Felicia Day's #mysteryproject revealed - Dragon Age: Redemption, webseries!

Felicia Day as 'Tallis' from her new webseries Dragon Age: Redemption (picture from USA Today)

EDIT: as hoped, more information on Felicia Day and Dragon Age: Redemption - an extended profile in USA Today.

AND: Felicia has blogged, too!

Plus: Great interview in io9 with exclusive picture

Gamers and Guildies Rejoice!

After weeks (months!) of speculation the dragon is out of the bag. When Felicia Day had mentioned that her new webseries was very much an action series speculation abounded about what that mean. Last year she starred in the well-received Syfy movie "Red: Werewolf Hunter". That shoot involved lots of action, weapons and stunts, something that she had wanted to more of since her stint on Dollhouse. 

USA Today broke the news last night

After a day working hard on "Mind My Brains, Darling!" I got on to Twitter late to find a link to the USA Today article. After eagerly reading it I passed on my congratulation to Felicia and the team, not realising that the news was supposed to be officially announced today. Ah well. A quick detour to The Guild Chatroom revealed that other people had also seen the link. An early morning Google check shows a whole raft of articles about it, so let the speculation and celebrations begin!

Webseries take a big leap forward

Using much-loved games as a basis for a webseries is not new. Legend of Neil, from Sandeep Parikh and Tony Jenning, is based around Legend of Zelda, and finished its final, triumphant season last year. Whether Nintendo could be said to approve of the hilarious (and definitely NSFW) antics of Neil and his friends is open to debate. The Guild itself is based on a game that is similar-yet-legally-distinct from World of Warcraft (WOW). Although Blizzard, the makers of WOW, have been very friendly towards The Guild and have welcomed the cast to Blizzcon, there is no endorsement from them because of the legalities involved.

'Dragon Age: Redemption' is different. From the outset Bioware, the creators of Dragon Age, have been on board. From the USA Today article:

..That dedication is what convinced the developers at Dragon Age studio BioWare that Day was the right person for the project.
"We are really, really excited to work with people like her who have a passion and appreciation for the content and a really good history of quality," says BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. "That's who we want to work with."..

There is no doubt about Felicia Day's love of the game, either, as this excited tweet from 2009 shows:

Also in production at the moment is Elfquest, a new webseries from veteran creators Stephanie Thorpe and Paula Rhodes. After a successful funding run on IndieGoGo they are now shooting and expectations are high for this new series. The creators of Elfquest, Wendy and Richard Pini, have given their blessing to the project.

More news to come!
There will be more announcements soon and hopefully a blog post from Felicia herself, so I'll keep updating.  What a great time to be a webseries fan :)

Keeping the Fans (and sponsors) Happy: The Guild Season 5 is GO!

And There Was Much Rejoicing!
News, hot off Twitter, is that The Guild has confirmed they are funded for Season 5! If you remember, Felicia Day held off and rejected many offers for the smash-hit webseries back in 2008, and eventually accepted funding by Microsoft from Xbox Live and Zune and from Sprint. Those funding offers had the magic ingredients for Felicia - she retains the rights to her series AND there is no editorial influence on the work she does. NewTeeVee has the details.

Congratulations and Speculations!
Felicia has been typically vague about what Season 5 might entail. The end of Season 4 was a cliff-hanger that left all sorts of possibilities open, but who knows where they might lead? It was the Knights of The Guild 2nd Anniversary last weekend Ustream celebration and although there were questions about it, no one expected Felicia to let anything go. you can see the whole, wonderful KOTG anniversary broadcast here (password: KOTG):




One more mystery...
Never one to take a break, Ms Day has also been working on other, non-Guild projects. She has been tweeting about shoots over the last few weeks, leading to lots of guesses about what she is up to. One thing she did say during the KOTG broadcast was that we would find out 'within two weeks' more about the #mysteryproject. And Wil Wheaton made a reference to it this week, saying:

"...Felicia is working on a Secret Project™ that I'm lucky enough to know about ... holy frakking shit balls on fire, you guys. When you know what it is, your mind will be blown right out of your skull so hard it will bounce off the wall and land on the ground next to your socks, which were also knocked right off your feet and through your shoes...."

Well then....!

Watch this space....for now here's the screengrabs I took of the whole crew during the KOTG broadcast:

Blogaversary: 396 posts later - Doing the Dance of Joy!

The last geek bus home is 3 today!
Yes, it was a surprise to me, too. I remembered last week and then got swept up in projects again that I failed to plan a proper birthday post. If I had I would certainly have talked about how unexpected this blogging thing continues to be and how grateful I am that people bother to pop here to read. That what I blog about has changed over time and yet has stayed the same. And how I wish I had more time to spend writing here because there is a metric buttload of stuff I've seen that I want to share. So instead let's make do with some geekbusbythenumbers:

• 396 -  posts published (including this one)
• 11 - draft posts (stuff I started but haven't finished. Yet.)
• 586 - comments (published - a gazillion spam ones deleted)
• 138 - Felicia Day labels for blog posts

Another old favourite: how you find this blog
Over the years there have been many times when I've glanced at search terms that have given me pause for thought. I mean - what kind of people are you?!? Here are just a few of the select ones:

webisodes battlestar nudity
"found object stew"
"michele boyd" drunk
404 page geek
2 horse 1 speedo
a geek catches a sexy fairy comic
avatar xxx vdo
bad pink girl
boypants
bus geek sex
corsetbuster 

And what of Felicia in that-thing-not-to-be-named?
The most popular off-topic search is this (there are more than 25, this is just the top 25)

This is much more popular than any search for 'higlet':

But then, even 'Becker' is pretty popular:

What's next?

There are so many things happening at the moment I don't even have time to think about them, never mind tell you. 'Mind My Brains, Darling!' is coming on fantastically - shooting has started and we've got our first scenes wrapped, which is cool! I have a new business launching soon, and more on that coming up, and there is also....well, I'm not allowed to talk about that yet :)

Thank you for you eyes and patience and support and laughs over the last 3 years. It's been amazing. YOU are amazing. 

Here's to the next 3 years! CHEERS!

Knights of The Guild 2nd Anniversary Party - we are all invited!

UPDATE: There is still time to send your questions in to the cast and crew ready for the party tomorrow - send them to Knightsoftheguild@gmail.com


Saturday February 5th at 6:00 PM PST - BE THERE!
How time flies! It only seems like a few weeks ago since the Kenny hosted the KOTG 1st Anniversary party at his new house. What a blast that was as Kenny and Jenni served up a delicious show full of fun, laughter and tons of special guests - live from the KOTG studio! Streaming it live via Ustream meant that everyone could take part and Guildies from all over the globe joined in the fun.

Celebrate this great podcast!
KOTG give Guild fans so much. They are the #1 resource for ALL the news on The Guild and a sure way to cope with Guild Deficiency Syndrome. With on-set interviews, the special guests they have on each show and reports from Cons, book signings and more, even the most obsessive fans will find out more about how The Guild is made and the people behind it by listening. So I hope you will be raising a glass to Kenny and Jenni tomorrow because they deserve it. WE LOVE YOU GUYS!!!

And don't forget that you can keep up with KOTG all over the 'Net:

The Podcast: http://knightsoftheguild.podbean.com/
The Blog: http://knightsoftheguildpodcast.blogspot.com/
The Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/knightsofguild
The Kenny: http://twitter.com/#!/geekyfanboy
The Jenni: http://twitter.com/#!/jennipowell
The Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=68587228491&ref=ts
The WatchTheGuild.com: http://community.watchtheguild.com/group/knightsoftheguildpodcast
The Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/knights-of-the-guild (Password: KOTG)

Special Guests Galore
Kenny has posted all the details for the live streaming on WatchTheGuild.com forums. There will be whole host of cast and crew attending including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, Vince Caso, Teal Sherer and Sean Becker. And speaking of Sean Becker, looked what popped up in a search that I don't have set up:

Frontpage of the new seanbecker.com (not shown: a wiener) 

What is this all about?? I've requested further information from Sean but so far he has refused to answer, so we can only SPECULATE IN A SCIENTIFIC MANNER.

Urkel + 2(chicken sammich) + wiener + hollow boasting* =  THE BECKPOCALYPSE!

*Sean has put "Best. In Town" at the bottom of the page. And the page title is "Director and other stuff". So Sean is boasting that he is the best "Director and other stuff" in town. Do you think Felicia is going to take that kind of smack talking lying down? She's fired him once, what will she do to him this time? WE'LL FIND OUT TOMORROW LIVE ON USTREAM!!

IAWTV: Election Update - Letter from the Board of Directors

Update: Jenni Powell has posted her thoughts on the matter.
More: Tom Konkle posted about this and there is another discussion over on webseriestoday.com. There is also lots of comments and thoughts on twitter.

As I posted last week, there have recently been elections to the IAWTV Board of Directors. The closing date for the final votes was last Friday and was looking forward to seeing who would be elected. This morning members have received an email to say that the elections will now start again. Once I had read the email and looked at the Forum I can say that I think this was 100% the right decision.

Here is the official IAWTV communication about the issue, sent today*:

Dear Academy Members:

This weekend, the Board of Directors had a conference call to discuss our latest Board election process and the online platform used to collect votes. While it does not appear the election process was compromised, we concluded it is best to nullify the election and start the process over from the beginning. The main concern surrounding our latest elections is the potential for a member to vote more than once. We use an online survey platform that places a cookie on receiving members’ computers. It is possible for a member to erase the cookie and vote multiple times. Also, each member was not issued a unique password.

Our Executive Director, Elisabeth Flack, gives a more detailed recap of the issues surrounding our latest election below:

Up to this point, we have been using an online survey service to collect votes. Members of the Academy uncovered that by deleting cookies placed on their computers by the site they could vote a second time, thus revealing a potential way to skew voting in favor of one candidate over another. These members alerted the Academy about the potential problem and any duplicate votes found were deleted, leaving only the original first ballot cast according to the timestamp of when the ballot was submitted. 

Separately, the online survey service doesn’t issue unique passwords that can only be used once. In the prior election, I’ve verified votes by reconciling the IP information from each vote against the IP information on file for member accounts. 

This election not only has the problem of the potential for duplicate voting, but there are a few IP addresses that could be not determined as belonging to members. While I don’t believe anyone in the membership tried to skew the vote or shared the voting information outside of the Academy, these do not make for the fairest election possible.
This differs from the previous board election because IP addresses and ballots were verified as corresponding to members and no duplicate voting occurred. In addition, the ballots and vote count were reviewed and verified by 3 members of the Academy in good standing, each of whom was not running for office at the time and had no conflict of interest with any of the candidates running for office. These verifications was done before the new board members were announced. 

In the interests of the membership and ensuring the fairest vote possible, here is what the Board has decided as best next steps. The Board, working with committee chairs, will identify a superior voting platform that will ensure our Board election process and results cannot be compromised. Our goal is to identify a solution by the end of this coming week. If anyone has suggestions for a platform we should evaluate, please email Elisabeth. After the new platform is selected, we will start the board election process over from the beginning. We plan to begin the call for nominations the week of January 31st.

Unfortunately, our new Board will not be in place by February 1st as originally planned, so the present Board will continue to serve until new Board members are elected. We are expecting the new election to conclude by the end of March. 

We deeply apologize to all of the candidates and to the membership at large for this inconvenience. And we thank you for your understanding and patience as we work through upgrading our election capabilities.

If you have any questions about the board’s decision regarding redoing the Board elections, please email any Board member or Elisabeth directly. 

Sincerely,

The IAWTV Board of Directors

Michael Wayne, Chair
Dina Kaplan, Vice-Chair
George Ruiz, Secretary
Drew Baldwin, Treasurer
Miles Beckett
Felicia Day
Zadi Diaz
Jim Louderback
Chris McCaleb
John McCarus
Tim Shey
Joshua Cohen, Emeritus Director

Speaking as a member of the IAWTV, I think that the fact the IAWTV has moved so quickly to correct the potential problem indicates that they are committed to fairness and openness - and not afraid to take tough decisions. This bodes well for the future.

The fact that we are now back to nominations means it will be some weeks before the new Board is in place. This is unfortunate but it is better to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to vote and that the results are fair, and are seen to be fair.

A New Look IAWTV Website
There was further evidence of the work that is going on in the IAWTV today. The IAWTV.com website has been updated and more functionality is planned. It still looks clean, but there are now links to become a member and to access the Forums straight from the Home page:

*I asked permission to repost the whole document.

IAWTV: Voting for the Board ends Friday - why it matters!

Let's rewind to 12 months ago...
The call for nominations for the Streamys 2010 went out in December 2009, and voting for the nominations ended on January 15th 2010. Anticipation was already building for the event and everyone expected it to blow minds. Which it did, but not exactly in the way imagined. As many will remember, the ceremony itself unfortunately detracted severely from the fact that there were Award winners, and the fall out from that is still being felt.

We are all doomed
...to repeat history if we don't remember it. Immediately after the Streamys last year there were all sorts of questions, accusations and intrigues around the Streamys and the International Academy of Web Television. It was not a comfortable time for anyone and there was inevitably soul-searching. But good things have come from that. The questions asked then have led to changes and new directions for both the Streamys and the IAWTV, and I think this is very positive. Last week the IAWTV held the first round of voting for the new Board of Directors, which has left 12 people in the running for the 6 positions.

The IAWTV, renewed
The idea of a dedicated body for web television is sound. And even while people can argue about terms (even 'web television' is contentious), reach, focus and goals, I don't see a better alternative anywhere. The election of the new Board will set the path ahead. The 12 nominees all bring their own ideas, enthusiasm, perspective and experience, and all of them will serve the Academy well. I have voted for the people I think will serve the Board the best, but every one of the nominees has much to offer. If you are a member of the IAWTV don't forget to vote - use your voice and make a difference!

The end of the beginning
There is still so much to do it would be foolish to imagine that the having a new Board will magically make things better. And yet, in a way it will. The new Board will be able to build on the work that has already been started and set the IAWTV on course to become the leader it needs to be. There will be a focus and that is the key to making progress. When there is so much to be done it is hard to get anything done. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Board sets as priorities so we can move things forward.

I'm ready to pitch in and help in any way I can. Are you?

P.S. I'd like to underline the fact that I think the IAWTV has made big progress in the last year. I am incredibly grateful for the hard work that has gone on there, often behind the scenes with little recognition. Thank you all.

The Guild Season 4 Marathon on Sunday! BC Browncoats watch in style.

One way to stave off Guild Deficiency Syndrome!
It's always hard to find new ways to stop the GDS from kicking in hard. Luckily there are now The Guild comics, too, but nothing beats sitting down to watch a whole season in the company of like-minded people. Once more La Fontana Caffe is the venue for what promises to be an afternoon of Guildie-related fun. Great food, company and entertainment - guaranteed.

Want to see BC Browncoats in Action?
For the last 5 years the BC Browncoats have been celebrating Can't Stop The Serenity day in Vancouver, raising lots of cashy money for charities such as Equality Now and BC Women's Hospital Foundation. I've been to the last 3 events and they were amazing - a wonderful day out topped off by seeing Serenity on the big screen.

Last year I asked my fellow Browncoats if they would wish a certain person a Happy Birthday - and this is the result:



How are YOU coping with Guild Deficiency Syndrome?