Happy Birthday To Us! Mad Art Lab’s One Year Anniversary

Friends! Family! Lovers! Today marks our 1st birthday here at Mad Art Lab. And to celebrate, Anne baked us a cake.

I should mention that that is not a real rat trying to eat the cake. Indeed, that is our wee mascot who has been printed IN THREE DIMENSIONS by Maggie and The Mad Art Bot, our very own 3D printer.

It’s little things like this that have made the past year so much fun for me. There are 17 contributors to this blog, and each of us brings something different to the table. When one of us wants to get something done, someone always knows how to go about it or find someone who does. When one of us needs advice or a resource, someone steps in. And sometimes when we just want to be silly and make jokes and be ridiculous, well, we all excel at this. It all makes for quite wonderful collaborations.

Coupled with our fantastic readers and commenters (who send us links, ideas, feedback and are just generally the coolest human people around) I feel that we have all, together, created a science-y, skeptic-y, geeky, creative space where we can flourish. We’ve created a community together, which brings me a never ending sense of satisfaction. But it also makes me want to strive to make it even better. To make it so that more people can participate and collaborate. So that we can expand our definitions science-art. I used to wonder how we would ever keep apace with Quickies links – are there enough things out there for us to share? It turns out that, Holy Kittens!*, we’ll never keep up with all of the amazing things going on in the Reese’s Pieces world of science-art.

To paraphrase something that our dear cohort Donna once said – I feel like I’ve found my people, my gang, my tribe.

I’d like to thank all of my fellow contributors, our commenters, readers, lurkers and smirkers for making this past year such a great one. And it should go without saying – thank you to Rebecca for giving us the space and the chance. And thank you to our chief, the inimitable Surly Amy for being the best damn cat wrangler there ever was. Think about it: skeptic artists. The mind fairly boggles.

(*Yes, I’ve been listening to a lot of Greg Proops’ podcast lately)

As a special treat for everyone, I  have made up a bunch of statistics from the past year for your enjoyment. 

Number of articles published in total: 609

Number of images of Felicia Day in all posts: All of them (There is a tiny Felicia Day photoshopped into every image on the website)

Number of us who swooned at Victor’s live poem reading during the recording of The Geek Life podcast: Every damn one of us

Number of times Cloe has been called a hippie by us: 8 

Number of articles published that brought down the entire Skepchick network: 1

Number of times nautical terms were used by us during the network outage (eg: “Batten down the hatches!”): Too many to count

Number of emails exchanged between contributors in the last year: 1400 +

Number of times the phrase “DOOOOO EEEEEEEET” has been used in said emails: 5000+

Percentage of times we are excited for the end of the day when Maggie responds to the days’ emails in a hilarious fashion: 100%

Number of MS Paint drawings that Skepchick Elyse Anders has sent to us in order to join MAL: 5

Number of tacos I have drawn for Elyse during video chat hangouts: 2

Number of contributors who have had dreams/nightmares about Sparklecorn: 5 (That we know of. Melissa refuses to talk about it)

UPDATE:

Cloe just made this amazing image and I had to put it up with this post. Fan-friggin-tastic!