SantaCon and Tom Milsom's NYC Launch Party

In which Emily recounts her time spent this past Saturday (12/12/09) in New York City with her mother, stumbling upon SantaCon and meeting Charlie McDonnell, Edd Plant, Tom Milsom, Alex Day, Michael Markman, and some other YouTubers / Nerdfighters.

soon there will be more than two full songs here.


EDIT:
Cool things? My videos embedded on Tom's website.

and Alex's website.

and then Michael Markman, who set up the show, tweeted:

Mickeleh: Best video I've seen on the NY gig of @eddplant @realnerimon @hexachordal and @coollike http://bit.ly/8hdfJ4 thanks @ChateauOfADoubt (RT by myself and @liliesarelike who is Charlie's mum and some 12 year old girl from Florida).

and then a comment on said video from Charlie's mum.

Blah blah blah, I know you don't care, but this is my blog, and I want to record these things.

Subbing you is easy 'cause you're beautiful.

Doot-n-doot-n-doo doo, AHHH!

I wouldn't know that song if it weren't for South Park. Yesss middle school.

Also, sort of related but not really, after years and years of searching for people to teach me to play Dungeons and Dragons, I found one in my friends circle... so I think I'm going to be making a trip to Flights of Fantasy in Colonie sometime soon to buy some dice....four sided, six sided, ten, twelve, and twenty.

You don't know how excited I am.

Internetless

In which Hank Green talks about being without the internet, and I talk back.

And say the word "internet" about 18 billion times.



This makes me glad I don't text message:
Girlfriend Keeper App

Good White Person

This morning I rode my bike to the farmers market. As I rode down my street, I said hello to and sort of ended up riding with another kid on a bike. He told me I didn't need a helmet, and asked why I was wearing one.

I figured I would never talk to this kid again, so I told him a friend of mine was hit by a car on her bike and killed. This did happen, but she wasn't someone I knew personally.

I also told him about the deal with my mom (she pierces her nose, I wear my helmet). He asked me how old my mom was, and said that he thought that was pretty cool.

He told me his name is Rashad and asked me if I go to school, and guessed Russell Sage. I had to explain about Goddard and how I don't live in Vermont. "Oh, but you're from there?" No, I'm from this area. I grew up in Saratoga.

"That explains the accent."

Accent?!?

"Yea, sort of country..."

Rashad goes to Hudson Valley. He grew up in Rochester. He is a year older than me, and is impressed that I'm where I'm at in my studies.

At one point he asked me if I had a boyfriend / why I didn't have a boyfriend. I started to explain that I'm looking for someone who loves Jesus and this isn't easy to find. At this point, his demeanor changed a little bit. A little more serious, a little less flirty. He asked me if I had ever looked into Jehovah's Witnesses.

I explained that I'm really opposed to this, because it is a "works" religion - being that you have to be on your toes at all times making sure you're doing everything right so that God will like you. I really believe that it should stem from faith, a love of God, a love of Jesus causes you to want to do things in a certain way. Like, I love my mom so I wear my helmet, because I wouldn't want to be dishonest to her. I don't wear the helmet because I think that not doing so will hurt my relationship with my mom, even if I believe that to be true, it isn't my motivation.

OK, Jehovah's Witness bashing and explanation over.

Rashad told me that he really wanted to be all religious (for the record, I never in my life set out to be 'all religious'), and that he questioned a lot of different religions. He asked me some questions, of which I explained my beliefs or explained why I thought the answers were irrelevant. Then he asked me two questions I found really interesting.

He asked me what I thought about a white, pointy nosed, blond haired, blue-eyed Jesus.

Jesus is from the Middle East, he wasn't from Western Europe. It is a pretty ridiculous notion that he was a white guy.

He asked me if I believed in Adam and Eve, and what I thought about them being white.

If we all came from Africa, and I believe that Adam and Eve started it all, then it follows that they were African.

"African? You believe that?"

Yea, I mean, it makes sense.

"You're a good white person."

I questioned him and he elaborated "There are bad white people and good white people, and there are bad black people and good black people."

This made me think of something John Green said today, about how we like crime shows because they make good and evil very simple and clear cut, when in reality it isn't so simple.

This conversation also is significant because I had spent the last packet discussing race relations.

Synchronicities abound.

50 Book Challenge

Let's say at the turn of 2009, somebody challenged you to read 50 books before 2010. How would you be doing on that front?

I've compiled my list, including (but excluding from the numbers) the books I listened to during my roadtrip.

1. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things - Michael Braungart
2. Wake Up and Smell the Planet - Grist Magazine
3. Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir - Graham Roumieu
4. Bigfoot: I Not Dead - Graham Roumieu
5. General Ignorance - John Lloyd
6. Che: A Graphic Biography - Spain Rodriguez
7. How We Are Hungry - Dave Eggers
8. You Shall Know Our Velocity! - Dave Eggers
9. Lyrical Life -Casey Jones
10. What is the What - Dave Eggers
11. Mother, Come Home - Paul Hornschemeier (this was really sad and beautiful. I'd recommend it to Graphic Novel Nerdfighters)
12. Urban Homestead - Kelly Coyne
13. City of Glass: The Graphic Novel - Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, David Mazzucchelli
14. My Most Secret Desire - Julie Doucet
15. A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art - Al Hansen
16. La Perdida - Jessica Abel
17. Savage Inequalities - Jonathan Kozol
18. Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman
19. The Complete Handbook of Sewing Machine Repair - Howard Hutchison
20. Things I have learned in my life so far - Stefan Sagmeister
21. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art - Suzanne Lacy
22. Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works - Erik Spiekermann
23. But Is It Art? - Nina Felshin
24. The Pleasures of Slow Food - Corby Kummer
25. Slow Food Nation - Carlo Petrini
26. Letters to a Young Artist - Shelly Bancroft
27. Made from Scratch - Jenna Woginrich
28. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic - Alison Bechdel
29. Unlikely - Jeffrey Brown
30. Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende (this is a really good, interesting and easy read)
30 a. (Audio Book) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
30 b. (AB) Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman
30 c. (AB) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
30 d. (AB) The World Without Us - Alan Weisman
30 e. (AB) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
30 f. (AB) Oil! - Upton Sinclair
31. Reenchantment of Art - Suzi Gablik
32. White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness - Maurice Berger
33. Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum
34. Looking for Alaska - John Green


I'm pretty sure I can and will read 16 or more books over the next 3.5 months.

What have you read this year?

Health Care Reform Thought Bubble

Visual by thoughtbubble.org, Audio by John Green

The best friends I never had.

In the spirit of Ally's synchronicity, I just spent.....maybe.....12? hours watching the video blog communication project of John and Hank Green.


John Green is an author of young adult romance novels, and Hank Green is an enviro-blogger. They live on the other side of the country from one another, and their communication had dwindled to IMing, e-mailing, texting, and the like. To counter this, they challenged themselves to take turns posting videos on YouTube every non-holiday weekday, and not communcating textually for an entire year.

I stumbled on this project, or rather, their YouTube channel whilst watching videos of cute animals (this originated in Sloths and the Slow Loris)

The video I stumbled upon was the following:



If you google the word "adorable," this is one of the first things that shows up.

This video is after the whole "Brotherhood 2.0" project, but I was so amused that I watched a few random videos and then decided to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) so that I would understand all the lingo.


I feel like I could be (or maybe like I am) good friends with these guys. I also love Hank, but strictly in a celebrity-crush sort of way. This is because 1. He is married (as is John) and 2. from what I gather, our theology differs too greatly for me to have been able to consider him if he even was on the market.

One of my favorite books is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which, I realized after I finished reading it, is non-fiction. Sometimes, I want another book. To be able to follow up on the characters...because they're real people is really satisfying.

I have had a similar experience with John and Hank Green. It is almost like if The Office were real, and you could send presents to, and potentially hang out with Jim and Pam. You could send them well wishes, and these might actually be received by them.

After the Brotherhood project was over, John and Hank were not finished vlogging. I sort of want to send them a present, but I want to make sure that no one else has given them this specific present, so I am going to wait to do this until I have caught up with all of their videos. They've vlogged through the entire 2008 year (I think once a week at least, each), and it seems that they've continued through 2009.

Hear an interview with them on NPR.

Also what is cool about John and Hank is their accessibility. Though they have thousands of subscribers, they keep up with the conversations in the comments, and comment on them. Vlogging is dynamic.

So I think that I could just drop in and hang out with these guys...but then I remember that I am one of sooo many. If everyone were to do that, it would probably be terrible.

Soon after the project began, John challenged Hank to write a new song every other week. I've tried to write songs. Have you heard them? That's right, because I have never finished a single song. Anyhow, Hank's love for TMBG is apparent, and his music is entertaining and enjoyable. He has actually released a CD (almost 2?) of his music, when I believe that it was just a hobby prior.

My love for John and Hank is almost directly related to my love for Liam Lynch.

The idea of vlogging used to really make me cringe. This is in large part due to Tila Tequila and her boring lame vlogs. (I was going to give you a link to the vlog that first made me want to shoot myself, but it appears to have been removed from the webs). However, I have had a change of heart about vlogging due to Ally's entertaining self, and the vlogbrothers.

I think I might start vlogging. It is something I'm doing in service of my Road Trip video (which I will probably upload in sections on the internet). The only trouble is my Flip video camera may or may not have died. (After like 3 months WQHTKXF!?)

One last thing! Hank lives in Missoula, MT. It is not a big town, and I totally stopped there on my road trip. If only I had known about his existence!

I suppose I'm creepy.
On an unrelated note, I suppose I'm a total nerdfighter.