Good morning John.

One of the things I saw a lot mentioned in the census, as I've been reading through it, is that people want to hear more about our adulty lives, doing the things that we do. And another that I know, just about the world, is that we celebrate our own successes and other people's successes, but we don't talk about failure at all.

And it's kind of a taboo topic. It's hard to ask other people to talk about their failures, and it's hard to talk about your own. And it makes it feel like failure is unique, and, when you experience it, like no one else ever has, because no one else has ever talked about it.

Well John, as you know I am currently in the midst of something of a failure. So I have this company, that aims to celebrate nerdy things in the world, by taking them off of the internet for a little bit of time and into the real world. VidCon, of course, being the thing that started this all off, but we also want to celebrate other nerdy things that people are passionate about. In particular, I started NerdCon Stories, because stories are this amazing thing that defines culture. It's how we build culture, it's how we decide how we are going to talk about ourselves and our world. And this is the way in which NerdCon Stories this year will not be a failure.

We sold about a thousand tickets, which means there is going to be a huge, diverse, interesting group of people celebrating storytellers and stories. There's a ton of community-generated and community-focused content, and it's not just about the big names that are going to be there. It's about all the people who are attending the conference, all being the reason that all of the people who are there are attending.

But we budgeted the conference to have three thousand attendees. That's sort of the number we needed to have it work financially; we have a thousand. So at this point NerdCon Stories, which I, as a human person, own, stands to lose a lot of money.

Now I can afford this. NerdCon's not going to go bankrupt, I'm not going to go into debt. But it does sting.

I'm learning a lot, through this whole process, but I do wish it was a slightly less expensive set of lessons. Talking about it is not a good feeling. That's why people don't do it! You want to portray to the world this image of like "Oh I'm so good at the thing" but it's not -- nobody's like that! Nobody's lives are like that!

Last year's NerdCon Stories was such a wonderful experience for me, and I'm very sad that I can't be there again this year, especially since this is probably going to be the last time NerdCon Stories happens. And I think this year is going to be a fantastic time for everybody who's there, and really that's, like, isn't that the thing that matters?

If you'd like to attend the event, or just out and see if like, maybe you'd like to (it's in Minneapolis and I know lots of people can't go for all kinds of very good reasons! Just to say to you, make sound financial decisions. You, you right there, you are your first responsibility), but if you're interested in checking it out, we've created a discount code, DFTBA. 20% off, 20 bucks off because, you know, what do we got to lose?

So I'm not proud that I made a bunch of, you know, thought errors, or just misunderstandings of how this event could go. And I might make a video over on hankschannel discussing all of those mistakes, so that you don't have to explain them to me in the comments. I -- I know.

But I'm very proud of the idea of this thing that we've put together. And I'm very glad that it's gonna be a thing that happened in the world.  We've got John Green Yoga Adventure happening one morning. We've got opportunities for in-depth conversations with professional authors. Live gaming, community sourced content, a live episode of Dear Hank and John (although the Hank is not going to be there), workshops on zines, puppetry, improv, podcasting. And panels on diversity, adaptation, even tabletop gaming.

As I list these things I totally get that NerdCon Stories is a really weird event, and that probably doesn't work in its favor. This is among the mistakes that were made. But it's also kind of the reason we're not going to pull the plug on this thing. We're going to keep it alive. We're going to do it, even thought it's going to lose me a bunch of money. This show must go on, because it's different, and I think special.

And that's the thing that we could all be going for. We're all going to fail sometimes. We're going to make stuff and it's not going to work. Even when we fail, is there a way to eliminate the shame of that, and instead, make it a failure you can be proud of.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

I'm going to be okay. Video on hankschannel. More in-depth.