The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.: ROFLCon recap, Day 1

4.26.2008:

ROFLCon recap, Day 1

9:30 AM

ROFLCon is... Well, exactly what you'd expect when meme's from the internet gather in a real-life venue with fans of said memes. That's all I really need to say, except that I need to change your expectation from "lame" to "very cool." Everyone's very friendly and we've had a lot of fun talking about all sorts of nerdy crap.

The highlights of my day yesterday:

Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of Reddit.com (kn0thing), recognized me as "the fist fight guy" after the LOLCat panel. I made the last "comment" during Q/A letting everyone know where they could get cheap Viagra, and he called me out after the talk. It was neat. I gave him a book, where he promptly recognized the logo and mentioned the Wal-Mart story. I felt important. It was fun.

I also got to hang out with Tron Guy after his panel. He (understandably) has resentment for Fark.com's userbase due to the derision he received after his pics got posted. Of course he's over it now, but when he talked about Fark during the panel, Drew Curtis yelled out "Hey, screw you buddy!" No one knew what to think, until he said "I own that site!" Then everyone laughed. Jay (Tron Guy) asked "So you're Drew Curtis?" and promptly began to backpedal and explain that he loved the SITE, but the USERS.... It was cute. I gave him a book.

I got to talk with Jason Scott for a while about textfiles.com and his Wikipedia speeches. I've seen Jason a few times, at Notacon mostly, but it was great to get to just chat him up for a while. I've been a fan of his BBS documentary series since it launched (I HIGHLY encourage you to buy a copy, but you can find the entire series it free on Google Video), the guy is just plain brilliant. I gave him a book.

I also embarassed the hell out of my friend Ian Spector, who invented the Chuck Norris Fact Generator (and for whom I did a full site redesign). He was signing books in the main lobby, but was too timid to announce himself, so I just yelled and hollered as a good ol' southern boy is apt to do. I gave him a book, but I've owed him one for a year.

Mainly, the weekend has been just hanging out with friends and people I've talked to online for a long time. It's nothing at all like I feared, where I'd just be seen as an attention seeker in a room full of attention seekers. No one cares about that stuff here. We all just want to have a good time... It's been great thus far.

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