Good Morning John. The other day I was on Twitter and I noticed a hashtag, in the trending tab, that I thought was appealing. It was appealing to me.

It said Nerdfarters. And I was like, that’s very funny, I wonder– I wonder what that is. And honestly I was astounded to find that it was the hashtag of an October Nerdfighter art prompt challenge that I did not know existed. I found out about it through the trending tab on Twitter, which I famously dislike. But I suppose the product does deliver some useful information. Maybe not some. Maybe just one, one piece of useful information which was the existence of the Nerdfarters October Nerdfighter art prompt challenge.

So the story is @dftbaRachel had the idea, asked people if they would be interested, and then @sweet_carolyn came along and said what if you call it Nerdfarters. People were into it. Rachel created this spooky graphic that had a different prompt for each of the thirty one days in October. We’re almost halfway through the month, and I wanted to share with you some of the genius that has been created, and I hope that more will continue coming.

The first prompt was simply DFTBA which people went a lot of directions with. And, since it’s the first one, I’ll go ahead and show you all of them that were submitted. I won’t do that for any of the other ones. The great thing about this is that no one is really trying to be a virtuoso…except for Alys… what the heck Alys?

Now, I’m not going to tell you my favorites, of these, but my favorite is obviously the one where I get chased by the crab with a knife.

Our next prompt: Pizza John Yourself… Which is an exceptionally good prompt! Then we had Breezy Fall Day, which is a reference to my second novel, thank you for that.

Followed by just the word “Pelican” on October 4th. Which is as delightful as you’d expect.

Next we have a Surprise Fiddle Concert, which you could do anything with. And then Nerdfighteria, and then Pizzamas, and then, possibly my favorite prompt of the whole month, “Draw A Crab, you have to do a bad job.”

It’s one thing to be told that you can do a bad job. But I think we need to require ourselves to do a bad job more often, otherwise it’s just too much pressure, and you will never do the thing cause you think you’re bad at the thing but you can’t get better at the thing if you don’t do the thing!

Going deeper into the lore here now, we have French the Llama and Puppy Sized Elephant. Then we got “Million Dollar Idea” featuring “Surprisingly Edible” and “The Awesome Club Club” Which, look, I’m not saying we’re gonna do that but I’m not saying that we aren’t gonna do it either.

Then, this Wednesday we had Pumpkins and Penguins.  Unsurprisingly, full of delightful stuff including an actual pumpkin cause it is indeed Halloween.

And then yesterday the prompt was Hope is the Thing With Feathers but I filmed this so early yesterday that there weren’t any posted yet. So if you wanna see em, you have to go look for the nerdfarters hashtag on Twitter or follow nerdfarters on Twitter.

There were of course way too many nerdfarts for me to post all of them in this video, and it only seems to have been growing organically as the month has gone on. And I very much hope that this video will inspire more people to go check it out. Maybe submit a couple prompts yourself. Maybe you have to do a bad job. I really love all of the prompts. I’m personally most looking forward to Robot Carl, that’s exciting for me.

Superior Fish Beings is going to be amazing. And also, of course, tss… I am very excited to see your Lemon Men. After all these years of doing this, and all of the other things that we do, I’m very happy and excited to not be in control of many of the cool  things that happen in this community.

I think, call me crazy, that doing things is never about doing the best thing. I think that it is about doing things and ideally doing things with people that you like a lot. And who are cool. And I am really feeling that  energy right now, having discovered this organically. Which is the strangest part. Like I had seen a couple of arts, but I hadn’t put together that it was part of a thing until the hashtag just popped up, which I guess is why they do the hashtag. I just wish it wasn’t constantly full of things that make me angry and sad.

But sometimes, it’s full of things that make me happy and happy. And what is the opposite of angry? Oh no, what’s the opposite of angry. I haven’t figured it out. Let me know if you know what the opposite of angry is.

John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.