I, geekrevThe closest you want to get to looking inside the mind of Shawn Coons.

I just got done doing an interview having a fun conversation with Felicia Day for my podcast HowIWow. It’s very weird how podcasting and World of Warcraft have influenced my life. Yes, I’m still a Presbyterian minister, but now I’m a Presbyterian minister who spent an hour and a half chatting with a guy from Paris and a talented and geeky gamer-girl/vampire slayer (who helped Buffy save the world).

Patrick and I had a blast talking with Felicia. It felt like we could have gone on laughing and talking for hours. Maybe Felicia was just being gracious and couldn’t wait to get off of Skype with us, but I don’t think so. She was uber-cool, way funny, had all sorts of interesting stuff to talk about, and was super nice! I’m really looking forward to seeing her in Joss Whedon’s new web musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog.

Right now Felicia is mad-popular for creating and starring in The Guild. I’ve embedded the first episode below, although I’m not sure how it will play to all you non-gamers out there, you may want to watch Felicia in her Cheetos commercial instead.

SECRET: I’m not a driven perfectionist.

It’s true. I don’t slave away hour after hour, making sure every last project or task I have is perfect in every detail. That’s just not me. I’m much more of a big picture/idea person. Fortunately, I have just enough skill, luck and connections that my ideas sometimes get off the ground and fly! The funny thing is that my ideas often work out not because I do them better than other people, but rather because I do them first.

The best example is “Decently and In Order,” the Presbyterian podcast and news site that I created and now co-host with several other friends and colleagues. If you’ve listened to the podcast you know that we aren’t the most-informed or well-spoken people out there about Presbyterian happenings. Our audio quality is good, but not great, and we are always talking about things we hope to do with the podcast but we never quite get around to doing them.

The news site is similar. The current graphic look of the website is ugly, but I don’t have the tech know-how to make it what I want. There are also certain functional things that would be great to add to the website, but once again, I just don’t have the skills to do it.

But even given these deficiencies, because I was the first to create a Presbyterian podcast and news site, it worked! There are a several hundred people that listen to the podcast and use the news website. Now, I’m not saying that what we do totally sucks, in fact I’m pretty proud of DAIO and our community. What I’m saying is that someone could do it better than we do.

Another example. I’ve recently started a World of Warcraft podcast called “How I WoW.” We released the first episode last Thursday and have had over 600 downloads since then. Mostly because of my involvement and connections with another podcast called “The Instance”, and because we are taking a different approach than any other WoW podcast out there. My involvement with “The Instance” was once again a matter of being one of the first people to do something. I created a weekly audio segment and submitted it to their show, and at the time they only had one other weekly audio segment and so I made it on to the show as a weekly contributor. I was certainly not the best or most knowledgable person to do that segment, but I was one of the first.

One more example. I’m the director for Alt7, which is a revival of the 7% Event that the PC(USA) used to do. How did I become the director? Was it because I was the most qualified person? Heck, no! I simply had the idea that the conference should happen again and I started a Facebook group to see if people were interested. I was the first person to work with this idea and now I’m in charge (don’t worry, I’ve surrounded myself with very talented people).

Now, because I was the first to do these things and turn out an adequate product, I’m getting a reputation as a well-known Presbygeek. This has lead to co-writing an article for the Outlook, and speaking about Web 2.0 at an upcoming Presbyterian Communicators Conference.

So what can we learn from all this?

1) Don’t be afraid to try something new! Especially if no one else is doing it.

2) The internet enables people with niche ideas to reach the people in that niche. This is the Long Tail that churches would do well to learn about. We don’t need to be all things to all people and try to compete with the mega-church down the street (or even with the flagship church of the Presbytery).

3) Communities make ideas happen. None of the stuff that I do would be successful without a supportive and interactive community.

So now my secret is out. I’m a slacker and the only reason I’ve had any success in my projects is because I’ve been first. Ok, hopefully I’ve done some good work as well. But it never hurts to be first.

I’m a geek, and I proudly identify with these geek definitions from Wikipedia:

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia (a love of novelty and new things). Most geeks are adept with computers and treat “hacker” as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves.

A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest.

My geekiness manifests itself in a number of ways. My fiction reading is 99% exclusive to fantasy and science-ficiton. If it doesn’t have dragons, wizards, robots, time travel, spaceships, lasers, or elves than chances are I haven’t read it. I’ve been playing video games since Pong. For the last two years I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (with forays into City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online). I blog, podcast, Facebook and was big into MUDs back in the day.

So I’m a geek, but guess what? My wife is too! We bought a new duvet cover this weekend, and when we tried it on our comforter it was just wide enough but a little too long. It fit well enough though, so we decided to keep it. After we washed and dried it we found out that the cover had shrunk so that it now fit lengthwise, but didn’t seem to be any smaller widthwise. It had magically shrunk only in the dimension that we needed it to.

Carrie: “It’s the Duvet of Requirement!”

Me: “No, it’s the One Duvet that changes in size to suit whoever wears it. Watch out for DuvetWraiths!”

It was a moment of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings geekiness that brightened my Monday morning. But not as much as this moment that took place as Carrie was trying to get our almost three year old son, Ben, ready for school.

Carrie: Ben, please listen to me. It’s time to stop playing with trains and come brush your teeth.

Ben: No!

Carrie: Ben, I need you to listen to me.

Ben: Don’t say something to me!

Carrie: Something.

Shawn: You didn’t just do that did you? How old are you?

1) My two year old son, Ben, and I were doing some errands the other day. While we were driving around he told me that “D is for dismal dungeon.” This is a line from the ABCs of Halloween book we’ve been reading. Call me a geek, but as soon as I heard the word dungeon come out of his mouth I swelled with pride. My son knows the word “dungeon”, as in Dungeons and Dragons! The dungeon is one of the basic concepts of all sorts of gaming goodness! I am a dedicated fantasy role-play gamer from way back when, and I can’t wait to introduce Ben to all sorts of geek games.

2) And speaking of geek games.  I’ve moved on from World of Warcraft and City of Heroes for the moment and am playing Lord of the Rings Online.  And in order to enhance my gameplay, I’ve started reading the LoTR trilogy again.  I’ve read the Hobbit but I’ve never actually read the trilogy.  I started it a couple of times but stopped reading out of boredom.  I know that I lose major geek cred for this, especially since Middle Earth is kind of the building blocks of Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of fantasy gaming, books, movies, etc.  Maybe this time I’ll get through it.

Stop what you are doing now and go watch this trailer.  I think it looks pretty good.  Hopefully we’ll get Spiderman and the first X-Men movie rather than Daredevil or Ghost Rider.

On a related tangent.  I’ve gone off of World of Warcraft for a while and am back to my first MMORPG - City of Heroes/City of Villains.

My previous post reminded me of an email conversation I had a while back.

Me:

“If you feel the need to pursue questioning my geek cred we can continue this discussion tonight, but let me remind you that you are dealing with someone who:

• is a level 44 Night Elf Hunter who is known and loved by thousands on The Instance podcast
• has had an email address and been “on the net” for 17 years (I pre-date the web and AOL - it was all text back then baby)
• wrote programs in BASIC on my Texas Instruments computer and saved them to a tape recorder
• likes to use bullets (not the deadly kind - but the list kind).

I see your Kung Fu is strong, but you are no match for me. *insert Keanu Reeves Matrix “bring it on” gesture*

My adversary (who shall remain nameless, unless Jeromy chooses to identify himself.)

It is on Elf Boy!  I know that you and Al Gore think that you invented the internet and all of modern geekdom, but that doesn’t give you the keys to the castle. You may have some geeky credentials, but I have a few of those:

• Played frogger from a audio cassette tape player on my Sinclair 1000 (TS1000)

• Twice attended the San Diego comic con

• Worked for 4 years in a comic/game shop

• Played a contiuous game of AD&D, meeting once a week for just over a year

• Built my own paper mache battlefields

• When I was 11 I had a job replacing rechargeable battery packs in Panasonic handhelds (I soldered my own battery packs)

• and last, but not least, I am an ICC certified building plans examiner and an Elder in the PC(USA) who wears a bow tie!

Maybe this could develop into an online battle of the geeks?

In World of Warcraft (and other video games) the word “nerf” has taken on a new meaning. Ok, maybe not an entirely new meaning, but at least a new usage as a verb. In WoW there are different classes (think roles or specializations) a player can choose. Let’s talk about them in Tolkein-speak since that is the basis of Dungeons and Dragons which is the basis of most fantasy gaming.

You can play a mage (Gandlaf), a warrior (Gimli), a Hunter (Legolas), a Rogue (a cross between Aragorn and one of the Hobbits), and so on. In WoW there are eight different classes that each have their own strength and weaknesses. Blizzard, the company that runs the game, is constantly adjusting the power and abilities of the classes to keep them relatively on par with each other. But if one class appears to be too strong, then someone will quickly say that that class needs to be “nerfed.”

The term comes from Nerf toys. The average baseball is not meant to be thrown indoors because it is too hard and can break things, but a Nerf baseball is softer and can’t hurt anything. So to nerf a class in WoW is to make it “softer” and less powerful or destructive.

Ok, so I introduce this concept to you so that I can make this clever statement:

We have nerfed the gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, we have nerfed Jesus.

Last month I heard Stanley Hauerwas speak and I was quite taken. He had a number of really interesting things to say, but I keep thinking about his comments regarding how we have reduced Christianity to being loving and being nice. Hauerwas basically says that nobody gets executed as a political criminal for simply telling people to be nice and love each other.

He also says that following Jesus should be hard, trying, dangerous, a lot of work, and should make people angry. When was the last time your church advertised something like that?

Jesus told people to carry their cross (an instrument of death), cut off their hand, gouge out their eye, leave their family behind, and give away their stuff. Sacrifice is a very Biblical concept, but the only time we seem to use the word is to describe some ancient Old Testament practice that “unenlightened” Jews used to do before Jesus came and said that God wanted hugs, puppies and Care Bears instead of burnt offerings or anything else that would make us slightly inconvenienced.

We may not be preaching the Gospel of Prosperity, but we sure aren’t preaching the Gospel of Sacrifice. And I’m as guilty as the next Christian, maybe more so.

We’ve taken a Jesus who demanded our very life, and made him into Buddy Christ.

We’ve nerfed Jesus.

Ok, so it’s not a deep and dark secret.  Those who know me, know that I really enjoy playing World of Warcraft.  And I’m not alone.  Eight million people worldwide play this Dungeons and Dragons /Tolkeinesque online video game.  People from all walks of life play this game. Sure, there are a lot of teenage boys that play it, but there are plenty of older players as well.  I play WoW, my sister plays wow, even my Dad and his girlfriend play WoW!

I play it quite frequently, pretty much daily.  Sometimes it is only for 15-30 minutes at other times for a couple of hours.   I regularly read several WoW blogs.  When I’m driving to work I listen to WoW podcasts.  Heck, I was a regular contributor to The Instance podcast which measures its listeners in the thousands.  Now, I haven’t gone so far as to dress up as a Tauren warrior and go off Gnome hunting, but I do own two different WoW t-shirts (one was a present from my darling wife, the other a present from her brother - who also plays), and I am now the proud owner of a WoW Visa.

So, WoW is more than a game to me.  It’s kind of a hobby.  I don’t expect too many people to get it, but that’s OK.  It is a complex game with a variety of ways to play.  You can do the obligatory killing to gain levels, but you can also get wrapped in its multi-faceted economy, spend time crafting weapons, potions, armor, or other items,  go fishing, explore far off places, or get involved in any number of conversations ranging from the infantile to the introspective.

If you play WoW, let me know!  I’m mainly on the Anub’arak server.  If you want to try WoW, let me know and I’ll hook you up with a free trial and some gold.

I plan to write some more WoW posts on aspects of the game I find interesting or people in the game who I find amusing.

During my sophomore year of college, in the fall of 1990, I dated a girl named Julie Neuberger. Julie was from Clear Lake, IA and although I haven’t talked to her in over 15 years I just Googled her and am pretty sure that she is the person teaching lifeguard classes on this page. Whether or not that is her has nothing to do with the point of this entry, but it’s the kind of tangents that I go on, so I thought I’d take you with me.

Anyway, Julie introduced me to this “really cool game that you play on the computer with other people” called a MUD. It was basically Second Life, but with no graphics. Instead of seeing someone walking into a room, you would see the text “Quasar has entered.” Quasar was the name of my character. The specific MUD I began playing was called Pegasus and I later found out that it was created or run by a guy I graduated from high school with named Mike Lutz.

I really got into this. I’d been a video gamer since my grandparents bought Pong. We had an Atari 2600, my friend had an Intellivision, Dad had a Coleco. I graduated up to the SNES, N64, Xbox and so on. Computers and computer games had been a part of my life since early on too. The TI-64, TRS-80, my first IBM, etc.

Back to the MUD. I liked computers, I liked video games. So I got hooked on Pegasus MUD. Pretty quickly I found out that if you got a UNIX account through the university then you could get into other MUDs all over the country and even in other countries. So I I got a UNIX account and learned my very first UNIX command - ‘telnet’. This was before the web (at least the graphical web, I remember “surfing” an all text web), I don’t think I knew that I was on “the internet” I just wanted to play more games. I learned that if I wanted to find out where more games were I could read newsgroups on “Usenet.” This is where you found information before there was a web.

In 1996ish I created my first website. It was about the card game, Euchre, a favorite in my youth group back in Iowa. The website has long been taken down and I didn’t save any of the files. And I can only find one reference to the site on Google only trace of it I can find is a reference to it. I also made myself a homepage at that time called Shawn’s Slice o’ Universe but I have no clue now what was on it. Then one summer in seminary I had a lot of time on my hands so I created a new website.

It was pretty fancy! Sort of. I had a webcam, a blog (although that word wouldn’t be around for a number of years yet), writings, and pictures.

I still have those files on my computer and have uploaded the site here. It is not completely intact, for some reason my pictures, blog entries and writings were either missing or not readable. But I still find it interesting to see the format and some of the stuff I was writing about. Later in seminary I created a website called Youth Are Prophets for an education class I was taking. I never actually implemented this vague idea of a model for youth ministry, the testimonials and examples on the site are made up.

Since then I’ve created a blog here and there, and made my footprints in other places on the internet. You can check them out yourself in the Where I Am and Stuff I Do links on the right. I’m pretty stoked about Decently and In Order which is a Presbyterian podcast and user-driven news site.

One of the stories submitted to DAIO was by Bruce Reyes-Chow called 3 Reasons Pastors Should be Blogging and it really got me thinking about starting my own blog again. Another reason I’ve started I, geekrev is because I have really enjoyed reading the blogs of others and they have inspired me to put some of my thoughts to add to the conversation. But I think the main reason I’m back on the blogging saddle is simply because it is a way for me to record what I am thinking/experiencing and a way to process it. I keep pretty much all my records on the computer and online. My email, calendar, to-do list, checkbook, photos, etc. So it makes sense to me to keep part of my story on here too.