I’m going to try to update my blog every month with the creative stuff I’ve been doing so it’s all in one place.
Last month, I started to release my comedy podcast, Obsessed, once a week, every Thursday. Recent episodes include Jordan Morris on NOFX, Matt Belknap, Riley Silverman, & Clarke Wolfe on THE FORCE AWAKENS, Allie Goertz & Will Weldon on TINDER, and Mike Black on ACTION FIGURES. You can catch up on past episodes and subscribe to the podcast here!
I wrote another episode of James Urbaniak’s great comedy podcast, Getting On With James Urbaniak and it got a great review on The AV Club’s podmass. You can listen to the episode here and read the review here.
I also wrote an essay about the comedy theory behind Munchkin for this book celebrating the popular card game. There’s even a new Munchkin card based on my essay. It’s available now on Amazon!
I’ve been doing some writing for RiffTrax, too. Two of the shorts I co-wrote are available now. Tremble before the might of The Litter Monster and learn more than you would ever want to know about The Shapes We Live With.
I was recently a guest at the big Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, Gallifrey One. I got the chance to be on my friend comic book writer, novelist, and Doctor Who TV show scribe, Paul Cornell’s great podcast, The Cornell Collective. Hear me say funny, weird, and deeply emotional things about Doctor Who here.
I’ve also been hosting a series of Star Wars podcast with my friend and Screen Junkies’ producer, Ken Napzok. It’s multiple shows all under the umbrella of Force Center. You can check out the podcast feed here.
Finally, I’ve got a bunch of shows coming up in Los Angeles and I’ll be at Wizard World in Las Vegas in March. PLUS, my pal, Hal Lublin and I are putting together a new comedy game show that will debut at Nerdist Showroom on Friday, April 1st. More info soon. You can always find show info right here on my live shows page!
For the last few years, I’ve been writing down all the things I did that year to remind myself to stop beating myself up for not working hard enough.
I did work hard and do a lot of things this year and I’m going to reward myself with a much shorter, lazier post. Here are 14 things I’m proud of, happy with, and otherwise feel like giving myself a gold star for. For example, I think I deserve a gold star for not giving two shits about ending a sentence on a preposition. These are also not in any particular order. One of the other things I did this year was EMBRACE CHAOS.
Here we go:
1) I moved to Los Angeles. I love the city, I love the weather, it’s good for my comedy career, and it’s fun to live in a place where I can go to the neighborhood grocery store for ice cream and whiskey and see three different character actors who have been murdered by Jack Bauer on 24. Most importantly, I have yet to burst into flames.
2) I did a lot of stand-up. I’ve done a lot of different types of comedy performance–improv, sketch, children’s theater, working at Kinko’s–but I’m really enjoying saying comedy things into a microphone. This year, I performed at SF SketchFest, the Jonathan Coulton Cruise, headlined at Comedy Corner Underground in Minneapolis, a bunch of different geek conventions, variety shows with my wonderful friends The Doubleclicks, and performing on shows around town in LA. A highlight for me was getting booked on Ron Lynch’s awesome show TOMORROW. I was the first comic up and the last comic of the night was Louis CK. I’ve also been posting a bunch of my stuff to YouTube. Here’s a bit about objectification and soup recorded live at CONvergence.
4) I shot an episode of TableTop with Wil Wheaton. If you’re not familiar with TableTop, well, hello and welcome to your first day on the internet! I hope you like cats! Seriously, TableTop is an awesome show, Wil’s an awesome host, and it was super fun to shoot. I played the game Concept and my episode should be out in early 2015. Until then, here’s a picture of me from the set!
A photo posted by Geek & Sundry (@geekandsundry) on
5) I started a Patreon. The kind and generous support of my patrons has given me the freedom and impetus to keep creating comedy stories and essays on my blog, producing my podcast Obsessed, and unlocking fun, weird goals like doing stand-up dressed as a squirrel.
6) I became a Social Justice Warrior. Contrary to my assumptions, there was not a long series of arduous trials. All I had to do was speak up about issues of common human decency and equality! I’m particularly proud of this essay about what a stupid, inefficient insult SJW is.
7) I wrote another episode of Getting On with James Urbaniak. James’ podcast is great. In every episode he plays a different character who happens to be named James Urbaniak. I’ve written two other episodes, but this one was a special spooky episode released on Halloween. It features James playing a man who is both a motivational speaker and a werewolf.
9) I helped make Thanksgiving Versus Christmas happen. Thanksgiving Versus Christmas was my friend Molly Lewis’ awesome holiday special. Molly wrote all the songs, the awesome Josh Cagan wrote the book, and we performed it as a live show. I directed, played the narrator, and did a little bit of work on the script. Everything came together beautifully (Molly has an excellent wrap-up here) and it was one of those wonderful magic times where the show was even more than the sum of its parts. And the parts were all damn good to begin with. The show is available as an album and you can pre-order the hell out of it right now.
10) I continued being Obsessed. I continue to enjoy doing my comedy podcast Obsessed and to my delight, the listenership continues to increase! One of my favorite episodes this year was both insightful and horrifically funny thanks to my guests Tim Wick and Rebecca Watson. The episode was about CATS. Other favorite episodes included obsessions with Maps, Grease 2, Tiny Things, and Tenacious D. You can find them all on iTunes.
11) I continued to tweet a lot. I don’t know if I’m proud of that, but it’s definitely a thing that happened. Here’s one of my favorite tweets this year.
As a kid, I thought being a cyborg would be cool. I just saw a guy wearing Google Glass smoking an ecigarette. Illusion shattered.
— Joseph Scrimshaw (@JosephScrimshaw) May 12, 2014
12) Writing, writing, always writing. I wrote a lot of different things this year. In addition to some of the stuff mentioned above, I’m proud to be a regular contributor to Alice Lee’s awesome essay site Yearbook Office where I write about things like social justice and U2. I also wrote 30,000 words of a novel that I’ll eventually finish and I wrote three drafts of a sit com spec script that I’m currently shopping around. I also wrote this thing about Aquaman and got a thumbs up on twitter from the current writing team on the actual Aquaman comic book. Several of my (already written, thank god) plays were produced this year including Adventures in Mating, An Inconvenient Squirrel, and Stitch, Bitch N Die with more productions to come next year.
13) I started a show in LA called HOT COMEDY DREAM TIME. The concept of the show is that I get guest comedians and actors and they perform something they’ve always wanted to perform. In the show’s three month trial run, we created new sketches and bits with Hal Lublin, John Ross Bowie, Wil Wheaton, Dana Snyder, Mike Phirman, Greg Benson, Kim Evey, and Audrey Kearns. The show will be back in 2015! Details soon right here on the website.
14) I AM STILL ALIVE. Well, that took a sudden and dark turn. 2014 has, in many ways, been a rough year. There’s been a lot of brutal and pointless violence in the world. A lot of sad deaths in the world of comedy. Two friends from the comedy scene in Minnesota passed away suddenly in the last months of the year. Sometimes it feels like it would be easy to succumb to despair given how difficult and unfair life can be. But in doing something like writing this year in review, I look back on all the amazing, kind, funny, brave, gracious people I know–people I work with creatively, people I know in real life, people I only know on social media, people I see in audiences at shows who have done this insane incredible thing called leaving their house–and I feel very refreshed and inspired.
Thanks to everyone who has helped justify my optimism this year.
15) I ADDED ANOTHER ONE BECAUSE CHAOS REIGNS SUPREME. I also watched a lot of Netflix with my wonderful wife, Sara. We like Arrow a lot. Thanks, universe.
If you enjoy my work, you can check out all the comedy words and things I’m making via Patreon.
