Felicia Day is one of the internet’s highest-profile geeks. She’s appeared as an actress in Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and also wrote and starred in the popular web series The Guild, about a group of online gamers. Her latest project, the Geek and Sundry YouTube channel, offers a wide range of videos for the Comic-Con crowd. But in a rallying cry to geeks issued on her blog, she argues that being a geek is about more than just playing games or reading comics.
“We have to mean something ourselves, and not just get trapped into, ‘Hey, everything’s just a mashup T-shirt,'” Day says in Episode 91 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The substance of what it means to be a geek is essentially someone who’s brave enough to love something against judgment. The heart of being a geek is a little bit of rejection.”
Day is no stranger to judgment. As a struggling actress in Hollywood she was told she’d need plastic surgery to land larger roles. Instead she eked out a career as a quirky character actor, but found herself frustrated at the shallow way that geeks were portrayed on television. To remedy that she wrote The Guild, but soon found herself facing accusations that she was too pretty to be a “real” geek, a charge she brushes off.
“At no point am I ever threatened by people who question who I am, or why I like the things I do, or my legitimacy,” says Day. “Because I know who I am very strongly, and I think that’s what geek culture can reinforce.”
Listen to our complete interview with Felicia Day in Episode 91 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which she laments the lack of porn-free sets in L.A., reminisces about writing Ultima fan poetry, and reveals what lies ahead for Geek and Sundry. Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Matt London and Cate Matthews join hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss YouTube for geeks.
Felicia Day on promoting The Guild:
“I would carry a stack of about a hundred bookmarks around with me every single place I went, and I would leave a lot of bookmarks in bathrooms, because, hey, you have nothing else to do in there, really. I would leave them at coffee shops, I would leave them at auditions. To me there was nothing too small, there was no venue or effort that was not worth my time, because when you’re starting from zero, every single person involved in your project is a person that wouldn’t have been involved otherwise.”
Felicia Day on Hollywood and the internet:
“Still to this day, people in mainstream Hollywood don’t really understand or acknowledge the web as being anywhere near on par with what traditional Hollywood makes … so that mentality kind of accompanies me with everything I do, because I still have my foot in a world that doesn’t see the net and what I do as something legitimate. Now, from the creators’ side, a lot of the creators do love the idea of working on the web, working without the gatekeepers and all the business and all the cookie-cutter parameters that people are forced to work in to make things in Hollywood. So on the creator end, what we’ve done with the show has been recognized by a lot of writers and actors and creatives, but from the business side — the gatekeepers — they don’t see the stakes as being high enough for them to acknowledge them and give credence. Though that’s changing, but very slowly.”
Matt London on video editing:
“I learned this term for the first time this week that’s amazing. It’s called ‘the frankenbite.’ Anyone who’s ever edited audio and watches a reality television show will be familiar with this phenomenon, even if they don’t know the term itself. It’s when a testimonial interview with a reality show contestant is hacked to pieces to the point where the original statement is completely indecipherable, but the editor has sculpted a new statement to better fit the narrative of the show. So you’ll hear something that sounds like this: ‘I think … Dave … is a … jerk.’ Now, ‘jerk’ is from one sentence, and ‘I think’ is from a sentence three episodes ago, and it all just gets mashed together to create the story that they want to.”
Matt London on YouTube comments:
“YouTube video comments are the worst comments in the world. One of my all-time favorite YouTube videos is ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ … It’s an amazing video, and it deserves the 180 million views that it has. But if you go to YouTube right now — right this second, as you’re listening to this — and type in ‘Charlie bit my finger,’ and look at the first five comments, they will all be profanity-laden, pornographic, or advertisements, just super-critical, disgusting, filthy, horrendous stuff. And I know that because the top five comments on that video are always that … And it’s just because people are always on it, being offensive, selling their own stuff, trying to draw attention to themselves.”
You can listen to episodes of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast here.
