Photo: Dave Banks
For more than four glorious hours last night, the occasional nerd festival, w00tstock, entertained a few thousand Comic-Con attendees in San Diego. The festival, which celebrates geek culture, is the lovechild of Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage and musical-comedy duo, Paul & Storm.
w00tstock features an ever-changing lineup of performers and interesting, funny and unusually smart people. For stop 2.4, as San Diego was called, the show started with a number by funny music guys Paul & Storm who set the tone with their popular song, “Opening Band”, with the help of Jason Finn, drummer from the Presidents of the United States of America.
Geek-A-Week artist, Len Peralta came on stage to create a show poster while the performance was taking place, and the show was off like a heavy-lift Proton rocket on its way to low orbit. Jamie Hyneman made a brief appearance (as did Grant Imahara) and then the crowd was entertained by Molly Lewis, who had to be escorted on & off stage because she was underage for this 21+ show. (Free Molly!) Next, traveling folk singer, Marian Call performed a few songs with her lovely voice.
Comics writer Matt Fraction shared his thoughts about story development and some personal experiences, the guys from RiffTrax did what they do best by tearing apart a 50′s lunchroom film and Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, provided the intellectual highlights of the evening by pointing out galaxies, nebulae and deep sky objects that looked like genitalia. (Hey, it was a 21+ show.)
Jamy Ian Swiss performed some magic that was quite impressive, but the highlight of the evening was when Chris Hardwick took the stage. The Web Soup host started out with by reciting pi to about 100 places before doing about 10 minutes of geek-based, side-splitting comedy. He had us in tears.
Adam Savage talked about his first kiss, thanks to Dungeons and Dragons, Wil Wheaton shared a story from The Happiest Days Of Our Lives about his first time to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Paul and Storm played a few more songs.
It was well past midnight when the show finally ended, but such a good time was had by all that few seemed to notice. w00tstock was the perfect compliment to an event like Comic-Con and something that should be experienced by all geeks, so be sure to keep an eye on the calendar for upcoming shows.
