Showing posts with label nerdfighter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nerdfighter. Show all posts

Thursday, June 20, 2013

The Inaugural FUFDay

Today, I faced my fears.

Well, not all of them. FUFDay - Face Up to Fear Day - is going to be a weekly thing, for me. I have items on the list I'd drawn up that I just didn't have time to complete. I reckon if I hadn't had to go get a hair cut, I might have achieved something. I blame the hairdresser for changing their student offer ('cause there's no way I'm spending €25 on a haircut that could cost me €9.)

Delays aside, I got to work.

Now, two of the three things I did are sort of personal. They're the sort of personal I can announce if/when I know more about them. We'll put it this way: it took some forcing to get myself to do them. In one case, I've never done it before. In another, it's been over a year since I've done anything close to it...and I did a lot more of it than ever before. (Hurray for vagueness, right?) In both cases, your finding out will be based on the results of my actions today. If I've been successful, you'll know.

Anyway, in less vague terms, I posted five poems on YouTube today. That's more than doubled the amount of poem-videos I have on my channel.

These videos, as a sort of easing-myself-into-it decision, are about five YouTube channels (totalling seven YouTubers). Well, I say "about"... I mean they've been inspired by them, in some cases speak to them directly to them, but they're not biographical works.


The first video features the poem Young Hopeful, quote-unquote about Carrie Hope Fletcher. As these videos were posted in order of writing, I suppose I ought to explain why I wrote it. Problem is, I can't. I just got an idea for the poem, the words happened, and it was somewhat about Carrie, but not quite.


With WOTO up next, I even broke their name for the poem; rather than making reference to the World of the Orange, my poem is called Contented Content of the World of Orange. It's almost the same thing. Not almost enough. However, I didn't write the poem to get everything right. I wrote it to capture some of the fun of the duo behind the channel, Brad and Liam. If they see it, maybe they'll like it.


The third poem, If, Like, is more addressed to Charlie McDonnell than about him. It was also the first poem I wrote because I wanted to write a poem about a YouTuber, and not because I had a video on my mind. Charlie was also the first YouTuber I watched that I've stuck with since finding his channel, which I think is fun.


In an attempt to continue writing about my favourite YouTubers, I came to Alex Day. Unfortunately, many of Alex's videos have been about Twilight or sex. He's also vlogged about a lot of other things, but the one thing that always pops up again is his music. With that in mind, I wrote the poem, The Day, utilizing as many titles of his songs as I could. I'm fairly happy with the result.


The final poem was probably the hardest to write, because I wasn't sure what to say at all. A Home in Nerdfighteria is a semi-fictional address to some of the recurring jokes in the vlogbrothers videos made by John and Hank Green. I did my best with what my memory could pull out on the spot.

Now, the reason these poems were part of FUFDay: the audience.

Not only do I get nervous getting on stage, I mumble on camera. In the editing process, I also became aware of how many times I said "um" and "eh". And all these worries weren't even to do with the poems. What if people hear them and don't like them? What if people think it's incredibly, ridiculously weird to have written the poems, and think I should just get off the Internet forever?

Okay, that last one was a joke. But what if the people about whom they were written (or who I had in mind when I was writing them) don't like them? And I don't mean just not liking them. I mean disliking them. Actively. That would suck.

Can we play the Make the YouTuber Find the Thing game and see what happens, though?

Saturday, February 9, 2013

When a Hero Comes Along

John and Hank Green came along to Dublin recently. On Wednesday, they had a show in the RDS Concert Hall, which is essentially a large library that seats a thousand people. Every one of these people was excited, almost deliriously so, because for the first time two of my favourite people arrived in Dublin to put on a show the likes of which I could only ever see on YouTube, or dream about.

Usually the latter.

Starting at seven, they were on to cover the following:

- An explanation behind the writing of The Fault in Our Stars, perhaps my favourite book of all time
- A reading from the book
- Questions from audience members
- The mispronunciation of the name 'Ciara' (like 'Kieran', but without the 'n')
- A song about Quarks
- A horse-head mask
- Songs about Harry Potter
- A song about chord progressions
- More questions from audience members
- A slap in the face
- Lots of cheering
- Crowd-volume control
- A misunderstanding of the word 'heckling'
- Five hundred miles
- A song about the book
- A signing

The latter, after all the excitement of music and laughter and reading and emotional stories about children's hospitals and Esther Earl, took the longest to get around to.

Myself and two friends waited an hour and a half to get on stage to meet John and Hank. We got our tickets signed, because only one of us knew this would happen and we should bring books. John thanked me for wearing his face, and I told him about scaring myself by forgetting it would stare at me in the bathroom mirror.

Good times.

Of course, the excitement doesn't end there. John was on Ireland AM the next morning (thank you, Mammy Carroll, for telling me about that!) and both brothers were interviewed on Two Tube. Frickin' awesome. Hank's latest video tells about their time in Dublin, though I have a feeling that John will end up showing some footage from their day-before-the-show wandering, too (because he got some footage of his book in The Gutter Bookshop which I was delighted to recognise when Hank showed them in Temple Bar). Also, we got to say good morning to Hank.

I can't wait to see that. I cheered first, I think. Then it all set off.

John described the crowd of one thousand Nerdfighters as sounding first like 100,000 people on Twitter, and then like 10,000 people on Ireland AM, and I have to say: I'm damn proud of that. Irish crowds are louder and more enthusiastic than most people expect, and it has nothing to do with alcohol (as is often the case when Irish people are loud and enthusiastic.) On Wednesday, there were mainly teenagers present, everyone sober, and we still raised the volume to a ridiculously high level, with much due excitement.

It is our duty as rarely-visited Nerdfighters to make ourselves remembered, and to make the night as awesome as possible. Mission accomplished, Nerdfighters of Ireland.

So, awesome night. I got home fairly late, but didn't care. It was all worth it. We had brownies and white chocolate while waiting to get inside, and were greeted with the type of awesomeness we could only before imagine, over and over again. It was an evening of awesome, when a hero came along.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Esther

On Wednesday August 25th, Nerdfighter Esther passed on. She was sixteen years old and had been undergoing treatment for cancer. John Green tells us about it in this video.



Also, the links John refers to:
The Friends of Esther Fund: http://www.thehpalliance.org/friendso...
Esther's Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/cookie4monster4
Esther's twitter: http://www.twitter.com/crazycrayon
Esther helped run the amazing site http://effyeahnerdfighters.tumblr.com/

I want to help, but I'm not all that well-off. To put it bluntly, I'm fairly broke. However, if you can help, I strongly urge you to. If you would prefer spend your money on something like a book for yourself or you have presents to get people, then please help me raise money for The Friends of Esther Fund by purchasing things through the Amazon links on my blog - as I'm signed up to receive a cheque once I've earned $100 through the Affiliate programme, I won't actually get any of the money until then. Being honest, I haven't earned a whole lot from this (I think so far my revenue has been $0.32 in total...). However, I'm pledging the first $100 dollars to the fund. (Note: this is me donating the money, not Amazon - it's technically against the agreement to associate them with any charity). So, if you have things to buy from Amazon and can't afford to also donate to the fund, please help me along the way to helping Esther's family. Her treatment cost an awful lot of money, and with everything that they now also have to face, they'll have a lot more money to hand over.

Of course I would prefer if you could donate directly. I'm a realist, though: I understand that not everyone can afford to do that, that they have things to buy for people and that they need downtime for themselves. If you're a reader of this blog, I imagine your downtime comes in the form of reading. That's why I'm pledging the first $100 dollars. I don't expect to get much more through the Affiliate programme, anyway. So if you're in need of some downtime visit the review page. I'll keep everyone updated on what goes on as I hear it.

Best wishes,
Paul.