Tag Archives: RVA

RVANews is doing a thing to talk about #RVA. You should be there.

Do you live or work in or around Richmond? Do you care about the direction that Richmond is heading in? Do you have this Wednesday evening free? Do you have twenty dollars for the ticket? Optionally, do you have extra cash for secondary drink ticket purchases?

THE POWER OF ROSS COMPELS YOU TO BE AT RVANEWS LIVE #002

I attended the first RVANews Live event which was pretty awesome. At the time, it was thought of as more of a proof of concept test, but I’m pretty sure the fact that RVANews could bring together such a high quality of the three panels of local activists, celebrities, and entrepreneurs meant that this could happen.

The three panel format gives attendees a chance to meet each other and ensures that panelists don’t run out of things to talk about. It’s pretty awesome to be in a relatively close-in setting to be able to shoot the breeze with a panelist before they take the stage.

If getting the commitments of three panels worth of busy people isn’t simple enough, finding a space in the city to host the audience for the event seems just as complex. It’s good to hear that the folks over at the good-ship USS RVANews are continuing the series at GatherRVA’s meeting room, because it was just the right size to accommodate everyone in attendance.

Finally, what’s even better than being able to hear everything a panel says? Being able to fire questions back at them probably tops the list. What’s better than that? The panelist asking a question to the audience and the audience becoming the panel for a brief moment. The feel of the panels at the last event felt more like a large group conversation more than the stage speaking at an audience. I hope that the rotating set of moderators allow this kind of fluid-ish format to continue at Wednesday evening’s event.

If you’re in town on Wednesday and want to hear what folks are doing to make Richmond (and in some cases, Virginia as a state) less shitty and generally better, buy a ticket and come on down to GatherRVA. After you buy a ticket, you’ll want to RSVP via Facebook.

I wrote something on RVANews about esports. #winning

Esports: Giving reasons for gamers to invade your favorite event space since now — Even though Richmond’s cyber cafes have closed, that doesn’t mean local gaming groups don’t exist. It’s easy to associate local gaming with comic shops hosting Dungeons & Dragons one-offs; video games don’t require you to drive anywhere to play together with friends. One player group in Richmond is working to bring more attention to its esports meetups and to bring more players together.

It’s my first piece for a local news source and hey—would you look at that—it’s about esports!

Yeah, that’s a West Wing GIF. I’m rewatching the West Wing. U WOT M8? COME AT ME BRUH.

Ross Catrow, captain of the good ship RVANews, reached out to me and asked me to look into LOLRVA’s viewing party. I mean, they’re holding it at The Broadberry. They typically have them at smaller places, but The Broadberry? My first thought was along the lines of “I definitely need to check this out.” And I did.

Hopefully this is the first of many future articles I’ll contribute to RVANews. I know in the past and also this morning that I’ve been critical of Richmond as a city. However, now that Feedback has moved downtown and is coming up on a year at 14th and Cary, I think I am definitely warming up to Richmond in general.

Public speaking for the greater good of mankind.

Or something like that.

From what I have heard about the recent TEDx event that happened in Richmond, VA this past year, I didn’t miss a thing that was relatively mind blowing or important. And that’s fine, because apparently the organizer for the TEDx event had the gall to charge tickets for the event–something that is generally not done for TEDx events.

Richmond has this perpetual self-esteem/identity problem where it sees itself as something as cool as an Austin-like city that deserves to have a properly attended celebration of its diversity and melting pot of the arts but can’t seem to break the mold. I hate that about this city.

Sure, Richmond should aspire to not suck, but it shouldn’t do that by trying to get x amount of influential people (read: owns a business with downtown frontage and/or has significant connections) into a room to hear presentations about what sucks about Richmond and what they can do to fix it. It should just get people into a room and talk about why things are pointlessly embarrassing on a case by case basis. The goal of the discussion shouldn’t be to fix something to be more attractive, it should be to share knowledge and discover what everyone should be addressing at their own levels.

I went off on a pretty wild tangent there, but this is along the lines of what I hope to accomplish in explaining my relationship with esports and writing about all things technology on this blog at bill conference 3.

https://alpha.app.net/bcarr/post/13541913

I think I’ll have slides, because holy shit I am a fucking train wreck when it comes to talking off of the top of my head, but I’m splitting my presentation into two parts. I’m looking to give a short presentation about why I am a horrible writer and then lead into a sort of “this is what I have to deal with” comparison with the current esports scene. I also intend to interrogate whoever is there (who I assume could give less than three fucks about video games and turning it into a spectator sport) about where I should be focusing or even if I have a place in esports at all.