Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Brothers Green IRL



This weekend I had a fun time meeting two of my favorite YouTube vloggers John and Hank Green of the vlogbrothers. I discovered the vlogbrothers and their project Brotherhood 2.0 last July when Hanks very popular song "Accio Deathly Hallows"was featured on the front page of YouTube. After watching his video and his brother's response video I was hooked.

It couldn't have come at a better time. I was about to graduate from college and had already started my first full-time job. In the weeks after receiving my diploma I went through post-college depression (that's according to this one blogger I found on a Google search). Which means I'd graduated a year early from college and left all the friends I had to sit in an office for 8 hours+ a day. Who wouldn't be depressed?

The only bright spot in my day, besides getting off work at 5 p.m., was lunch time. I didn't know anyone and often didn't have transportation, so I closed my office door and had lunch with the vlogbrothers. They were about 150 videos into the B2.0 project, a project which had the two brothers who live in different states communicating every week day back and forth in YouTube videos, so I had a lot of videos to watch to get caught up.

I really looked forward to lunch everyday. I had so much fun with the Green brother videos! I now know I'm a made of awesome nerdfighter and have read all of John Green's books. It's been a great journey getting to know the Green brothers and the other awesome nerdfighters through the forums at the various nerdfighter Web sites, first www.brotherhood2.com and now http://nerdfighters.ning.com.

It's very hard to explain the awesomenss of nerdfighting. The inside jokes, phrases and songs are really best experienced first through the videos. Of course if you're coming across this for the first time you have a long way to go to get caught up. The vlogbrothers currently have 369 videos up on YouTube and will have a lot more before the month is up.


All of this background information leads up to my meeting the brothers Green on the first stop of the Great American Tour de Nerdfighting 2008 in Plano, TX last Sunday. I thought I'd be nervous meeting John, Hank and The Katherine (Hank's wife) after watching them for more than a year, but it was actually like meeting friends. They didn't know me, but I knew a lot about them. (I didn't want to make too many assumptions because I learned the folly of that in John's latest novel, Paper Towns.) They were even more awesome in person as they are via YouTube. It was also great meeting other Texas nerdfighters. We all have a shared history through the vlogbrothers and it was very easy to talk to complete strangers because of that commonality.

The visit was short, sweet and totally awesome. The Tour de Nerdfighting continues as the Green brothers travel the country meeting others just like me. Thanks to John and Hank for never forgetting to be awesome and teaching others the value of being a nerd.

Hank and John Green, brothers for over 27 years, decided not to write to each other during all of 2007, and instead make daily video blogs.

Though the project "Brotherhood 2.0" has now ended, they decided to keep updating the YouTube channel at least once a week. Additionally, the community of nerdfighters that they helped create is now stronger than ever, and lives at: http://www.nerdfighters.com

John Green is the author of the novels "Looking for Alaska," "An Abundance of Katherines" and "Paper Towns." His personal site is http://www.sparksflyup.com

Hank Green runs the Web site http://www.ecogeek.org.


Photos
TOP: Hank (left) and John (right) walking up to the Plano library where we had our nerdfighter gathering.
RIGHT: John signed my copy of Paper Towns. You should go buy a copy today or if you live in Waco and are really nice to books, you can borrow mine.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post, keep writing the good stuff.

Sarah-Jane said...

Thanks matt!