I Went on the JoCo Cruise andYou Should Too

or: Safety and Community on the High Seas

Dear Friends,

I went on the JoCo Cruise this year for the first time and will go again next year, and probably the year after that, and the year after that.

You should join me.

The obvious reasons are:

1. It’s a cruise, what’s not to like?
2. There’s lots of activities I think you’d enjoy: board gaming, crafting, talks, etc
3. The music is pretty good

Of course, you can get all these things in other ways, and probably for a lot less money. JoCo Cruise is almost twice as expensive as the same cruise without the games and concerts — it’s more expensive than even a Disney cruise, which (I imagine) is a pretty nice experience.

And yet there’s something special about the JoCo Cruise: over the years its has grown from a few hundred people sharing a ship with 80% non-JoCo cruisers to thousands of “JoCoNauts” on a dedicated ship, and it consistently sells out.

So what makes the JoCo Cruise unique? A post-cruise Facebook thread is filled with people struggling to explain the experience to their friends:

“Most people I know outside of the cruise don’t understand, and act like it’s just some weird thing my husband and I do.”

“I’ve never really been able to properly get the idea of JoCo across. Even other nerdy people I know just can’t seem to think of it as anything but another normal cruise. So typically I just avoid talking about it.”

“I struggle with this every time, and I think that’s why I try so hard to get people to come with me. You can’t quite explain the thing in words or pictures. There’s a feeling to it that I don’t find anywhere else. And once I convince someone to try it, they’re like, ‘ohhhh.’”

“A friend asked how the cruise was and I said it felt like coming home. It was my first time on the boat and it felt that way.”

Nevertheless — even though this was my first JoCo Cruise ever, and even though I only attended a small fraction of the events — I’m going to try to explain the magic.

In What Happens When You Put 2,000 Nerds on a Boat?, one of the cruise organizers described it as “nerd summer camp at sea.” This is a good starting place, but I think the foundation of the cruise is two elements which might or might not have been part of your summer camp: Safety and Community.

Safety

We take pride in our event’s inclusive culture and community. JoCo Cruise is a place where differences are celebrated, dreams nurtured, and a good time is had by all. Express and be yourself, and join the family!

This is not the summer camp where you were teased and mocked. Many people on social media have posted that they feel safe being who they are on the cruise — there are even some who chose the cruise as their moment to transition.

JoCo Cruise has had a code of conduct in place for almost a decade (prior to that it relied on Wheaton’s Law). They gave us a printed copy before boarding the ship, and it’s also displayed prominently on board along with a hotline for any violations. (And the Cruise enforced it in 2021 to ban a performer for his public statements).

Online, I saw the community come together to help enforce it. In one case, someone behaved badly towards a crew member, in another someone made a clumsy joke disparaging a particular computer language and its users. The people who were called out made prompt, direct, sincere apologies.

More examples:

• A diverse group of speakers, including Ryka Aoki, a trans woman who wrote Light From Uncommon Stars, a best-selling LGBTQ+ science fiction novel.
• A visible and flamboyant presence at parties was CONFAB, “a collective of diverse dancers, burlesque, drag, and performance artists”
• The cruise’s Discord has channels not just for makers and gamers, but also many marginalized communities: spoonies, trans-and-queer, enby, stemarginalized, bipoc, etc.
• Coulton himself skewered J. K. Rowling for her TERF views during a comedy routine, to cheers and applause.

Community

In spite of the fact that JoCo Cruise is a multi-million dollar business, the organizers somehow give every passenger a sense that they are (or can be) participants and contributors. This is a summer camp where there’s something for every interest, anyone can run an activity, and it’s totally fine if you just sit by the pool every day and do nothing.

Shadow cruise

The Shadow Cruise is the nickname for events on JoCo Cruise that are created, organized, staffed, and run by our amazing attendees.

As a first-timer, I didn’t see much difference between Shadow events and Official events. (Of course, the big concerts on the main stage were official events.) Blood on the Clocktower game was a Shadow event, Murder Mystery Party was Official. Musical Theater Live Band Karaoke was Shadow, Meaningful, but Not Pretty, A Cappella was Official. Swing Dance Lessons was Shadow, Practical Chickenkeeping was Official. The overall effect was to make you feel like you could give a talk or run a class or host a game on the next cruise — to make you feel like this was your cruise.

Social media

As I mentioned above, the cruise runs a private Discord server for attendees, as well as a private Facebook group. The groups have dozens of specialty channels, and the community is as active as any I’ve been involved with.

On the ship itself, internet access is slow and expensive. Instead, the cruise runs its own open-source social media server accessible to anyone with a browser: Twitarr. It supports public posts (aka Twarrts), email (aka Seamail), and Forums. Twitarr runs on a volunteer’s laptop for the duration of the cruise. On the last day, the server is taken down and the contents are destroyed. Twitarr is used to post jokes, food reviews, schedule changes, meet-ups, and hook-ups. For 7 days, I checked Twitarr all the time and didn’t look at Twitter once. It was great.

Random fun

The JoCo Cruise experience is filled with whimsical elements, some of it is created by cruise organizers and some of it is user generated content.

The value of the funny elevator carpets (changed daily) isn’t so much about the funny elevator carpets themselves but rather the opportunities to talk to other random elevator passengers about the funny elevator carpets.

Random gifts (3d printed Pokemon, a felt dolphin, various pins and buttons) were placed in hiding places throughout the ship (inside planters, behind railings, under sculptures). These were replenished by an army of volunteers every two hours, turning the entire ship into one big geocache.

Random funny posters and post-its with a nerdy bent (the first one was in the cafe):​​

People decorated their cabin doors, giving the passageways a college dorm feel (but without any of the icky downsides of college like studying).

Activities

No matter what your interest, we have you covered!

The number and variety of activities can be overwhelming, and you might wonder if the cruise is making the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. Many of them are science/tech related (star-gazing, science quiz show, 3-d printing), but others tilt more towards liberal arts (how to get into voice acting, learning to crochet, poetry readings). What kind of nerd cruise is this? Perhaps by nerd we don’t so much mean a “single-minded expert in a particular technical field” but rather someone “extremely excited or enthusiastic about a subject, typically one of specialist or minority interest”. And part of what makes this cruise a community is a mutual respect for and appreciation of all our various nerdy pursuits.

Until next year

The last example of Safety and Community I have is one of the very first experiences we had: a welcome letter from Jonathon Coulton himself. Like much of the cruise itself, it’s funny, kind, and heartfelt:

We’ll be on an upper deck, aft, not far from the board gaming scene at the Lido Market. See you there.