An Interview With Melvenorc12 answer the many questions Lin-Z has...

Lin-Z: First off, where does your screen name come from? I know people call you "melvin" sometimes.

melvenorc12: Yeah, well first I just want to say that my real name is NOT Melvin haha, it' really Brian. The name actually comes from when me and my friend were pretty young. On a video game we were playing you had the option to chose nicknames for your character. They had ones like the tackler, the killer, or something... and than randomly they had melvin. Me and my friend just decided to put that in our screen names (I forgot to add, we were both trying to make extremely similar screen names to confuse the fuck out of people). So his was to be melvin, and mine melven, only change of one letter. Also we were kinda... lord of the ring geeks haha.. this was a while ago. So orc comes from that. 12 was simply my friends age (I was actually 11, but we both decided to do 12 just to keep it the same. And there you have it melvenorc12. I still use the screen name to this day, however my friend stopped using his, sadly =P.

Lin-Z: haha. so what brought you into the rave scene, and specifically to gs.c?

melvenorc12: There was this site called musicvideos.com, which is not currently up anymore. This was around late August/ early September. I got REALLY bored one day and decided to look through every last video that was on the site. I was scrolling through it alphabetically from A - Z. When I came to "G," they had "glowstick" and "glowstring". I clicked the glowstring link, and it was Wes' late 2002 video, which I was absolutely amazed by. Than I saw Wil's 2003 freehand video under the glowstick link. This didn't amaze me as much as stringing (of course, the stereotypical newb =P), so I decided I wanted to try glowstringing. I saw glowsticking.com linked on the videos, so I went to the site and checked it out. This was actually my first forum ever, I never even heard of what a forum was. For 2 months I was on gs.c only downloading videos and reading articles, becuase I didn't know it was possible to post. This was until stinkowicz, who I IMed to ask for help on glowstringing, told me I should post. I didn't get into the rave scene afterwards until 8 months in, which is also when I met my first gs.c person, who was Ange (Cody). Than down to socal for EDC I met plenty more. I was still not really into the rave scene yet, since I only went to one. It wasn't until I met nmestar99 (Jeff) that I really started to take interest into the rave scene, as well as progressive trance music =D. Since than, I have gone to numerous underground raves around norcal and three massives.

Lin-Z: that's awesome. How did you like EDC?

melvenorc12: It was great, and the ultra circle was just awesome. It was supposedly the worst ultra circle thats happened though haha. The next time I went to EDC in June of 2007, it was 10 times better, so I'm not gonna argue =]. I just wish I brought my camera to EDC 2006 to get more footage.

Lin-Z: I wasn't there for 06, but yeah I heard it went down kind of weird.

melvenorc12: There we're a lot less ultras because the people Dave ordered ultras from said it would ship a day earlier than it did... So we had to gather as many as we could from members.

Lin-Z: oooh. okay.

Lin-Z: so, other than glowsticking (and sneaking up on us with a freehand video) what other things are you interested in?

melvenorc12: Well, I'm really interested in most object manipulation, however other than glowsticking, the only thing I can do is penspinning. I'm actually taking a lot more interest into it lately. Also I run cross country and track. Track kinda conflicts with glowsticking stuff haha. Like I have a cross country invitational at 6:00 AM on the day of Lovefest, which goes until the next day at 4:00 AM. Also the day before the race is a meetup which we are planning to end around 11:00. Those are really my only two other hobbies... at least that I can think of at the moment.

Lin-Z: how are you going to fit lovefest into that? or are you just going to have a lot of caffiene?

melvenorc12: The movie Rocky gives me motivation for stuff that takes a lot of energy =D. I never have coffe, hehe.

Lin-Z: me niether, it's gross

melvenorc12: So, I'm gonna pass out, basically.

Lin-Z: but you'll feel accomplished?

melvenorc12: For sure. Always worth it to spend time with my norcal glowsticking buddies =P.

Lin-Z: definitely

Lin-Z: so, have you seen the norcal scene evolve? and how would you say it's doing now?

melvenorc12: Well, before I started, there was absolutely no body glowsticking from norcal aside from nmestar99 (Jeff). The NCR fiasco ended about half a year earlier, and many members either got banned, or left because their friends got banned. I gotta give props to Jeff for staying on gs.c the whole time, even with no one to stick/chill with. Randomassly... me, Legend (Ryan), ImmortalFate (Antonio), and a few of Ryan's friends joined gs.c in late 2005 and we're all glowstringers. We all knew eachother on the internet for a while, rarely talking to eachother. I thought Ryan was very very good, and wanted to have a meetup in Oakland really badly. With Ange just having moved from France to norcal, I decided we should just have a meetup out of no where in Oakland (This city that ironically me, Ryan, and Antonio were all from). So I made a thread on gs.c for it to be held July 8th, 2006. I had horrible editing on the thread, but it was still going down. The meetup came along, and the attendees were me, Ryan, Antonio, Cody, and one of Ryan's friends named David. After such a low turn out to the meetup, I thought it might be bad. Turns out this was one of the funnest meets I ever went to. We had a kick ass time, and made a video of it all. I made the video make it seem like our meetups we're hella fun. I think the video is still in the media center titles "bay area meetup". After that, we had a compilation meetup (Bay Area Summer Compilation 2006) at Cody's house, which nmestar99 (Jeff), and his friend IndianSpicedRice (Nalin), who just met on gs.c randomly after having known eachother in the 7th grade, and haven't talked to each other since. This compilation was held in late August, and it was really good to get to know both Nalin and Jeff. After this, we decided to have a second Oakland meetup in October. Holy crap, the turnout was huuuuuge compared to the last one. We had 20 something people, as aposed to 4. I think the reason for this could be partly out advertisement. We linked the meetup in our signature in huge bold letters. Also we had the video I made for the old meetup which advertised like crazy for the meetup. We linked this video in the thread for the meetup page... this showed how fun the meetups in norcal were to all the lurkers out there =]. Since than we have been having numerous meetups, and numerous gatherings at raves with large numbers of people. In Febuary of 2007, we had a meetup with about 34 people. We even had people flying in from Southern California. This meetup was title Norcal Meetup, and was decided to be held as our annual meetup. Ironically, we are having it again this year... The reason being that Love Fest is the biggest rave in norcal out of the whole year. And since the pre meetup idea works so well for EDC, we norcalians thought we should borrow the idea from the socalers =D. Right now there is a posibilty of 36 people going to the meetup, and people always always bring friends. We have 8 or 9 people flying in from socal, and some driving from very far, such as DocInferno from Reno, Nevada. It's really crazy to think that our community in norcal has grown so much from where it used to be me, nmestar99, Legend, ImmortalFate, and Ange... All the time more and more new members from norcal are joining and adding to the number of norcalers, and will continue to do so. There, I just shed some vague light on recent norcal gs.c history =].

Lin-Z: That's great that you guys have seen so much change. I remember that NCR thing, but it's really true that area communities can get strong again.

melvenorc12: For sure, we are a great example of it in my opinion.

Lin-Z: definitely.

Lin-Z: So is there anything else you'd like the people of gs.c to know about you? Any tips for newbies?

melvenorc12: Hmm...

melvenorc12: I want people to know that my solo glowstringing video should be coming out very soon.(Hopefully). I really am way more serious this time thatn the 1000 times I've said it in the past and failed to do so. Also, I want the people of gs.c to know that they should not expect that much out of it =].

Lin-Z: haha. good to know we have something to look forward to.

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