Last night, I stayed up until an obscene hour playing with Google MapMaker. I’m excited about it because it has quickly become more than a tool–its inherently social aspects have turned it into a community. The MapMaker Google Group is still small because the tool was just announced a few days ago, but the discussion is already starting to blossom in a productive way: bug reports, suggestions of additional resources, and structural questions about the project. Even though the young MapMaker community must work with the Google engineers who ultimately make the changes, aspects of a self-sustaining and -reliant community are definitely surfacing. With conversations like the one currently occurring about how Google Maps can best collaborate with existing open-source mapping efforts like OpenStreetMap, it seems increasingly like the command structure is not as much one-to-many as it is many-to-one: Google’s going to have a lot of work on their hands if they want to keep this passionate and eager userbase satisfied.

Where did these expectations for how online collaboration should work come from? What is the precedent for this type of behavior? Many have described MapMaker as Google’s approach to “Wikipediaize” mapping, but the Chris Kelty would argue that Wikipedia, too, is a cultural descendant of the free software movement.

<Prologue! class=”In Medias Res”>

What geeks may lack in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris.
- Chris Kelty, Two Bits

Alongside my friends Tim, Diana, Alex, and Mike, I am going to be blogging my responses to Prof. Kelty’s new book about this whole free software thing, Two Bits, chapter-by-chapter as part of 2B2P (the official abbreviation for the Two Bits Processor Project). I’m excited about this because:

1. All the people I just mentioned are brilliant and totally interesting.
2. As an aspiring historian/anthropologist of science and a free culture activist besides, this book is right up my alley. More to the point, it is up my thesis’s alley.
3. In addition to being a kickass moderator for ROFLCon and amazingly well-dressed, Chris Kelty is the only professor I’ve taken more than one class with. His History of Software and Networks (which is how Tim & I met Mike!) basically convinced me to become a History of Science major after one lecture.

Of course, reasons 1 & 3 also mean that this is somewhat stressful for me. I have to write commentary on a book written by one of my most respected mentors? And have it look good while sitting next to the posts of my brilliant friends? Damn.

So here’s a quick summary of what you can expect to see here, just so I’m not fooling anybody. Unlike my wonderful housemate Mike, I am not capable of using the phrase “In a Marxian reading of Kelty” and you won’t find much reference to existing social theory basically because I suck at reading. Unlike Diana, I am not full of delightful 19th century postcards that somehow manage to be relevant to every situation. Unlike Tim, I am not a robot.

This is what I can promise. I will always be asking the question “is this really new?” because history has surprised me enough times when I assume that something is revolutionary. I will always be wondering what the big picture is for those outside of the digital elite or even on the other side of the digital divide.

</Prologue>

This week, we read the introduction to Two Bits, which doesn’t so much provide detailed arguments to chew over as much as a framework for how the rest of the book is going to proceed. I already have tons of questions, but I’m sure most of them will be answered later. Instead, I’ll offer a bit of an introduction myself to two (as in bits) basic concepts: geeks and non-geeks. Along the way, I hope I’ll reveal something about where I’m coming from…

<Geeks>

“Why do geeks associate with one another?” The answer—told via the story of Napster in 2000 and the standards process at the heart of the Internet—is that they are making a recursive public.

The first part of Two Bits is an ethnographic look at the international free software community–basically, a long-term study of geeks in their natural habitat of listservs and IRC chats. I’m sad to say that this is not a community I was ever a part of. Growing up, I never even FOUND the free software community, and since my introduction to it in college I still haven’t really joined it in anything more than a sympathetic sense. However, I suspect that the characters and events that Kelty will describe will be incredibly familiar.

Within the introduction, Kelty uses the word “geek” many times to refer to his free software hackers. While this is almost certainly the self-identity chosen by most of this community, however, these days the term also encompasses a much larger subculture that may or may not agree with or even know of free software.

I’m not saying this just to nitpick Kelty’s word choice, but to show that as the word “geek” evolved from an insult to a reclamation to a subculture to a not-so-sub-culture, the actual community, lifestyle, and connotation it describes also changes. This seems obvious, but I want to make it explicit. Once upon a time, the “geek” community–that is to say, the community of people who were proud enough of their geekdom to define themselves as geeks–was much more technically-adept as a whole. This meant that the people creating and participating in geek culture were also the ones involved in geek activities like free software. Now, however, geek culture envelopes much more because being a geek has become more socially acceptable, and the sites (no pun intended) where geek discourse take place are filled with people who have a strong stake in the culture and the identity without necessarily being involved in the actual infrastructural work. Basically, Slashdot’s user base has not just free software hackers but also Microserfs and gamers and a whole bunch of other sub-sub-cultures who are united in geekdom but often divided on everything else. Are these other geeks part of the recursive public? If so, then what does it mean when not everyone in the recursive public is actually, you know, recursing?

The conflation of the two in the introduction, accidental or not, brings up the interesting question of how the two interact. Are “mainstream geek” and Free Software ever tugging in different directions? I’ll be keeping an eye out on this for the rest of the book for sure.

</Geeks>

<Non-Geeks>

When it comes to non-geeks, one potential way of dividing them is by power.

More Powerful Non-Geeks

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.

So independence seems to be pretty important in Kelty’s concept of a recursive public. That is to say, not independence as in we-don’t-need-anybody, but independence as in sovereignty. What does this mean, however, in a world with proprietary hardware, ICANN, and Ted Stevens? Since absolute independence isn’t feasible in a world as interconnected as ours, where does dependence begin? And what does that mean for free software? Understanding this will help, I think, in understanding which battles free software is capable of winning–and how.

Less Powerful Non-Geeks

The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and “geeks”…it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge.

If free software really is a reorientation of power and knowledge, what does it mean that those doing the reorientation are probably overwhelmingly American and definitely overwhelmingly male? What are the implications of the fact that because, as Kelty points out, geeks argue not only about technology but also through it, the technically proficient prevail? I mean, obviously this means that certain values are privileged over others, but are we actually in danger of losing something important to large swathes of the population because of this reorientation?

</Non-Geeks>

Hopefully, these are questions that will get brought up again (and perhaps answered?!) when I read through more of the book. Meanwhile, feel free to modulate on this blog post via commenting and responding! The more bits, the merrier.

Having just finished Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous a few days ago, I’ve been feeling particularly tag-happy. So, today, upon noticing that the vast majority of my pictures from Jamaica are sadly not geo-tagged on Flickr, I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to pull my share for the glorious Third Order.

Then I remembered why they were untagged. Because Kingston looks like this on Yahoo maps:

Hmmm. That’s…actually really discouraging. I want to make my information useful, but the best level of accuracy afforded to me by Yahoo is “general region within grayish blob”? (The satellite view is, by the way, Kingston obstructed by an enormous white cloud over the entire western side. Thanks.)

I was particularly taken aback, I think, because just yesterday I was adding information about Kingston to Google Maps via MapMaker, their new project that allows users like you and me to input information about countries that Google doesn’t know much about (read more here). While the tool is anything but perfect (um, why is “art gallery” not a category? Or “landmark”?), it’s a big step towards democratizing the healing process of the digital divide. Sure, Google’s engineers and whatnot probably know just as little about Kingston as do Yahoo’s, but the fact that they CARE more is palpable. Just as code is law, so passion is code.

The digital divide isn’t just a problem of access, it’s a problem of infrastructural support by the companies that govern information depositing as well. And it’s a problem of passion. To some degree this would be fixed if all of that were open-sourced, but that potentially translates the problem from access to uber-literacy, which isn’t great either.

Basically, Yahoo, step up your game. And Flickr, you guys left Yahoo already, right? DUMP THEIR GIS ALREADY.

I’ve been a really irresponsible blogger, I know–it’s amazing (and slightly pathetic) how much of my blogging is fueled by academic procrastination. As both excuse and reparation, I’ll start describing some of the shenanigans I’ve gotten involved in for summer “break.”

It’s common (and accepted) knowledge that my friends are way, way cooler than I am, so I’m always pretty grateful when they let me hitch a ride on their awesome-wagon (or van, in this case) and live vicariously through them. That’s why This American Summer is so fricking cool.

The basic concept is delicious because it is so simple and classic. Three college kids–in this case, my friends David, Danbee, & Alex from MIT–get in a van and explore the country. Not quite the quintessential American summer because few get the guts to actually do it, but certainly the quintessential crazy American idea for how to pass a summer. Not only did they follow through where others have gotten lazy, though, the gang has actually gone beyond by documenting–and even planning–their adventures extensively online. They are Twittering, Flickring, blogging, vlogging, and doing all kinds of other buzzwordy things that are cooler in practice than they are to talk about. Best of all, they’re planning to release all the stuff under CC so that others can share it and remix from it to their heart’s content. Vicarious living made legally sound.

Alex rides a horse for the first time!

My minor part in all of this, other than intense envy and admiration, is as part of “Mission Control,” a small but loving team that helps them do the stuff they can’t do on the road. Like designing their website. This was my first foray into web design, so if you have any suggestions (or bug reports, teehee), please let me know!

They’ve been on the road for almost a month now, traveling from Colorado through the Midwest and the South. They’ve broken tent poles and van windows, but they’ve also tried honeysuckle dew and driven through sunflower-covered hills. They’ll be in Miami tonight: if you know of anything cool to do there (or anywhere else they’re going), please let them know through their forums!

I spend most of each exam time promising myself a land of milk & honey afterwards, one where I can laze around and read without papers and other academic pressures looming. However, this is mostly a lie–the beginning of summer is, as usual, much more hectic than I ever imagined it could be. Between moving in, starting my new job, and hanging out with soon-departing friends, I’ve been spending much less time at my new summer home than I hoped. Bizarrely, however, I have found time to do plenty of rollerblading.

Yes, that’s right, I rollerblade. I not only rollerblade for fun, I rollerblade for transport: I’m bad on a bike, and besides I just really like the sensation of whizzing down a street on 8 wheels. Save your strength if you’re going to mock me in the comments: I’m sure I’ve heard anything “clever” you were planning on saying.

This past week, I went late-night rollerblading like three times with sensei Dean (who sadly departed for NYC on Saturday. Cambridge will miss you!), clocking in miles all around Cambridge. Then, Mako somehow talked me into doing Critical Mass. This month’s ride took ~200 bicyclists, one guy on a skateboard, and me as far as Roxbury and back, so it was the longest and hardest I’d ever skated in my life. But so much fun! Earlier this evening, I (finally) took the time to service my skates and rid my bearings of much hair and sand (eww). All of this adds up to WHOAMG so much skating in my life.

So what better time to post the paper I wrote about rollerskating for Prof. Stilgoe’s Modernizations class that I wrote this past semester? The paper is yet another one where I skim the surface of many subjects, furtively dipping my toe in and sampling the water without committing to a full analysis of any one of them. These topics include: gender & rollerskating! Class & rollerskating! Jam skating! Rollerblade barbie! The history of rollerskating! Madonna! Rollerskating & childhood!

Following in (but adding to!) the tradition of the great Diana Kimball, I will post the first chapter and two other pseudo-random chapter to whet your appetite. If you want the rest, email me or leave a comment!

In 1979, the Harvard Crimson reported on the opening of Roller Power, a new roller skating rink in Cambridge. “Boston and Cambridge were ready for something new, a new form of exercise, a new way of getting high,”¹ the owner claimed, and the article went on to describe the wheeled antics of various community members. This statement is doubly ironic, however: not only is roller skating not new, but its modern incarnation was actually invented by a man from Medfield, Massachusetts.

1Pam McCuen, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” The Harvard Crimson. 03 July, 1979. Accessed online on April 15^th, 2008.

… … …

Even more popular than the single girl having fun on the rink, however, is the image of rollerskating as the ultimate girl’s night out activity—an idea that is equally appealing to both sexes.¹ Advertisements like image 5 continue the trend started long ago by the pair of women dancing in image 2: here was a place where energetic and youthful women could go to have fun together. Furthermore, they are able to do this in a mixed setting while wearing clothes that would be deemed inappropriate almost anywhere else. Like the tiny skirt of the woman in image 4, the shorts worn by these women show a preponderance of leg and, more than likely, copious glimpses of underwear. Skating has always been a sport favorable to legs: even in images 1 and 2, we see that the act of skating reveals, as a manager of rinks declared, “the best lines in a woman.”² Why the skimpy outfits are acceptable in rinks despite the more revealing movements expected is mysterious, but whatever the reason, the effects are that the rink becomes a place where it is socially acceptable for women to be dominant over men while being in full control of their sexuality.

1This statement (and several others in previous paragraphs) is, I realize, more than a little heteronormative, but it is said with the understanding that almost all mainstream advertisements assume heterosexuality in their viewers, especially in eras past.

2Traub, 57.

… … …

Not only does rollerskating accommodate economic diversity, it is also surprisingly racially diverse—or at least often designated as such. In many of the images mentioned above, minorities figure prominently: Madonna and Simpson’s crews both include minority members, for example, and the Nair ad includes a leggy black woman throwing her head back in laughter. In reality, rollerskating—and especially rollerskating culture—is usually thought of as a predominantly white domain for a variety of reasons. First of all, the sport had origins in wealthy society, which was completely white in the early 20^th century. Secondly, many of the modern manifestations of rollerskating culture also come out of predominantly white cultures—there is a glaring lack of minorities in the X Games, for example, and even roller derby, while better than extreme sports culture in terms of ethnic makeup, is still disproportionately white.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like Firefox 3 so far! It seems to function smoother than Firefox 2 and be faster, although I don’t work my browser that hard so I can’t say it is making a huge difference.

But. Two things about it almost made me switch back to Firefox 2 immediately. The only reason I haven’t is because I’m susceptible to peer-pressure and my fellow C4FCM intern Dan called me a coward and told me to keep using it. So instead, I am griping–that’s a useful beta-tester action, right?

egregious design flaw #1:

I know this is really really minor and pretty trifling, but I am an avid tabber so this is always bothering me. I understand that the no-line is supposed to distinguish the active tab from the non-active tabs, but this is just…really ugly. It looks like there was a rendering flaw or something, especially when it starts blending into gray elements on the site you’re browsing. Just put a line there. Or change the background color of the active tab to a slightly different color! It’s easy, I promise. Minor things like this upset more than just me, I’m sure–it creates an overall unsettling feeling and just looks unprofessional to new users. Like the native

Way More Egregious Design Flaw #2:

The Firefox 2 URL auto-completer (more or less…I think this is an augmented version):

I know FF3 is trying to make the location bar more functional, but I really disagree with what was done. The first time (and every time since, I’ll admit) I reached up to the location bar and tried to type in a URL, it was like getting punched in the face.

BAM. What was I doing? Who am I??

So let’s break down why I hate this:

1) Wrong Priority: In the process of making it easier for users to find a URL they can’t quite remember, this new URL auto-completer has sacrificed ease of actually completing a URL. Which is, you know, what the auto-complete is used for (in my case) 95% of the time.

2) URL Autocomplete Isn’t Even That Useful: As in, when I go up to type “g” for gmail, I don’t need to see every single Gmail thread I’ve ever been on. I know where I’m going already! Sure autocomplete is nice when I don’t remember the knick-knacks of someone’s URL, but honestly, I mostly use the location bar for the “I’m Feeling Lucky” function–this just gets in the way!

3) Graphical Party Foul: There are varying font sizes. There are multiple colors. It changes as I type. This thing is like the MySpace of the Firefox UI! Not only is it huge and blocks a significant portion of my screen, it’s also just frickin’ distracting! More than once now, I’ve started typing in a URL and actually forgotten what I was typing because this attention whore of a feature was all up in my face. This is exceptionally bad in light of…

4) “What If I’m Giving a Talk and Dolphin Sex Shows Up?” As my boss so eloquently puts it, autocomplete is already such a source of potential embarrassment. I don’t need it to be bigger and easier to read from far away.

All of this would be maybe okay, except for #5, perhaps one of my most frequent and fundamental complaints about things that are wrong with well-intentioned new features:

5) THERE IS NO WAY TO TURN IT OFF. My first reaction was to dig around in Edit -> Preferences and hope that there was a checkbox that would make this go away, but there isn’t one. Shame. I know that in a lot of cases, the user doesn’t know best and forcing them to better habits is a favorite past-time of developers (see: Engelbart, Douglas), but this is really not how we make friends (see: Engelbart, Douglas). Besides, how I use my location bar isn’t like using Dvorak over Qwerty, it’s a matter of lifestyle–and this is way, way cramping mine.

Aforementioned co-worker Dan suggested another way you could turn it off–by having it be an opt-in thing. Maybe the location bar can be a normally functioning thing and, if you wanted this additional assistance, you could press tab? No such luck there either.

So, Mozilla…I love you. I love Firefox. Please fix this. Please??

At this point, we’re just all beating a dead horse over and over again: there are more than 2000 pictures just in our public Flickr pool, dozens of accounts from mainstream media and bloggers alike, and more Tweets than is ever appropriate. Youtube videos were being put up before stuff even happened. And really, Ryan North already wrote his thoughts on ROFLCon, so what else could I really possibly contribute?

Well. So I thought until I was a) nagged consistently by Diana, b) shamed by Rachel and Carrie’s postmortems, and c) invited to write on the issue for iDC. So here it goes. The following is a slightly revised and augmented version of the email I sent to iDC.

ROFLCon was an idea that Tim Hwang and I came up with while we were at the xkcd meetup last September. We were fascinated by the real world manifestation of this community that had been constructed around a piece of internet culture–the social structures it took on, the way people interacted with each other once they were face to face, and the Stone Soup mentality of the participants involved. It got us joking around about what the rest of the internet would look like in real life (Goatse and Tron Guy and Star Wars kid all in the same room?), which we quickly decided was the most horrifying idea we had ever come up with in a storied tradition of bad ideas. Then we decided to do it–it was just too epic not to.

The image of many internet celebrities in one room was really all that we had in the way of a coherent vision at the beginning, but we decided pretty early on that the “con” in ROFLCon would stand for both conference and convention. We recognized that at some level, we were doing this out of fandom, and that part of the appeal of the event would be being within arm’s length of these internet stars. However, we were also interested in thinking about this stuff at a higher level, and being steeped in academia as we were, it was natural for us to consider a conference-like format with panels and moderators.

Yet, it had to be different from the conferences we were used to. As someone who grew up on the internet, I had always been somewhat allergic to outsiders’ depictions of what was going on, because they were usually hopelessly out of touch. At Harvard, I was fortunate enough to have become acquainted with a wide network of scholars thinking about the internet, but even so I noticed that at the conferences I had gone to, the internet itself–that is, the people who spend hours upon hours on it, generating the content that we all chuckle at during coffee breaks–remained disturbingly voiceless. It was easy to talk about nonprofits like Creative Commons or Wikipedia because they are still somewhat within the extended academic framework, but what about YouTube celebrities or the creators of internet communities? What about the people who had gotten famous themselves? We thought that they probably had really interesting things to say, and set out to make sure that they would have a voice.

One of the most magical things about ROFLCon, incidentally, was that seeing internet celebrities in real life is somehow even better than seeing real-world ones. Real world celebrities are decidedly human–we know where Britney Spears was yesterday, what she ate, how she fucked up, and who her baby daddy is. Within internet culture, however, the identities of the people behind some of the things we all know and love remain totally hidden from us. Even we, the event organizers, knew little-to-nothing about them: moot and Group X’s nametags said just that because we didn’t even know their real names until they introduced themselves. Also, while it makes sense conceptually that there are people behind the Homestar Runner phenomenon, it is never really made explicit, and so getting to see them in real life is kind of like meeting Santa Claus–or at least, the elves in Santa’s workshop. You’re real? You made this thing? You’re that guy?

The tone of the conference was something that we had to control pretty carefully from the beginning. We wanted to be able to discuss things seriously and productively, but at the same time had to do this with a sense of humor that wouldn’t alienate us from the community we were celebrating and giving back to. For ROFLCon to work, it had to take fun seriously without taking itself seriously. Luckily, this came pretty naturally most of the time simply because of the personalities of the ROFLCon staff–we didn’t take ourselves very seriously, and saw ROFLCon less as a serious project than an elaborate practical joke of sorts–hence the ROFLCondoms, and the lunchboxes, and the obsession with Brawndo (which was definitely not fueled by $$$, since they only donated in-kind. I’m looking at you, Nashua Telegraph!). By not trying to prove anything and focusing on creating an experience that would be fun for ourselves, we managed to create a good balance between academia and levity, legitimacy and lulz. This attitude, which also manifested itself in the “jankity” aesthetic of the conference. We made it clear that the bureaucracy and logistics were subordinate to the primary objective: having fun and being ridiculous.

Of course, there were flaws with this plan. As we tried to iron out discussion topics for the panels, we realized that the “internet culture” we were focusing on was much too narrowly defined. It was the internet culture I grew up with–video game/anime/geek-influenced, propagated on message boards and Slashdot, and overwhelmingly white and male. Oops. Doing it again, we would definitely broaden our conception of “internet culture” to other huge components that we missed the first time around: global memes like “Bus Uncle,” for example, or the mostly-female fanfiction community. Despite this, I’m happy with what we DID accomplish–an excellent cross-section of the subculture most commonly called to mind when “internet culture” is mentioned.

When people ask me how ROFLCon was, it is often so hard to articulate how overwhelming of an experience it was for me. On one level, it was my coming-of-age ceremony: it was really the hardest I’d ever worked on anything, so seeing it go off without a hitch was personally redeeming in an actually transformative way. Look, ma, I can do things too! Afterwards, I’ve felt much more accomplished as a person. I have business cards now. People apparently care what I think? On another level, OMFGWTF TRON GUY.

Really, there were few moments of ROFLCon that I didn’t enjoy. It was a hectic experience to be sure, but an incredibly rewarding one. At the end of the first day, I think we were all absolutely shocked that everything had gone so smoothly when we had been bracing ourselves for shitshows and disasters for so long. It was wonderful to hear not just all the attendees, but even all the guests tell us that they had a good time. Obviously, meeting all of these people whose videos and jokes I’d been appreciating and referencing for such a long time was incredible, as was watching the memes have similar experiences with each other. The I Can Has Cheezburger guy was just as wowed by meeting Leeroy as we were! Leeroy, by the way, is an awesome dancer and tells great pirate jokes when he gets drunk. The fact that I know that kind of completes my life. Similarly life-completing was the chance to hang out with Group X onstage (albeit while drinking clam juice, which was…less gross for me than it would’ve been for most people) while they performed Schfifty-Five. I remember watching that with my high school friends. My life is awesome.

It was painful to let go of ROFLCon and return to the library. Not being able to turn the corner and see all these cool new people I had just met anymore. Not having interesting events and hilarious surprises at every corner. The adrenaline crash after two days of constant running around. The decompression after this monster that had consumed most of my year was no longer taking up my time. The Brawndo withdrawal. I basically curled up into a ball for a week and pathetically scrolled through the Flickr pool, checking for new emails on the ROFLCon staff list every few minutes.

This picture from Scott Beale was my original reaction to “ROFLCon 2009?” I have a thesis to write next year. We never really expected ROFLCon to have a date suffix because it was never supposed to be more than a one-off thing. Frankly, we never really even thought this first one was going to work. It was go big or go home. Now that we’ve gone big, however, I don’t know if I can go back.

Word to your ROFLCon ‘09!

(Note: Sorry about the blog constipation lately! ROFLCon + Finals + Recovering from finals + Packing != productive writing time. I’m working on a ROFLCon postmortem which will be finished someday…until then, I’ve been posting lots of short, unpolished thoughts and links to cool stuff on my Tumblr.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to smooth out my thoughts about “the gentrification of the web.” A short and simplified summary is: web 1.0 was jankity and was somewhat ruled by jankity people; web 2.0 is smooth and polished, and people using it don’t have to know about the jankitiness underneath. Expect something more detailed…sometime this summer.

I found something that, in my opinion, really resonates with this today. I’ve been trying to use Twitter in the last 24 hours, and as part of my habituation process I’ve been using the “Find & Follow” thing on various email accounts.

* When I did it on my “college” email address, the one that I use to contact everyone I’ve met since coming to Harvard: 62 people used Twitter.

* When I did it on my high school social address, the one I’ve had since I was 13 with all the contact info of my high school friends and my internet friends: 0 people. Zip. Nada. Not a one.

So even though I’ve been active in internet communities since I was like 13, it’s clear that the communities I’ve been in have shifted. The weird thing is, all those people on my old email account? They’re still active online, probably more so than my college friends. In fact, they’re active in the places where a lot of internet culture gets produced. But they’re not on Twitter. And the people who are on Twitter are mostly unaware of their existence.

Weird, huh?

T-Minus LESS THAN 24 HOURS TO ROFLCon!!

I guess I haven’t talked about my involvement with ROFLCon too much on this blog, but I’m going to try to summarize it right now. It has consumed/is still consuming my whole life since October. Because of it, I’ve seen the wrong end of the sunrise every day for the last two weeks, and it is STILL the best thing I have ever done. (Warning: the rest of this entry is more than a little self-congratulating and possibly incoherent.)

I’ve been with ROFLCon since Day 1 because it was born from a little joke between Tim and I (isn’t that how the best and worst things always start?) These days, I mostly function as a volunteer coordinator, ROFLConcert organizer, and ROFLCondoms-obtainer (you think I’m joking? I’m not joking), but because the staff was (and still is!) as small as it was we all worked on basically everything as needed. My prouder moments are from working on getting memes to attend: getting to contact (and successfully rope in!) long-time heroes of mine like Group X, Rooster Teeth, Leeroy Jenkins, and OCRemix was really, really awesome. But in those days, we sort of didn’t realize that it would, you know, actually happen. We wanted it to, we just thought there was no way we would actually get our shit together.

BUT WE DID. And I couldn’t be prouder.

And now, 700 people are due to converge on MIT’s campus over the next two days because of us. We have representatives from almost 50 internet memes, 7 awesome academics, almost 50 volunteers, and more press coverage than I can shake a neon green twisty straw at. The Weekly Dig did an entire issue as a tribute to us (David Day, you’re a crazy man). We’ve been mentioned in Wired, the Washington Post…everywhere except BoingBoing, really =P We are, simply put, awesome. Even if the shit hits the fan (*knock on wood*) in the next 72 hours, we are STILL awesome for the amazing amount of work that a couple of silly Harvard kids were able to do in such a short time. ROFLStaff, I LOVE YOU!

If you’re interested in learning more about the thoughts and ideas behind ROFLCon from the mouths of ROFLStaff, you should definitely check out Xiaochang’s interview with us on the C3 blog. (Side note: I want to be cool like Xiaochang when I grow up.) If you are unable to attend but want to stay updated about how the con is going, bookmark the webcast and the Flickr photostream and the Twitter. If you’re coming to ROFLCon, I leave you with a (digital) hug, the same advice I’m giving all the other attendees and myself, and a cup of Brawndo to make you uncomfortably energetic:

Take a deep breath. You’ve made it!

Congratulations and welcome to ROFLCon. We can’t believe this is actually happening either.

Debt-o-meter? REALLY?

]]> http://spreadtoothin.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/worst-facebook-app-ever/feed/ crimsonninjagirl http://spreadtoothin.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/linkthink-04-16-08/ http://spreadtoothin.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/linkthink-04-16-08/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:20:25 +0000 crimsonninjagirl http://spreadtoothin.wordpress.com/?p=124

Don’t expect these too often…but for today, I feel like sharing lots of things.

Nerddom

LCD Games - Prehistoric Edition :: Youtube
Really frickin cool compendium of very old-school games.

Politics

Barack OBollywood :: Ethan Zuckerman
This is way awesome. Just…just watch it.

Mike Gravel - Rock :: Ethan Zuckerman (Good day at Berkman, apparently)
Mike Gravel, ex-presidential candidate, stares down the camera and then drops a rock into a lake. There are no words for this level of crazy.

Dancehall

Mariah Carey ft. Damian Marley - Cruise Control :: from Yawd From Abroad
Con: Damian Marley, you are so talented and you’ve made so many good songs, so why do you keep collabing with crazy U.S. has-beens divas? Pro: Mariah Carey says “ting”–epic lulz. Hot mess.

Badman Commandments (and Vol. 2) :: Heatwave
Gabriel Heatwave has listened to hundreds of dancehall tracks to collect all the instructions on being a good badman. My favorite: “Badman don’t drink Snapple.”

Mavado featured in GTA IV ad :: HearingTest
Apparently, Rockstar loves Mavado’s music and he’s recording some tracks just for the game. Anywayyyyyy

Political Dancehall

DJ Green Lantern - We Need Barack ft. Mavado & Barack Obama :: Wayne&Wax (the linkthink champion)
Mavado redubs his On the Rock for Barack…!?!