That Vegas thing
So the big news was Yearly Kos. This would have been 100x better if I had managed to post in anything resembling a timely manner, but it wasn't possible. I even thought about buying some kind of wifi pda thing to surf and post from Vegas and then returning it, but nothing seemed to fit the bill. So 3 weeks later (which in internet time equals an ice age, I think) some impressions of blogger Woodstock.
Azulita and I decided to go mostly because we thought it would be a. fun and b. interesting. If those priorities seem fucked up, well then you don't know us very well. Key was the fact that it was in Vegas, so even if YKos sucked, we'd still be in Vegas (baby). As it turned out, absolutely nothing sucked at all except leaving. It was totally fucking awesome. It was so awesome that a lot of what we did the entire time was have conversations with random people that went along the lines of this:
Az and I were in a minority in that we are mostly lurkers in the world of Kos-dom. I comment occasionally and she never does. We have this little rag here, but it's not exactly the HuffPo. Neither of us considers ourselves "bloggers" and in fact we are made slightly uncomfortable by the idea that anyone at all actually reads this. So we were a little surprised to find that almost everyone there was either a big time blogger, Kos or on their own, a policy/thinktank/activist type, or a journalist. Once we got over the feeling a little weird about that it was all good. I think the username or knowing someone online thing was really only an icebreaker, and since the gender breakdown was about 75% male/25% female, we didn't have so much trouble with the ice...
The great thing about YKos was the feeling of community. Now that was probably the lamest and most touchy feely sentence I've ever written, but there it is. There was a real feeling of community. You just felt like you were with your people. All weekend long, everyone (including me, not known for my outgoing nature) would just walk up and introduce themselves to absolutely anyone at all. And more likely than not, after that you'd talk for a while. And 99% of the people you met were interesting (except teacherken, who was an asshole). And then when you got bored you could kind of get up and walk away and meet someone else. It was like a four day long liberal cocktail party.
The very first night Wes Clark (the adorable general, as he will be known henceforth - shoutout to Baratunde!) gave a party at the Hard Rock, and we (oh, btw Az and I were basically joined at the hip the whole time, so I really do mean "we" in each of these cases) ended up chatting with Chris Mooney, who wrote The Republican War on Science and is an all-around smart dude. We had no idea he was a big author dude, he was just a cool guy that we talked to for a couple of hours. Then we hooked up with Az's friend Katie Halper, who is a stand-up comedienne with Laughing Liberally, which is exactly what it sounds like. Katie is great and was a sort of YK celeb, so we got to meet a lot of people through her. We ended up at the coffee shop at the Hard Rock, chilling with some (at that point) random folks until quite late. However, in the college orientation manner, the people we met at the very beginning ended up being the ones we hung out with most of the time.
The next morning we made it to Wes Clark's (and Chris Mooney's!) 8am panel on Science. Clark is really into science and made a pretty passionate presentation about the importance of supporting scientific research and education. So adorable! We fell into a pattern of going to morning panels (all at 8am ugh), doing the lunch keynote thing with our boy Alejandro (one of the first night Hard Rockers and another person of extreme awesomeness) and then taking it easy by the pool for some of the afternoon. (It was a vacation, after all.) Then we'd head back and do some late afternoon events and then in the evenings there were mad parties. Here's what you need to know: liberal bloggers like to drink.
Jesus, this is the longest post ever. OK, I'm going to stop now and go to dinner, but in the next post I'll try to discuss actual politics, and not just socializing.
Azulita and I decided to go mostly because we thought it would be a. fun and b. interesting. If those priorities seem fucked up, well then you don't know us very well. Key was the fact that it was in Vegas, so even if YKos sucked, we'd still be in Vegas (baby). As it turned out, absolutely nothing sucked at all except leaving. It was totally fucking awesome. It was so awesome that a lot of what we did the entire time was have conversations with random people that went along the lines of this:
Us: "How fucking awesome is this?"Slightly more difficult would be quantifying exactly why it was so great. So I'm probably going to have to go a little free-form here to get some of my thoughts down, and I'm sure I'll forget a lot. (Oh and speaking of free-form, I've been looking over some old posts and I am so sorry there are so many typos. My only defense is that almost all of this happens at work, and I have to hide the window behind a spreadsheet or something every two minutes, and spellchecking can be hard. I'm going to try and go back and make some edits in the coming weeks.)
Other person: "So fucking awesome!"
Az and I were in a minority in that we are mostly lurkers in the world of Kos-dom. I comment occasionally and she never does. We have this little rag here, but it's not exactly the HuffPo. Neither of us considers ourselves "bloggers" and in fact we are made slightly uncomfortable by the idea that anyone at all actually reads this. So we were a little surprised to find that almost everyone there was either a big time blogger, Kos or on their own, a policy/thinktank/activist type, or a journalist. Once we got over the feeling a little weird about that it was all good. I think the username or knowing someone online thing was really only an icebreaker, and since the gender breakdown was about 75% male/25% female, we didn't have so much trouble with the ice...
The great thing about YKos was the feeling of community. Now that was probably the lamest and most touchy feely sentence I've ever written, but there it is. There was a real feeling of community. You just felt like you were with your people. All weekend long, everyone (including me, not known for my outgoing nature) would just walk up and introduce themselves to absolutely anyone at all. And more likely than not, after that you'd talk for a while. And 99% of the people you met were interesting (except teacherken, who was an asshole). And then when you got bored you could kind of get up and walk away and meet someone else. It was like a four day long liberal cocktail party.
The very first night Wes Clark (the adorable general, as he will be known henceforth - shoutout to Baratunde!) gave a party at the Hard Rock, and we (oh, btw Az and I were basically joined at the hip the whole time, so I really do mean "we" in each of these cases) ended up chatting with Chris Mooney, who wrote The Republican War on Science and is an all-around smart dude. We had no idea he was a big author dude, he was just a cool guy that we talked to for a couple of hours. Then we hooked up with Az's friend Katie Halper, who is a stand-up comedienne with Laughing Liberally, which is exactly what it sounds like. Katie is great and was a sort of YK celeb, so we got to meet a lot of people through her. We ended up at the coffee shop at the Hard Rock, chilling with some (at that point) random folks until quite late. However, in the college orientation manner, the people we met at the very beginning ended up being the ones we hung out with most of the time.
The next morning we made it to Wes Clark's (and Chris Mooney's!) 8am panel on Science. Clark is really into science and made a pretty passionate presentation about the importance of supporting scientific research and education. So adorable! We fell into a pattern of going to morning panels (all at 8am ugh), doing the lunch keynote thing with our boy Alejandro (one of the first night Hard Rockers and another person of extreme awesomeness) and then taking it easy by the pool for some of the afternoon. (It was a vacation, after all.) Then we'd head back and do some late afternoon events and then in the evenings there were mad parties. Here's what you need to know: liberal bloggers like to drink.
Jesus, this is the longest post ever. OK, I'm going to stop now and go to dinner, but in the next post I'll try to discuss actual politics, and not just socializing.
posted by chiniqua at 5:48 PM
1 Comments:
Glad you had a great time. I just wanted to give you a heads up -- Chris Mooney is over on Wes Clark's site doing a live blog event and taking questions right now. http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/7262
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