When I first agreed to speak at Nerd Nite East Bay in Oakland, California, I thought I could get away with reading an especially gnarly passage from the book version of Shattering Conventions, crack a couple of jokes and answer a question or two. I was totally wrong about this.

You have to keep your eyes on the ground while walking through the halls of California’s San Mateo Events Center during the Maker Faire. There are robots down there. You look up at the towering Godzilla woven entirely from wool and then you’re almost tripped up by a small moving platform trimmed with aqua blue lights. The platform scoots around the floor, weaving in and out of peoples’ footfalls

It’s hard to tell what the llamas are thinking as they are mobbed by students on Memorial Glade at UC Berkeley for the event that is now called Llamapalooza. These Peruvian pack animals have been coming to this grassy field on campus ringed by three of the university’s imposing libraries for four years now.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Or at least that was the take from famed rebel journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Speaker KiKi L’Italien, president and CEO of Amplified Growth and host of Association Chat, is taking this life lesson to heart.

“Hey Robert, great to have you back. What’ll you have?” Lawrence says as I grab a seat at the bar while I take a break from shooting video at BABSCon, the Bay Area Brony Spectacular, a three-day gathering of people of all gender identifications who are obsessed with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

The live camels seem a bit out of place near the back of the Santa Clara Convention Center, but there they are. It is the San Francisco Bay Area Travel and Adventure Show so it all makes a kind of sense—especially when you emphasize the adventure aspect of the whole thing.

What used to be a "towering inferno" of flaming weed is now in the mainstream.

Every cat is a good cat at CatCon in Pasadena.

You probably wouldn’t expect a former shipyard to be the perfect place for a conference, but challenging expectations is the mission of the wildly successful “commerce-meets-creativity” annual gathering that is turning heads around the globe: C2 Montreal.

There was a surprising lack of zombies at the Walker Stalker con.