I’ve been thinking alot over this past year about how exactly I first came to be introduced to the GWC podcast and thus, by extension, our fantastic community. A little over a week ago, I hit upon the idea of starting a thread where each person could share his or her own personal ‘GWC origin story’, as it were, with the rest of us. If you feel so inclined, please do so below! (Feel free to include as little or as much detail as you prefer, but please share only if you would like to do so. No pressure!) Here, I’ll start:
It was about mid-March of 2011, and I had just begun playing EVE Online for the THIRD time, having jumped quickly in and out on two prior occasions. I had never played for more than a month those first two times, but this time I went at it with a bit more gusto. In true nerd fashion, I started doing some research to try to get a better understanding of the minutiae and actually engaged in some things that I usually don’t. I actually joined a corp (I’m a terrible MMO player mainly because I hate the ‘MM’ aspect of MMO’s) and even engaged in some PvP. I even started up my own short-lived 1-man corp (mainly as a tax dodge, there was never any real chance of it becoming anything more than me, even if I had delusions to the contrary). I was scarcely-employed IRL and wound up dropping out again mid-May, only to dive back in in October and play until the end of the year, with a second corp, this one focused on RP.
All of that’s fairly tangential to GWC, however. (Actually, the tangent goes on for a bit more. Bear with me.) As part of my nerd-brain-induced obsessive-compulsive crash course into all things EVE Onliney, I had taken to reading Brendan ‘Nyphur’ Drain’s Eve Evolved Column at Massively.com, and by combing back through the posts, had found out about this award-winning machinima film called Clear Skies (some of you may have heard of it). I had seen some machinima in prior years and was a huge Red vs. Blue fan, and thought that checking out this little computer-generated indie film might be a good idea. Of course, once I saw Part 1, I immediately watched it again about a dozen times, followed by Part 2, as I had pretty much absorbed them both into my soul and had the uncontrollable urge to assimilate them at once. (Obsessive-compulsive nerd-brain, remember?)
Of course, watching the films on such an endless loop meant downloading them onto my hard drive, which meant poking around the Clear Skies website, which led to digging through the ‘Extras’ section…which just happened to contain a link to this thing called a podcast, which happened to be called GWC…I had heard of this odd thing called a ‘podcast’, but had never listened to one before and really had no inkling of exactly what the whole idea was all about. (Despite being a sci-fi nerd, I’m actually a bit of a Luddite, for various reasons, and am usually behind on the cutting edge tech by at least four or five years…) I’m also (as alluded to before) religiously anti-social, and had never really been part of a long-term, hard-core nerd group before. I was always an outcast and a loner (and for the most part still am, happily) but once I listened to that ‘first’ GWC podcast, I promptly bookmarked this place and have been listening to the 'casts ever since. (Still keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll get some new ones someday!)
Sorry for the long build-up, there (the writer in me can’t resist telling a story, and the narcissist in me can’t resist drawing it out, ‘cause it’s about me), but basically the overall progression (in its most basic form) is: EVE Online -> Clear Skies -> GWC. This was my first podcast and my first real inclusion into a genuine ‘nerd/geek’ community. Admittedly, it took me several months of listening to GWC and being a forum lurker before I worked up the courage to sign up for reals, due to my being the aforementioned outcast/loner, but I’m glad for all that I’ve gained since. Being a member of the GWC community also led directly to me finding my current obsession, that being Nerdist.com and the entire nerd media empire surrounding that. (In that regard, even GWC’s year-long-plus hiatus has been a blessing in disguise, as I’ve had time to catch up on four years’ worth of Chris Hardwick podcasts that I never would have found otherwise!)