relay FAQ
From zefrank
Any individual entity that presumes to understand the rules that guide this space is under an illusion
-Ze
The Ze Fool Relay FAQ
Q: What is this thing - the Ze Fool Relay?
A: The relay is the brainchild of the forum community affiliated with “The Show with Ze Frank.” It’s a project to send RunningFool, a member of the forum (now also known as the Human Baton), on a round trip across North America. His journey begins in Eugene, Oregon and will take him all the way to New York, N.Y. and back again, relying solely on other online community members for transportation and lodging.
Q: Who is RunningFool?
A: RunningFool is Luke Vaughn, a Math major at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He is 22 years old, and he grew up in Washington state, mostly in Spokane. When he was 17, he graduated High School and started college at the University of Redlands in Southern California. After a year there, he decided to transfer to the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. Two quarters later, he ran out of money and moved back to Spokane for a month and a half before moving on to Eugene, Ore. There, he got an apartment with a friend from High School, and soon afterward his family moved to Southern California.
RunningFool is a Sports Racer.
Q: Who is Ze Frank?
Short answer: He’s a well-known videoblogger who’s long been drawing attention from sources in every corner of the internet, and who has, more recently, begun getting press from establishments like the New York Times and the Economist.
Longer answer: He was born Hosea Frank in 1972 to German-American parents and raised in a suburb of Albany, N.Y. He graduated from Brown University in 1995 with a degree in Neuroscience, and played in a funk/jam band called Dowdy Smack until the band’s dissolution in 1998. In 2001, he created a now infamous birthday invitation, showing short clips of himself demonstrating “how to dance properly.” From the original 17 recipients of the email, the invitation soon went viral, generating millions of hits and overwhelming Ze’s (then) small personal website. From there, Ze expanded the site to include other short films and animations, games, and Flash toys of his own invention, and posted projects (when office supplies attack etc) for his fans to participate in. Ze won a 2002 Webby Award for Best Personal Website, and was featured in Time Magazine’s “50 Coolest Websites” in 2005. He was a featured speaker at the TED Conference in 2004 and 2005. Ze has also served as an adjunct professor at ITP/NYU, Parsons School of Design and SUNY Purchase.
Ze Frank is also the Chief Decider of the League of Awesomeness.
Q: What is The Show With Ze Frank?
A: The Show is a videoblog, or vlog, which posts every weekday. Ze began it on March 17, 2006, with the promise for it to run a full year. He will discontinue it on March 17, 2007. Each episode is a salmagundi (and we say that only because we like the word “salmagundi,” though we think it’s kind of pretentious) three to five minutes long. Ingredients in this stew include songs, current events commentary, pithy observations, freeform video narrative experiments, and project challenges to the Sports Racers, all delivered in Ze’s own endearingly frenetic style.
Q: Who are these Sports Racers?
A: At the beginning of the very first Show, Ze sang the Sports Racer song for us and soon afterward invited us to submit video to his site of us performing a “power move.” Many, many people did. Why Ze chose the term to refer to his viewership is, in all honesty, a mystery (besides, of course, the fact that it is fucking wicked). A simplistic answer would be to say that the Sports Racers are Ze’s fans. The relationship between Ze and the Sports Racers is far deeper than that, though.
It’s special. And this forum is special, too.
Q: What’s so special about it?
A: It’s an embrace and celebration, frankly, of nerdity. Not just tech-geekiness, but the kind of mental process which wakes some people up in the middle of the night with their minds filled with burning questions about philosophy, cosmology, technology, theology, psychology, and of course politics.
What’s been emerging in this forum is more than just rapport. It’s respect, trending toward actual trust. You don’t hear these words often associated with online communities, and the opinions expressed in the forum itself indicate an awareness of this remarkable relative lack of animosity.
Sure there’s bickering in the forum. There’s bickering in every community, online and off, but there’s a remarkable unity as well. When called to a cause, the Sports Racers answer together. Tellingly, thus far the forum has had only two active moderators: Ze, and a mysterious and all-powerful entity known as supportandcomfort.
Q: How did RunningFool’s relay get started?
A: In the words of the Fool himself:
Every year for Christmas I’ve gone back home to my family, usually by plane. I was discussing with a friend of mine what mode of transportation I should employ this winter break, since he had been talking about not using planes because of pollution. Ze had posted a thread asking for suggestions/ideas/questions for the week of Nov. 6, and I asked him for his opinion on the matter (post link).
I got the following response from [forum user] lukkucairi: You could go all beatnik and hitchhike :p Or perhaps there’s a Sports Racer with a similar travel agenda near you planning to drive, and you could split the gas money?
…And this from Lala: heh…I just had a funny thought… Maybe, instead of hitchhiking with complete strangers, some of us could volunteer to sort of do a relay with you – I don’t know how crazy that would get…I am just getting the brain crack out there.
A thread was posted, and the idea hung around in the forum and gathered relatively consistent attention. Luke really liked the idea, but wasn’t sure he could pull it off. After consulting with the forum again, he decided to expand his volunteer-seeking range to Facebook (a social utility site) and got about a dozen more volunteers from outside the Ze Frank forum area. By November 21, Luke had enough volunteers to make his trip theoretically possible, though a few gaps still remained that would have to be filled by Greyhound or Amtrak. That night, Ze sent a message to Luke, asking “you gonna do this? for real? if so, let me know the details and I’ll call it out on the show.” Hell yeah.
At about 1:30 p.m. PST the show went live, and Ze did just that. Luke spent the next 11 hours answering emails. In short, the project snowballed.
Q: How long did it take to gather steam?
A: Six weeks from idea to implementation. (Holy crap!)
Q: Who is involved?
A: Anyone who wants to be. Everyone. At least 300 people are now directly involved through hosting and driving, and another several hundred as well wishers.
Q: What is Luke’s itinerary?
A: It’s very complex, and will most likely be revised several times during the trip itself. See this link.
Q: Practicalities. What happens if Luke gets stuck somewhere? What if someone pulls out at the last minute, or if there’s a blizzard?
A: We have a lot of redundancies built into the system. Particularly on the coasts and through the Midwest, there were many, many more volunteers than Luke could ever need, so those areas are pretty well backed up. Through the thin parts in the middle of the country (Desert Southwest, Plains States) the alternatives are, again, Greyhound and Amtrak. If Luke gets weathered in, some stops may have to be bypassed in order to put him back on schedule to get back to Eugene before classes start in January. This Relay has no static plan, and we’re using this flexibility to our advantage.
Q: What is the purpose of this thing? Why the hell would you do something like this?
A: Many see this is a proof of concept. Luke and other Sports Racers believe that the Internet is basically a positive thing and that people don’t give it enough credit. The Internet is not made up entirely of Nigerian 419 scammers, identity thieves, and pedophiles—a fact you’d never learn if you believed everything you heard about it on network television. Just because people interact through keyboards and computer screens doesn’t mean the communities they build there aren’t valid, and it doesn’t mean that social safeguards don’t exist there just like they exist in the offline world.
People who write about these things for a living often state that the Internet creates social distance and keeps people apart. The Sports Racer community appears to disprove this. As Luke says, “…the Internet really isn’t understood yet, because it’s still pretty new. I think it’s about the biggest thing that’s ever happened to humans. There’s now a collective consciousness…a different kind of space where people can share things. I hope that when people see things like this, like what I’m doing, that other people will want to be more open with themselves, and will want to contact each other more, give out their phone numbers or email addresses when they feel like they’ve got a connection with someone instead of being afraid.”
Q: What kind of people are Sports Racers?
A: They tend to be idea people. Nerds. They’re people who’ve often spent a lot of their lives hiding the life of the mind, for fear of being judged and shunned as a nerd. They are, in general, kind people, people with a sense of humor. They are people who care about the same kind of things that Ze cares about—community, communication, collaboration, and making other people happy.
After the dance invitation watershed, and way before the inception of The Show, Ze started getting interested in creating social spaces to share, as he says, “with people who don’t consider themselves artists.” These “peripheral activities” that Ze created, things like his Flash toys and photo challenges, attracted a lot of people who were unafraid of (for example) posting on the Internet a picture of themselves wearing clothes entirely made from toilet paper. Why do such a thing? Because Ze did it first. And then he asked us all to join in. These activities were inclusive spaces, where people could show a little vulnerability without the fear of getting hacked to death for the sin of being silly. The Sports Racer forum has evolved out of that intention, and remains largely true to the spirit of it.
Q: How is all of this tied to The Show?
A: That’s the thing; though the Relay couldn’t have been brought to fruition so successfully without The Show, the original idea wasn’t actually tied to The Show. It arose out of a conversation between three Sports Racers and then caught the imagination of the community, completely independent of Ze. Something like this could only happen in a place that fosters the development and exchange of ideas, however wacky they might be. In the Sports Racer forum, anyone can post an idea for appraisal. The idea might be rejected or it might just sink out of sight, but it will at least have been read and considered first. In part, this is also because of the concept of “brain crack.”
Q: What’s “brain crack”?
A: The phrase “brain crack” was first used on The Show of 07-11-06 in reference to ideas that “stay around in your head.” Talking about brain crack led Ze to talk about ideas, saying “When I get an idea, even a bad one, I try to get it out into the world as fast as possible, ‘cause I certainly don’t want to be addicted to brain crack.” On 10-26-06 Ze revisited the theme of ideas and following through on them. Quoting his stepfather, he said, “Why would you do anything unless you were going to try and do it right?” This prompted some discussion in the forum about whether the two were mutually exclusive.
An unorthodox idea that won’t leave your head is brain crack. The forum is where you put brain crack to see if it’s worth anything. The Relay started out as brain crack, and is now a reality.
Q: Is there an ulterior motive? Are we going to get hosed a la Lonelygirl15?
A: Fuck no. These are nerds – the genuine article. They’re skeptics, and they’ve been involved in the development of the Relay from the beginning. They don’t buy in without a good reason.
Q: Is RunningFool gay?
A: Contrary to what a certain button might say, Luke is straight.