Successful nerd Felicia Day ruminates on failure with Third Eye | interview

venturebeat.com:

Felicia Day is one of the most successful nerds in history with eight million followers. So naturally she is exploring the subject of failure in her latest work called Third Eye.

She made a splash with The Guild web series about nerdy online gamers which ran for six seasons. As an actor, producer and writer, she has starred in shows like Eureka, the CW show Supernatural, the SyFy series The Magicians, and three seasons of Mystery Science Theatre: 3000. She has over 100 credits on IMDB bio and solder her digital brand and production company Geek & Sundry to Legendary Entertainment. Oh, and she wrote two New York Times bestselling books (here and here).

Her new Audible podcast Third Eye launched in October. She created, wrote, and stars in Third Eye, which is narrated by Neil Gaiman. And yet that sense of failure keeps coming back. Her whole category of the high-budget web series — spawned by the surprise and awesome success of The Guild — has been obliterated. It’s either small user-generated creator works or gigantic franchises that rule the internet now.

I met her long ago at the video game industry’s Dice Summit Awards show, which back then was about making nerds feel better about themselves with awesome awards.

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If all of this is failure, I hesitate to examine my own history of self-expression. But the cool thing for Day and many other nerds like me is that now we rule. We have The Last of Us on HBO, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (viewed by 169 million nerds), and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Nerdom is so universal