You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

  “Joseph: Enter back door at 10:54 a.m. Felicia: Front door at 11:07 a.m. Lana: 10:20 a.m. through garage. Carry craft service in a single grocery bag. DO NOT BE LATE!” I’ve never been more nervous going to someone’s house in my life. I wore an outfit with a huge hat and sunglasses like Audrey Hepburn in a spy thriller. I parked half a mile away and, as I approached the house, I ran through the back door, feeling as if a sniper was outside waiting to take me down.

  We finished the scene, but with me talking in a very creepy whisper. (And people ask me why my character Codex is so neurotic.)

  Another time we were filming at my own house, and in the middle of the shot, the sound guy called, “Cut!”

  “Leaf blower is really loud next door, dudes. We can’t work like this.”

  Kim turned to me. “Felicia, you need to go charm your neighbor, get the gardener to stop working.”

  “But why me?!”

  “It’s your neighbor.”

  “Oh, God. Okay.”

  When I send food back at a restaurant . . . well, I don’t. Because I’m convinced they’ll send it back with cyanide in it. Or bodily fluids. I have only fired agents by certified letter. I apologize to cashiers when I return things at clothing stores. I’m sorry you have to re-rack this dress because of me, but look! I steamed the wrinkles out! Confrontation is what I dread the most in life. But my precious creation needed me to gird my loins. So that’s what I did.

  I walked next door with my heart pounding in my throat. This was how Marie Antoinette had approached the guillotine, I was sure of it. “Hi, Mr. Gregory! We’re filming over at my house . . .”

  “Is that why people were loud at seven a.m. this morning?” Of course, he had to embody the “cranky old man neighbor” cliché.

  “Um, so sorry, I’ll tell them to be quiet tomorrow. We just need to finish filming.”

  “So?”

  “And we need the leaf blower to stop blowing?”

  “He has to finish. The crepe myrtle’s gone crazy this year. When I first planted that tree . . .”

  “What a cool story. Ahem, so if he could just pause for thirty minutes or so . . .”

  “Don’t ask me, ask him.”

  I turned to the gardener, who was standing too close, staring at me silently, and holding the leaf blower on his shoulder like a weapon. I started sweating.

  “Hello.” No response. “Can you wait for thirty minutes please before doing more leaf blowing?”

  He stared at me. And stared. I turned to Mr. Gregory.

  “Does he speak . . .”

  Mr. Gregory was staring at me, too. I felt like I was in a zombie movie. I fumbled in my pocket for any money I had and held out my hand.

  “Eleven dollars? Stop blowing? Until five o’clock?” I tapped my wrist. There was no watch there.

  The gardener took the money and nodded.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gregory!” I called out over my shoulder as I ran away as fast as I could, back into my house. Full run. (Reminder, I have no dignity.)

  Kim met me at the door. “How’d it go?”

  “He’ll stop for a half hour, but I’m pretty sure if my house is invaded by robbers in the future, he’ll lend them a dolly to help carry stuff to their car. Let’s make this COUNT!”

  Every time the camera rolled on set, my nerves ratcheted up. I seriously didn’t poop for a week. I think it was because I cared SO MUCH. I wanted everything to be perfect, I wanted people to think we were hilarious; hell, I wanted us to be the first to win an Oscar for a web series. I had incredibly high expectations, and at the same time, I wasn’t secure in anything I was doing. Half the time I put my “producer hat” on, I felt like I was playing dress-up.

  “Absolutely the budget can accommodate a Steadicam for this shot. Psst, Jane: What’s a Steadicam?”

  I pretended to be a leader, but on the inside I was still that homeschooled kid who wasn’t allowed to walk to the corner by herself. Because, you know, murderers.

  I knew I was a jittery mess, so I tried to self-coach myself off the ledge every morning, Be happy! All the work we’re doing is so good! Remember? That chauvinist comment from Bladezz yesterday went over like gangbusters! But as a superstitious Southern lady, any second of enjoying myself felt like I was deliberately inviting disaster into the production. So any positivity backfired.

  The whole time on set, I was convinced that something terrible was going to happen. So I coped by visualizing every horrific scenario possible and playing it out blow-by-blow in my mind as I tried to get to sleep at night. I saw the police shutting us down when a PA double-parked outside, a tsunami hitting Los Angeles before we got to film episode two. I had a recurring dream that one of the actors, Jeff Lewis, would have a heart attack. Or an aneurysm. He was the highest-risk cast member. Almost forty, practically a corpse. So every morning I’d look up “instant death” diseases on my phone in order to say them out loud to myself in the bathroom mirror and prevent disaster from killing him and ruining my show.

  “Blood clot.”

  “Aneurysm.”

  “Heart attack.”

  “Stroke . . .”

  Knock on the door. “Felicia, are you ready to roll?”

  “Sure!” “Okay! I’m ready!”

  This sounds insane, I know, but I do this ritual a lot. When I’m driving in a thunderstorm, I say out loud to myself in a very musical theatre voice, “Gee, I sure hope this rain doesn’t make me spin out of control and make me die on this highway!”

  Laugh if you will; I’ve never had a spinout. Or had an actor die of a web-series aneurysm.

  [ 5: Making Things with Friends Is Awesome ]

  Even though every single second of filming was stressful and panicked and done completely illegally and the very hardest way, I’d never felt more alive doing anything in my life. There was a joy that I’d never felt before, because I was PLAYING with my friends. Many times during shooting, my fellow cast members were so funny I had to chant, Dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens for twenty seconds in my brain to get through a scene without giggling. Those were the moments I’ll never forget. (Partially because of the traumatic visuals, partially because of the fun.)

  We filmed for four days in the summer of 2007 and completed everything we aimed to do with the first few episodes of the script. There were complications, of course, like when I discovered that most of the cast had never played a video game before, but I just put on the hat of “gamer consultant” (in addition to lead actress, show runner, and co-caterer) and plowed ahead.

  “What does this term mean?”

  “You won’t understand. Just think, ‘He has a Marc Jacobs purse and I want it.’ ”

  “Got it!”

  Looking back at those first episodes now, I see all the rough edges in the acting and the writing and the editing I never noticed at the time. But the fun we had making it blasts away the imperfections. Kim, Jane, the cast and crew, and I created something together that didn’t exist before. Without permission. Without regrets. Hell, yeah.

  - 8 -

  WE MADE SOMETHING! #lookit

  The fine art of grassroots “getting all up in people’s faces” with The Guild. Tweetin’ and pioneerin’ and awards! Oh my!

  When I was in music school in college, everyone had to perform a senior recital in order to complete their degree. But it was a serious pain to get anyone to ATTEND the events. Enduring a classical saxophone concert for more than fifteen minutes is a private hell NO ONE wants to live through if you’re not dating the person, believe me.

  As the tiny prodigy of the building, I entered my recital semester with an ego the size of a Mack Truck. There was no way I was playing to an empty house! Did I put eight months of work into learning a Henryk Wieniawski showpiece with twelve million notes packed into three minutes for nothing? Hell, no! People were gonna show up. They had no mother-frakkin’ choice!

  Ahem.

  I did all the regular th
ings you were supposed to do to get attendance. I ordered tons of food and picked out a skanky dress that my professor gave two thumbs-up to, but I knew I needed something extra. Something special. Maybe something to do with the fliers everyone posted around campus to advertise their events? I asked myself, What can I make that stands out from the boring “John Smith plays an evening of Brahms at 7 p.m. Tuesday” kind of thing?

  Hmm, what could I do . . . ?

  Yup, that’ll work. That’s me as “Xena, Princess Violinist.” I whipped it up in the computer lab one evening, and, MAN, was I happy when I figured out how to engulf that violin in flames. An evil genius “muhahaha” kind of joy!

  I printed up about a hundred of the fliers and blanketed the music building at 11:00 p.m., right before the place locked up. I couldn’t wait to see what people thought when I got to school the next day.

  Good news: THEY PAID ATTENTION.

  Bad news: I got pulled into the dean’s office and was forced to take the fliers down due to “questionable taste level.” But at that point there weren’t many left anyway. People had stolen them. All the stoner percussionist majors tracked me down to say, “Badass, man, I’ll be there!”

  For once in my weirdo too-young-for-collegiate-life . . . I felt cool.

  And yes, I sold out the venue.

  People ask me if I have a marketing or PR background, since that’s what helped catapult The Guild into situational internet fame against all odds. Answer? Nope, I have no qualifications in those areas. But I’ve always had a flair for showmanship. I love adding a bit of “VOILÀ!” to life, like secretly slipping a turd into the pool and watching people react REALLY strongly. Um, except it’s a turd everyone gets excited about, not grossed out by. One made of gold or diamonds or something . . . I dunno where this analogy is going.

  Kim, Jane, and I had a meeting right after we finished filming to figure out what we were going to do with the show. We knew the episodes were going to be great, but any plans after that? Not so much.

  I tried to be organized and take charge. I even brought a clipboard to the meeting. “So we have a show to release . . .”

  Kim nodded. “And?”

  “Uh, that’s all I got. What do we do with it?” I dropped my clipboard next to me in the booth, because I suddenly felt stupid for bringing a clipboard into a coffee shop. Or owning a clipboard at all.

  Jane said, “We need a plan to get people to see the show before we upload it next week. Kim, how did your video do so well?”

  “It’s quirky. And it was linked by a TV show,” said Kim.

  “And it has a character named Lick Poop.”

  I frowned. “I don’t think we can count on the viral thing happening like that with this show.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. Episode two has great poop jokes.”

  “Meh. They’re okay.” I was always the gloomy Darth Vader of the group. I could even see the dark side of poop jokes.

  “We could use help in the PR department. Does anyone know anyone?”

  “For free? I already called in every favor for dog, cat, house-, or baby-sitting during filming. Every single sitting favor I had. Tapped out.”

  Jane sighed. “Well, someone has to be in charge of outreach. Or no one will ever see what we’ve made.”

  There was a long pause where we sipped our lattes together, knowing someone needed to step up to the plate, but no one wanting to fall on this particular sword.

  At last, I raised my hand. Like I was in English class. What a dork. “Uh, I’ll do it. Because I know the internet best? Kinda?”

  With that overconfident hubris, I went home and tried to conquer the fantastic world of online marketing! My only starting point was, “People. Want to make them watch things. How do I corral them?” Since the internet is part egalitarian democracy, part vengeful cat worshipers, it was a daunting task. Because I knew that making something discoverable on the web is like sending someone on a scavenger hunt into the universe’s biggest flea market. There’s anything and everything available you can imagine, with an infinite number of stalls to browse and no emergency exits in sight. (That sentence flashed me back to a trip I took to Ikea recently. Major panic attack in the cutlery section.)

  But it was actually the perfect time to dive in, because 2007 was when social startups were popping up online like acne on a teenager’s face. It’s hard to imagine with babies practically born with hashtags tattooed on their foreheads today, but social media back then was not mainstream. Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, most of those sites were brand spanking new. They were super nerdy, super fringe, and super small. (The trending topics were like Drupal and the latest version of Linux. So yeah. That nerdy.) And I had a secret power in this new world: I was used to trolling the internet desperately for friends. (In 2002, I had a Friendster account, yo.) So all the experience I’d had hanging out online and creating bitchin’ recital fliers was about to pay off!

  I sat down and scoured the web for every single social network startup that was able to reach new people for free and jumped on them to claim the usernames /felicia and /theguild. Ever go into a gas station and browse the souvenir section for a key chain or a coffee cup with your name on it, only to discover your parents were horrible human beings and named you too weird to be part of the rest of civilization? That’s what I experienced every time I had to settle for /feliciaday and /watchtheguild instead. (To the girl who has /felicia on Twitter: Damn you, ma’am. Damn you to hell.)

  I also taught myself how to program a website. In the most rudimentary, janky, kid-with-crayons way. I’ve always taken my art seriously, even when I was terrible at it. From ages eight to twelve, I would spend months making everyone in my family handmade gifts for Christmas:

  “Mom, get in the car, let’s go! I need more blue construction paper.”

  “You have a ton of paper there.”

  “But I’m out of royal blue. Santa is flying through the night sky to deliver presents, it’s 2:42 a.m. GMT in this piece, I need blue!”

  “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?”<
br />
  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!