Wow, it’s been awhile, Internet, what have you been up to? Sorry we’ve been taking so long to update on this here blog.

Rest assured, though, dear readers, that the folks over here @ ROFLHeadquarters have not been sitting around idly eating Funyuns and watching back episodes of Clone High like you might expect. If you’re in New York City on April 11th, we’ve been working with our friends over at The Barbarian Group to put together TITANS OF SMALL TOWN @ 303Grand in Brooklyn — a kickass one-night webcomics gallery event featuring work (and limited run, exclusive work only available at the event)  from:

* Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics

* Chris Hastings, Dr. McNinja

* Chris Onstad, Achewood

The artists (still working out the deets with Onstad) will be on site as well to do a Q&A about the work!

Tickets now on sale for $20. Due to the size of the gallery, supplies are extremely limited and we totally expect to sell out all the slots on this, so if you’re interested, definitely worth getting in ASAP.  More details to follow in the coming days! Drop a line at tim AT roflcon DOT org, if you’ve got any questions.

IT’S GO TIME.

Let’s do this.

Registration Opens @ 11:30 AM EST at Santos Party House (96 Lafayette Street).

Be there.

Gah, been so busy getting things together that we didn’t realize we’re running out of time to announce new guests! So we’re picking up the pace — with a few others coming out of the gate later today.

In any amazing 11th hour surprise (we didn’t even know it was coming until late last week), we’re happy to announce that Jay Maynard, alias The Tron Guy, will be attending ROFLThing-NYC. You might remember Jay from his appearance at the original ROFLCon back in April with Dancing Matt, and from the original Slashdotting that boosted him to South Park and We Are The Web fame.

Score.

photo courtesy Kate Raynes-Goldie, CC BY NC SA

Thanks to what is clearly the mighty magical powers of our friends at Rosen Group, extremely glad (and majorly relieved) to announce that ROFLThing-NYC will, in our traditional style, be finishing up as announced with a crazy post-conference dance party with Jamie Dubs & Serious Business heading up the Wheels of Steel and special awesomeness added by the interactive creations of Hak5. Best of all, it’ll be going much later than the previously announced time of 10:30 to more respectable party hours (see updated schedule).

The venue? Moomia Lounge, just a block or two down the street from all the conference events at Santos Party House @ 157 Lafayette Street.

As you’ll see from their website, the place is a bit kooky — but fitting. After all, what’s a more fitting way to close out a day of web culture geekery than in an Egyptian splendor? Right? Right.

Really bodacious news coming out today that our old friends from the original ROFLCon and this summer’s ROFLThing-SF are once again rolling out with us to make some major A+++ Would Buy Again action in New York City next week!

To be precise, Rick Webb, co-founder of interactive marketing geniuses/generators of the cool The Barbarian Group, has just confirmed that he’ll be co-hosting ROFLThing-NYC with Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian. Beyond creating a mighty charming power team to MC the events that day — we’re also super happy to announce that TBG is also officially coming on board as a sponsor for the event!

You might remember The Barbarian Group from such awesomeness as Subservient Chicken. And, if you haven’t yet seen their Biomimetic Butterflies project yet, you really, really should.

Badass.

Super excellent news coming out today that ROFLCon’s friends over at the awesome art/culture/technology blog-and-web hosting-empire Laughing Squid are officially coming on board as event sponsors for ROFLThing-NYC on Jan 24th! They were with us at the original conference back in April and we’re thrilled to have them along for the ride again.

Also, if you’re in town earlier in the week, keep your evenings open — Scott will be throwing a drinkup for Laughing Squid and the ROFLTeam will be kicking it over there en masse to hang out.

In celebration of New Years, the team is super happy today to reveal our final mystery speaking slot for ROFLThing-NYC.

Specifically: we’re glad to announce that Jamie Wilkinson (who’ll be rolling deep with Serious Business later in the evening on the 24th) will be heading a panel showcasing “Firefox Art” — creative, experimental add-ons that twist the web experience (see e.g. Add-Art) — and discussing creativity on- and with- the web, and the specific possibilities presented by Firefox extensions, advances in javascript, and open-source generally.

In addition to Jamie, the panel will feature fellow F.A.T. member Steve Lambert (who you may remember from the NYTimes Special Edition project a month back, among other projects), and Tobias Leingruber, programmer of China Channel and the co-creator of Pirates of the Amazon. They’ll also be talking about ArtZilla, an awesome repository for Firefox add-on projects usually denied from listing on the addons.mozilla.org universe for being “useless art.”

Badass? You betcha.

Super stoked to jump on the AnnounceCon 2008 bandwagon and announce the epic return of Ji Lee to the ROFLcon featured attendee list. In case you guys don’t remember, he’s that dude that essentially turned New York City into a giant caption contest by posting an obscene amount of blank speech bubbles all over the metropolitan area and photographing the aftermath. As would be expected, hilarity ensued.

Expect to see Lee lurking with ninja-like stealth in the shadows, armed with a sharpie marker, paste, and several bubbles. Want a chance to make a statement too? Here’s a way to DIY.

Back again.

Yeah, all the rumors are true. After a post-summer hiatus, ROFLThing-NYC is happening. While we’ve been quiet on the interwubs, the Team’s been busily working behind the scenes to put together a day-long event of sheer, mainlined, unadulterated badassery and are ready to finally go public with what we’ve got lined up. We’ll be updating regularly again from here on in.

January 24th in New York City. Get ready.  

We’ve got limited space and fully expect to sell out quick. So if you want to reserve tickets, drop us a line at tim AT roflcon DOT org and you’ll be the first to know about reg stuff.

image by sushiesque, CC BY SA

This is a week or so late already, but ROFLThing was recently shouted out on Neat-O-Rama!

Sweet.

Good news that we’ve been in touch with Yiying Lu, who was the design mastermind behind the now iconic Twitter Fail Whale. Turns out she’ll unfortunately be unable to join Sean O’Steen and the Fail Whale Club crew over at our August 29th event in San Francisco. However, excited to announce that in a move of incredible generosity and awesomeness, she’s agreed to put together some designs for our schedule for the event. Which (be still your geeky hearts) will be printed out on old school 5.25” floppy sleeves. We’ll post ‘em as they get put together over the next week or so.

You can see more of Yiying’s gorgeous (non-Fail Whale related) work at her site here.

Doctor Popular, San Francisco-based Yo-Yo Genius and Nerdcore Rapper, was showing me these ridiculously slick “LOL-llets” that he’s been putting together the other day. Two cool bits of news:

1) He’ll be showing up to lurk around the crowd at San Francisco ROFLThing on Aug 29th!

2) He will be bringing some of this hot handmade wallet action and other various cool doodads with him! If you can’t wait to get your grubby little paws on them, they’re also available on Etsy.

That is all. Been working out the deets on the Onstad party, stay tuned…

As we ramp up for the August 29th San Francisco ROFLThing, people have been asking if we have a slick little something that they can post up on their blogs, etc to let people know that they’re going.

Good news!

Just got word that Kristen Curtis over at the ever-awesome Wexley School for Girls slammed together these (kickass) badges for us. Feel free to take ‘em and post ‘em all over your blogs, websites, wallpapers, ANSI art splash, or whatever.

We’re busily cutting out more individual images for all the badge joy your heart desires and will be posting ‘em shortly, but if you’re all hardcore and DIY and stuff, feel free to do it yourself with this Handy Dandy PDF.

We’ve also launched the ROFLThing preliminary schedules page, which’ll be updated as we track who’s coming, what’s happening, and where it’ll all be going down from city to city. For SF, there’ll be some open time during our open bar for people to propose stuff and bring things to do/display. If you’re interested, get in touch at tim AT roflcon DOT org.

Getting the final details on billing worked out on Wufoo today (we’ll be doing $10 reg fees to cover costs of admission AND open bar), and it should be opening up late tomorrow or over the weekend. Woohoo!

There’s only one outdated phrase one could use for ROFLCon’s recent feature article in the latest edition of Wired Magazine: freakin’ bodacious.

If you’re coming to this site and you’d like to reserve a spot at the next ROFLCon event during this summer, send an e-mail over to tim AT roflcon.org with your name, e-mail address, and location (we’re working on being all over the country over the next few months). We’ll keep people posted on how things are coming along on this blog — for now, know that San Francisco will definitely be happening. Details to follow.
Get in while you can — we’ve been taking informal requests for the past few weeks and spaces will run out.

(photo credit: Wired Mag, Angela Cappetta)

Kyle Macdonald, the genius behind the One Red Paperclip project and superstar panelist at ROFLCon, is finally picking up and trading his house! He’s accepting open offers for the cute three bedroom, two bathroom place that the internet built until July 11th.

At present, we can only speculate how far Kyle’s going to end up going with these new round of trades, but from his past performance, we’re pretty sure he’ll be getting his new personal spacecraft any day now…

Writers have Pulitzers, musicians have Grammys, the Boston Celtics have the NBA Championship, and scientists (& Al Gore!) have the Nobel Prize. Today, the ROFLCon staff was surprised with accolades of similar magnitude in our own field—that of running really freakin’ geeky conventions.

It’s no annual event and there’s no red carpet, but that can’t stop us from basking in the glory of being named the #2 Most Pathetic Geek Convention by Cracked.com.

In and of itself, this ranking would be no big deal. After all, most geek conventions are slightly puzzling to behold and take some concept or another “to a whole new, frightening level.” What makes this honor truly epic is the other conventions we’re sharing it with. Guys, we beat out Klingon Feast, a furry convention, and the Ohio Valley Filk Festival (which, incidentally, is happening in my hometown. And I thought there were no nerds here!), and we did so with reasonably good overall conference hygiene. If that doesn’t mean we just leveled up as a ‘Con, I don’t know what does.

We don’t usually do guest-specific news here, but this one was too good to pass up and bears mentioning. ROFLCon guest Jay “The Tron Guy” Maynard, who ended up being a huge superstar at ROFLCon and gave a kickass talk with Matt Harding, recently purchased a plane.

For real. More pictures on his LiveJournal.

And yes, if you’re thinking it, the paint job IS matched with his suit.

Looks like we’re running a bit slow to catch this bandwagon, but the ROFLCon team’s been trawling through all the e-mail it hasn’t been reading for a few weeks now and recently caught wind of Andy Baio’s incredibly granular and nuanced data analysis of the Great Star Wars Kid Meme Crisis of 2002. Superbly worth checking out if you’re into that sort of thing. (as if you haven’t seen it enough already: that video here)

(thanks to Coustan of Extraface for the catch)

So, uh, this ROFLCon thing turned out to be pretty cool.

As we’re gratefully soaking up all the incredibly generous interwub praise from the press, guests, and seeing all our media find its way online, it occurs to us that this isn’t half as fun as getting rolling on putting together the next big thing.

So as of today, I’m happy to officially announce that members of the ROFLCon team will be fanning out across the nation this summer and will be kicking major ass in cities from coast to coast. We’re planning a healthy bushel of one day events with the internet celebrities in a variety of flavors — parties, bar takeovers, talks…

Roughly, the schedule we’re thinking about looks like as follows:

mid-July: Chicago, Seattle (party)
late-July: Seattle (some bigger event)

August: San Francisco, New York

More details to follow as they start to come together here at roflcon.org, so hang onto your seats and stay tuned. ALSO, if you’d like to help out and be a part of this — shoot me an e-mail at Tim AT roflcon.org, we’d be happy to have you aboard.

As for ROFLCon 2009? Well, we’re taking the wise and cautionary words of Adam Lindsay of LOLCode into mind — and we’re going to take it easy, keep what we’re doing with ROFLCon interesting new and changing, and see how the summer goes. Not going to lie though: doing another one is one helluva awesomesauce and attractive prospect.

(photo courtesy Kate Raynes-Goldie, CC BY SA NC)