I'm giving a talk on the STEMpunk Project this Saturday at the Boulder Future Salon:

https://www.meetup.com/future-51/events/243043394/

I love BFS and I would encourage you to come check it out if you're in the area.
Let me tell you a story which illustrates why I think they're a valuable group. Once upon a time I went to a presentation there given by a member who'd written a program that generates artificial music. As we were waiting around one of the other guys (whose name I can't remember off the top of my head) just randomly handed me a book and said "you'd probably get a kick out of this."
It was Rudolph Carnap's "The Logical Structure of The World". I read the introduction, thumbed through it a bit, and we had a brief conversation about its relevance to philosophy and to recondite areas of software engineering like database design.

Reflecting on this episode later I realized how remarkable it was. It's not like this other person knew me very well, but by the mere fact that I'd walked through the door he assumed I'd be able to read a book like this and that I'd want to.
I have encountered precious few places like this anywhere.
There wound up being a guitar in the facility, and later in that same meetup I had a duel with the software my friend had created.
Any place where you can find robot music and logical positivism is a place worth exploring.
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You might want to make this a meetup not a discussion post. That will alert people who are geographically local of the event

That hadn't even occurred to me, thank you! Do you think it'd be inappropriate? This isn't a LW specific meetup, just a bunch of tech nerds getting together to discuss this huge tech project I just finished.