The thing I love about the modern day is how goddamn EASY it is to do whatever you want to, whenever you want, however you see fit. Feel like creating an internet empire on the back of your G.I. Joe doll collection? Go to it. Found some out-there idea no one else has and want to gas-pedal that thing into notoriety? Make it happen.

What seems like a million times a day, people complain about reasons NOT to do something. This is the very definition of LAME. They give endless excuses on why they’re not qualified, how they don’t have time, how they’re not well-connected, on and on, ad nauseum.

You think just because somebody else did something AWESOME that you CAN’T? I say fuck that shit, man. Stop saying, “Why THEM?”

WHY NOT YOU?

Within the last thirty days, I have closed an immense deal for my consultancy, traded sellable ideas with a television creator, booked travel to five different places I never thought I’d visit, gotten elected to the boards of two august institutions, and made personal contact with one of my own internet heroes. I did all this because I said, “Why the fuck WOULDN’T I do this???” I made it happen. I didn’t prevaricate, commiserate, or otherwise masturbate about how and why things couldn’t work out. I Scott Pilgrim‘d my way into some great things. That’s a lot of “I’s” but these are just examples of an attitude change I made early on this year that’s paying craploads of dividends now.

Why not you, too?

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I mentioned in a prior post that Andrew Wilson had taken the first meaty stab at a list of requirements for the new Twitter Government Liaison. I want to spend time directly addressing his thoughts, because they are true AWESOME gold.

Andrew rightly calls for people to submit and discuss ideas about the Gov Liaison’s duties. His overarching theme though is that those duties are non-political. This seems to fly in the face of Twitter’s original requirements in the job listing, but in actuality, Andrew is trying focus people on the more important issues of connecting citizens to their representatives in DC and at the state and local levels through discussions of open government. Tools are just tools, as Andrew says, and it’s up to us to responsibly figure out how to employ them to the best benefit of everyone.

On to Andrew’s list. (Warning: this will be a longer post than usual.)

1. Please engage, in a transparent manner as possible, with the federal, state and local employees that are using these tools to get their input, ideas and concerns. This is a community with no end to thoughtful, innovative leaders… and listening to them will benefit everyone.

I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Twitter fosters engagement, so the Gov Liaison should be blowing it up with AWESOME, connecting with folks like the ones Andrew mentions, the Gov 2.0 crowd, and anybody who has some insanely great ideas. You can bet your ass I’ll make this happen if I get the job. This is a great community to be a part of, and I would demand that level of engagement from Twitter.

2. Please use your position to help raise awareness about section 508 (accessiblity for people with disabilities) so that EVERYONE can access Twitter. This includes having Twitter throw its weight around, when possible, to get 3rd party services to develop compliant and accessible services and add-ons.

I actually need to get a lot smarter about 508 and really get an understanding for how this affects government leaders and workers in the workplace. I do think there’s something to be said for Twitter using its throw-weight to push policy and legislative change where needed. This is something I’ve found way too many companies in DC unwilling to do.

3. Please make sure to devote enough attention to state and local government concerns. Some of the best and most innovative uses of social media are at the local level and I firmly believe that social media is most powerful when it reinforces and enhances existing (in real life) connections.

This would be a hallmark of my work if I got this job. I got jazzed seeing all the cool hyperlocal innovations from state and local folks at the Gov 2.0 Expo a couple weeks ago. But I think the federal government could act as a change agent to help more communities adopt Twitter for innovative local use. We’ve just got to educate some people and get some others voted out of office.

4. Please make (or work with the Library of Congress to make) an archiving and access tool that would be truly useful for government employees and, in particular, policy makers.

Done. I too want to see quick and easy access to all of Twitter’s data when anyone wants it, anytime. I’ve participated in some research projects in the past where my team designed analytics to run on captured tweets, and the hardest thing was just capturing the tweets in the first place. We need to figure out how to make that data access easy and available.

5. Please help establish a quick and transparent process to get “Verified” on government accounts.

This is a must and a quick fix, in my opinion. Especially if the Gov Liaison duties are getting govvies on Twitter in the first place, we should be able to verify very fast.

6. Please create a public directory (perhaps with some associated metrics) of federal, state and local accounts

Does this already exist somewhere? I know I’ve seen sites like Govloop and GovTwit try to list tweeting govvies, but I’m not sure it’s comprehensive (especially at the state and local levels). I bet we could police that up pretty easy with verfied govvie accounts and develop lists. This may even help folks understand the Byzantine organization of our government.

7. Please develop some more robust off-the-shelf metrics to help measure engagement. Facebook Insights would be one model for this and perhaps access could be tied to verified government accounts.

I’m guessing Andrew wants to measure the engagement stats on govvies? That’s a pretty interesting method for accountability. Having spent some time helping develop algorithms to measure influence on Twitter, and now seeing easy-to-use, free measurement tools hit the web (like Edelman’s TweetLevel), I think it’s important that we use commonly available and individually modifiable tools versus sinking money into colossal objective systems. The latter way leads to government pork like Future Combat Systems. What Twitter could do is start organizing the creators of some of these tools and promoting specific accountability measures tailored to the agency or politician of choice.

8. Please be available when emergencies occur to help government use Twitter in the most effective manner possible. AND publicly post lessons learned, best practices, a related archive of tweets and possibly links to any relevant research on the issue.

I think the Gov Liaison should be more than just available. I think he should be the point man for such issues. There are tons of lessons to be learned from the State Department’s engagement with Twitter, lessons that Twitter itself could take a leadership role in collecting and publicizing.

9. Please expand your government cases studies beyond the USGS to highlight best practices by school districts, local governments and state agencies, as well as federal agencies.

Totally agree. Like I mentioned above, there are tons of case studies to be made from State’s AWESOME work, San Antonio’s traffic and transportation program, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s bus notification systems, and many others. It would have been great had I this job at the Gov 2.0 Expo, because I feel like there so many cool stories of local governments using Twitter to solve communication problems with their citizenry. Those stories would have made good captures, but it’s not too late!

10. Please partner with the Open311 standard to increase visibility of inter-governmental efforts to create a universal API for access to non-emergency services, and work with law enforcement and emergency services agencies on use of geo-location capabilities for emergency reporting and response.

Getting back to open government, this is definitely a partnership worth pursuing. Twitter’s value as an emergency response tool is, I believe, so far untapped despite being so promising. I have not read much about Open311, but I’ll start getting smarter on it ASAP.

There are some additional thoughtful ideas from some of Andrew’s commenters as well, like standardizing hashtags for specific gov agencies, engaging better with African American constituents on Twitter, and a wiki for best Twitter practices in government. Suffice to say, I don’t think any of these things are impossible. In fact, I think most of them are pretty easy to do if we can catalyze the right communities. I just hope I get selected as that catalyzer.

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When I was younger, I thought a lot about time and how once you accepted that everything happens along temporal continua (be it linearly, spatially, nonlinearly, or transcendentally), you could exert total control over your own life. I never developed this thinking much beyond high school, possibly because I didn’t have the life experience to best understand what I was on to. And up until now, I had never encountered a book, a person, or other source that confirmed my suspicions about time as an engine of faith and culture.

That is, until now. I recently discovered the following video on Open Culture. It’s a speech by Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, who explains how our perceptions of time give us heretofore hidden insight into temporal power, particularly as seen through a lens of culture. If that topic isn’t AWESOME enough for you as it is, someone has taken Zimbardo’s speech and illustrated it via a series of sped-up whiteboard drawings.

It’s incredible illuminating and really challenges you to think about time and yourself in new ways. I’d be interested to hear what you think about it in the comments section below.

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A friend of mine with whom I’m doing business coined an AWESOME term around the same time as we were discussing how to get my business, @Du4.llc, off the ground. I wanted to share that with you, O Faithful Consumers of AWESOME, and elucidate on the concept of Weaponizing Oneself.

Jon Iadonisi (or the more nefarious “Jonny I,” as I like to call him), with whom I’ve worked in a variety of irregular roles, once told me this:

“Du4, what you’ve got is unique, innovative and creative. The idea of Du4 is made up of all those things that people get access to when they ask you for your opinion on a white paper or your help ironing out a contract. You need to find a way to weaponize Du4: to take all those unique things do and put ‘em into a delivery mechanism that’ll get you PAID.”

I’ve never forgotten those words, and I’ve been thinking on them a lot since launching my own business. The idea of “weaponizing” oneself, I believe, emerges from an entrepreneurial spirit that galvanizes ones to capitalize on what’s most AWESOME about themselves.

Businesses or organizations may not want to hire you as a full time consultant, whether because of how much you cost or other reasons. But they still want what you got. So they’re willing to plop down something to take you out to the firing range, fire off a few shots, and see how you perform. They may want to buy a limited deployment of YOU and drop you into a project or business scenario to see what kind of damage your particular weaponized payload may deliver.

The bottom line is that you should start figuring out what it takes to weaponize yourself too. Find the unique mechanism that allows you to deliver AWESOME on the timeline and scale that YOU want. I can tell you this: it has been fuckin’ FUN figuring out how to deliver precision strikes of Du4 upon unsuspecting populations in Meagerville and Bullshitberg. No matter your trade, passion, or profession, I guarantee you’ll never regret it.

Here are a couple questions to ask yourself to help you pursue your own personal weaponization strategy:

• Who are you? Answer this question first. Really figure out who the hell you are and what you’re all about. Tyler Durden says you’re not your fuckin’ khakis. I say you’ve got some AWESOME in there somewhere.
• Who enables your AWESOME? Communities will always rise around subjects of interest. Who’s in your social circle that engages you about your passions? Find those people and spend more time with ‘em. Ask questions. They can help.
• Where do you want to go? Weapons have to be deployed, so identify the places you want to drop your Fuckbombs of AWESOME. Best thing I ever did was scrape together enough money to go to TWTRCON DC in 2009 and speak in the Open Mic Contest.
• What are you offering? When you launch your AWESOME Missile, you gotta have a payload already loaded. Is it consulting services? What kind? Are you writing papers, blog entries? Are you delivering physical items on Etsy? Figure it out.

One last piece of advice, at the risk of pissing off the gun control crowd: BE BOLD. Jonny I didn’t use the armaments metaphor to be cute… he did it to show me that I’M A FUCKING WEAPON OF AWESOME and MY BULLETS ARE LIFE CHANGERS. Weapons are loud and leave large swathes of damage, so don’t be afraid to kick over some enemy emplacements on your way to the arsenal. There will be a lot of naysayers and a TON of adversary fire coming at you. You’ll have to take a couple head shots and keep returning fire.

Only YOU knows how rad YOU are, and you’ve gotta make BIG SPLASHES sometimes to show people that your particular brand of machine gun rocks the house.

{Jonny I is only one-half the creative powerhouse of the White Canvas Group. I am also indebted to Tim Newberry for his guidance, mentorship, and partnership in the arts of creatively blowing your mind.}

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RCA Type 77-DX microphone used by Edward R. Murrow (courtesy of oobject.com)

In Must. Be. AWESOME!!!‘s continuing mission to seek out new AWESOME things, your cuddly and adorable host has been conducting a series of experiments in podcasting. Currently, I’ve found TweetMic to be the easiest program to use in recording and instantly uploading audio podcasts to the web via Twitter, particularly because its iPhone app is so easy to use. I like the quick and dirty, no-edit style of podcast deployment this tool offers, but I also recognize some people’s preference for well-produced regular podcasts that can be downloaded outside of Twitter on channels like iTunes. If you have suggestions on how my podcasts can improve, either through programming or tools, please drop me a line and let me know.

In the meantime, please enjoy the inaugural Must. Be. AWESOME!!! podcast, “HOWF!” (At this link, you can also find an archive of some of my earlier experiments with TweetMic. Be forewarned: they’re not at all up to snuff.)

In this information overloaded culture in 2010, Our Foul Year of the Interwebz, the noise to signal ratio has never been higher. Anyone who communicates on the web these days faces a growing competitive landscape across different media, so much so that it becomes necessary to develop and nurture trust networks amongst one’s social familiars to even have a slight hope of getting your content seen (much less acted upon).

Courtesy of Chris Sims of The Invincible Super Blog

While said trust networks naturally develop audience loyalty and attention over time, there is another method you can employ that will guarantee eyeballs on your content.

Make your fucking content ENTERTAINING.

At the end of the day, people are going to remember the stuff that makes ‘em laugh or tickles their AWESOME bone. As a content provider, you should be aiming to deliver entertaining stuff every time. You want everyone who stumbles across your content to come away having the same reaction you did when you walked out of the opening day IMAX screening of The Dark Knight: “THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!!!”

Entertainment enables AWESOME. You must perform. You have to raise your game to match and beat web personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk, whose every video blog is a blast to watch even if you don’t immediately dig his content (which caters to wine). You have to transcend this homogenization of social capital across the web and bring thunder like you’re a goddamn Greek god.

I’ll challenge you to take an even further step out on the ledge: your entertainment must be provocative. Don’t just think that by adding a soundtrack to your podcast you’re automatically more entertaining. What kind of music is it? Is it AWESOME? Do your listeners rock out to it and pay more attention to your content because of it? Using provocative methods like dirty words, shocking images, and flat-out ballsy boldness will punch your signal past all the other noise.

Many will decry my endorsement of such methods as mere shock tactics; causing controversy to draw an audience in. Well, no shit, sherlock. Content providers are competing against so many different channels of entertainment today that you must enable some Shock and Ahhh to be heard. This doesn’t mean you should let these tactics overshadow your content or your message. You can be entertaining, shocking, memorable, and deliver great stuff people will love.

Here are some examples of AWESOME entertainment across a couple different online media:

• Chris Sims’ Invincible Super-Blog raises the bar on comics commentary by incorporating funny, often ridiculous instances of comics AWESOMENESS. Chris likes his comics full of punches and kicks, and not just normal punches and kicks, but punches and kicks delivered in the most insane ways possible. Ergo, the Punisher punching a polar bear.

"Cuddly. Lovable. Docile. That won't do at all."

• Jon Stewart transformed the face of mainstream media and news through the simple art of making fun of it. The Daily Show provides a hilarious take on current events and the personalities that report on them. Comedy Central wisely made all episodes of this show available via its website as more and more of its audience professed that they get their news from The Daily Show versus other traditional news reporting.
• The maestros at The Cheezbuger Network took photo editing comedy to the next level with Comixed.com. In this new crowdsourcing experiment in hilarity, Comixed encourages people to remix 3-4 photos into panels that tell a story (similar to a Japanese manga technique explained here). This entertaining site has birthed several great new internet memes like “The Reaction Guys.”

The Reaction Guys

I confess I’m having a tough time finding some badass examples of online music or podcasting that really flip my shitbiscuits. If you have any suggestions for AWESOME content I should be paying attention, by all means comment away.

Now, I admit I’m just as guilty of not being as entertaining as I could be on this blog. We’re gonna change that today. If the above pics and links weren’t AWESOME enough for you, let me leave you with this little bit of Alec Baldwin love that never gets old:

Most of you are employed by some company, some organization, some government institution, or otherwise. If you aren’t now, chances are you have been at some point in the past. I even bet you don’t think a thing about being called “employee” of your company.

I would like to put a moratorium on the word “employee” because it sucks balls.

I’d wager that everyone and their dog has been forced to read an “employee handbook” or participate in “employee training” or aspired to be “employee of the month.” We here at Must. Be. AWESOME!! believe that this is a terrible appellation for those of you who are in fact employed by a company. It is the most generic, dehumanizing term possible with which corporate leaders, owners, and human resources people can refer to their workforce. And the idea behind this term, while seemingly innocent, is in fact not awesome. Nay, this ugly word is LAME.

Anyone can be an employee. Corporate training manuals, ethics programs, and all other retarded drivel instituted to keep you in line refers to you as merely an employee: a small cog in a big wheel. Chances are, even if you’re working somewhere you think is badass, you’re still referred to as an employee by someone higher up on the food chain. You may even have a cool sounding title like “Ant Wrangler” or “Strategy Executive.” But you’re still just an employee.

Despite how well-meaning a company may be, especially in this startup-rich landscape In Our Foul Year of the Lord 2009, eventually all the people – the humans - organized under a company get referred to or lumped together as that company’s employees.

I despise this word. It deconstructs the AWESOME of a person. It boils everyone down to a level of retarded standardization. It homogenizes and restricts. It steals innovation and courage. And most of the time, no one comprehends that this word can be so destructive.

I hereby challenge every business leader, every CEO, every HR department, EVERYONE who institutionalizes the term “employee” to come up with a better alternative. Hunt that word down in your manuals, your training videos, and elsewhere, and murder it. Replace it with something creative. Something fun. Something that inspires your people. Something that will make them proud to be employed by you. Something AWESOME.

Startup CEOs, you have no excuse. You’re probably starting out with fewer than 5 people. Agree from the get-go that there will be no employees… but find an apropos yet AWESOME term to describe the types of people you want to attract to your brand.

Furthermore, I implore all of you are now or have ever been called employees… SPEAK! What would you like to be called? What word would you like to use amongst you and your fellows to describe you as a group or organization? What term makes YOU feel AWESOME about what you do?

Sound off in the comments section. Let’s see what kind of creative replacements we get.

{For some additional AWESOME reading about alternatives to employee nomenclature, check out this article, “The chaos theory of leadership” from The Financial Times.}

[Image by Blogowski.]

I recently spoke at TWTRCON DC about how inserting a little AWESOME into your daily activities will reap large rewards in your life, be it personal or professional. I posit that by adhering to the tried and true K.I.S.S. Principle – “Keep It Simple, Stupid” – you’re actually defeating a creative, innovative urge that leads to all things AWESOME. Worse, by continually sticking to the K.I.S.S. Principle, you may actually do long term damage to your inherent ability to recognize and generate awesomeness on your own. This is the first chat in what I hope is a long conversation about raising everyone’s game in modern communication.

A classic case of AWESOME simplicity.

I am not by any means arguing that simplicity is a bad thing and should be shunned. Simplicity in communication is critical to the imparting of ideas and concepts to audiences small and large. However, I want you to think about this in terms of how keeping it simple can be dangerous if you’re a creative type (or want to be). For that, let me draw upon a sad example from my time working in the Pentagon.

One of the first things you get told when you go to work for any Defense Department organization – be it military or civilian service or contractor – is that you need to learn how to communicate briefly and succinctly. This is important because the Pentagon, like all military bases and commands, runs on a steady stream of documentation, policy, and other “paper” that constitutes the general “work” of the Department. General officers are often required to make several decisions a day, requiring extensive coordination with multiple offices.

So the “staff memo” has become something of a regular item seen in the hands of many poor staff officers running about the Byzantine five-walled maze. While these memos often contain the complete policy or document that requires coordination and decision, the important piece to each one is its cover sheet or executive summary. “EXSUMs” are no more than one page and summarize the content of the documents in bulletized form and clearly note what action is required of the recipient.

Because of these summaries, the main documents they summarize often never get read. So staff officers value the skill of being able to boil the component information down to a few bullets one one sheet of paper. (You all see this a lot on government PowerPoint slides, which constitute absolute abortions of the presentation medium.)

Sounds reasonable, right? Why shouldn’t we communicate so concisely between all these hundreds of thousands of government employees?

Here’s why: Ask any one of those staff officers to author a white paper on their own on any topic of interest, and you will see how massively boring their compositions are.

After a fraction of a career of having the K.I.S.S. Principle drilled into your head, it’s a mammoth task to indulge in original thinking much less creative communication. This causes a state of document fatigue where everything you produce looks similar, sounds similar, adheres to the same style, ad infinitum. The more you do it, the harder a habit it is to break.

This vicious circle destroys the creative impetus to deliver AWESOME content. Even the very word “keep” restricts one to certain, specific actions. While this may help in homogenizing a Defense Department and a government that depends on brevity to survive, I submit to you that it also prevents those same organizations from improving their methods of work and evolving to a modern, 21st century degree of communication and interaction.

Instead of keeping it simple, I invite you to make it AWESOME.

Here are a couple suggestions on doing just that:

• Next time you see a tweet from someone in your network referring to any publication longer than an article or blog post, print it out and read it away from the computer.
• For every business or nonfiction book you read, commit to reading two works of fiction. A book of short stories by your favorite author is a great way to start.
• Instead of writing a summary for someone, go talk to them in person about it. Extra points: bring a couple of photos of the subject with you for visualization.
• Do something risky with your work. Insert a LOLcat pic into that white paper you’re producing. Draw a cartoon, even if you’re not an artist. Tell a joke. Fart.

Simple and AWESOME do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some of the best examples of AWESOME are pretty short and sweet (see the “Dick in the Box” T-shirt design above). Brevity will naturally enable your content to be absorbed more quickly by more people, especially when disseminating via social media tools. As you can see from the examples above, being creative can be as easy as regurgitating someone else’s content from the Web (thanks, socialism!). The tricky part to that is enabling your creativity in such a way that its awesomeness flows out and has the same effect when it’s edited, summarized, abrogated, or otherwise cut down.

I believe that by keeping it simple, you’re making it harder to absorb and produce AWESOME content, no matter the source. I understand that this idea of mine may seem controversial or even mad in this travel-sized world that social media has enabled around us. The authors of Made to Stick, one of my favorite books on creativity, even argue that simplicity is paramount to the permanence of great ideas. I also recognize that I’ve applied some sweeping generalizations using specific examples in this post.

So tell me what YOU think. What are some examples of this that YOU’VE experienced? Where have I gone wrong? Do you have some better ideas to share?

Light up the comments section on this one, folks. I will give out a special prize to the most passionate response to this post I see.

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If you notice the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see my blogroll looks a little anemic: only a couple links there in no particular order, some related, some not. Instead of throwing a bunch of links up to sites and blogs I visit often and/or love, I figured it would mean more to YOU if I added these things organically. Or, more to the point, socially.

If you’re anything like me, you visit blogs and any other website with an RSS feed and, if you like them, you check out their blogrolls to see what else you may be interested in. This was the 1.0 version of the Web, back when content creators simply blasted shit out into the ether via their platforms, caring not who was paying attention. Blogrolls were one of those methods: endless lists of the author’s favorite sites, people, etc.

Image by inju via Flickr

I’m taking a different approach. Must. Be. AWESOME!‘s blogroll is gonna be just that: AWESOME. Each link will track back to something I’ve either written about or linked to within a post. This way, it will develop naturally and organically. I hope this will create a steady buildup to a larger list of good, productive content on the actual site that people will come back, check out from time to time, and perhaps add to their own RSS readers or newstreams.

Today, I know a bunch of y’all are reading Must. Be. AWESOME! through an RSS aggregator or other service. You may not be coming back to the main site every day. This is OK. While I would love it if you came back all the time and participated in comments discussions, I understand that it can be hassle. No worries, I won’t hate ya for it. But hopefully, every so often when you DO come back, I’ll have some cool new links for you in the blogroll section.

If you’re someone who wants on the Must. Be. AWESOME! blogroll, I only have one piece of advice for you: be social. What’s so great about the internet of today is that I get to feel like I have personal relationships with anyone I interact with. If you’re looking to advertise or sponsor something on my blog, I at least want to get taken on a date first. Talk to me. Socialize with me. Be human. You’ll thank me for it in the long run.

[An addendum: I understand that the formatting for a lot of the text on the sidebar looks kinda dopey and can be hard to read when it runs over a single line. I'm working on fixes, but if anyone out there is a WordPress theme master and wants to help out, I'd love to have you on board. I freely admit my XHTML and CSS skills are totally weak.]

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Sometimes, AWESOME simply defies description. Sometimes, the best emotional explosions and reactions to AWESOME are unexpected. Sometimes, it just happens. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it. You can’t model it.

It just works.

Such is the case of The Venture Brothers.

GO, TEAM VENTURE!

The Venture Bros. premiered to Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim time block in 2003. Over the course of its 3 seasons (currently in its 4th), the cartoon exemplified an unabashed and unadulterated love of classic genre staples – from depictions of a drug-addled grown up Johnny Quest to a Fantastic Four amalgam voiced by Stephen Colbert. However, each and every episode attacked and murdered genre expectations. The comedic timing of this sharply dialogued show arose not from the stale trappings of one-off jokes or sarcastic parodies of real life, but from the adoration and respect of the humor inherent in the show’s inspirational material. Jackson Publick, along with his showrunning cohort Doc Hammer, has even said that despite the rolling hilarity, the show is ultimately about failure… and how we can find humor in it.

Now, if this hasn’t convinced you to check this wondrous show out on DVD yet… GOOD. What??? Now, I’m discouraging you from checking out this sexy sin of AWESOME? Well, that’s part of the beauty of The Venture Bros’ AWESOMENESS.

The Ventures’ audience grew slowly, almost dismally over the past six years. Indeed, the producers have only just now begun their 4th season. That’s what’s brilliant about the show’s appeal: You have to self-select in to get the joke.

What I mean by that is that The Venture Bros is something of a private club. Part of what has made the show such a phenomenon is its use of the genre culture as marketing. In season 3, for example, Doc Hammer announced a special weekly gig where hardcore fans of the show could order exclusive T-shirts based on each episode, but only for a limited time. These shirts became hot commodities even amongst non-fans, and they drew in larger numbers to the show. Why? Because everyone who discovered the show not only liked the content (and let’s be honest, the content fucking RULES YOUR FACE), but they also liked being in on something exclusive. Something… underground.

This sense of exclusive insider knowledge perpetuated the AWESOMENESS of the show. Granted, there is a level of geektitude and nerdosity built into many Venture Bros fans. As a fan myself, I value that niche fandom too much to let the hoi polloi in on it. Except y’all. Y’all are OK.

One you get in on the inside joke, it’s something you can never come back from. The AWESOME inherent in The Venture Bros makes you a fan for life. You can’t help but ask when the next season is due out, or be mildly curious about the live action dress-up the show’s creators performed on the season 1 DVD, or wonder why the hell you keep coming back to watching stuff like THIS despite its mind-shatteringly weirdness:

I’ll tell you why.

Because it’s AWESOME.

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