Note: This post was drafted on 3/13.
I was invited to speak about the Eureka Room at Nerd Nite last Tuesday. Fortunately it was online and it was OK for me to prerecord my talk and have the only live part be the Q&A. This made a much better experience for everyone, since I don’t have much public speaking experience and I had a lot of media to show during the presentation. Editing it ahead of time would make it much more of a zippy presentation.
The previous Nerd Nite had about 20 viewers, so I was not sure how much I wanted to invest in my effort. I ended up spending 2.5 days on it and came up with a pretty good history of the Eureka Room. I was glad to finally have a reason to retrospect and looking it all over made me feel good that I have not given up after so many fails.
I had the good fortune that the other speaker for the evening was Ralphie Hardesty, a popular local comedian who is one of the hosts of Master Pancake Theater, a popular Mystery Science 3000 type live (currently virtual) event. There were around 80 viewers at one point, 78 of which I credit to Ralphie. Looking at it now, just five days later, I can see that there have been 222 views. That’s perhaps even more than I might have seen in person. Though it’s very possible they skipped over me and went right to Ralphie.
I’m no lover (or hater) or the spotlight. It’s just not rewarding or that exciting to me. I much prefer to watch people respond positively to my work. Even if they don’t know I made it. But I believe most successful people are self promoters and sales people to at least some significant degree (even if they won’t admit it), so I put on that hat when it helps me with the mission. The Nerd Nite thing gets me a little attention, another video to share, some links to my sites from a relatively popular site, and it helped me write a clearer history in my head of the Eureka Room. It was useful to see the history and I think someday I’ll be glad to have captured it when I did. I’m glad I did it.
You can watch the whole show here or below.
