To give you an idea of the last time I wore dress shoes, I didn’t recognize the box at first because it was full of shooting targets from when I went to summer camp. I assembled an outfit that I like to think projected, “I’m wearing this sweater because I value unrestricted limb motion” and not, “I don’t have a jacket and I wanted to cover up the fact that I don’t have a belt.” I have no idea what the cut on my forehead I inflicted upon myself while trying to shave said, but, thankfully, they didn’t seem to notice. I’d say there’s some room for improvement with my morning routine but all in all I can do this professional, be-seen-in-public thing.

I’m not going to say where this interview was because A. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be publicly associated with someone who can’t shave properly and B. I don’t want to increase the odds of them coming to know that I can’t shave properly. The fact that I even had an interview was out of the ordinary for me at this point but the interview itself was actually relatively standard in that, while being interviewed by another man of similar age, Star Wars became a topic of discussion early on. One of the things we talked about was the superior quality of the original versions of episodes IV-VI. Nothing ground breaking there. (I’m pretty sure there are people who have no idea who Greedo is that can tell you Greedo shooting first was a mistake.) As the discussion progressed I had a new insight into why I probably liked them better besides the obvious reasons that they were what I knew first and they were aesthetically consistent throughout.

I recently found the bulk of my Star Wars toys cached away in my brother’s home office and these were probably the finest children’s toys ever produced. The fact that you could tell that they were using models in the films didn’t make it less realitic, it made it more realistic because I actually had all of those space ships in my room! When I think of an X-Wing, I actually think of the behind the scenes footage of the Death Star run where they’re moving the fighters with wire. I don’t want to say that the props used weren’t detailed, because they were, but that’s never been the point with Star Wars fans. For every obsessive that goes out and buys an official piece of merchandise their are dozens more that make their own. Polish has never been the point. This is a fantasy franchise that is, perhaps more than any other, rooted in its fans’ ability to bring about physical manifestations and see it in reality. The more I think about it the more confused I am as to why merchandisers and film makers ignore this aspect of it’s success. I am not a toy collector or fanatic. I don’t buy any real collectibles at all. Not even those vinyl figurines people who like urban art seem to enjoy so much. But I’m pretty sure a common complaint (from children) is that these toys are poor representations of the films’ subjects. It’s probably a relatively alienating process to play with a toy from a more recent movie franchise. Not because the toys are bad, imagination is always going to be inherent in playing with a toy. It’s actually the best part. That aspect let’s you have the fun of putting Han and Chewie in Sherwood Forest, only to be “bat-a-ranged” by Batman. If anything, I’m saying the movies are getting too good.

I haven’t seen Avatar yet but from what I understand this movie is all about polish. It’s supposed to be immersive on a level we haven’t seen yet and apparently Cameron has set his sights on Lucas’ franchise in terms of producing a back story and universe to rival the one present in Star Wars’ literature, games, encyclopedias, and what-nots. But it’ll never happen; because, while Avatar might be more fleshed out with it’s scientifically accurate planet descriptions and it’s professionally created and documented languages, the film was made with the intention of being realistic to an unrealistic degree. It’s hard to say a movie that has brought in over 1.3 1.9 billion dollars worldwide is a failure. Especially considering how close it is to eclipsing Episode IV’s revenues (adjusted for inflation.) A film as financially successful as Avatar will surely have an impact on the industry and will probably always have a certain type of pop culture cache as the first of it’s kind technologically. However, there is no way a fan can take a piece of a movie like Avatar home and, in my mind, that’s going to kill it.

Although they probably don’t see it this way, even Avatar’s most rabid fans are admitting that this is a problem.

The more I think about it, the more benefits I see to treating a film project like open source software, at least if you’re trying to foster a community surrounding the work. I think about a show like Pure Pwnage which has become wildly successful for a web series (and is making a switch television.) They have done an amazing job monetizing the form. Part of that is due to the fact that they have a relatively uniform audience with a shared, targetable, interest — gaming. Online advertising is really only part of the puzzle, merchandising has got to be at least three of the corner pieces here. In the beginning the characters wore distinctive (sometimes copyright infringing) shirts that were obviously home made. You can buy those shirts. You can wear your FPS Doug shirt and feel like you have a piece of the show. Even if Jeremy isn’t rubbing each shirt on his balls.

Pure Pwnage is also a show that has the spoof factor. It’s actually gotten pretty sophisticated now and has aspects that would be difficult to reproduce but when it started out they were literally walking around with keyboards and using a PSP with a chord hanging out of a pipe to “open” security gates. I’m not saying everything has to be that rudimentary, there are plenty of large scale productions out there that allow people to get the same sense. Indiana Jones had a huge budget and tons of action scenes but what do people love most about Raiders of the Lost Ark? They love a hat, a whip, a bag of sand, and a dude getting chased by a big rock.

And fans go out and make stuff like this.

The fact that this Lego boulder got busted on Mythbusters doesn’t matter, just like it doesn’t matter that I’ve never heard of a boulder booby trap in real life or that the motorcycle scene from The Last Crusade got busted. These films don’t have to be realistic, they just have to make you feel like a real part of something.

A quick search will yield some awesome non literal star wars interpretations…

yoda oragami

and they’re all more satisfying than this

I personally think giving gifts is really fun but that’s because I rarely take into account what the other person needs or wants. That is not to say I don’t try to give them something they will like. A gift is supposed to cement social ties and say “I know who you are, I was thinking about you, and I like you.” That said, I have never tried to get a gift for my own child, especially one that lives in a grown up-ish body. I would imagine that would be hard because everything they have is already a gift. You are a river unto your people. It’s hard to play on an inside joke because since you live in another city you probably miss the funniest stuff that happens. I mean, I tried to convey the humorousness of the time I got handcuffed in Dallas by the DART police to my parents but instead of laughing they just told me I was an idiot. I also just don’t want as much stuff as I used to. In fact, I only want things in the way Miss America contestants do; i.e. things ludicrously out of reach.

That’s why the twenty bucks they surprised me with in the mail was so great. As someone who has no money of their own, but still manages to have quite a bit of stuff, this may sound weird but it has been a long time since I had that kid feeling of “this is mine, all mine, and I’m going to blow it!” Like an eight year old Wil Wheaton with five bucks in his pocket, I thought of a myriad of ways to spend it. I could wait until Friday and share my wealth with people at The Broken Record in the form of fifty cent Pabsts. Do you know how many beers that is? Forty! (Minus tip) I, like Wil Wheaton before me, thought of saving my money and putting it towards something later but that is a slap in the face to the spirit of the gift. After calculating how many lemon drops I could buy, I ultimately decided to spend the entirety of my fortune on w00tstock and watch Wil Wheaton talk about how awesome having five bucks could be.

There was a brief moment where I wondered if I was geeky enough to go to this. Generally we like to think that geeks are a friendly and accepting bunch; but, as more and more people come into the geek fold, there are those who suffered for their preferred recreations who are wary of people who didn’t pay their dues. And I’m a kind of cheap guy. I watched my friend Patrick get kicked out of D&D club because he wasn’t a serious enough geek and, for my part, was never even allowed to play a game. To this day people laugh when I say not playing D&D is a regret of mine but I’m 100% serious. It was my own fault though. I can still remember the day when I told my friend Michael that we probably shouldn’t talk about Star Wars so publicly anymore. I remember guiltily looking on as Leif was mocked for trying to explain the difference between an AT-AT and an AT-ST to someone who mislabeled them. (I actually remember being a little confused as to why I should have to jump in since I thought everyone already knew the difference.) In high school I quickly learned that correcting people, in general, was just a bad idea. Sure, I still memorized most of the items in Diablo II and could call them without the use of an ID scroll but I was coordinated enough to skateboard and experienced a pretty decent and stigma free adolescence. Plus, as long as we’re being honest, video games are geek amateur hour. They’re almost the new football at this point. In high school my friend “D” made graphs plotting what he was going to do per level with his Diablo characters; he also carried a switch blade, was actually on the football team, and had his hands in a number of illicit ventures.

My fears were completely unfounded and the fact that there were so many moments of mixed laughter coming from different parts of the hall only served to remind me that there is no one type of geek. There were word geeks, programming geeks, gaming geeks, young geeks, old geeks… I could go on and on.

I started this post with the intention of talking about how much fun I had at w00tstock. I wanted to talk about the feeling of belonging and how funny everyone was, including the audience, but instead I wound up talking about geek guilt and thinking about labels. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the title of a Geek last night and today I don’t think it matters. I feel like today there are more things than ever to be interested in but instead of viewing ourselves as a huge ven diagram (the kind that Wil Wheaton and Paul of Paul and Storm made when designing W00tstock) we are defining ourselves and each other more narrowly than ever. “I’m a geek,” we say, or, “She’s the vegan one.” Maybe Chuck Klosterman is right and it’s all The Real World’s fault for casting stereotypes and editing people into one dimensional characters. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are vegans out there who love shooting guns and there are English scholars who still watch T.V. So yes, we should celebrate the fact that everyone at The Swedish American Hall last night wanted a secret passageway activated by book and we should hold on to that feeling of saying “ARRR!” with a roomfull of other people; I just don’t want to forget that all those people were different.

Today is my birthday and for the first time in twenty three years I feel different than I did the night before. (Unless you count nausea.) Thank you Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage, Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Kid Beyond and every single person in attendance last night for making me feel like I was a tiny part of something and bigger than it at the same time.

Moments from w00tstock

I got my w00tstock poster signed! Adam Savage laughed at my friend Josh Wood in print!

Kid Beyond was the only one with a pro body-graph stance and no one had given him the chance yet. I was happy to oblige.

The happiest and saddest song

Paul and Storm from the night before

Molly Lewis

The previous Kid Beyond link was for his official site but I recommend checking out his blog My Idea of Fun which focuses on the supervocalic (and has cool videos pulled from the youtubes)

My search for more information on Adkins led me to the Born Bad series.  Most people generally point to Nuggets as the definitive series for the rockabilly/garage style revival that’s coming around (you can’t read a Strange Boys review that doesn’t mention it) but I’ve found the original series to be pretty much impossible to get my hands on (I can’t even find the tracklist).  I do have the Original Artyfacts from the First Psychadelic Era set however and if it does in fact pull a lot of its material from the original series than I can say Born Bad feels much earthier and relevant to the stuff bands like The Strange Boys and King Khan & The BBQ are putting out.  Physical copies of Born Bad aren’t exactly just lying around either but you can find them online. I can’t vouch for the quality or safety of that site because I didn’t download them but it looks trustworthy in my opinion.

If you want to take a look at the full tracklist to see if it’s worth it (which it is) or for some jumping off points you can find it broken down by volume here

Check out this list of compilations if you’re looking for a resource to find out about more bands.

This couldn’t have come at a better time because I’ve been wanting to find more stuff related to bands like The Mummies and The Phantom Surfers and Thee Cormans (who really fall more on the surf/psych side of things but I just wanted to link them.)

Since this post has a lot to do with hard to find records this link from Sean Bonner for hard to find punk records seems appropriate

This post sure was link heavy but I don’t want them to start calling me the “dead-end of the internet” like they are Wikipedia over that whole “no follow” thing. But that’s for another post.

The 100th monkey effect seemed weird to me the first time I encountered it.  You have to understand that it was the first thing I heard when I walked into an unlisted after school club called Charlotte’s Web that had no visible link to any subject.  The faculty member proceeded to tell me that I was the last member they would accept because the club was now one away from achieving critical mass and they didn’t want it to get out of hand. In retrospect, my high school was pretty cool. After I had a chance to think about it, the 100th monkey effect seemed more reasonable than critical mass itself.  After all, societies around the globe all seem to have designed similar origin myths independently of one another at around the same time.  Tools too were developed in different societies independently.  But critical mass… that always seemed like it should be one.  The idea, of course, is that the early adopters are doing so on a basis of merit rather than simple emulation.  Let’s look at the classic example of someone looking into the sky.  A passerby might follow the onlooker’s line of sight while they continued to walk and, if there was something of interest, they would pause.  Enough people standing around looking up though and a passerby would stop to scan the sky simply because there were so many already doing it.
The pedestrian assumes there is something up there, or that the behavior has merit, even if they can’t see it.

While critical mass is interesting and exciting in a kind of mass hysteria, lemmings off a cliff kind of way, I think the first couple of people are the most interesting part. That’s why I was so happy to see this video.

I guess you could say that the first few people started dancing because it’s fun and the others started dancing because critical mass was achieved.  I’d rather argue that while not everything has a critical mass of one, dance parties do.

Weirdo Kid Starts Huge Dance Party – Watch more Funny Videos

sometimes utterly demoralizing I’m sure, and then there are those who will empower themselves.  Instead of thinking about how we don’t have jobs though, I’d rather think about the awesome places there are to work at.  I came across this video

The Floor Is Lava from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

from a Vimeo employee while I was still taking my finals and it became something of a “land on the horizon” for me.  I marveled at the notion that I just had to throw some ink down on a few more papers and I would be free to seek my future, possibly as bright and shiny as Casey Donahue’s shoes.  It honestly looks like they have the most fun ever.  From autotuned conversations to Robocop x Jurrasic Park crossovers to impeccable tributes to Star Wars and the aforementioned dinosaur laden park.  If you already have a job, don’t be bitter.  Just enjoy knowing that somewhere out there a kid right out of/still in college is living the dream.  I for one ain’t mad at ya Vimeo staff.

Thanks to @jayzombie for the craigslist link, and (I believe) @tywhite for posting the autotune link that led me to the rest of these glorious videos.