So yeah, I decided yesterday afternoon to go to w00tstock 2.2. I told my father and his first response was “You can’t see Wil Wheaton, he’s Sheldon’s arch-enemy!” This made me laugh out loud. I then put on my Green Lantern shirt and ventured in to the city. I won’t bore you with the HORRIBLE FUCKING TRAFFIC I dealt with, but I eventually made it to Park West and found a seat amongst my fellow nerds.

First things first, all the words, images, and videos in this post that are done by me are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. I am also including the Wheaton Clause in this one… Don’t Be A Dick.

The event started fairly promptly and we were immediately informed that “3 hours of Geeks & Music” could be anywhere from 3 to 5 hours. Not a single person was bothered by this. Wil Wheaton started off the show and was… well, Wil. In other words, he was completely freaking awesome. In fact, every single person there was just great. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long long time. One of the things announced at almost the very beginning of the show was that Len Peralta would be drawing a special edition w00tstock Chicago poster… that would ONLY be available to those of us at the show. Oh yeah, and he would be drawing the entire thing ON STAGE during the show. They asked for ideas for the poster… and used the interwebs to get it. #chistock was our hashtag, and we made use of it. I did order one of the posters after the show because it was fucking epic. I’ll post a picture of it once I receive it.

Quick note, due to my stupidity and not checking my camera battery before I went in to the theater I have no good pictures and only some slightly okay quality videos. If I had known how open they would be to recording of the show I would have tried to get a good video camera and record the entire FIVE HOURS of awesome.

I’ll do a quick rundown on the list of people who were there. (Guests are in alphabetical order)

Bill Amend – Creator of the comic strip FoxTrot

Trace Beaulieu – Founding writer/performer on “Mystery Science Theater 3000″

Tim Cavanagh – Comedian/songwriter who has had many songs on the awesome “Dr. Demento” show.

Jason Finn – Drummer and singer for The Presidents of the United States of America.

Molly Lewis – Singer/songwriter. She plays the ukulele and is full of win.

Len Peralta – Awesome cartoonist/illustrator/podcaster.

The Rifftrax Crew – Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy – Both former MST3K members.

Peter Sagal – NPR radio host of “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”, author, playwright and cool dude.

And now… quick blurbs about each performance.

Bill Amend had an awesome presentation with some great remakes of classic comics(Cathy, Garfield, Dick Tracy, and some more) to be more geek friendly. He also talked about some of his FoxTrot comics which were geek friendly to begin with. His discussion of Wil crashing his server and the comic that he feels caused Wil’s server melting anger had me laughing so hard I almost peed a little. This comic is probably my favorite of all the ones Bill showed during his presentation. I almost died when he showed it.  Bill is just a funny guy and watching him speak was truly a joy.

Trace Beaulieu read from his upcoming book that he is doing with Len Peralta and it was hilarious and I’m fairly sure I’ll have to buy it as soon as it comes out.  I wish I could have gotten some video of his presentation because his words and Len’s art were just full of win.

Tim Cavanagh performed a few songs including his classic “99 Dead Baboons”. Being a Chicago native Tim threw in a few jokes for those of us who live here and it made his act so much better.

Molly Lewis performed her wonderful music for all of us and wanted to send a note out to Stephen Fry. She also had a very sad song about her breakup with Wikipedia and I think Wil summed her act up succinctly with his tweet… “In my entirely objective opinion, #w00tstock Chicago loves @Molly23.” And we did.

This video © Erin Perry under the CC by-nc-sa 3.0 License

Wil read his Rocky Horror Picture Show story from The Happiest Days of Our Lives. The audience participated with extreme gusto. He had us all shivering with antici…. (SAY IT!!! SAY IT!!!)… pation. We talked about Brad(ASSHOLE!) and Janet(SLUT!) and not only did the story remind me of my own RHPS deflowering… but it had it’s own soundtrack thanks to Mr. Paul & Mr. Storm. It also made me want to do a RHPS night at a local theater. I’m going to have to look in to that…

These two videos © Erin Perry under the CC by-nc-sa 3.0 License

Peter Sagal did a truly epic act. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was… the feelings of every Evil Genius’ henchman condensed in to a perfect one man stage act. This was truly one of those things that you had to be there to see. I seriously hope someone out there got film of it and will put it online. Every nerd on earth needs to see it. Edit: Found some video of Peter’s truly epic routine. Put in below.

Adam Savage was great. I really love watching him on “Mythbusters” and seeing him live when he could say things you aren’t allowed to on TV was gold. He told some great stories about his co-host Jamie and had the entire audience roaring with laughter. Lets put it this way… one of the stories ended with Jamie saying “If my couch looked like Angelina Jolie I’d fuck it.” He also told an hilarious story about his first visit to Chicago several years ago and his trip to a club in Boystown during Pride Week. Lets just say it involved a public blowjob and move along. Oh… and he sang “I Will Survive” as Gollum.

This video © Laura Harbron

To close out the night was the musical stylings of Paul and Storm. What can I say about them… they are funny as hell. They did a few songs and then Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage and Jason Finn joined them on stage for The Captain’s Wife’s Lament. Keep in mind… we were over 4 hours in to the “3 hours of Geeks and Music”… and the entire Captain’s Wife’s Lament shtick took over 30 minutes. Yeah… you heard me. Over. Thirty. Minutes. It became someones birthday during the song and that just added more time. If you’ve ever seen them do it you know the “cover band” joke… let’s just say we covered R Kelly, Miley Cyrus, George Michael(multiple times), Devo, Gary Glitter and plenty of others I don’t even remember. There was also some Zork references in there, several trips by the stage manager to bring out beer(and a discussion on which beer bringing method was more efficient, serial or parallel). The audience was told multiple times to shut up, but in a nice way. Once the singing truly started… it took 18 minutes to get through it. I’m hoping to get the video up somewhere soon… but YouTube gets all bitchy if the video is over 10 mins. Full audio of the Captain’s Wife’s Lament now posted below.

The Captain’s Wife’s Lament… full audio… almost 38 minutes.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

My final thoughts on w00tstock 2.2… it was incredible. I felt right at home there. If w00tstock comes to a city near you please do yourself a favor and go. It is one of the greatest geek experiences anyone can have. I got there about 30 minutes early… and left almost seven hours later tired as hell, but my hands hurt from clapping and my face hurt from laughing and smiling. If they come back to Chicago I will be going again. And I will drag every geek, nerd, dork, gamer, coder, hacker, and anyone else I can get to come.

And now, some pictures!