So this happened.

As we’re (predictably) huge nerds over here at ROFLCon HQ – we were absolutely ecstatic to get news over this past week that Maria Popova, founder and proprietor of the profoundly mind-expanding Brain Pickings, has been confirmed for ROFLCon III!

Beyond raising our collective perceived literary IQ more than a couple points, we also recommend sifting through her other writings scattered around the far spanning reaches of the Internets, if you haven’t already.

In any case, hello Maria! We’re glad to have you in the ROFLSphere.

Our headquarters are all abuzz today with news that jetsetting international man of destiny Alexis Ohanian is locked and loaded for attending and speaking at ROFLCon III!

In any case, Alexis is a phenomenon. He’s the co-founder of this fun obscure little site on the internet called Reddit, swine defender over at Breadpig, helped to launch the cutest travel site of all time in the form of Hipmunk, is makin’ it rain over at the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, is working on a new book about making the world suck less, and most recently was a happy warrior in the battle to protect the Internets on SOPA/PIPA.

Alexis was the fearless moderator on our LOLCats panel back in the day, and also MCed our ROFLThing-NYC event a few years back. We’re bringing him back (with a few other folks to be announced in the coming weeks) to be part of a session that collects a number of internet badasses to talk strategery on ways to scramble the United Internets security council and defend the internet the next time an attack comes around the corner.

BAM! More tomorrow, stay tuned.

(photo courtesy Laughing Squid)

If you’re like us over at ROFLCon HQ, you may have had the pleasure of catching Taiwan-based Next Media Animation’s bizzarely awesome short machinima reproductions of current events: the Tiger Woods car crash, the Zuck IPO, Steve Jobs, and so on. We generally are all agreed that pretty much all information on the internet should be presented this way.

And so, we’re thrilled today to announce that the overlords over at NMA are dispatching Chris Vespoli, the lead writer and mastermind behind much of this work, to represent at ROFLCon III!

And that’s not all! Happy to pair out the announcement with the additional twist that Next Media Animation itself is coming aboard as a sponsor on the event — I have to admit tangentially we’re sort of hoping to team up to produce a piece that features a polygon’d Tron Guy. Welcome aboard, folks!

He’s back! Mr. Leeroy Jenkins (Ben Schulz) of World of Warcraft fame will be returning to Cambridge and running amok, so prepare yourselves for some action, homies

So much moar coming soon y’all, get ready for an excited week! For now, at least we have chicken.

]]> http://roflcon.org/2012/01/31/alright-chums-lets-do-this/feed/ 0 http://roflcon.org/2012/01/30/moot-mootkins/ http://roflcon.org/2012/01/30/moot-mootkins/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:13:56 +0000 Tim Hwang http://roflcon.org/?p=1677

DOCTOR MOOTY MOOT MOOTKINS WILL AT ROFLCON III.

THANK YOU INTERNET THAT WILL BE ALL

…and by that we really mean that we’ve confirmed Dan Sinker, the voice behind that which is @MayorEmanuel.

If you’re not familiar with the whole saga of Dan and the role of his deftly-fuck-laden anonymous bit of Twitter epic poetry in massively disrupting the election news cycle of a major metropolis, you really need to get yourself to this here article.

You may be also interested in the inexplicably published book of those tweets. We’re mentioning this because we’re hoping that Dan will relate that time that Rahm himself showed up at his book party and signed the book, “You are an Asshole.” For serious.

You can read more about Dan at his website, in particular his awesome work with the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which we’ll be sure to force him to talk about at the conference in addition to the lolz. Excited!

Oh, also just another note today.

Excited to announce that Matt Oswald, the originator of Me Gusta, will be at ROFLCon III.

ME GUSTA.

Registration is open, Mystery Passes are rolling out, and the excitement is just starting.

Chris Torres, the man with the brains behind the pen behind Nyan (Poptart) Cat will be around to chat a bit at MIT. Check out his site LOL-Comics for more drawings, musings, and in general fun.

And what do you get when you combine the adorable kitty cat with an obnoxiously cutesy tune? Why this of course. I hope four months is enough time for y’all to either manage whistling just right, or to purge it from your brain, either way enjoy!

The names may be rolling out faster and faster, but the excitement never ceases!

Andy Baio is another ROFLCon Summit alumni who will coming to the east coast for a ROFL-style party! In case you don’t know Andy used to work at Kickstarter until last year and is now working with Expert Labs. He was the first person to coin the term “Supercut,” a collection of which can be found here, and if you have not been to waxy.org then you are missing out on insightful and entertaining blogging. Most recently about a full length remix of Pulp Fiction and copyright infringement. There are plenty of fascinating reads to keep you going until May, so read up!

That’s right y’all. Mr Chuck Testa of Ojai Valley Taxidermy is locked in and ready to come out to ROFLCon. Nope! Chuck Testa has been used on current events such as the death of Steve Jobs and Muammar Gaddafi as well as on such childhood memories as Mufasa’s tragic end and the hard to cope with end of Albus Dumbledore, and even worked into some notorious Internet scandals.

Hope you are as excited as we are to meet him! More updates and registration info soon!

Back for another round of excitement we have Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and ROFLCon alumni. Ethan has been quite busy this last year, discussing topics from SOPA to cultural developments in Nigeria. Here is his ROFLCon inspired post from last year.

Moar soon!

]]> http://roflcon.org/2012/01/05/ethan-zuckerman-at-roflcon-iii/feed/ 0 http://roflcon.org/2012/01/03/natedern-at-roflcon-iii/ http://roflcon.org/2012/01/03/natedern-at-roflcon-iii/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:01:54 +0000 sherlock http://roflcon.org/?p=1490

If you ask someone who Nate Dern is, you might just get a blank “huh?” which is a surprisingly appropriate response. His one liner in this AT&T commercial and resulting rage face created quite a bit of excitement on reddit, and now he is getting ready to meet you at ROFL3!

Still curious about Nate? You can have a good read up about him here. Until next time homies

So, really, just when you thought that the ROFLCon guest list couldn’t get any larger — we’re decided to bust all previous expectations open by formally announcing a final series of new and alumni guests that will be turning up for the conference! Some of these you’ll know from their quiet appearance on our schedule, but others have been as yet unannounced to this point. Check it out! We’ve got:

* Neil Cicierega, of Lemon Demon, Potter Puppet Pals, and other greatness.

* Ian Spector, owner and operator of the Chuck Norris Facts.

* AJ Mazur, creator of the (by now classic) Lazy Town-Lil Jon remix.

* Larry Oji and David Lloyd, of the behemoth video game music community OCRemix.

* And, brand new this year, is Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, general Masters of Pop Culture and the amazing minds behind the Found Footage Festival.

Okay, cool, I think that’s it. For now.

Last, but absolutely definitely not least by a long stretch, ROFLCon is happy today to be announcing the last of our of special guest artist announcements by concluding this fine Thursday afternoon to say that the following fine ladies and gentlemen will be representing themselves and their creations at ROFLCon II:

* Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, creators of the beautifully dark and wonderfully brilliant A Softer World (and alums from ROFLCon I and our gallery show Titans of Small Town)

* AND Tak Toyoshima from long-standing favorite Secret Asian Man (who the sharper among you may have already picked up on from our announcement about Super Art Fight yesterday).

Thrilled to have ‘em both — catch them hanging around through the weekend, and otherwise kicking ass.

And, as of today, we’re officially t-minus two weeks before ROFLCon gets under way — mind-blowingly excited to see you all there!

Swinging back into the comix universe, terrifically happy today to be finally announcing that our friends Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota, creators of the gorgeously done, semi-biographical Johnny Wander, will be joining the guest list and attending the festivities at ROFLCon II!

You might also remember Ananth from Applegeeks, and may have seen his masterful design skills recently in action on ONI’s limited-edition geek-salivation-inducing Scott Pilgrim shirt. Both are works of high badassery and both Ananth and Yuko are folks of the highest order, so we’re absolutely lucky to have both of them on board.

Unbelievably enough, the guests keep on piling in as we run into the home stretch. We’ve got double announcements today, so check in later for a bonus bit of ROFL!

Amazingly — was able to snag an image this morning that fits beautifully for two of our guests. So happy to give a double-trouble guest announcement this morning confirming that both the creators of Lamebook and folks behind My Mom Is A Fob will be attending and speaking at ROFLCon II!

If you haven’t seen it, absolutely worth checking out the treasure trove of aggregated awkwardness and hilarity on both blogs. Thrilled to have both of them participating: Jonathan and Matthew will be repping up on our “The Good, The Bad, and the Awkward” panel talking about embarrassing stuff on the internet, and Serena and Teresa will be participating in an evolving panel that we’ve got coming together about race on the wubs. We’re excited to have both of ‘em there for the party.

In any case, stay tuned! We’ve got a few more guest announcements and other good stuff coming down the pipe to round out this week.

So — today, we were going to claim that we had successfully confirmed Goatse for ROFLCon II, and then link to it. But we figured that’d be in poor taste (and not in keeping with ROFLCon’s general high standards for “professional” behavior). Besides, anything we could come up with would probably pale in awesomeness to what some of our guests are up to today (and elsewhere).

To that end, we’re extremely happy today to confirm that the University of Illinois’ very own Lisa Nakamura will be attending and moderating at ROFLCon II! Lisa is a professor over at their Communication Research and Media Studies program, and head honcho of their Asian American studies program.

Her work is all over the questions about race (real and fictional) and internet culture, and it’s led to some seriously badass stuff (see, i.e. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft“). Worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet (pdf alert).

We could go on and on, but for now, just wanted to say that we’re thrilled to have her! We’ll have more details and schedule info out tomorrow (yes, it’s true: we’ve finally hammered it all out).

Heyas, readers!

We’re keeping on keeping on here at ROFLCon HQ with all the guest announcements, and I’m happy to confirm all the rumors today that internet elder statesman and awesome dude Aaron Peckham, the creator of the internet knowledge repository that is Urban Dictionary, will be attending (and speaking at) ROFLCon II.

If you’re like me, Urban Dictionary figures prominently in the development of your knowledge of obscure pop culture exclamations, rage-filled commentary, and (probably, mostly, hopefully fictional) prohibitively nasty sex acts. It’d be difficult to estimate how many total hours of fascinated clicking have been lost on the site, internet-wide.

Also, if you lost track, the site has been up for a decade and now contains 4.8 million definitions. Outta control. In any case, Urban Dictionary’s seriously great, and we’re excited to have Aaron there. Welcome!

So, we’ve been sitting on this one for a little bit now (sorry about that), but everyone agrees on the ROFLTeam that it’s time to let this tiger right on out of the cage. So, we’re blogging it up.

Yes, glad to announce officially today that Mister Jeffrey Rowland — of the long-running webcomic institutions over at Wigu and Overcompensating (and some of his wonderful, wonderful crew over at TopatoCo, which stocks this recent geeky t-shirt gem) — will be loading up the wagons and making their way to Boston in April to attend ROFLCon II! We couldn’t be happier.

And what might all these webcomics folks be doing at the conference, you might ask? Good question! ROFLCon HQ is currently hard at work hammering out the schedule of events, tying up some loose ends, and confirming with all our guests before we ask them to do something ridiculous. But, we guarantee it’s going to be epic, and we’ll likely have it out next week. Sit tight.

First off, if you haven’t seen the video yet, you really should. No, really. Do this first.

Good? Great. We’re thrilled to announce today that ROFLCon will be screening the much acclaimed “Winnebago Man” – the documentary about the life and times of Jack Rebney (which Michael Moore has described as “one of the funniest documentaries ever made”). This will be an exclusive screening for ROFLCon II attendees – and a rare chance to see the film before it hits theaters nationwide this summer.

We’re very excited to share the film with you. And we’re even more excited to announce that the titular Angriest Man in the World himself will be calling in to ROFLCon II for a post-screening discussion with Ben Steinbauer (the director) and Alexy Vayner (Impossible Is Nothing). Moderation will be done by the talented and awesome David Weinberger. Which, all in all, indicates that this will be a pretty seriously kickass session of the conference.