You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

  Praise for You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

  “It’s hard to keep up with Felicia Day. She’s an actress, a gamer, a screenwriter, a songwriter, a producer, a director, a webmaster, a costumer, and queen of the geek girls. It’s hard to imagine where such a prodigy could have come from. Wonder no longer. Felicia tells all . . . well, most . . . well, some . . . in her new book. Reading this is like sitting down and having dinner with her, and hearing the story of her life between the clam chowder and the cheesecake. I can’t imagine a more charming or amusing dinner companion. Felicia is a lot of fun, and so is her book.”

  —George R. R. Martin

  “I came for the delightful snark, I stayed for the disarming frankness and the hard-won insights about the internet—Felicia Day uses the internet to distribute entertainment, but she understands that it’s really there to be the nervous system of the twenty-first century.”

  — Cory Doctorow, coeditor of Boing Boing and author of Little Brother

  “Math nerd defies physics! Felicia Day, who is woven from moonbeams, has written a book that seems lighter than air but that ends up punching you firmly in the emotions. Felicia lays out a hilarious tale of how her unique upbringing, eclectic skill set, and killer work ethic led to The Guild, one of the pioneering works of online creativity. In the process, she pulls you inside her delicate skull, so that the final moving chapters aren’t as much read as they are experienced. An excellent book.”

  — Jane Espenson, writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Upon a Time, and Husbands

  “Felicia Day gives us an achingly funny, honest, open look at being ‘situationally famous’ (I love that phrase), plus the vital art of finding your creative joy, and weathering the storms that follow. It’s a wonderful book. Buy it before I grab all the copies.”

  — Rachel Caine, New York Times bestselling author of The Morganville Vampires series

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  Contents

  Foreword by Joss Whedon

  Introduction

  1. Why I’m Weird

  2. What Avatar Should I Be?

  3. Jail Bait

  4. Hollywood: Not a Meritocracy?

  5. Quirky Addiction = Still an Addiction

  6. The Guild: A Ruthless Beginning

  7. Web Series: A DIY Journey

  8. WE MADE SOMETHING! #lookit

  9. Convention Fevah

  10. The Deletion of Myself

  11. #GamerGate and Meeeeee!

  12. It’s Been Real

  Thanks, Guys!

  About the Author

  For my mom, who is kooky and unique and taught me to be both those things and more. Even though my childhood wasn’t “normal,” she did her best to help me become who I am, and I love her for it.

  Foreword

  by Joss Whedon

  There’s about twelve guys in very fine suits, scratching their heads. I’m in a boardroom at a major Hollywood talent agency, having just presented my internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. With me are the other writers: my brother Jed, my sister-in-law Maurissa, my brother Zack, and Felicia Day. Though we’ve created the piece, we have no clearer idea of what to do with it, how to actually put it on the internet, than these fine-suited minds do. They hem and we haw. Their resident internet expert suggests tentatively that we could maybe put it on YouTube—but only if we cut it up into three-minute bits, because no one watches more than three minutes of anything.

  Which is when the redhead pipes up.

  I’ve asked Felicia to come because I know she’s internet savvy; her series, The Guild, was a guidepost for me in mounting Dr. Horrible. I’ve sat with her, a couple of times, to learn about how it all works. I know she knows her stuff, but it’s still a surprise and a delight to hear her take the conversation and just run with it, own it, slam-dunk it, knock it out of the park—. She sports-metaphors the shit out of that meeting. Talks rings around all of us, experts included: This site has the bandwidth but not the views; this one requires a fee; yes we could go here and charge up front but we’d be compromising the ethos of the endeavor . . . . I’m practically glowing, watching this girl, who looks all of fourteen, school a roomful of Professional Agent-Men and I realize, oh, of course: I’m having a Buffy moment. They never saw her coming.

  I have personal heroes, and Felicia Day is one of them. She’s kind and loyal and funny and weird—but that describes a lot of my friends. She’s pretty and I want to touch her hair—but that describes, sadly, almost all of my friends, including the lads. But Felicia has something few of us do. She’s fierce. She’s more than a self-made woman—I sometimes think she’s not a human woman, that she willed herself into existence, before willing the world to make a place for this new, unfathomable creation. Felicia is stronger than I am, and stranger than I am, and she double-majored in math and violin (which she felt compelled to tell me within five minutes of meeting me). I love her for all these things. I love this book because it relates, hilariously and occasionally harrowingly, how she came—or brought herself—to be this singular (though double-majored) creature.

  It’s hard being weird. No—it’s hard living in a culture that makes it hard. This book deals with hard—without rancor, without the ugly flush of one-upmanship. Felicia created a persona of the bewildered waif who somehow manages to manage (and occasionally triumph). That persona is a gloss on a similar, but more painful, reality. Her odd, compelling journey was more difficult than a lot of us who knew her knew. But that’s part of her gift: she makes crippling anxiety look easy.

  Another part of her gift is that she’s damn funny. Even if she’d come from the heart of normcore, her tale would be worth telling and well told. But she was raised in Crazytown, and the more foreign her territory, the more delightful—and somehow more relatable—her tale becomes. Reading this book is like spending an afternoon with Felicia, hearing breathless tales (they’re always breathless—Felicia doesn’t pause when she talks) of achievement, despair, and dazzling, almost transcendent nerdiness. This is the story of someone who found her place in a corner of the world that literally didn’t exist till just before she showed up. Felicia’s place is always off the edge of the map, where dragons wait, and this story is more than a memoir. It’s a quest. If you wanna survive, stay close to the redhead.

  She knows her way.

  Introduction

  Whereby I introduce myself to people who have no idea who the hell I am, but have found themselves in possession of this book. Welcome, stranger!

  I recently experienced the perfect summary of my career at a Build-A-Bear store inside a suburban mall in Lancaster, California.

  Okay, sure, a single adult woman in her thirties with no children might not necessarily pick that as the first place to kill an hour of her life. But I’d never been inside one before, and I’d already spent twenty minutes outside like a creepster, watching actual legitimate customers (mostly toddlers) go inside and, like modern-day demigods, craft the companion of their dreams. At a certain point, after eating two Auntie Anne’s pretzels, I decided to throw off the societal yoke of judgment.

  Get in there, Felicia! Build yourself a stuffed friend. No one’s around to witness your weakness!

  So I entered, told the saleswoman I was browsing for “a nephew,” and proceeded to spend forty-five minutes trying to decide
what design to get. My mom wasn’t there, so I could take as long as I wanted. Unfortunately.

  There was a six-legged octopus that almost took my heart, but after much agonizing, I settled on a stuffed Santa Claus. Because it was July, and a stuffed old man doll seemed more ironic. (The hipster attitude helped get me over the shame that I was buying a STUFFED ANIMAL FOR MYSELF.)

  I moved on to the accessories aisle to dress my Santa. And proceeded to have a small panic attack. Because my impulse was to dress him in a flouncy pink tutu, but it was a small town and I didn’t know if it would offend the saleswoman to make Santa a cross-dresser. But then I thought a liberal stance on the issue might, in a small way, help promote transgender rights in the area . . . when I turned to see four hip girls standing at the end of the aisle. Staring at me.

  Eagerly.

  I overcame my social anxiety about people I don’t know turning their faces toward me and waved. “Heyo!”

  They waved back simultaneously, standing in a clump together, four feet away. Practically a gang. (Not really.)

  “Hi!” “Are you . . . ?” “You’re her, right?” “Hey!” They seemed excited.

  I wanted to smile back but stopped myself. I had to check something first. “Uh, who do you think I am exactly?”

  “You’re Felicia Day, right?”

  “Yes! That’s me! Nice to meet you!” I always double-check where people think they know me from, because one time at San Diego Comic-Con, a guy bought four DVDs of my web show from me, and as I ran his credit card, he said, “My wife is going to love this gift. You’re her favorite actress. She adored you in The Devil Wears Prada!”

  Doh.

  The girls crowded toward me. “We work at Hot Topic next door! Steph recognized you when you were standing outside at the benches FOREVER.”

  So much for anonymity at the Lancaster Build-A-Bear.

  “Uh, yeah! I couldn’t decide if I wanted to come in here or not. Most people my age don’t buy things here for themselves, right?” I laughed awkwardly, waiting for them to reassure me.

  “Yeah, it’s mostly for little kids.”

  Moving on. “Nice to meet all of you. Did you guys want to take a picture or something?” They were brandishing their cell phones like an extremely amiable group of paparazzi.

  “Yes!” “Sure!” “Thanks!” All four of them clustered around me, trying to get simultaneous selfies, like a six-armed octopus of their own, as a mother and child approached.

  “I can take those pictures for you.” The mother gathered all the phones as she stared at me. “Are you an actress?”

  “Uh, kinda. And a producer and writer. More of that lately, to be honest.” She stared at me blankly. “Yes, I’m an actress.”

  “Are you in the movies?”

  “Nope. No movies.” I wanted to make it abundantly clear to everyone in the Lancaster mall area that I was NOT Emily Blunt.

  One of the Hot Topic chicks piped up. “She does tons of internet stuff!”

  “And TV!”

  One of them leaned in slightly too close. “I love you on Supernatural.”

  She smelled like cherry ChapStick. I liked it. “Thank you.”

  The mother was confused.

  “Is that a TV show? I don’t watch it. But I love Law & Order: SVU.” The woman called over to her eight-year-old. “Jenna, baby, do you recognize this lady?”

  The kid stopped poking through a collection of pastel princess outfits to look me up and down in a surly way.

  “Nope.”

  I opened my mouth to lecture the kid on how princess dresses reinforce sexual stereotypes when the Build-A-Bear saleswoman walked up to join the crowd.

  “How’s it going back here?”

  One of the Hot Topic girls spoke up. “We’re just grabbing a picture with Felicia Day! She’s awesome.” I thought to myself, I should bring these girls with me everywhere.

  “Oh. Are you a celebrity?”

  “I didn’t recognize her either!” said the mother. She smiled at the saleswoman in camaraderie, which was kind of crappy but understandable. I’d have the same reaction if I encountered a reality star I didn’t recognize. Or a sports person. Or a lot of other internet stars, really.

  One of the Hot Topics, the ChapStick one, came to my defense. “It’s Felicia Day! She makes tons of videos online.”

  “Internet videos? Do you do pranks or something?” said the saleswoman.

  Oh, hell no. “No pranks, no kittens, no extreme sports, or music parodies. Probably why you don’t recognize me, ha!”

  “Probably.”

  One of the other Hot Topics said, “I only know you because my boyfriend is into your gaming stuff. He has a huge crush on you.” Then she gave a reassuring smile. “I’m cool with it!”

  “Great, that’s a real compliment!”

  I hear this a lot. The insecure part of me always feels like there’s a backhanded insult underneath, like the girls know I’m not QUITE hot enough for their guy to go through with a hookup. Sometimes I think to myself, I can steal your boyfriend. WORRY ABOUT ME!

  At this point, I realized that I needed to move the conversation along.

  “I think we can just take the pictures now and go about our bear building . . .” The mother was already ahead of me and snapped the first iPhone photo as I was midsentence.

  I tried to freeze retroactively into a rictus smile, one I’ve perfected over the years to prevent me from looking like I have palsy in the thousands of pictures that are tagged on Facebook, but I had a feeling it was too late. I leaned forward, “Can you just take that one again . . . never mind.” She had already moved on to the next phone. It was fine; people have palsy. I could look like I have palsy, too.

  As we took the photos, the saleswoman texted on her phone, then called over.

  “Hey, I just texted my son, and he’s never heard about you. And he’s online all the time.”

  “It’s a big internet . . .”

  “He’s on there a LOT.”

  “Uh, I’m sorry?”

  One of the Hot Topics started going Team Felicia on her. “He’s probably one of those online trolls who hate on women.”

  “My son is very respectful of women, thank you.”

  “You never know . . .”

  I could smell the situation going south. “We don’t need to get in a tussle, guys. Everyone on the internet is a jerk sometimes, ha!”

  Hot Topic drew back like I’d slapped her. “I’m not!”

  Leave it to me to alienate my own roadies. “Oh, I didn’t mean . . .”

  The mother taking photos broke in and shoved her kid toward me. “Jenna, get in there and take a picture!”

  “But I don’t KNOW her, Mom!” We posed, the kid’s body language screaming of apathy, as a beefy military-type guy came strolling up to the saleswoman with a pair of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dolls in hand. “Ma’am, can you show me where the nunchakus are?” He looked over at my doll and scowled. “Is that Santa Claus in a tutu?”

  Annnnd . . . that was my cue to head for the exit.

  “It was nice to meet everyone!” I grabbed literally anything nearby to accessorize my stuffed Santa—because he was not leaving Lancaster naked—and backed away toward the cash register, waving like an idiot on a parade float. “You guys rock, thanks for supporting my work!”

  Two hundred dollars’ worth of plastic skates, sunglasses, and mini-electric guitars later, I left the mall. This is what I built, if you’re curious:

  Yes, Santa’s holding a light saber.

  Then I drove to where I was headed before I stopped at the mall: to meet Richard Branson.

  (Okay, I had to type it that way because it sounds impressive. I was technically not meeting him personally. I was touring his Virgin Galactic spaceship hangar on a social media PR invite. But during the event, I stood two feet away from him on up to four occasions, and he was wearing a hot leather jacket and had perfectly coiffed hair. Definitely smiled in my direction. So yeah, we’re b
esties.)

  All in all, it was a completely typical day in my life.

  Not.

  Based on that story, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make a stab-in-the-dark assumption: You’re either extremely excited to read this book (inner dialogue: “OMG, FELICIA DAY WROTE A BOOK!”). Or extremely confused (inner dialogue: “Who is this chick again?”).

  For the excited: Thanks for liking my work! I like you, too!

  For the confused? I hear you, man. The friend who gave you this book does not know you at all. They should have gone with a more impersonal choice, like a scented candle or a gift certificate to somewhere with good french fries, amiright?

  But do I at least look a little familiar? Like the girlfriend of one of your cousins? I’ve been told I have a significant-other-of-a-distant-relative quality to my face.

  Or just a little bit of Emily Blunt in the eyes area?

  I’m not begging, I’m just asking.

  Forget it.

  I know I shouldn’t introduce my own memoir with this amount of insecurity, but my personal life philosophy is always to assume the worst, then you’re never disappointed. BAM! Highlight that previous sentence, baby! It’ll be one of many quotable life-nuggets you’ll be able to pull from this thing. I’m SUPER good at inventing Hallmark-type solipsisms. Later in life, I plan on making my fortune with a T-shirt/mouse pad/coffee mug company. I’ll call it Have a Nice Day Corp.! because of my last name, har har!

  Yes. Sorry.

  Hi, I’m Felicia Day. I’m an actor. That quirky chick in that one science fiction show? You know the one I’m talking about. I’m never on the actual poster, but I always have a few good scenes that make people laugh. As a redhead, I’m a sixth-lead specialist, and I practically invented the whole “cute but offbeat hacker girl” trope on television. (Sorry. When I started doing it, it was fresh. I promise.)

  I’m the writer, producer, and actress/host/personality of hundreds of internet videos. Literally hundreds. I have a problem, guys (let’s talk more about it later). A lot of people know my work. And a lot of people do not. I like to refer to myself as “situationally recognizable.” It’s way better than “internet famous,” which makes me feel like I’m in the same category as a mentally challenged cat or a kid doing yo-yo tricks while riding a pogo stick. I know that kid, super talented. But the cat . . . not so much.