The Movable Type Gathering

September 17, 2003

I was just reading Matt's account of this weekend's Movable Type gathering and I realized I actually had some worthwhile thoughts on the event. Matt complained that a number of attendees (specifically Anil and Cam) were a bit intimidating. It's funny how different people deal with different situations.

I can understand Matt's problem as meeting someone you respect or admire can often be a difficult thing, but I don't seem to suffer from this phobia.* Despite people's accomplishments or notoriety, they are just people. They have thoughts and they deal with the same problems and see the same movies and take the same subways to work. So, when I sat down between Kottke and Meg I jumped right into a conversation. Why not? What's the worst that will happen? These are people whose opinions I respect and enjoy, so the logical response should be to engage in dialogue instead of continuing the one-sided conversations of reading weblogs.

When I went to the last 601am/Gothamist Happy Hour (another one is coming up tomorrow night) there were a couple college-age girls there who were creaming their pants when they got to meet Nick Denton and Aaron of 601am. These are both cool people but come on, they just run weblogs. It's no big deal.

So, when you go to the Happy Hour tomorrow night or the Morning News Party on Saturday, you should run up to whatever cool/famous people are there and share your thoughts. Oh, and if you think I'm cool then you can talk to me as I'll be at both.

P.S. I get 40,000,000 hits a day. Bow down to me.

*As you continue reading, I don't mean this as a shot at people who have actual problems in these situations, but to those who just don't know how to react around "famous" people, not people in general.

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