Fantastic Blognanza!

Hey everyone! As John mentioned back on Friday, Joe and I spent this weekend at ROFLCon, a.k.a. The Great Meeting of the Internet. It was a blast!

First, a word of explanation. From ROFLCon’s “About Us” sidebar:

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon. [...] It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.

So what was Fantastic Bonanza doing there? Well, we designed the t-shirts!

Image yoinked from Flickr

In addition, the ROFLCon organizers (being the awesome folks they are) kindly offered us the opportunity to set up a booth at the convention. Of course, we jumped at the chance. Things happened, deals were made, and soon enough Joe was flying across the country to meet me in Cambridge, MA.

Here’s the breakdown:

Day 1:

The crowd at ROFLCon, as seen from the Fantastic Bonanza table

We arrived a little late on the first day, but the super-awesome Christina was there to cheerfully greet us and hand us our schwag bags—among the goodies included were a Firefox-branded apple and a 16-ounce can of Brawndo¹. In an extremely well-conceived plot, I downed the Brawndo in the span of 10 minutes, thereby dumping a cool 100mg of caffeine into my normally stimulant-free circulatory system. Between the resulting jitters and my poor vantage point, I didn’t really catch most of what the opening keynote speaker was saying. I believe it had something to do with the internet.

After the keynote, a group of Internet Famous folks took the stage to talk about how to make money from being Internet Famous. Among the panelists were Joe Mathlete (of The Mathletes and Marmaduke Explained) and Andy Ochiltree (from JibJab).²

After the talk was over, Joe and I went to Building 34 to set up shop. After a fair amount of hustle and/or bustle, we were ready to go.

Look, Joe is saying “hi!” Hi, Joe! [The table on Saturday looked way better than the haphazard spread of Friday! -Joe]

Our table was situated right next to Leslie Hall’s booth, which was kind of neat. Leslie herself was out and about for the most part, posing for pictures and whatnot (you know how it must be for Internet-Famous People); her mom had the duty of managing the booth. So we talked with Leslie’s mom for a bit, and she was extremely friendly. She even bought a shirt from us!

Before long, Joe Mathlete came on by and set up shop right next to us. He was selling off the last handful of MARMADUKE IS AN ASSHOLE shirts in the world. Yes—the whole entire world. This was extremely lucky for us, as it meant that we got to hang out with Joe Mathlete on-and-off for the next couple of hours. From this experience, I can say without equivocation that Joe Mathlete is all three kinds of awesome. Yes, all of them.

I stole this picture from the ROFLCon site because I am incredibly bad at taking pictures of my own. But see that arm on the left side of the picture? See it? That’s my arm!

Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 1

• Leslie Hall’s mom (Conezor Attacks!)
• Joe Mathlete (The Monster Masher)

Day 2:
On the second day, we had our table a bit more standardized than the first…

A view of our table… from the side!

At the bottom edge of the table, you can see our super-neat Conezor buttons (courtesy of the amazing Purebuttons³) and our last-minute DIY cannibalized stickers. We were situated between the ROFLCon info/schwag desk on our left, and the Weekly Dig (whose special ROFLCon issue is hilarious) crew on our right.

We spent a pretty decent chunk of Saturday chilling with Larry ‘Liontamer’ Oji and David ‘djpretzel’ Lloyd (from Overclocked Remix). I was going through Greg’s iTunes library, and he has basically a million video game music remixes from OC Remix. So if you see some sort of OC Remix/Fantastic Bonanza collab, don’t be surprised!

A camera dude from Fox 25 Boston came by and talked with me, and they posted the brief interview on their website for some reason. So that’s pretty cool! I obviously wasn’t ready to give a spiel about Fantastic Bonanza, and they cut the part where I mentioned our name:

Before his appearance on the Internet Cult Leader panel, Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics) stopped by and got a t-shirt. We heard it straight from his mouth: he doesn’t consider himself to have either a) a cult or b) a leadership position. But, in our opinion, he still has a pretty sweet webcomic! After this final panel, Jeph Jacques (of Questionable Content) swung by for his very own Fantastic Bonanza tee. He seemed pretty discombobulated… Christi described him as like ‘leading a herd of cats’. At the very end of the day, shortly before we packed everything up, Andy Ochiltree (head writer at JibJab) came by to get Octotree because his last name, Ochiltree, is so eerily similar!

So all in all, ROFLCon was good times. Pretty much a lot of the internet was there. I got live Rick Rolled… twice. Hundreds of people did a barrel roll. And Tron Guy was there. It was great.

Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 2

• Leslie Hall’s mom (Conezor Attacks!)
• Joe Mathlete (The Monster Masher)
• Ryan North (AVE Mizar)
• Jeph Jacques (AVE Mizar)
• Andy Ochiltree (Octotree)

¹ It’s got electrolyes!™
² Why am I mentioning these two dudes specifically? Because of foreshadowing, my friend.
³ Use coupon code HPB for 10% off at Purebuttons.