Former local’s fiancé the object of worldwide jealousy

Former Eau Clairian Justin Johnson (talked about in the very first issue of Volume One) proposed to his girlfriend through a complicated rigging of the social media/blogging platform Tumblr – and through one hell of a sweet video (72,700 views and counting). It helps that Johnson is a filmmaker and it helps that he started filming his fiancé Marissa since the first time he met her, but still … this puts a lot of lovestruck dudes to shame. The proposal was basically the social media equivalent of a public proposal at a baseball game via JumboTron, except, you know, way cooler.

Simply googling "Justin and Marissa" produces pages and pages of articles and blog posts on the proposal, ranging from congratulatory odes to hoax theories to jealous rants. Here’s a “behind the scenes” article on how it happened from NewTeeVee.com:

• Justin Johnson, creative services lead at Next New Networks and one of the original writers for College Humor, was sitting at home yesterday with his girlfriend of six years, Marissa Nystrom. It was about 6:30 p.m. EST, their sixth anniversary as a couple, and a quiet night. They were making spaghetti for dinner, Nystrom was checking her Facebook and Tumblr accounts, and Johnson was nervous as hell.
• About a month prior, Johnson had begun working with the team at Tumblr to create a wedding proposal that suited them as a couple — a big, splashy takeover of every Tumblr user’s dashboard, in which he’d pop the question in a post only Nystrom could respond to. That night, Johnson had just used a “secret link” to activate the proposal post, meaning that soon the entire Tumblr universe would be able to see it…except that his first attempt to activate it didn’t work … Read more.

Spoiler: she said yes. Big thanks to Johnson’s brother Jesse (who takes photos for Volume One) for the tip. And big congrats, of course, to the happy couple.