Last week, I attended W00tstock 1.1. What is a W00tstock you might ask? Well, if you had clicked the convenient link I added you’d already know but since you asked here’s the description direct from Paul and Storm’s site:

For decades, geeks were ostracized, picked on, laughed at and punished by the sun’s harmful UV rays. But there is only so long that a people can be kept down before they rise up against their oppressors; and, indeed, the dawn of the 21st century has seen the ascendancy of geeks and geek culture.

We now celebrate that rise to power–and let’s face it, nerds pretty much run everything now–with w00tstock, a special event for geeks of every stripe. Television host/special-effects artist Adam Savage (”MythBusters”), actor/author/blogger Wil Wheaton (”Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Stand By Me”) and music-comedy duo Paul and Storm (hey; that’s us!) present a night of songs, readings, comedy, demonstrations, short films, special guests, and other clever widgets born from and dedicated to the enthusiasms, obsessions, trials and joys of geek pride.

It was the brainchild of Paul and Storm, who wanted to do some west coast shows but weren’t sure they’d draw a big enough crowd on their own. So they got Wil Wheaton and Adam Savage to join them and planned three initial shows; two in San Fransico and one in LA. Each one had special guests, in LA it was: Hard and Phirm, Molly Lewis, Felicia Day, Jeff Lewis, and Sandeep Parikh. There was also a hilarious video from RiffTraxs and a few short “Moment with Wil” skits.

It was a great time. For me the real highlights were Wil’s reading of “The Trade” from his book Just a Geek with musical accompaniment by Paul and Storm; the acoustic performance of “Do you Want to Date my Avatar” and The finale of Paul and Storm’s pirate song which was a free for all of geeky pirate jokes.

There were a few ‘technical difficulties’ along the way including mic stands all over the place, broken mics, crooked projectors but they did detract from the show. If anything it made it more entertaining, you could tell it wasn’t something they had rehearsed hundreds of times and were regurgitating.  Everyone was having fun even the performers.

Lucky for you, there will be more W00tstock in the future, there’s not official dates or cities yet but if you demand it, they might, possibly, maybe come. Also, should you be so inclined w00tstock 1.1 live at the Largo available online here. (Thanks to @Jules_Party934 for the link). I highly recommend it.

View all w00tstock tour dates

I started this post almost 3 months ago with the tentative title: Twitter Shitters – No one cares. The original post was heavily influenced by this comic & post at Penny Arcade. As well as a friend who decided to link their Facebook status to Twitter which caused them to show up in my news feed every 20 minutes. The whole concept of micro-blogging seemed stupid to me. I mean who really cares that you’re sitting on a bus waiting to get home? I sure didn’t. Luckily, the post didn’t turn out that great and I ultimately decided not to publish it. Since then my thoughts about Twitter have changed quite drastically and when I discovered this post sitting the unpublished queue I decided to revisit it.

My conversion from Twitter-hater to Twitter-liker (I’ve yet to tweet while taking a dump) started when I created my account way back in January. I did it mainly because I’m just plain interested in the web and create accounts for almost every service I come across. At the time I didn’t see much of a use for the service and quickly forgot about it.  I didn’t think about it again until after I made the decision to go to PAX.  I found a group of people in the PAX forums who were trading Twitter IDs and forming an official Twitter group appropriately called the Twitter Shitters. I joined in since I figured it would be a good way to get connected with the PAX community and give me an easy way to keep track of anything I wanted to write about while I was there.

Before I left for PAX, I linked Twitter to my cell so I could update via text message so I wouldn’t have to rely on my phone’s crappy WAP web browser to update. My lack of a decent web browser kept me somewhat isolated from the community aspect but throughout the day I found myself updating more and more. Since it turned out to be such an excellent way to keep track of everything I saw and is probably the main reason I wrote so much about PAX . While I couldn’t regularly check out what everyone else was up to it was neat to get a glimpse of what everyone had done throughout the day and their thoughts were. There was even a meet up of the TSers which I unfortunately had to skip due to a very early flight.

Since then I’ve become hooked on the service. I follow Wil Wheaton who in addition to posting amusing thoughts also lets me know when he’s written something new on his blog. Felicia Day keeps me up to date with the Guild and Dr. Horrible news. Even CNN has a Twitter account for breaking news. Beyond the news and updates I get Twitter is actually a lot of fun when you have a group of semi-connected people like the TSers. I get a kick out of some the “conversations” that spring up. Which range from frustrations at work and puppy cams to the latest video games and to strange observations on life. I find myself compelled to update or respond to others several times a day.

As much as I like Twitter, one thing I refuse to do is link it to my Facebook status. I don’t want to be the guy who updates his Facebook status every 20 minute with the current status of his commute, that’s just annoying. I figure if anyone is that interested in me they can always create an account and follow me.

*Update*

So the reason this was required was because in my copious spare time I put together a Dr. Horrible costume for Halloween. I think it came out rather well although almost no one recognized the costume and I was called everything from a spaceman to sperm man.