The Awesomeness of a Liveathon

Well it has certainly been quite awhile since I have added anything here but but between an awesome experience I had recently, more about that to come, and a conversation I had with a friend who is a superb blogger himself has convinced me to take another shot at it.  I think I should here warn that I am not always the best at expressing what I feel and generally when I try grammar is the first casualty so please forgive that as I often have trouble writing these so tend to write them in quasi-stream of consciousness. 

It all started this past Sunday as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my day and saw a message from America Young who is an actor/stuntperson whose work I quite enjoy (check out Geek Therapy on You Tube and you'll see why!) mentioning a 60 hour livestream she was going to be doing in order to try to Geekify one of her friends, April Wade, in support of a movie they were going to be making together called The Concessionaires Must Die.  As I am myself a geek I thought it sounded interested and so figured I would check it out.  This rather quickly went from something I was going to watch for a bit to something I watched all day to something I was glued to for every second I could possibly watch it till it was over.  I am not really going to go over exactly all of what happened during the Liveathon, as it was dubbed during the stream, as I would much rather talk about the experience of it as in many ways I think that is what is the most amazing about it.  If you are curious to see what the schedule was for it it is still posted on their site here The Making of CMD Liveathon they managed to stay mostly on schedule but as with anything done live some changes needed to be made.

What made this livestream so compelling wasn't just that America and April were great & entertaining hosts (Which is far tougher then it sounds as not only were they trying to introduce April to things she has been resistant to but also entertain the people watching via the internet, especially when they were watching movies/tv shows where they couldn't show them for copyright reasons, but they also were trying to raise money to support the movie they are making which adds its own demands as it requires frequent explanations as to what they were doing, what is the movie about, why should you donate.  So while it sounds easy 'Watching movies and tv shows while being filmed how is that hard' there is so much more involved) nor the fact that they had alot of great, entertaining and energetic guests & friends but it was that through their interactions with the chatroom and the interactions with other people in the chat room it came to feel much more like meeting a group of people at a convention and having a sense of connection that only grew stronger as the livestream continued to the point where I now follow a bunch of these people on twitter so that I can continue to communicate with them despite the fact that the livestream is no over.  We had some trolls, pervs and other internet undesirables show up but I love that we as a group in the chat room would either flag them or ignore them or do whatever we could so that they wouldn't disrupt the livestream.  In many case we became the ones that took over the explanations and calls for donations when the people actually on the livestream were busy with what they were doing as we had become fully committed to what they were doing at that point.

On a more personal note I am usually not a very social person, I tend to be rather shy and I have massive problems with self worth and self esteem and as such I usually have alot of difficulty making new friends but by the end of the livestream I felt I had actually made some friends on the livestream such as April who I had never heard of before but now I think is absolutely awesome, America who I only really knew of through her work on webshows but now I feel like I actually know the real America a little and John Keating who was one of the guests who was in most of the livestream as a friend of America and April.  However that wasn't it I also felt like I made friends with some of the people in the chatroom such as Angie who is a published author of a number of books, who has alot of the same tastes as me in TV and video games and who incredibly stayed awake for 69 hours straight in support of the liveathon and others that I look forward to getting to know better.  In fact I felt so supported and encouraged by the liveathon that I actually went and sent friend requests to some of them on Facebook which I know sounds trivial and dumb but for me it is actually quite a big deal as I have been avoiding anything that might possibly involve rejection like the plague out of a fear that seems to have claimed my life but even though I was still quite scared and nervous about even that I was actually able to do it thanks to the confidence that the liveathon had given me.

So I would just like to say a deep and heartfelt thank you to both America Young and April Wade, and to all the amazing guests they had come join them for the Liveathon and to Angie and everyone else in the chatroom that made this such an awesome and encouraging experience!

If you would like to learn more about the movie they are making you can find that here The Making of CMD and even though they raised and amazing $6,550 towards their goal during the Liveathon there is still time for you contribute to this amazing project! They have more information and some amazing perks here Support CMD