My birfday was on Thursday, and for a present my ever-loving wife gave me a ticket to w00stock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. Not coincidentally, it was @SphinxAkashaa’s birfday last month, and his ever-loving wife also gave him a ticket to w00tstock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. So the two of us (our wives had to work and stay home with a baby, respectively) went and saw the show last night.
It was lots of good.
Let me just try to do a quick run-down of the many, many things that happened at the show. This probably won’t be in order at all, but oh well:
The show was run from a Macbook, and the desktop was visible on a giant screen in the background throughout basically the entire show (unless they were showing something else on the screen). You would actually see the mouse cursor double-click on the next section of the show to start it in Quicktime, which would then go fullscreen. The background of the desktop was Ceiling Cat:
Paul & Storm did their “Opening Band” song.
Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun did a humorous time-travel reading, then showed two sketches on the big screen. One was only okay—about superheroes who all have similar emblems so get confused as to whom the signal in the sky is summoning. The other one—about a guy who obsessively installs Linux in EVERYTHING—was really very funny.
Molly Lewis performed four songs: the three-movement one about the assassination of Lincoln, a brand-new one that didn’t have complete lyrics about wanting to have Stephen Fry’s baby, the one about breaking up with Wikipedia, and then a “Two Girls, One Uke” version of “Conjunction Junction” with Presidents of the United States of America drummer Jason Finn backing them up, and a special surprise to perform the spoken-word segment of the song. Don’t take my word for it, though; I recorded it:
Xbox Live banhammer Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse gave a humorous reading about the process of banning people from the Xbox Live service. He gave it in the style of a pious religious reading, with Paul & Storm backing him up as chanting monks.
Two guys from Loan Shark Games are making a sequential puzzle video, and they’re showing a different piece of it during each of the next few w00tstocks, starting with this one. It was a funny video that involved one guy juggling some very specific objects. Then they did a live plate spinning trick. The climax of the trick was a hand holding a stick on top of which was a spinning tray, on top of which was a really long pole (probably four or five feet), on top of which was a spinning plate. Very impressive.
Wil Wheaton gave a reading from his book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, about the first time he went and saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Interesting side-fact: I’ve never seen it, and have absolutely no desire ever to do so. It sounds like a dreadful time to me. But it was a well-written and well-performed reading, with again Paul & Storm backing him up with snippets of songs where appropriate.
MC Frontalot did a set. It was really hard to understand his lyrics; I think a combination of mic volume and speaker placement made it so that where I was sitting was just not the best place acoustically. But man, what energy! Very entertaining.
Hank Green performed a couple of his nerdy songs, about particle physics and evolutionary biology. And one about Star Trek: TNG, which he said he never imagined he’d be performing in front of one of the cast members.
Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave a very funny talk that started with revealing his geek street cred about how he got his first kiss from a girl he met playing Dungeons & Dragons at the public library. He then told funny behind-the-scenes stories about Mythbusters, and show lots of in-depth clips from an upcoming episode. He was very funny and engaging.
Paul & Storm closed out the show with a set. There wasn’t anything new in it, and I’ve (strangely enough) now seen them three times within the last nine months or so, but they’re still very entertaining. They brought Wil, Adam, and Jason out to do the “Pirate’s Wife’s Lament” with all the Arrrs.
There were a series of running audio and video gags throughout the show between performers. One of them was “A Moment with Wil,” wherein We’d spend a few minutes watching Wil do something, like wear a necktie or drink a Guinness or eat a pizza. A funny gag in those series of videos was that the episode numbers quickly jumped from three to seven to fourteen. Then there were a series of audio clips of George Takei singing various songs that would end whenever he said, “Fire,” which would be followed by phaser and explosion sound effects. Really hilarious stuff. They also showed the Academy Award Winning Film trailer and did a funny bit with the Trololololo song when they came back from intermission.
I bought the official w00tstock 2.0 t-shirt and it came with a free matching poster! Looks like this:
The whole show lasted just a few minutes over four hours (including intermission). Good times. I only took five photos during the whole show, and here they are (click for larger):
Posted by Christopher Grant Harris at 1:14 pm.
Something completely adorable happened on Tuesday. See, musician Molly Lewis is a big fan of Stephen Fry — and why shouldn’t she be, really? Why shouldn’t everyone be a fan of Stephen Fry? No good reason as far as I can see. Anyhoo, a while back she wrote a song for/about Stephen Fry called “An Open Letter to Stephen Fry,” and last week she got about to releasing a recording of it. Things moved rather quickly after that. 
The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard announced that they would be honoring Stephen Fry at an event on Tuesday evening. Similarly, Molly Lewis posted a cryptic plea on her website asking if her fans could perhaps help with airfare so she could fly out to some event in Massachusetts…
– Palmdale
– Anya Marina
– JP Inc.
– Daft Punk
– Bonobo & Andreya Triana
– JP Inc.
– Mtume
– Palmdale
– Bitter:Sweet
– She & Him
– JP Inc.
– Cocorosie
– White Town
– M.I.A.
– Pomplamoose
