I’m spending more time offline in 2012 planning and executing events and building integrating marketing plans around those events. Many of these projects are exploding through client work, some as experiments via my volunteer time in cause-based organizations. I’m learning a ton from it though, and I’m putting a lot of the lessons learned to work in my other passion: MUSIC.

Last year, I started two rock bands. VA Stripper grew out of mine and guitarist Andy Petrick’s love for 1990s rock, a passion we both shared experiencing the music scene at SXSW 2011. For various reasons, VA Stripper never quite got off the ground explosively, so we started another act. This act – Brains of J – paid tribute to one of our favorite ’90s bands still rocking today, Pearl Jam. Both are very different projects, and both give us very different satisfaction in performing. Brains of J is a headlong dive into the music of Pearl Jam, while we plan on writing our own music as VA Stripper at some point in the very near future. However, both use similar methods of integrated event marketing to get fans to come see our shows.

Hence, the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! call to action:

Come see both bands Feb 2nd at Mad Rose Tavern

If you’re in the DC/North Virginia/Maryland region, consider coming to see both VA Stripper and Brains of J for our first full-on rock show. Joined by DC sensations The Vandelays, we’ll have a solid show of facemelting from 9pm till closing time. The Mad Rose Tavern sits within spitting distance of the Clarendon Metro station on the Orange Line. View a Map of Mad Rose and the surrounding area.

Be sure to grab one of us and tell us what you think of the show too!

What else can you do to support us?

Engage, baby. Here are a few things you can do to keep track of us:

• Like Brains of J on Facebook and, on our Wall, tell us your favorite Pearl Jam songs
• Follow Brains of J on Twitter
• Like VA Stripper on Facebook
• Follow VA Stripper on Twitter
• Post your photos and videos of our performances to our Facebook Walls
• Check in to Mad Rose (and future venues) with hashtags #brainsofj or #vastripper
• Sign up for our fans-only mailing list & newsletter using the form below

And in closing… some FACEMELTING!

Brains of J – “Hail, Hail” Live at The Front Page from Chris Dufour on Vimeo.

Hi. I’m Chris Dufour. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.

According to this place on the interwebz, I do things like digital strategy, creative content development, and event planning. I dig words like brandjacking, LOLling, and memefucking. From time to time, I write on this electro-buoyant tablature. Occasionally, I make rock. Ultimately, I blow doors down. I also like things in triumvirates.

Above all things, I chronicle the AWESOME. Been a bit delinquent in that lately. Alas, I’m sometimes given to fly.

You can holla at me via Twitter, which I monitor ridiculously, or contact me via this website.

This is my current favorite internet meme:

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot com.

Tomorrow, I’ll be accompanying my lovely wife to a holiday tweetup at the White House. While I’ve visited the White House on several occasions – some for fun, many for work – this will be my first visit where I’ll get to interact with senior members of the Obama Administration’s communications and engagement staff. I intend to livetweet the entire day, so be sure to follow me on Twitter or just search the hashtags #WHTweetup or #AtTheWH throughout the day.

I’ll monitor my Twitter and Facebook feeds all day in case you want to send me a question to ask the officials on hand. On the docket to brief and greet us are:

• Tina Tchen, Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady
• Jon Carson, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Public Engagement (@joncarson44 & http://www.whitehouse.gov/engage)
• Brad Cooper, Executive Director of Joining Forces (@joiningforces & http://www.joiningforces.gov)
• Aneesh Chopra, Assistant to the President for Technology and US Chief Technology Officer (@aneeshchopra)
• Brian Deese, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council (http://www.whitehouse.gov/economy/jobsact) 
• Laura Dowling, White House florist
• Macon Phillips, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy (@macon44)
• Kori Schulman, Deputy Director of Online Outreach in the Office of Digital Strategy (@ks44)
• Bill Yosses, White House pastry chef

Image courtesy Spectacle Theater.

So… every few months I put on one of these Rando Happy Hours, which is essentially me just mining my contact database and telling everyone at the same time where I’ll be drinking one evening. What ends up happening is a really fun social experiment wherein I get to see how the varied people in my offline network interact together.

There’s no goal: it’s totally rando. Hence the name. However, what ends up happening at these things are odd little personality collisions between people who would normally never talk to each other, and I love watching it happen. For instance, one of my music buddies might rub shoulders with a buttoned down colleague of mine from the Pentagon, resulting in commodious AWESOME talk about favorite bands. People have even found new leads on jobs and work through the amorphous blob that is the Du4 grid.

So if you’re in the DC/NOVA area, feel free to come join us in Shirlington on August 30th for a brew. The details follow–

‘Wired’ Magazine Forecasts the Death of the Printed Monthly Comic

Damn decent analysis from Comics Alliance on the evolving debate over printed versus digital comics. CA’s Doug Wolk guest posts for Wired and puts a comprehensive evaluation on all sides of the issue, favoring the coming doom of the $4 monthly printed comic. I’ve been saying this ever since the iPad debuted, but DC Comics‘ recent announcement that all of its future titles will be released digitally the same day as print is a game changer. Moreover, digital comics provider Comixology recently sold Warren Ellis’ entire epic Planetary for a mere $25, a quarter of the price of DC’s Absolute Edition and on par with trade paperback pricing. It’s bold publication decisions like this that will continue to hammer away at the frayed, yellow pages of print comics, badgering the aging black shirted slobs of yore into submission and inviting new audiences to experience these AWESOME comics. Had they thrown in the Planetary specials that weren’t included in the Absolute collections, I may have forked over the cash.

Why Can’t We Preorder Digital Comics?

With more proof that Comics Alliance is becoming my go-to source for coverage on the digital comics debate, David Brothers offers a compelling argument for comics publishers who are trying to figure out to make money off digital offerings in this early stage. While the numbers on digital purchases are not so enticing to comics publishers today, they are trending upward (and will probably explode by the end of the year with DC’s “Great Experiment”). Brothers argues for setting up a preordering program for digital comics similar to how customers can preorder comics from their local comic book store. This could be a good way of tracking trends on digital offerings as well as marketing to the supposed “new audience” DC has cited is circling well outside physical comics stores. I think this isn’t a bad idea but ultimately for this to work, you have to bring the costs down on digital comics. I would pay a year’s subscription for almost any title if you could get each issue under $0.75. What’s more, publishers could also make some serious bank by preordering digital bundles of classic comics stories. I like where the thinking’s going; we just need to keep moving the football down the field.

Warren Ellis. He braingasm you. Image via Wikipedia

A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics

Warren Ellis, writer extraordinaire and Mad Space Bastard, weighs in on the digital comics debate. A negative tongue from Saint Warren is a likely kiss of death for your product, so Graphic.ly better be paying attention to his UX concerns on their iPad app. Ellis counters comics publishers’ digital strategies with the simple yet elegant solution he devised for his web serial Freakangels: serialize a page a week online then collect finished stories into print editions for on-demand sales. To an extent, he plays to the Old Print Wankers more than those of us at the edge of the digital evolution, which I found odd, but then again, he’s seen the receipts come back on his own digital work.

Anonymous vs. NATO: Get your popcorn ready

So, remember when NATO was all like, “Donchu DARE come all up on mah porch!” and Anonymous was all like, “Bitch, PLEEZ!” and then the internet exploded??? Yeah. This was a topic of great interest at IO Europe a couple weeks ago mainly because no one knew how to deal with it. Purported “cyber-experts” were more in favor of getting their systems completely OFF the internet instead of figuring out creative ways of defending against attacks like LULZsec and responding appropriately. A large part of this fear, I believe, comes from simple inequity in information assurance professionals these days– they don’t know their Googles from their Farmvilles. So ignorant posturing of the kind seen in this article will just antagonize online attack groups like Anonymous. They don’t have to get an operation approved by 10 echelons of command like we do.

New 3D Looney Tunes Announced, Archive Mel Blanc Recordings To Feature

I’ve been fairly disappointed in Warner Bros’ revamped-for-the-21st-century Looney Tunes Show, which has earfucked me with simpering, inane impersonations of the Mel Blanc’s original character voices and insanely horrible musical numbers. So to discover that a creative animation director built new Looney Tunes shorts around archival recordings of Blanc has me giddy as shit. Hopefully, this provides the impetus for more AWESOME GENIUSES like this director to cut up and reinterpret existing Blanc recordings into new takes on his classic characters. I gotta believe the technology is getting close, right?

Related articles

• Planetary Omnibus: The First In-app Graphic Novel Available? (socialtimes.com)
• Exclusive: Meet Warren Ellis, Profane Comics Muppet (wired.com)
• In the comic book SVK, Warren Ellis writes his dialogue in invisible ink [Comic Review] (io9.com)