Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Fresh off having drinks with Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedians last month, I headed Saturday to the Howard Johnson on 50th street for the annual Tampa Fark Party.

I’ve written about Fark.com before. The Tribune recently took a look at Fark’s obsession with Florida, too, and Fark was name-dropped by the St. Pete Times back in June.

The Times even went out of its way to investigate the Fark Party phenomenon back in 2005:

Basically, it’s just a bunch of people standing around and drinking who live in the area and have something in common - which is, they like Fark. It’s like walking into a room with 25 people you’ve heard of before. I’d say about half the people are from some kind of a tech-related field, but we’ve had doctors, lawyers, the whole gamut. Baptist ministers show up at these things.

As a matter of personal disclosure, I’ve attended numerous Fark parties and even threw one at the Columbus Doubletree in 2003 that earned me a permanent ban from the hotel. Yet as I’ve grown busier my familiarity with Fark cliches and members has declined; there were roughly 20,000 registered accounts on Fark when I first found the site, and now there’s more than 10,000,000 page views A WEEK. (We’ll get there someday.) Add in that I wasn’t familiar with the 50th St. HoJo (and that the nerd-corps of Fark were sharing the HoJo lounge with a BBW meeting) and you’re talking about an odd amount of trepidation about something I ought to be pretty comfortable with.

As it turns out, the current crop of Florida Farkers is a good group; fairly nerdy, yes (one librarian’s shirt about grammar being free sticks in my head), but ready for a good time. A handful of people at the party had flown in from places like California, Michigan, or Virginia, and very few were actually from Tampa Bay, the majority having come from the East Coast or Gainesville or Naples/Venice/Ft. Myers. It says something about a web site that its fans are so dedicated they’ll travel extensively just to meet other netizens “IRL.”

My most eye-opening observation, though, was the age of the party’s attendees; while Fark claims its readers are 80% male 22-49, there were both Farkers “of a certain age” and women at the party. One woman, in particular, nearly kept me late (I had another party in Pasco to get to) talking about baseball and education; forced with the difficult decision of carrying on with my dream woman (who’d driven down from Gainesville for the party) or ditching my best friends, I scrawled her Fark name on my forearm and headed out.

It turns out I missed the better parts of the night, the parts with the police getting called, the BBW lapdances, the special brownies, and the skinny-dipping. It wouldn’t be a real Fark Party without them, for sure. And now I know that the lounge of the 50th Street HoJo has $2.00 domestic bottles and nice pool tables. Best of all, after swapping a few emails, I think I have a date with the girl from Gainesville…

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