My name is Jason Finn and I am the drummer for the Presidents
of the United States of America, which is really an
absurdly named band from the '90s.
I'm in charge of all the drumming, and all the
complaints, and all of the managerial [BLEEP]
too.
It's a lot of fun.
We are sort of a part-time band, a legacy band, let's
just call it what it is, an older band, and we try to keep
it around 20, 25 dates a year.
For a lot of bands it would be like, what?
You guys are hardly working.
But hardly working is our motto, sort of.
The first day of fifth grade at South Shore Middle School,
I was supposed to play the saxophone.
The kids were all lined up there and they were
going down the line.
Well, what do you want to play, and then they send you
home with your flute, or your baritone, or your
trombone, or whatever.
And moments before it came to me, this note comes flying in
and my orthodontist says that I can't play the saxophone,
because I'm about to get braces and it'll [BLEEP]
everything up, so.
I was sitting next to my best friend, Mike Selinker, who now
is a big deal in gaming.
He was playing drums, so I selected drums, because I was
next to him and wanted to stay next to him.
And there you go.
That was 30 years ago.
Took almost 30 years to tell that story.
Sorry about that.
I don't have much of a history with gaming, per say, but I do
like to play card games and stuff.
I'm a very good Cribbage player, if that helps.
And a pretty good backgammon player, and I don't know.
Backgammon is actually played on an
actual table top, usually.
So I think that qualifies.
As it turns out, I did the right thing by not investing
much in Scrabble, because I just read on the internet that
all the point values are [BLEEP]
up, right?
K is undervalued, and some other letter.
So it's been a sham.
It's been a sham.
The whole Scrabble thing.
Maybe I'll start playing now.
Will, along with Adam Savage of "MythBusters" and the
musical Paul and Storm group started a nerd-centric variety
show called "w00tstock" a couple years ago.
When it stopped in Seattle, I was invited to be one of the
performers, because I already knew Paul and Storm, and
that's where I met Will.
And since then, I've flown around to a dozen w00tstocks
in different places and have a good time.
And usually involves a bottle of some sort of porter or
stout or something with Will at the end of it.
It's been great not only just gaming, but gaming while being
filmed is the way to do it.
I'm going to film myself from now on when I'm gaming.
It's going to be great.
If I had to finish a sentence that began, "Gaming is," I
would probably swear at some point, so I'm not even going
to finish that.