A Holiday Message From The Editor In Chief

I wanted to take this chance to quickly reflect on the last two years of Geekscape and to say thank you for being with us, however long your stay has been. Am I the only one hanging out on the Geekscape site this morning, picking through old threads and reading old articles? I woke up this Christmas morning and couldn’t think of anywhere else I needed to be.

By 6am, Laura was at work. My brother is in New Mexico visiting my mom and my dad and step-mom are overseas. I’m spending a large part of January shooting so decided a few months ago to stay in Los Angeles and collect myself during the holiday break. This morning, after dropping Vijay off at the airport, I found myself in a McDonald’s treating myself to a guilty breakfast when I realized that for the first time in my life I had Christmas Day all to myself.  But because of you all, I was far from alone.

Over the last two years, Geekscape has grown into a large family and I couldn’t be prouder of the direction it’s headed. A year ago, we didn’t have a website (did we even have forums or were we “down” again?). Two years ago, we barely had our first show. And today we have a bustling little community, with new members joining up every day and taking part in the show, the site and the forums. I have a direction for where I want us to be in year from now but you guys usually find a way to surprise me so I’ll just reserve myself to steering the boat and see where you guys take things.

After the demise of Geekdrome, I made the decision to not pitch a new show to Revision 3. David and Jay were nice enough about seeing what other ideas I had but in all honesty, I didn’t move out to Los Angeles to do podcasting. My interest was (and is) in narrative storytelling. Even when I was on college radio, Kevin McCaffrey and I spent more time making up characters and telling stories than we did spinning CDs and talking like human beings. It’s always been the goal. But what I found in the community that had been built around Geekdrome was a kind of safe haven for people like myself, where no matter how much rejection I put up with in that fledgling “storyteller career” (I was delivering packages in a uniform for a lot of Geekdrome’s run), I had a place where I could go to interact with people of a shared passion. The last thing I wanted was for it to end.

So it won’t. During our time at Revision 3 (even though everyone was very nice and cool), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was standing in the corner at someone else’s party where I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have anything else to talk about. It was very much a place for tech-minded geeks. I grew up reading Fangoria, X-Men and Nintendo Power. That’s the kind of geek that I’ve always been. So the first chance I got to start my own party, I took it.

Thank you for coming to the party and hanging out with me. It really is the best gift I could have received during these past Christmases. Yeah, sometimes we got shut down over the course of the last two years. That happens to parties. But with the support that everyone has shown, we’ve kept the party going and growing. We’ve only missed one week of shows (the Comic Con 2-week shows are responsible for the other discrepancy in the 52 episodes a year numbering) and there’s new content on the front page of the site every single day. There are a few things I wanted to get done in the last year that need to wait till next year and a few goals that were accomplished that were pleasant surprises completely. Together, we’ve done some pretty cool things and are prepared to do a few more in the next year.

In counting my thanks, I have to give some up to a few individuals. Thanks to the Christmas Elf Brian Gilmore for continuously annoying me to do better and for putting together a fantastic experience on the Geekscape site (and in the weekly show). Thanks to Martin Scherer for continuing to trouble shoot the site and helping me in any way possible to keep this boat afloat. It’s sailing really well now, thanks to him. Thanks to my producer Georg Kallert, for supporting me in Geekscape when I’m not working for him on set. It looks like 2009 is the year that we do a lot of both. Thanks to Benjamin Dunn for helping me book some of the best guests of the last year (including Chris and Brock and Felicia Day) and doing a solid job on our “on location” segments. Thanks to Vijay for being “cool” with shooting the show “whenever”. Thanks to our website guru Jarrett for putting together a functional site and popping it up there for you all back in April. Thanks to our rogues gallery of writers for putting up weekly content that really is a pleasure to read: Jacob 108 Lopez, Connor Che, Eric Diaz, Ivan Kander, Faye Hoerauf, William Bibbiani, Nick Gregorio, Noel Nocciolo, Brandon Bales, our “house band” of Anthony Tedesco and Clark Crozer and everyone else who contributed this past year.

All of you have shaped this place up to be defined more by you than me and that has been the goal from the beginning. I’m just one man with a bevy of limitations. You are a community with a growing voice and no limits to how far you can take things. Already, 2009 looks to be much bigger and better by leaps and bounds. As I told Eric Diaz and Hong at the recent Geekscape party, I just happen to be the guy who does the podcast and pushes some buttons. I’m definitely not Geekscape.

So thanks to you for being Geekscape. On a day like today, it’s meant and done more for me than anything that could have fit under even the biggest tree this year.