Introduce Yourself

145791044

Comments

  • I'm a teenager who raved to friends. They liked it, then googled him, then a fair few began to dislike him because they thought he played WoW. And hi again.

    Is there a thread to post seething anger? That'd be nice.
  • Heh.. As a tutor who spends most of her evenings with teenagers (who are bad at Algebra), that surprises me. So many of the kids I work with are having trouble in school because they're playing TOO MUCH Warcraft.

    Or SecondLife.
  • Jon, do we need a seething anger thread?

    Welcome everyone! I'm not a teen but I know they are around.

    Why is 37 the magic age here? It is funny, my whole life I have associated with people either much older than me or much younger (went to college late) and now there are a bunch of my age peers interested in the same sorts of things. The magic of the internet, I guess.
  • We don't, I do. Stupid seething anger. I could say that Mr Coulton is trying to brainwash 37 year olds, but that seems a little odd. His songs don't seem to have too many cultural relevances that applied only in that time period, so that rules that out. And then I'm out of ideas.
  • Interesting about the ages. Well, I'm not a teenager anymore but I'm not JoCo's age either. At 26 I guess that makes me the monkey in the middle. Wait no! I don't have a tail. Ape in the middle? Ook?
  • The magic age is 37 because that's how old JC is. We were talking about the age thing at the SF show. Jon's right. There's nothing specific in his songs. The only age/era reference we could find was in Town Crotch, where he mentions the puffy leather jacket (had one!) and healthy head of hair (didn't do the big hair). But something in his music obviously speaks to our experience.
  • I think the younger generation didn't grow up listening to the soft rock that influenced JoCo. ;-)
  • I introduced some of my friends to Joco, not a lot of them took because they think they will be veiwed as a nerd... Even though I am living proof that listening to this music doesn't affect your social status at all(I'm still pretty high up there). Or maybe its more acceptable for me since i listen to about everything.
  • What soft rock mtgordon? I'll tell you what I listened to... Pink floyd, Supertramp, Queen, Steve Miller Band, Eagles, Led-Zeppelin, etc... tell me a band and I will tell you if i listened to it.
  • I think the skating in The Future Soon is a dated reference. I know that there are skating rinks out there but I doubt they are a hangout like they were when I was growing up. Heck, I went on my first date to Skate King.
  • I remember going on field trips to skate rinks. Ice or roller? I've done both, but I'm permanently off ice and pretty much roller(getting kicked in the head with an ice skate isn't fun at all).
  • @monkeybiznis1: Yeah, I know he covers Queen (among others), but a lot of his songs (not just SRBM, but also his "Baby Got Back" cover) have a fairly soft 70's or 80's sound. I suspect that most of the younger generation of his fans grew up listening to older music. The "younger generation" I meant in my earlier comment are the friends who Just Don't Get JoCo. Maybe the apparent gap between the cohort and the young adults are those who are too young to have heard James Taylor (just as an example) on the radio during his peak but whose parents were too young to have James Taylor records sitting around? ;-)

    @jesss: Not only is it going to be the future soon; it's also not the past any more!
  • Ah, ok I understand now. I think...
  • OK. Here's a treat for the youngins (and maybe others). Here is a visual of what it was like to be a dork in 1983. I was thirteen. Please note the feathered hair, the mismatched socks (which I thought for sure would really take off at my junior high), the US Festival t-shirt, and the copy of Stephen R. Donaldson's The Illearth War atop my pile of books. Flash forward two years and here I am with my boyfriend. Note the new wave haircut, complete with Sun-In highlights, which required massive applications of mousse. You can't see, but I'm wearing my Ghostbusters t-shirt.

    And just for some fun, and because I'm both an exhibitionist and a glutton for punishment, here is an iconic image of being a child of the 70s (taken with a Polaroid, no less). Everybody and their brother had an organ in the house. You can't see the burnt orange shag carpet in this picture, but check out that floral wallpaper in the dining room. Huh?

    I hope the thirty-somethings have enjoyed this brief trip in the Wayback Machine. :-)
  • haha that was pretty cool, not dorky at all to me. Much simpler time I'd say.
  • edited February 2008
    Re: the music, the soft rockingest stuff I can think of would be like Air Supply, REO Speedwagon, Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield. Would Huey Lewis count? And don't forget your JoCo trivia. His guilty pleasure is Billy Joel, who is one of my favorites. He's also a big fan of the Beatles. I hadn't really thought about it before, but I guess his style, more than the subjects of his songs, hearkens back to what we grew up with. And then the subjects echo what we have become. We were the Star Wars/Weird Science/Real Genius/Revenge of the Nerds generation that grew up on Star Trek reruns. We grew up with TRS-80s and Pong and Atari, and we have become the Google/Web 2.0 generation. I feel like when I metaphorically look around the web, everyone is my age. Although it may be more accurate to say that folks my age are congregating in the same virtual spaces.

    I'm suddenly feeling very nostalgic. :-)
  • The US Festival!!! One of the greatest concerts ever! I have video of the Oingo Boingo performance. Terri Nunn of Berlin lived in the house behind me and went to school with my brothers. We used to listen to her singing Carpenters songs.
    I had the TRS-80 with the tape drive. You learned very quickly that when programming, you had to do it right the first time or life sucked. Lines and lines of code to search to find you accidently hit comma instead of period. It made me a better programmer.
    My wedding band is white gold. I have never had the opportunity to wield it though.
    This has been a fun trip down memory lane.
  • Gle3nn: I just have to say that my wedding band is also white gold, but that's entirely incidental. ;-) Besides, you don't wield the white gold, you are the white gold! Also, as I was telling the folks at the SF show, if my husband and I ever have kids and want to give them good Celtic names, Corwin and Connor are right out. Our friends would never let us live those down.
  • I'm sorry, folks. I couldn't help myself. Here are pics of my sister and I playing Pong on Christmas day, probably 1977.
  • Ok, this is a strange coincidence but while I was reading the last several comments here, my brother sent me this link:

    http://www.rickspringfield.com/

    It is because I had the HUGEST crush on Rick when I was about 13 years old. My family still rib me about it, give me albums, etc.

    Ahh, memory lane! I still love Billy Joel, Elton John, James Taylor (JT!). We had a Commodore 64 and then mac, mac, mac all the way to my current mini.
  • edited February 2008
    Gle3nn: Delayed reaction. My head just imploded imagining the woman who sang "Sex" singing, "I'm on the/top of the world looking/down on creation..." Ouch. My mom's Sweet Adelines quartet used to sing that ("Top of the World," not "Sex"). :-)
  • BryBry
    edited February 2008
    To clarify, irrelevantly: I don't dislike puns in general, but rage and hate well up in me when I read conversations that go like this:
    >>> ...both my fingers crossed... >> U LOST UR OTHER FINGERS? LOL!! > I wish I could patella you that I enjoyed your joke, but it'd be a fibula. > I keep seeing you rib people from every angles, as if everyone within a > thirty-mile radius is stuck in some kind of rib cage. I'm sorry if I seem > sternum, but I don't find it at all humerus for you to mock him for a > simple clavicle error.

    (takes off user hat, puts on dunce cap, sits in corner for twenty minutes)

    (seriously: I hate that. I hate that I'm even capable of it. I've never done it before, and I won't do it again. Unless provoked.)
  • edited February 2008
    Bry its ok. I'm sure it wasn't intentional if you hate puns that much. We are all human. To err is human-as good ol Shakespeare would say.
  • BryBry
    edited February 2008
    Oh, no. I love a good pun and hate a string of bad ones. What I'm saying is, puns are fine by me if used sparingly, particularly when cleverly done. But when you get to torturing your words to bleed out an extra pun (e.g. "clavicle" for "clerical"), and when you basically take a list of words related to a particular subject and go through them saying, "How could I fit this one into my post?" -- that's when you're going too far.

    [Although in my defense those bones were from memory.]

    Shakespeare certainly might say, "To err is human," were he quoting Pope [who lived a century later]. ;)
  • However, "errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum" goes back to Seneca the Younger.
  • Touche. There was a time when I would've been surprised I'd forgotten that...
  • Oh man another wrong statement... Alas, having the memory of a 4 month old infant is surprisingly bad. At least I remember that "To be or not to be.." was shakespeare. haha how horrible. I hope you forgive my horrible idiocracy. You see? To err really is human!
  • It seems I have caused a stir- Correction, me, and my two fingers. Sorry for that.
  • Eh, I'm sure enough stuff is misattributed to Billy Shax that it doesn't really matter.
  • Don't worry Doug, this isn't a roast. No one is really going to rake you over the coals. Theres not that much at steak here. Some are just bone tired of conversation seasoned with puns. Well, time is prime to go off to bed now to sleep, perchance to dream of bbq; Aye, there's the rub.
  • OMGWTFBBQ?
  • We're groaning out here....
  • I don't feel like the teens are the minority here... I'd really love to see that poll of birth years suggested on the last page. :-P

    I'm 26 and see a lot less people in my age group than younger or older.
  • Just for posterity, here is my personal information:

    I am a 38-year-old engineer from San Jose, with a wife and two kids, seven and five. I first heard of Jonathan Coulton when a friend sent me Code Monkey and told me to listen to it. After that, I started in on Thing a Week and I was hooked!

    I first saw JoCo back in February of 2007 at the Cafe du Nord (where I also met Merlin Mann). And yes, I did raise my hand for Chiron Beta Prime, but I put it down when he said, “Wait, first let me tell you what you’re volunteering for.” So I waited for his explanation, then someone else behind me raised his hand and got picked. Ever since then, I’d been kicking myself for missing my opportunity to sing with Jonathan Coulton. Then the next time I saw him, Paul and Storm were there, and he didn’t do Chiron Beta Prime, so I figured I’d missed my chance. That’s why I jumped up so quickly at the DVD show, and I am so happy that I finally got picked!

    Oh, and my wedding band is also made of white gold. You know, just in case.
  • edited February 2008
    I'm the Mike who isn't Spiff. :-) I'm a 41-year-old computer specialist who lives in San Leandro and works in San Francisco. I first became aware of Jonathan when a friend posted a link to Baby Got Back on her LiveJournal. I tracked down Thing-a-Week in its infancy (okay, maybe it was a toddler by then) and went looking for more on Yahoo Music Unlimited. After listening to Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow, I bought the tracks outright to load on my player.

    Having seen WoW videos like Gnomevasion and Leeeeroy Jenkins, I started capturing some scenes for a Skullcrusher Mountain video. It got shelved as I realized I didn't have access to some of the better areas to shoot in, so I went back to playing WoW. Then some guy named Spiff released a couple videos. I sent an e-mail asking how he'd managed to do something in one of his videos. About this time I managed to get my hands on some really good editing tools, and a copy of the WoW map and model viewer. Spiff asked what song I was working on a video for, and it turned out to be the same thing he was working on: Skullcrusher Mountain. Using his push to release soon as incentive, I managed to finish mine in time for an agreed upon simultaneous release. A beta version of mine led him to do more with After Effects, as I recall, so hopefully that was rewarding for him as well.

    I've gotten to see Jonathan two or three times with John Hodgeman, and twice with Paul and Storm at the GAMH. I showed up at the Cafe Du Nord show, but ended up behind a pole on a barstool in the crowded area behind the bar with a girlfriend who hadn't eaten. Jonathan was kind enough to come out and say hi (and thanks to the lady at the merch table for suggesting it and fetching him) before I got my money back and headed out.

    I'm looking forward to seeing (and hopefully appearing on) the Live DVD. I managed to get an interview with Spiff before the concert that I hope will be used as an extra, and also had the camera on me pointing at the lyrics on my shirt during Re: Your Brains. Paul, watching from a monitor backstage, said he cracked up when I made as if to wipe the blood away from the covered lyrics.

    Shouts out to Spiff, Andy, Colleen, and Keira (if she's around here) who I got to see at the show (even though I didn't get to talk to Andy).
  • Welcome, Andy and Mike! Y'all must've had so much fun at the concert. Hope you both stick around.

    I forgot Jon Who's forum anniversary! Happy belated anniversary, Jon.
  • Lol, thanks Bry. I forgot too-great sign for the future.
  • I managed to finish mine in time for an agreed upon simultaneous release.
    I always thought that was a coincidence. Who knew there was secret plans.
  • I suppose I should put a hello in here.
    Semi long-time lurker I finally decided I should join the forum and get around to posting something.
  • Hello, Christophano. 'Bout time!
  • hmm havent looked at this for some time now and reading 150 is kind of long :P
  • Hello. :)

    I joined the forums in order to get excited at you about the fact that I'm going to see JoCo in London. I figured it was time to introduce myself. I'm from New Zealand but I live in Geneva. I'm a mathematician by training, programmer by trade, physicist by association, and writer by some historical accounts. That is, I used to write stories and poetry, I even won a few competitions back in the day, but then my life was taken over by geekdom and I've hardly written anything this millennium. Actually I've just started my own 'thing a week' thing (but mostly without the singing, I know my limitations) to get me back into writing regularly, even if only weekly/weakly.

    Anyway, I couldn't remember how I discovered JoCo, so I had a look at iTunes to see which JoCo songs had the earliest added date. Now I remember... In May 2006 I discovered 'Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms' thanks to the MASSIVE database and then subscribed to Thing A Week and eventually discovered the other stuff on his website.
  • Welcome, Angelastic and Christophano! Angelastic, are you planning on letting anyone see anything you're writing? I understand if you don't, but there's really no better place to plug something you're working on than the "Introduce Yourself" thread... :)

    ("Physicist by association?" Should I ask?)
  • Well... I have a blog for my thing a week thing... but I'm not all that happy with my first Thing (I've only done one so far, and the rhythm is all messed up), so I don't know if I want to share. But I guess the whole point of putting the things online was so that people will harass me if I miss a week, so I may as well have lots of people harassing me. I think I'd better post a link before I change my mind.

    Okay kids, here it is, but harass nicely...

    *gulp*

    You'll also see in the intro about the physicist association thing. Even physicists need code monkeys.
  • Jinx-

    Hey - haven't logged in for a while. Thanks for the hug. I am still unpleasantly seperated. I am however, back to the NIH on Tuesday. I went one time already, but they put me on hold because I had a sinus infection at the time. OMG I cant believe the security there. My car was searched 2x - you weren't kidding! I will be there on Friday with my best friend, her daughter and my two girls at the Birchmere. I have to meet you... let me know how to find you!

    Take care and see you Friday!
  • Excellent, Lori! Look for the monkeys. I know I'll see you there.
  • hi, I'm a British Britannic fan of joco, who has now decided to join the forums after hearing about his finally playing over here.
  • Welcome, Askwho! Do you know yet if you're going to the London show?

    Angelastic: Nicely done! The binary rhyme scheme was a clever idea, and you pulled it off successfully. I hope you don't mind that I'll be keeping track of your progress. ;)
  • Hey, Ask who. Welcome.
  • Welcome indeed, Askwho. We already have a Jon Who here, are you related? ;)

    Thanks for the encouragement, Bry.
Sign In or Register to comment.