{"term":"clowncon-2026","results":[{"@id":"https://pip.clown.business/posts/clowncon-volunteer","title":"I volunteered at ClownCon and slipped on Penny's banana peel","description":"Volunteered at ClownCon 2026 as a student! I ran the mic for Penny Wise Jr.'s banana peel session and, during Q&A, slipped on her demo peel in front of 200 people. Rofl told me afterwards that it would have passed the CCF surprise criterion with full marks. I've never been so proud of something I didn't mean to do. Other highlights: I watched Mimi's whole talk (I cried, then clapped for four minutes), and Dusty Calhoun let me hold his barrel. It's heavier than it looks. Everything in this industry is heavier than it looks.","image":null,"date":1791277691180,"postDate":1790272800000,"octothorpes":["internships","clowncon-2026","pratfalls"]},{"@id":"https://giggles.clown.business/posts/clowncon-by-the-numbers","title":"ClownCon 2026 by the numbers","description":"I tracked everything so you don't have to. Attendance: 1,140. Sessions: 46. Pies thrown: 212, of which 9 were scheduled. Longest standing ovation: Mimi Marceau, 4 min 12 s, for 45 minutes of silence. Second longest: Bozo D. Ringwald, 3 min 50 s, who has asked me to note that his talk was longer. The birthday track was standing room only, mostly because it was held inside a bouncy castle. Attendance at castle sessions was up 300%. Recommendation for 2027: put every track in a bouncy castle. See you next year.","image":null,"date":1791277689353,"postDate":1790078400000,"octothorpes":["birthday-parties","clowncon-2026","corporate-clowning"]},{"@id":"https://bozo.clown.business/posts/the-honk-within","title":"ClownCon keynote recap: The Honk Within","description":"What a week. I delivered the ClownCon 2026 keynote, “The Honk Within”, to a packed main hall and received the second-longest standing ovation of the conference. (Mimi had the first, for a talk with no words. I've made my peace with it. I've made my peace with it twice now, in a journal.) The heart of the talk: every clown has a honk inside them, and leadership is creating the conditions for that honk to come out. Several attendees told me afterwards that they cried. One said it changed how he thinks about horns. Slides and a recording are available on request. I've already had a lot of requests.","image":null,"date":1791277733114,"postDate":1790010000000,"octothorpes":["honking","clowncon-2026","leadership"]},{"@id":"https://dusty.clown.business/posts/clowncon","title":"ClownCon","description":"Went to ClownCon. Good people. Indoor falls, mostly. Only rodeo clown there. Gave a six-minute talk on barrel work. Got a standing ovation from Rofl and a nod from the mime. I'll take the nod.","image":null,"date":1791277688947,"postDate":1789999200000,"octothorpes":["clowncon-2026","rodeo"]},{"@id":"https://coco.clown.business/posts/twisting-at-scale-revisited","title":"My ClownCon talk: twisting at scale, after an outage","description":"Gave my ClownCon talk, “Twisting at Scale: Lessons from a Single Point of Inflation”. Standing room only, which I'm told was partly the fire marshal's decision. The thesis: resilience isn't redundant balloons, it's redundant everything: tanks, minivans, cousins. The giraffe is the user-facing surface. The system is everything nobody sees until 14:02 on a Saturday. Most-asked question afterwards: “Is Dale available?” He is not. Dale is our failover.","image":null,"date":1791277740510,"postDate":1789909200000,"octothorpes":["balloon-art","resilient-infrastructure","clowncon-2026"]},{"@id":"https://tristan.clown.business/posts/demo-day","title":"Demo day at ClownCon: what went wrong (everything) and what went right (also everything)","description":"We live-demoed Squeakly on the ClownCon Demo Day stage to 600 clowns. The conference wifi went down two seconds in. Contextual honking requires the cloud. Our horn produced nothing for eleven seconds. I squeezed it harder. It produced nothing, harder. Then Mimi Marceau, front row, mimed a honk. The room lost it. Biggest laugh of the day. I've watched the recording 40 times and I believe it's the strongest product-market-fit signal we've ever had, though my co-founder disagrees about which product. Grateful for every lesson. Rebuilding the demo with an offline mode.","image":null,"date":1791277691964,"postDate":1789830000000,"octothorpes":["startups","honking","clowncon-2026"]},{"@id":"https://penny.clown.business/posts/banana-peel-meta-analysis","title":"My ClownCon talk: a meta-analysis of banana peel friction","description":"Slides from my ClownCon session are up. I pooled 38 studies of the banana peel and found an effective coefficient of friction between 0.07 and 0.66, depending on ripeness, floor finish, and whether the peel was placed with intent. Headline finding: a brown-spotted peel on polished linoleum is the most reliable trip in the literature, and also the most dangerous. Reliability and safety are in tension, and managing that tension is the job. Thank you to the 200 people who came, and to our student volunteer Pip, who slipped on the demo peel during Q&A. Rofl has confirmed it would have scored full marks for visible surprise.","image":null,"date":1791277690427,"postDate":1789761600000,"octothorpes":["engineering","clowncon-2026","pratfalls"]},{"@id":"https://rofl.clown.business/posts/ccf-v1-ratified","title":"CCF v1.0.0 ratified at ClownCon 2026","description":"This morning in Hall B in Sarasota, the Safe Clowning Alliance membership voted to ratify Certified Controlled Faller Level 1 as a v1.0.0 standard. 412 in favour, 3 against, 1 abstention (a mime; we're counting it as a yes). I presented in a personal capacity, as I'm currently between roles. Thank you to everyone who submitted comments, every candidate who fell for the pilot, and Dusty Calhoun, whose late comment on section 4.2 (“Rodeo don't have a mat”) became our new Appendix D: Falls Where There Is No Mat. Certify the landing, not just the fall. It's in the standard now.","image":null,"date":1791277704582,"postDate":1789743600000,"octothorpes":["safety","certification","clown-business-news","clowncon-2026"]},{"@id":"https://mimi.clown.business/posts/clowncon-2026","title":"Thank you, ClownCon","description":"...","image":null,"date":1791277690194,"postDate":1789671600000,"octothorpes":["mime-theory","silence","clowncon-2026"]},{"@id":"https://bozo.clown.business/posts/keynoting-clowncon","title":"Humbled to be keynoting ClownCon 2026","description":"When the ClownCon committee called to ask if I'd deliver this year's keynote, I told them I'd need to check my calendar. I did not need to check my calendar. My calendar has been clear for this since 2019. ClownCon 2026 runs September 17–19 in Sarasota. My keynote, “The Honk Within”, is about the leadership lessons hiding in every squeeze. Also speaking: Coco Klein on balloon infrastructure, Penny Wise Jr. on friction, and Mimi Marceau, who confirmed her attendance by nodding. See you in Sarasota.","image":null,"date":1791277694126,"postDate":1783951200000,"octothorpes":["clown-business-news","clowncon-2026","leadership"]}]}