Thursday, November 21, 2013

This Nov. 29th, reddit's 1st Livestream Brings the Black Friday Chaos to You

On Black Friday 2008, a retail employee was stampeded to death when a mob of shoppers broke down the doors of a store in Valley Stream, NY.

On Black Friday 2011, a savings hunter in Porter Ranch, California injured 20 people when she doused her fellow shoppers with pepper spray.

On Black Friday 2012, an argument about a parking space in Tallahassee ended with two shoppers being shot.

On Black Friday 2013, experience the Black Friday chaos and adventure from the safety of your own dwelling with the redditgifts shopping network.

Black Friday is absurd.

The day after thanksgiving has mutated into a disgusting, crowded, and sometimes dangerous national holiday in the US. It's the manic lovechild of a /r/Murica, /r/wheredidthesodago, and /r/hailcorporate threesome after one-too-many Watermelon martinis one night at Olive Garden. It's become an increasingly hyped and sprawling holiday ritual, but there's still some magic in a cultural tradition spending time with family, no matter how crass the motive. Unless you work in retail, that is. In which case, welcome to Hell.

In the face of such perversion we have decided not to turn our noses and hibernate, but rather to embrace the commercial chaos head on.

On Black Friday, we are hosting an EPIC 8 hour livestream on redditgifts.com and our youtube channel. It's going to be part home-shopping-network, part old-school-holiday-variety-show, part fundraiser telethon, and part Muppets Take Manhattan. We're going to be featuring amazing small merchants from the redditgifts marketplace, dynamite musical acts, hilarious comedians, appearances from celebrity redditors, and of course a Hoffman's two-toed sloth.

We know from traffic graphs during previous Thanksgiving holidays that many of you are stuck at home on Black Friday, rightfully scared to venture outside, and bored with family.

This year, while we can't save you from all the madness of the holiday season, we promise that from 12pm ET to 8pm ET we're going to do our best to entertain and amuse and bring some of the Black Friday spectacle to the safety of your own living room/bungalow/yurt/bunker. Consider this our grand experiment to put just a little humanity back into the soulless empty big box holiday.

Our show will be hosted by some of NYC's (and Toronto's) finest comedians, including:

Casey Jost - actor and comedian who is the head comedy writer of "Impractical Jokers" and a member of UCB's Harold Team "Good Girl")
Lisa Kleinman - actress, comedian, and lady person based out of Brooklyn. She is currently an actor on the UCB Maude Team Beige.
Benny Pearson - funmaker who has had multiple pursuits in the music industry, and he hopes to use his platform on RGSN to play with something sharp.
Sasheer Zamata - actress, writer, and comedienne living in NYC. She has a new web series called "Pursuit of Sexiness".
Yoni Lotan - actor, improviser, writer, and filmmaker living in New York City. (Just like every single person in NYC).
Nat & Marie - Writers, podcasters, and hosts of Canada’s longest running Internet trend barometer show.

You can see some of them in action in the preview below.


We will have in-studio musical performances by YC The CynicKiah VictoriaCharlieRED, and others. We also have MNN's Jay Miller presenting a very special "Midevenings" from our studio, video submissions from CollegeHumor's Pat Cassels and Jeff Rubin, Jake & Amir, Pee-wee Herman (via telephone), Joel Hodgson (from MST3K), /u/GovSchwarzenegger, and many more.

We are especially honored that Mike Rowe, one of our touchstones for the show, will be participating. Before Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe was a host on QVC and made comedy gold out of selling trinkets to the late night masses. His mischievous graveyard shift work is an inspiration to this project.

We'll be raising funds for classroom projects for DonorsChoose.org with the help of none other than Stephen Colbert. We'll be highlighting some great bitcoin deals from Bitcoin Black Friday, including a deal on reddit gold. We'll also have some surprises and special contributions from the reddit community like this moving collaboration from /u/indiefied and /u/Poem_For_Your_Sprog:
Sometimes, when I'm sleeping, I dream of it yet -
That day in November I'll never forget.
The sounds as they rushed and they crushed and they fell -
Their faces; their fury; that vision of Hell. 
- The Ballad of Black Friday


See you all on Nov. 29th from 12pm - 8pm ET on redditgifts.com and youtube.com/reddit, and we will weather this storm together.
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