w00tstock chicago and w00tstock minneapolis

My first post for Techland went up yesterday morning:

I just got home from performing two w00tstock shows in Chicago and Minneapolis. w00tstock is a sort of nerd variety show that I produce with Paul and Storm, and Adam Savage. We and an ever-changing lineup of invited guests perform geek-related material for people who are just like us, in an environment we hope feels like the This American Life stage show meets Coachella. (On these last two shows, we had Bill Amend, the creator of Foxtrot, join us in Chicago, and Professor James Kakalios of The Physics of Superheroes joined us in Minneapolis.)

As I sit here today, my voice almost completely gone, every muscle in my body aching, and so tired I don't want to do much more than grab a bunch of comics and spend the day with my feet up, I am once again grateful to live in The Future. As recently as five years ago, w00tstock could not have existed the way it does today, and we owe a lot of that to our audiences, who have promoted and supported us, and helped us grow so fast, we just announced a show at Comic-Con.

Cory Doctorow famously wrote about the implied endorsement when a friend hands you a book, or a movie, or a CD. There is tremendous value there, that we artists simply can't get from publicists and interviews. I know that w00tstock wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is if we didn't make it easy for our audiences to share our shows however they want, and that's what I wanted to write a little bit about today.

To support my contention that artists are doing it wrong when they prevent their audiences from recording and sharing their shows, I now present a recap of our Chicago and Minneapolis shows featuring video, photos, and blogs from people who were there, mostly in the audience, beginning with Chicago w00tster pk_gojira wrote:

The show began with Wil Wheaton coming out and giving an introduction for the evening, and a somewhat fictionalized version of how this w00tstock came about.  He also introduced us to the guest artist for the evening, Len Peralta.  This guy sat at the back of the stage all evening and drew a special poster you could order a print of online after the show.  Oh yeah, Wil also said everything from the night was released under the creative commons act, which sure is a swell thing for them to do.  That meant that they were actually encouraging us to take pictures and videos, so of course I'll be showing you what I took.

See, this is why we embrace Creative Commons and make it easy for our audiences to share their experiences from the shows, because it lets us get awesome stuff like this:

Eternal Arr from Dan Coulter on Vimeo.

That's from the longest Captain's Wife's Lament in history, which is significant fro two reasons, one already stated, and the other the realization that when we do this bit, we're sort of pretending to be from The Rat Pack, which was a lot of fun.

Another Chicago highlight came from Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me. He wrote an original monologue for w00tstock that is so amazing, I'm sure it will find its way to someplace even more famous and respectable than w00tstock (yes, believe it or not, those places do exist). I'm grateful and amazed he chose to debut this story with us:

Chicago was a particularly special show for me, because I did what I think is the best performance of anything I've ever written during this show. I told my Rocky Horror Picture Show story from the Special Edition of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and it was one of those perfect storms (more like a perfect Paul and Storm AMIRITE?!) where the audience was into it for the whole time, I nailed the beats the way I needed to, and the music was exactly right.

Part One:

Part Two:

Boy, do I want to go do the Time Warp again. Seriously.

The following night, we did a show in Minneapolis at the Guthrie Theater. The Guthrie is a legitimate theater, the kind of place I dream of performing as an actor, and I think all of us who have been doing w00tstock felt the same sense of wonder when we walked into the place and realized that we were about to do a show in a place for grown ups.

Just before the show started, we got a cake, and not only was the cake not a lie, it was a Tardis. I was a little excited, on account of what a giant Doctor Who fan I am (preemptive FAQ answer: Tom Baker, with David Tennant threatening to overtake him every single time I watch the New Who, and I haven't watched Matt Smith, yet. I'm busy, people.)

John Scalzi joined us in Minneapolis for the sold out (!) show. Video and secret inside thoughts from John are at The Whatever, so you probably want to go check that out, since it's hilarious, and John wrote it specifically for our show. Seriously, how do we get to be so lucky?

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, so I'm going to refer you to Paul and Storm's post about w00tstock in Chicago and Minneapolis that has links to all the great stuff you'll be glad you watched and sad you missed in person:

Every time we think new w00tstocks can’t possibly live up to the past ones, we are proved laughably wrong. We continue to be amazed by the energy and good feelings generated by audience and performers alike, and Chicago and Minneapolis BROUGHT IT. The energy was so strong, in fact, that the show ran nearly 5 hours in Chicago and 4 1/2 in Minneapolis—to the delight of the overwhelming majority, who were laughing and cheering just as hard at the end as at the beginning.

Yeah, what they said. I hope you'll go to their blog, follow the links they put up, and experience some of the wonder and joy I got from being able to sit on the side of the stage while all of these incredibly talented people gave us five of the longest and geekiest three hours they'll ever spend in a theater. (Don't worry, future audiences: we're not going to run so long any more; we've heard you about the length of the show, and are taking deliberate and specific steps to ensure that we're closer to 3 hours from now on.)

OH HAI IM IN UR GENCONZ ROLLIN MAH DIZE!

I'm coming to Gen Con!

If you like playing nerdy games, even a little bit, you owe it to yourself to go to a game con. There are awesome regional cons happening all the time, like the Strategicons we have here near LAX, and RinCon in Tucson, but the biggest one of all is Gen Con.

I've wanted to go to Gen Con since I was in my teens, but one thing or another has always prevented me from making the trip. This year, though, I rolled a 20, and it's finally happening!

I'm a Media Guest of Honor, joining Felicia Day and members of the cast of The Guild. I'll be signing stuff for about three hours each day, and the rest of the time I will be getting my geek on and playing games – look for me wherever you see Zombie or Cthulhu Dice, Small World, Pandemic, Savage Worlds, and of course True Dungeon. I will be doing a storytelling hour at some point, and details about that will be in the program. I'm hope someone will coordinate an epic gathering of the How I Roll shirt from shirt.woot, and if someone else doesn't do it, I'll organize it myself. 

I've wanted to go to Gen Con since I was in junior high, and I'm super excited that I can finally attend. See you there!

kick out the jams, motherfu-

@mickipedia at the roller derby

(Photo by me. Click to embiggen and get more info at Flickr.) 

Last night, Anne and I went to watch Roller Derby (which doesn't, by the rules of English grammar, need to be capitalized, but by the rules of capitalizing Things What Are Awesome does) live for the very first time. 

I used to watch it on TV when I was a kid, and grew out of it the same time I grew out of wrestling, for pretty much the same reasons, so each time my friend Burns, who is a referee at the Doll Factory, told me to come watch a derby, I always had something else to do.

About a week ago, Burns told us that he'd get us VIP tickets if we wanted to come out. He promised us that we'd have a good time. Anne and I have been looking for excuses to get out of goddamn fucking suburbia lately, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see something our friend loves, experience something new, and get out of goddamn fucking suburbia all at once.

We fought through horrible are-you-fucking-kidding-me-it's-7pm-on-a-Saturday traffic (we can't move away from Los Angeles soon enough) and walked into the Doll Factory just before 7:30. I instantly fell in love with the scene: an incredibly diverse crowd of enthusiastic, interesting people mingled around The Doll Mall, a room off to one side of the main building where artists and vendors had all sorts of cool stuff for sale. Skaters from both teams cruised around, talking to fans and each other, and the vibe was overwhelmingly positive.

We found Burns, found our seats, paid way too much for two Newcastles (not the Dolls' fault, apparently, but come on, vendors: $7 for one can of beer is bullshit) and got ready for the derby to start. Checking Twitter, I learned that the people sitting next to me were friends of @Mickipedia, putting them one degree from me through a bunch of different friends, including Sean Bonner, who I've concluded is the nexus of awesome in Los Angeles.

(Fun fact: About two weeks ago, I taunted Paul F. Tompkins during his hilarious #verifypft efforts that I'd get reverified before he got verified. I didn't think it would actually happen, but I sat next to @trammell who works for Twitter, and he was able to speed up my process. I got reverified this morning. Your move, @PFTompkins.)

Just before 8, the derby started. The Dolls' fielded an all-star team called the After Shockers, while Arizona brought the Derby Dames. The match was a blowout – LA won by something like 80 points – but it didn't seem to bother either team, because it was obvious that everyone was having a hell of a good time. All the girls skated like they meant it, and I'm pretty sure most of them are feeling it today, because they beat the shit out of each other for every point.

Unlike the televised stuff I watched in the late 70s and early 80s, this was not scripted or planned or faked or stupid, and by the end of the first quarter, the only thing I regretted about coming to the derby was waiting so long. The entire experience was amazing, from beginning to end, and did I mention that the girls are incredibly sexy? Because holy shit, you guys.

Now that our kids are grown and becoming more independent, Anne and I finally have time for ourselves that we haven't had for over a decade. In the absence of being full-time parents, we're starting to miss all the art and culture that we used to experience before we moved out here for the schools. We both feel like we've been trapped in a Suburban world bounded by responsibility, yard work and the mall, and the only road out is so choked with traffic, taking it is an aggravating ordeal that's barely worth the effort … but I keep thinking about the quote from Ferris Bueller's Day Off about life moving by pretty fast, and I'm not quite ready to resign myself to missing it. Going to the Roller Derby last night, and being around all the non-suburbanized people there felt foreign and familiar and inspiring, all at once. It viscerally reminded me of all the things I've been missing, and I can't wait to go back.

Seriously, guys, if you live anywhere near roller derby, it's really worth making the effort to go and see it in person, at least once. Unless, as I said on Twitter last night, you hate things that are awesome.