“W00t.” The nerd rallying cry. This is a powerful, emotionally charged term among those who prefer LAN parties over keggers. It also adequately describes my feeling of excitement as we rolled into Seattle for our 14-minute set at W00tstock, a traveling nerd music-and-comedy circus put on by Paul and Storm, Wil Wheaton and Adam Savage. According to Wikipedia, “w00tstock” is a portmanteau of wooly, magnets and buttock. The show was held at the Moore Theatre, a gorgeous and mysterious theatre built in 1907 which is cavernous and filled with weird passageways, haunted dressing rooms and even a special upper balcony with its own discrete entranceway, an artifact of the era of segregation. Though not as large, it surpassed in impressiveness the stage we played at PAX East.
Speaking of PAX East: I didn’t blog about it at the time, but I managed to make a terrible first impression with Wil Wheaton in the green room. He walked up to the food table and asked what was tasty. “The turkey ro
lls,” I replied in a boisterous tone, “are off the #@$!ing hook.” Silence filled the room, and Wil looked at me with a mix of pity and reproach. In a soft voice – barely above a whisper – he said “I haven’t eaten meat in 14 years.” The Enforcers in the room looked away from me and shook their heads in disgust at my obvious ignorance. This very fact – and many more – were in plain sight right there on his blog. I had not done my due diligence. Feeling the pressure mount, I tried to save face through eloquence: “Well,” I said in an even louder tone, “the @#$?ing veggie dip is @#$?ing delicious!”
You can understand, then, why I felt a slight sense of trepidation upon meeting Wil again at W00tstock. Luckily my vulgar, carnivorous boorishness and nescience appeared to be water under the bridge as he shook my hand and congratulated me on a job well done after we left the stage, a knowing look in his eye that said You’ve come a long way, baby. In my defense, though, those turkey rolls were SO GOOD OMFG.
In all seriousness, Wil is a very nice guy with a genuine passion for geek culture. The same can be said for everyone else at the show, notably Paul and Storm, who are funny and warm-hearted in addition to being stellar performers. Factoid: they used to be in a professional a capella group called Da Vinci’s Notebook which, in 1999 or 2000, performed at Carnegie-Mellon at a little gathering put on by none other than the CMU Originals, the group I founded during my sophomore year. What a small world! At the after-party (there are always after-parties, darling) – which was held at the wood-and-leather-adorned 13 Coins, home of the “premium old-fashioned” – I had a chance to chat briefly with Adam about our differing opinions on Inglorious Basterds. I thought Shoshanna’s arc was riveting while the Basterds storyline was superflous; he liked the whole package. As for the myth that he travels from place to place in a gold-plated mecha: busted! He uses a flying carpet. Salmon with aquifer blue trim.
A note to those fans who were lucky enough to get their posters and CD’s signed by the one and only Vic-20 (click here 
for disambiguation): my signature evolved over the course of the evening until finally settling on a consistent look. The earlier versions are therefore rare and should not be parted with for anything less than some premiere pocket lint.
Our home-away-from-home here in Seattle is the house of the most generous Peter and Mary Schroeder, parents to Bl8k L0tus’s girlfriend Lena. We have a lovely view of the Puget Sound, a hot tub, and nowhere to go today except to the High-Dive, where we will rock the Emerald City again in the company of Lisa Dank, Billy the Fridge and Beefy. See you there!
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