DefineTO Wrap-Up Post

Last updated on April 3rd, 2021 at 11:37 pm

Blogging and trying to do it well takes time. At first, I was thinking that I’d be able to do my series on Africa over the course of a week, breaking down the trip into individual stories, but when I sat down and tried to express everything I’d experienced in words — I realized that my stories were far grander and embedded deeper within me than I’d originally thought.

So, much like they had us climbing Kilimanjaro, I’m blogging about the trip “pole pole”—Swahili for “slowly, slowly”; making sure I write everything I want to and making sure that I’m using the right photos and videos from my collection that really help to tell the story.

But just because I’m taking my time doesn’t mean that the world will stop revolving on its axis—case in point, last night I was at DefineTO, the event that succeeded last year’s Twestival Toronto. While definitely a lot less packed than last year (personally, I suspect that it was due to the name change and few people knowing that it had formerly been called Twestival), it was still a good event with great organizers!

While my primary focus was preparing to rock the crowd at the #Twidol karaoke competition, there were lots of other things going down that evening, like:

• Meeting Fahima, the event organizer, and scoring an early T-shirt for helping open a box
• Throwing down on the dance floor with the likes of Corey Herscu
• SweetGIF.com: A creation by Matt Read (who I’ve indirectly blogged about before) that takes 12 snapshots of you and makes an instant animated GIF file—awesome fun!
• Performances by June Ballentyne, Marie Coyle and SepTo on The Remix Project, and Ryan Creelman

I’d love to see it grow next year, with even more word-of-mouth and getting #DefineTO in people’s mouths where Twestival used to be.

As for #Twidol, despite an early lead in the competition, my buddy Jaemeel revealed that he had a genius self-marketing strategy put in place days before the event, and we all simply fell victim to it. It’s all good—he needed a new phone anyway.

Until next year, DefineTO; I’ve got me some blog posts to write!

(You can also see mi amiga Reggy’s breakdown of the night’s events on her blog post here!)