“Can’t you use black?”
“He’s flying through Norway. Notice the fjords I created with hundreds of individually cut-out gray mosaic pieces? It’s daylight there in the winter, it would be untruthful to have the night sky be so dark. GIVE ME THE TOOLS FOR GRANDMA’S PRESENT, MOM! DON’T NEUTER MY VISION!”
With that kind of intensity, I binged fifty hours of online video tutorials and used my “skills” to make something that turned out one step above GeoCities level.
I was so proud. I printed out a screenshot and taped it on the fridge. Then I sent this email to the ladies after I uploaded the design files. Quote:
We’re ready to release! The website’s up. AND I made us a Myspace!
XOXO
Felicia
Unquote.
Unironic.
And as my marketing coup d’état, the day we released the first episode of The Guild I sat in my computer chair for eighteen hours using all the accounts I’d created to bother people all across the internet. In the most inefficient way possible.
I wrote messages to hundreds of bloggers at gaming-related websites and linked them to the first episode of The Guild. But instead of using a form letter (cut and paste was too sophisticated for me at that point), I typed each email individually. Because I didn’t want to come across as “fake.” (Even though I essentially wrote the same thing to each person.)
I also went overboard on the hard sell. Just a little.
“Dear sir/ma’am, My name is Felicia Day, I have been an actress on such TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have recently written a show based on the game World of Warcraft. Here is a link and another five paragraphs about how great it is. Plus, I tailored this email to your specific tastes because I researched every single one of your blog posts on the internet and have files of screenshots from your personal Facebook. Please spread word about my show because I know everything about you and have a general idea of where you live. That’s not creepy, right?”
It sounds counterintuitive (and illegal), but my spamming worked. And not just in a “restraining order” way! More and more people started watching and linking the video. Bloggers who must have had a high “creep” tolerance posted about it, and that led to more views, and the cycle kept repeating itself. So I just sat there and kept emailing. And emailing. The process morphed into a game for me. With my WoW addiction dead and buried, I’d finally found a legitimate reason to sit at the computer for hours. I even bought a pair of those compression socks. You know, to prevent blood clots from sitting too long.
In the “getting views” department, I had no shame.
“Yes, Grandma, that’s the right video, the one with my face. Now all you have to do is hit the triangle and play the video. And when it stops, just play it over and over again.”
“How many times, hon?”
“All day every day. Have Poppy do it on his computer, too. Love you!”
I forced all my relatives and friends to go through YouTube view-scumming training. I probably contributed ten thousand views to the show myself, running the show on mute in the background of my browser as I replied day and night with a personal “Thank you!” to every single blog entry, forum comment, or tweet related to the show. I needed to convey personally to every single person in the world HOW AWESOME THE GUILD WAS. DO YOU HEAR ME, WORLD? IT’S AWESOME! HAVE SOME MORE CAPS!
I think part of why I glommed on to the task so much (besides more than a touch of OCD) is because crusades are part of my DNA. My mom was into politics my whole life, and I have vivid memories of helping her stuff envelopes as a preschooler in the “John Glenn for President” headquarters while Michael Jackson played on the radio. She always worked for a losing, underdog candidate, and was super active in the Independent Ross Perot campaign in 1992. (How do I describe this . . . it was the Tea Party movement of the early ’90s? Tons of people just got angry at me. Oh, well.)
We would hold signs on street corners, travel over state lines to rally after rally (thanks to the “illegally not attending school” thing), all the while believing that we had the power to tear the establishment down. Advocating for my own web show kinda felt like standing on a street corner all day, handing out fliers, takin’ down “the man.” And the minute real actual humans started responding back, well, that’s when I truly got hooked. Viva la Webolution!
It was thrilling to refresh the video page over and over again and see comments roll in about our work. I’d love to say Kim and Jane and I focused on the compliments, but it’s the internet. You can’t help but pay attention to the mean things more. We traded the “best” back and forth:
“Webisode . . . uh . . . no. Which writer from MADtv wrote this?”
“. . . which high-school did you get those actors out of?”