Hank: Good morning, John, it's Monday December 29!

And sometimes I forget how amazing it is to have a fanbase that is entirely and completely and purely made of awesome!

And then I get featured on the front page and get comments like this one:

"WTF are you some kind of gay nerd homo sapiens activist??"

(Intro)

Sure I'll be a gay nerd homo sapiens activist... if, if you want to call that a bad thing then I'll be one! My wife might get a little bit angry about the gay part but everything else I'm sure she'll be one hundred percent in favor of!

Back when John and I first started on YouTube, probably fifty percent of our comments were negative, and now, because we have the "Nerdfighters," who, for those of you who don't know what a Nerdfighter is, mostly they are people who like to watch John and I and other Nerdfighter programming on YouTube. They are also people who instead of being made of bones and organs and stuff on the inside are actually made of awesome. And Nerdfighters believe in fighting for the rights of nerds and for intellectualism and for accepting people for who they are. so the Nerdfighters generally have very kind and supportive things to say to us. but then you get on the front page and there are a lot of non-Nerdfighters watching the programming, and suddenly you remember how hateful YouTube can be.

The only difference now is that when the haters come out, the Nerdfighters POUNCE.

Generally, I think that nerdfighters do a really good job of insulting people though. And frequently they do it by invoking Shakespeare.

"Zoaster Toaster" responded to a pretty offensive comment thusly:

"Thou foul-lurking cur resembling a wag-tailed embossed carbuncle!"

In fact, I'm a really big fan of responding to haters' comments with Shakespearean insults. I think that that is proof that there is a great well of awesome in the world, and that it is only just being uncapped.

It seems like many of the haters, in fact, are just the same person commenting over and over again, which makes me feel a little bit better about the nature of YouTube. I mean, at least it's not tens of thousands of evil people, it's just, you know, ten evil people commenting thousands of times each.

For example, ZacEfron4Life is a real meanie! You wouldn't expect ZacEfronForLife to be a real meanie but he's a real meanie! And i kind of want to get in touch with ZacEfronForLife just so that I can contact him in 30 years and see if it really was Zac Efron for life. It just occurred to me that ZE4L is probably a girl. I don't really think about girls as haters very often. But, you know, maybe ZacEfronForLife is is a girl hater.

I heard that you had a pretty good Christmas. And that you received, among other things, a personal trainer. Good luck getting off the pounds there, buddy.

I, in fact, weigh about 15 pounds more than I used to so maybe I'll be going down that road eventually as well.

I, as you probably know, received Rock Band. That has been fun. My wrists hurt. It's really hard. The bar, the thingies, bababababab. It's pretty fun, though. And I got Katherine a ukulele.

YOUKILLELAGH!!!

And hopefully you will see a Hank-and-Katherine duet in the future, guitar-ukulele style.

And of course, I wanted to thank you all very much for all of my llama butts. I mean, honestly, I'm having a hard time imagining my life before I had those llama butts. How did I live?

A couple of housekeeping things. There are a lot of people who are wondering where their copy of So Jokes is. I can promise you that it is not on my desk! (holding up copies of So Jokes)

Unfortunately, it turns out it is much more difficult to ship out large quantities of things at the same time than we had originally assumed. You need a special device and license in order to do that. And so we are in the process of acquiring that device, and as soon as we do, they will go out. But I don't have an estimated date for you right now, I'm very sorry about that.

So you don't need to worry about that, we did get your order, and we are about to send out several hundred copies of So Jokes and if you haven't pre-ordered them, you can go do that now at dftba.com.

Second little announcement for everyone: I am looking for people who are interested in 1: environmental technology, and people who are 2: interested and active in social news, like Digg and Reddit and StumbleUpon and that kind of thing. Because a friend of mine and I are working on a project and we were wondering if you would like to be included. So we need people who are interested in environmental technology, and we need people who are currently involved in social news. Just send me a letter to sparksflyup@gmail.com with "Environmental Technology" in the subject line. And if you spell it wrong, I won't get the email, so spell it right.

John that should be all from now, I will see you very soon in a video in which we will discuss the future of Nerdfighting on YouTube for 2009. And it will be a very exciting discussion indeed. We have some amazing plans for 2009 so ROCK! Don't forget to be awesome.