador’s president has fallen, the new pope is not only from my homecountry and quite dispised there amongst liberal and tolerant thinking people, but was also member of the Hitler Youth, and has put huge hurdles and repressive processes on pregnant women seeking abortion. The mainstream media here is building up an anti-G8 and anti-anarchist hysteria, which now leads to McDonalds and Shell petrol stations being closed down for the week of protests. (Not that anybody would greatly mind these corporations closing for some time, but a big deal is made out of that – guess G8 topic article sell better even without or hardly any news content.