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The inspiration to finally document exactly how everyone found their way to PubNight? It's all Cindy's fault. It was early March, 2005, and we were talking about how she was going to take over Kris's position as "Triumvirate member most likely to remove their bra in the bar" later that month at the 9th anniversary. As Cindy started with PN #213, well after Stuart's move to Portland around #170, there were a whole lot of early attendees she'd never even heard of. I tried to fill in with stories of the earlier days, but while I was familiar with most of the characters (I appear starting at #69), I found myself struggling to remember some of the formative connections. The question that stumped me was "how did Laura move to Viacom?" Luckily, Kris hadn't escaped the area yet, and I sat down with her one night that weekend and drew the first version of the diagram you see here on a sheet of paper. Finally I knew that Laura's co-worker at Apple Leslie helped her get a job at Viacom through her friend Larry.
It struck me that by the end of that month, we were going to have an entire triumvirate who had never attended a single PubNight during "Phase One", and that information like this was just going to get harder to track down as time went by. After some work with Visio, a first computerized draft of everything I'd pieced together premiered at the 9th anniversary. Several rounds of "oh my God, I am so not downstream of THEM!" commenced and corrections were noted. An interview with Crispy about the Gryphon connections filled in much of the missing territory in the middle, and I fleshed out areas that had expanded since I moved out of New York (like the still in process PN takeover of Advance). At the end of the night I had a fairly complete view I was happy with as a good start. Then I did nothing related to this for a year, because I was, like, busy and stuff. The week of the 10th anniversary, I picked this project up again at the last minute and added a lot of new information, like outlining the continued expansion into other cities during that time. A frenzied rush of e-mail over the course of two days filled in more previously undocumented and convoluted connections, with shocking surprises in long messages from Rebecca, TK, Kris, and Petro; Mike's sharp eyes caught all my stupid mistakes as I hacked away. The word "tesseract" was independently used twice during this period. Jay also wrote an e-mail detailing what he remembered, and from its accuracy rate we deduced that as suspected all along he really was drunk for most of those nights. When it was done I had included everybody who attended twenty or more nights with us, far deeper into the stats than I had originally thought was possible to condense into a single sheet. Near the end, most of the controversial spots centered around the time period when Chris Sokol expanded PubNight to include most of the employees at Shooting Gallery. When asked for final commentary on this subject, I was hoping we might get some sage clarification from Chris himself on the debated points. His ever verbose reply was "Dude, awesome graph." I'll have to settle for that. |
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 Greg would like to guarantee his work: if you have been to 20 or more pubnights and you're not on this diagram, he'll buy you a beer! If you didn't make the attendance cutoff but want to be on the diagram anyway, cozy up to him at anniversary and buy him a beer. Showing a little leg wouldn't hurt.
-Vineel
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