Felicia Day

I’ve decided to turn the phrase “stressed beyond belief” to “coping with a wealth of opportunities”.  That sounds so much more positive and lovely!   I haven’t had time to blog in a few weeks, time has passed so fast it’s unimaginable that I just took that trip to New Media Expo and now I’m packing my bags for PAX in Seattle!  So crazy! Seeing a Twitter by Jenwriter tonight about how she was looking forward to a blog entry by me was what spurred me to write, so thanks Jen!  I can’t guarantee quality, but I can deliver quantity ONE BLOG ENTRY!

I have been totally overwhelmed this past week.  So overwhelmed I haven’t even had a chance to TOUCH a video game, gasp!  Not only did I have to juggle an unexpected commercial job (shooting from 7pm to 7am for two days in a row!) but I’ve been scrambling  to get Guild Season 2 jump started.  It was an executive decision by me and my producer Kim Evey to start planning to shoot at least a few episodes by end of September.  I looked at the calendar a few weeks ago and was like, “It’s been WAY too long, I’m not waiting anymore. We have to shoot!”  And with that, we started getting ready for pre-production.  We have been waiting all summer to meet the right funding partner to enable us to shoot and pay people.  Unfortunately, people are slow to let go of their money, haha.  Not to say we haven’t gotten offers, but none of them has felt right to me yet.  The New Media landscape is so crazy right now, and every deal is different and has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  Kim and I decided a while ago to try and retain the rights to our show, and that has definitely ruled out some avenues of funding, but we know the right opportunity will present itself in time, we just have to keep plugging away.  We still have a few interesting possibilities looming on the horizon, but now we’re working with a set goal to shoot in September no matter what and it makes me feel so empowered to have that line drawn in the sand.   The lesson I’ve learning the last year or so is that waiting on other people to solve my problems is never going to accomplish anything and I just had to remind myself of that to get the ball rolling.

Not having the script totally done has been the main stress because it takes me long uninterrupted blocks of time to write.  I’m also developing a script with Machinima.com at the same time that is also fun, but another time-block-requirerer.  The challenge for me is somehow letting emails and other correspondence  go rather than automatically responding and spending 3-4 hours a day on messaging, which has been the case the past 3 weeks or so.   Video Game Addict => Email addict anyone?

I saw an interesting article on Tim Street’s Blog the other day about Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.  He has a clever way of dealing with emails:  He send people a link to this video:

I love it because he’s so polite and he obviously cares that people take time out to contact him but he simply can’t respond very quickly and he wants people to know that.  I don’t get nearly as much mail as him, but to make time to finish this script AND get everything else done in my life, ruthless triage must be done, at least for the next 4 weeks.  I missed a dear friend’s baby shower due to Comicon and utter chaos, and it was kind of a wake-up call.  I think I may be copying Senor Vaynerchuk!

I’m proud to say that the effort to delegate is now a goal of mine for the next month.  We put a post on the Guild website last week asking for volunteers for the show and had to take it down again the next day due to the overwhelming response!  All THOSE emails have ironically taken a lot of hours to deal with and respond to, haha, but now we have a great group of people we know we can call on to help us, and as for set PA’s:  We could staff a Michael Bay film with the # of volunteers on the list!!!  Thank you all who offered their time and services, it means so much to us.

Anyway, enough whining about how hard my life is!  I’m leaving tomorrow for Seattle, and if you’re at Penny Arcade Expo please stop by and meet me and Zaboo and Kim Evey my producing partner!  We’ll be selling and signing DVDs and screening the first season of The Guild on the big screen, yay!!  Check out The Guild site for details on signings and the Friday night screening!

I leave you with an interview I did with Pop17.  It was quite fun and was done at New Media Expo!

So many people expressed their enthusiasm but newness to Twitter in comments to my last post that I wanted to compile some helpful links: Everything from searching to finding people to follow, and making it easier to integrate Twitter into your web life.   I found that after I got my iPhone, my dependence on Twitter changed from night to day because Twitterific and Twinkle make it so easy to keep in touch.
Here are some fun resources for you:

• Twitter Search is a great tool for searching Twitter.  Some people are unaware that if you don’t START a Twitter reply to someone with an @theirID, then that the person won’t see it in their replies tab.  This search engine, formally Summarize and recently bought by Twitter, makes it easy to search all Twitters for anything you’re looking for, including lost replies directed to you.
• Better, if you’re lazy like me, you can automatically search all Twitters and have them sent to your inbox like a Google Alert with TweetBeep.  Very convenient.
• Added due to smart comment:  Linking your Twitter to your Facebook Update is as easy as installing the Facebook Twitter App.  During installation it will ask you if you want to tie the two together.
• Desktop ways to keep track of Twitter include  Digsby (PC only) and Twhirl which are very popular.  Digsby includes Facebook and email alert options, Twhirl focuses more on microblogging sites.
• It’s not as useful in a huge city like LA, but Twitter Local can show Twitters in an area you designate.  Along with the iPhone apps Loopt and Twinkle, that show you people in your area, location-based Twitter tracking could be cool for finding local Twitterers.
• TwitPic lets you post photos to Twitter and replies to your photo show up automatically as @ replies to the poster.  Very cool and convenient, especially while posting with an iPhone through Twitterific.  It’s automatic, takes your pic from your iphone and you can easily posted (sideways, but oh well, they have a few bugs to fix, haha).
• Picking who to follow is hard when you first start out.   Twitterholic and TwitDir lists the top 100 most followed and other “most” people, but these aren’t necessarily good guides to follow.   Twello is a great place categorizing people by category.  Twitterpacks is another service like this.   If you’re looking for people in specific careers or interest categories, these are good places to look.
• Twitscoop has a cool dynamic search of what is hot on Twitter, like a tag cloud.  Twiturl tracks hot links that people are currently Twittering and ranks them.
• Lastly, FriendFeed is a lot more than just Twitter, it’s a whole Lifestreaming service.  I won’t go into details, but you can have comment threads to your Twitters here, saves “@trash” as I like to call it (When people reply to others with @ Twitters and you don’t know what the hell they’re referring to, lol.)  I try not to use too many of those in my Twitter stream because it’s not interesting to followers other than your replyee most of the time.  I use Friendfeed and connect my Facebook status update to my Twitter to have threaded conversations there.
• If this isn’t enough information overload, the Twitter Fan Wiki has a listing of just about every Twitter app, anything you need or never wanted will be listed there!

If I left anything off, please post in comments and let other people know what you use to get your Twitter on!

Ever since I started using Twitter I haven’t updating my blog as much. I’ve read about this phenomenon many times on other prominent blogger’s sites: That the immediate satisfaction of Twitter drains the will for more long-form blogging. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure that I could take any number of Twitters I post every day and write a whole blog entry about each of those subjects, but it feels like after I Twitter something there’s no real reason to write a blog about it. 140 characters seems enough. I don’t know if this is encouraging shallow thinking on my part or just enabling me to post more spur-of-the-moment and share more overall. I’m still trying to analyze it. I know that as I travel through the day, my mind is more attuned to communicating in “Twitter-speak”, just as, when I’m writing a scene for a script, my mind is constantly searching for character traits or line inspiration. It’s an awareness that has become second nature for me, especially since I can Twitter on my iPhone now (addicted, lol).

I think Twitter is brilliant because it is a very effective form of one-way, selective communication. We’re all being deluged with information on the internet, and the “megaphone” approach seems like the natural way to move towards when communication reaches overload. However, that’s from my perspective, having over 7,000 Twitter followers and 1,000 Facebook friends. Most people don’t deal with the volume of communication that I do daily. If I were just limited to a few dozen friends, I feel like Facebook and MySpace would be much more attractive to me, because I would have the time to really keep up with what each person is posting and use the tools to coordinate more real-life meetups etc. It would be a deeper level of connecting than is available to me, the way I use these services.

If any of you Twitter, especially if you’re new to it, I’d love to hear your thoughs about it and social networking in general, and how you use it in your lives!

I have mentioned in interviews that one of the reasons I love being a web content producer is that it requires me to learn something new every day.   Before I wrote “The Guild” I had no idea what producing a scripted show entailed.  During the shooting process, I learned about pre-production, script revisions, casting, props, production coordinating and more.  After the show was shot, I  learned about a whole new set of skills; editing, video uploading specs, sound mixing, Photoshop for credits and graphics, YouTube and more.  After picture was locked I had to learn about marketing, raising awareness of my show, getting press, promoting, retaining audience, Wordpress programming, RSS etc:  It was definitely the biggest set of skills and the most important part of making the series what it is today.  And these past two months I learned a whole OTHER set of skills about DVD production.  It was a sharper learning curve than anything before, believe it or not. I suppose it’s because I’ve been exposed to TV and movie productions for years, so learning that stuff was easier since I had experienced it firsthand.  The steps in actually manufacturing a DVD were a lot more complex because I’d never been exposed to it before.  But I feel quite proud now having gone through it.  The DVD looks great.  I couldn’t wait to share it with everyone.  But nothing, my friends, has exhausted or tried my patience more than this last phase:  Shipping and Handling.

Don’t get me wrong, part of this was my fault.   We put the pre-order button on the website several weeks before the DVD was actually finished, partially to help us gague how many we needed to manufacture our first run.   We offered free shipping as incentive.  Not that much of a problem, except we underestimated how popular our DVD would be internationally:  A full 1/3 of the orders were from outside the US.  This wouldn’t have been a problem EITHER in a theoretical universe.  We had calculated the average shipping and, besides shipping to Malaysia and South Africa, we didn’t have to eat that much more shipping than we anticipated.

No, all of this could have been handled fine, had we not decided to ship everything out at once on August 1rst, and use PayPal as our service.  O M G.

If PayPal were a man, I would punch him.  I would cold-cock him into tomorrow, even if I had to break my hand.  I think this is a perfect example of a monopoly gone wrong.  The useability of the site is a nightmare:  The documentation, laughable.  Combine this with a Brother Q500 label printer that is bundled with software that was created on Fortran, and you have the perfect storm for driving a girl over the edge to a day job, abandoning web video forever.

Paypal, you suck.  Yes, I had too many orders piled up to do at once, I understand that might have been my problem, but your Multi Shipping option is a nightmare.  What, you say?  When you import orders 100 at a time there’s no indication of the number of DVDs they ordered, and hence, no way to tell if their packages need more postage?  That’s retarded.  Hmm?  You mean, there’s no documentation anywhere about what kind of labels the label printer needs to print properly?  It couldn’t be that no one in the city of Los Angeles or surrounding areas would carry such a label size, that would be ridiculous!  I mean, it seems natural that you’d use a readily available technology instead of having to order it overnight on the internet!  Hmm.  OMG, are you serious?!  You mean, despite not indicating it ANYWHERE, you CANNOT IMPORT ORDERS PAST 14 DAYS INTO THE MULTISHIPPING SOFTWARE?!?!  I HAVE TO HAND ENTER 300 USA DVD LABELS MYSELF!??!

Breathe.  Yes, my friends, the nightmare was partially my doing, but oh, it was a nightmare.  I still can’t move my right hand properly.  The repetitive motion of clicking through 300 individual DVDs and printing their labels one by one, waiting for Paypal to load, 2 out of 10 times having it or the printer lock up and having to relog in…I shut off my brain in a way that I never knew possible in order to accomplish that phase of the task in an 8 hour stint at my computer.  I ate a lot of junk food and ice cream to get me through the day.

Oh, and I forgot.  The international DVDs?  Well, here’s a little tidbit:  Paypal doesn’t allow you to either automate in batches OR print First Class shipping for anything other than the US.  Their only option is an expensive $20.00+ Priority Option, because they insist on delivery confirmation.  Thus leading me to my secondary nightmare:  Exporting all the international orders (know what a .csv file is?  I do now!) and print them out on a DIFFERENT kind of label, THEN HAND PRINTING ADDRESSES ON EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMS FORM.

I have since learned that stamps.com can do that for you, the customs forms and international labels.  Thank you Twitterers for letting me know that.  Thank you Wil Wheaton for giving me a lot of great advice to alleviate these things next time I do this.  I wish I had asked sooner.   My producer Kim Evey has Carpal Tunnel now, I think.  She has lovely handwriting, if you are in Canada or Australia you will see it.  If it’s chicken scratch, that’s my claw working.  We were desperate to get the orders done because we had promised August 1rst shipment, and it was August 5th already (due to waiting on labels and learning software), so we cobbled together this totally crazy system where I had to learn how to use the 1980 software that came with the Labelmaker Printer in order to import a database and print only the international addresses.  Mmm, I’d say 4-6 hours total on that.  I’m actually laughing now, because it’s so absurd and instinctual:  Never let hundreds of orders pile up and do them in 3 days time, especially if you don’t know how to do it already.

Oh, and the post office:  Surly Postal Worker, I understand you get hassled all day, I empathize.  But when my producer comes in with 75 neatly filled out international DVD packages, all nicely arranged in boxes, maybe you should do your job and enter the information in the computer?  Maybe DONT FORCE HER TO BUY $4.30 STAMPS AND PUT THEM ON HERSELF!  And maybe don’t, upon seeing me enter with a wobbly dolly cart that spilled over two times in the parking lot (thank you sweaty construction man for helping me re-pile them), don’t look at me, lock the big dropoff door and then yell: “8 boxes yesterday, 9 boxes today!?  Girl, I’m gonna SMACK YOU!”  That’s kind of the last thing I want to hear.

Learning curve:  Vertical.  Satisfaction: too tired to rate, haha.  I’m so happy they’re out and in people’s hands, but believe me, I’ve learned my lesson:  Some things are meant to be hired out.

Next week?  Accounting and Quickbooks.  Thank God I got a math degree.