The most recent Virtual Drinking Skeptically video chat was a bit of a special event. Brian hooked up a computer and camera at TAM9 and invited all of us poor bast*rds who weren’t there to join him for a few hours via videoconference.  
The chat started at 9pm Pacific Time (aka Las Vegas time) on a Thursday night, which means it was 11pm for me, and midnight for anyone who chimed in from the East Coast. There were also some people streaming in from Europe, Canada and maybe from Australia. I think.* There were about six or seven of us, which I thought was a fairly small turnout until I remembered that a lot of the regular participants were…you know…actually at TAM.
 
The TAM attendees didn’t have any audio input or output; they were streaming from one of the on-site bars and it was too noisy to turn on the mic or speakers. We had to remember to type all of our questions and comments to the TAM participants (omg, it was like an old-school chat room!). That was a little awkward because audible conversation would break out in the room and we’d end up forgetting to include whoever was on the TAM line.

Let’s see…who visited? Brian obviously hung out for a while. Dr. David Gorski stopped by, which was a treat for me because I’m a fan of the Science-Based Medicine blog and his other writings. Sharon Hill sat down at the keyboard and answered a few questions. I’m almost positive that Sarah Mayhew, a TAM presenter and VDS regular, visited for a while.** One TAM attendee managed to sign in from his cell phone and spent a few minutes panning the camera around the room and telling people to wave at us. A happy gentleman in a cowboy hat came over and told us what a great time he was having at TAM.

Someone mentioned being very excited to hear Bill Nye speak, another couldn’t wait to see Neil deGrasse Tyson. A lot of attendees were very enthused just to be drinking at TAM. We can be very in the moment, we skeptics.

As for the conversation among those of us not at TAM, we discussed where we were from and the types of skeptic activities and topics we enjoyed. We took a headcount of who was going to be at Dragon*Con. But mostly we talked about how bummed we all were that we weren’t at TAM because they sure look like they’re having fun and why don’t they come entertain us?

One thing that would have made the TAM VDS better for me would have been to put the TAM computer in a quiet room, and to have a few attendees lined up who were willing and ready to talk about what they were excited about doing and their TAM experiences thus far. As it was, it seems like most people stopped by out of curiosity to find out why there were a half dozen faces peering into the bar from a computer screen.

I left around 12:45am my time (10:45pm TAM time). A few of us were yawning and rubbing our eyes, and as we left we all agreed that having a chance to peek in on TAM from hundreds of miles away had been a neat experience. I will likely attend again if it is available in the future.

*There was wine, and I didn’t take notes because I didn’t know I’d be invited to write a blog about it afterwards ;)

**See the previous bullet.
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The previous was a guest post, written by Brianne Bilyeu (check out her blog), a Minnesota Skeptic, VDS regular, and one of the few people that joined the Virtual+nonvirtual Drinking Skeptically event last week from The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas.  Thanks Brianne!  - I hope you guys had fun! (sounds like you did)