Saturday, August 23, 2008

The First International JBlogger Convention

Yeah. We did. And it was kind of awesome. And by kind of I mean a lot.

I do not have the requisite time to do the event its full justice in this post, so this will just be a brief overview of some of the highlights and I will G-d willing give you something more fulfilling later this week.

So first of all? Yeah, there were name tags that had your name and blog on it. Now I know this shouldn't be a surprise because it makes a lot of sense, but it's kind of like going to Poland in the winter and realizing that all the pictures of Poland are black-white-and-brown because those are the colors of the Polish landscape, not just because that's what pictures looked like back then. That makes almost no sense in context. But what I mean is, I had kind of imagined that there would be and it made me giggle, and then they were, and that made me giggle some more.

A lot of things made me giggle actually. Me and Tobie both, because of course we were sitting in a corner and whispering snide comments to each other, because that's what we do at social gatherings, even the social gatherings that gather anti-social geeks together. And believe me, that's what this was.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I may say so, there is nothing in the world more beautiful than getting a bunch of geeks together in a room for the sake of having them revel in their geekiness with other geeks. I mean, I know geek conventions are generally like this, bc I've been to one or two, and they made me almost as happy as this did. (For any and all Jbloggers living in Israel who may be interested and don't know about it - ICon!!!! It's amazing and it's coming up! I highly recommend it. I'll try to find a link.) But this was the first one I've been to with such a specialized demographic- and one that I actually fit into. Everyone there was someone who "asked questions on the story" - you could tell by the tone of their questions. Especially when they were questioning Netenyahu. Yeah that's right - Bibi came, and he spoke, and answered questions, and made fun of people ("Jewlicious?") and got made fun of in turn ("Netenyahu?"). Because that's what this very specific cross-section of humanity does. I think we all got about triple our share of Jewish chutzpah, and we're generally quite proud to show it off.

I'm not sure what to tell you all about it, specifically. I mean, I imagine you people aren't all that interested in the itinerary although some of the speakers were really interesting. But all of the typical blogger jokes were made - more actually than I was able to recognize bc of course I'm not as deep into the blogosphere as many are. There was a laptop charging station :) And there even was that one guy who comments in capital letters with too many exclamation points and absolutely no logical arguments and then hides. ("Excuse me, but this is a Jewish state!") And we made a couple of new blogger friends, and unfortunately did not have as much time to "mingle" as we would have liked bc Tobie and I had to leave early to go meet someone who was in from the States.

There is another side to this event that I would, in all fairness, like to discuss, only I haven't the time to do the research as it is almost 5 a.m. and I do need to sleep someday. So I will save that for the other installment later this week. I hope that this will satisfy curiosity in the meantime.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Was there any skeptic representation?

BHB

1:52 PM  
Blogger Miri said...

well now unfortunately, as mentioned, I didn't get quite as much mingling time as I'd have liked, so I can't tell you for sure. Most of the people there seemed Orthodox, although not all; but unfortunately I couldn't say for sure.

5:26 PM  

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