Other Groovy Posts...

• March 2, 2009 -- The Black Hole – 1979
• February 25, 2009 -- The Proverbial Earwig Story
• September 18, 2009 -- Leo Sayer on the Muppets

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• July 16, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Honeycomb Cereal
• July 15, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Kool-Aid
• July 14, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: 1972 Peter Pan Peanut Butter Commercial

Stuff Like This...

• July 17, 2010 -- Burglary: Cookie Crisp
• July 15, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Kool-Aid
• July 14, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: 1972 Peter Pan Peanut Butter Commercial

Stuff Like This...

• July 16, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Honeycomb Cereal
• July 14, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: 1972 Peter Pan Peanut Butter Commercial
• July 17, 2010 -- Burglary: Cookie Crisp

Stuff Like This...

• July 16, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Honeycomb Cereal
• July 15, 2010 -- Breaking and Entering: Kool-Aid
• July 17, 2010 -- Burglary: Cookie Crisp

Stuff Like This...

• June 18, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Hair Horror
• June 17, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Evil “I”
• January 4, 2010 -- Mad Monster Party (1967)

Stuff Like This...

• June 19, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Varnished Violets
• June 17, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Evil “I”
• January 4, 2010 -- Mad Monster Party (1967)

Stuff Like This...

• June 19, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Varnished Violets
• June 18, 2010 -- Alphabet Anxiety – Hair Horror
• January 4, 2010 -- Mad Monster Party (1967)

Friday night, Mr. Cupcakes and I had the glorious opportunity to attend w00tstock here in Seattle. For those of you who are not part of the geek elite, w00tstock is a little shindig created by the Dark Lord of the l33t, Wil Wheaton, and 2 guys whom I had never heard of until the show, Paul and Storm. It’s billed as “3 Hours of Geeks and Music”, and it so lived up to that name that it ended up being 4 hours of pure nerd bliss. This was a beautiful, almost transcendent experience. I sat in the theatre, seeing dozens of people I knew and or recognized from around town. Former coworkers, people I went to school with, hell, I even ran into the guy who introduced me to my husband there. The show opened with Ceiling Cat and “Also sprach Zarathustra”*, and only got bigger and better until the end. There wasn’t a single low or forgettable moment for the entire 4 hours and I will see it again if it ever comes back to Seattle.

This was the “Trololo” bit with Paul and Storm and Wil Wheaton. Very silly, but oh so fun.

After the show, hubby and I stayed to get autographs. I was wondering what I would say to Wil Wheaton, seeing as you are socially obligated to say SOMETHING meaningful to a complete stranger when you ask them for their signature (unless, of course, you are the UPS guy). When I got up to him, he was very gracious, signed my poster and I sincerely thanked him for the show.

Then, as typically happens to me when I least want it to, I got retarded…

Not “Black Eyed Peas” retarded. Not even Juliette Lewis retarded. We’re talking The Full Corky here. For reasons only known to my idiot head, I blurted out “It’s been nice growing up with you!” You could almost hear the teenage girl throbbing heart emoticon dripping off my voice. I inwardly slapped my forehead and rolled my eyes. WTF Brain! THAT’S the best you could come up with??? I started to backtrack, “I mean, er, that sounds really schmaltzy… but it’s true”. NOT BETTER, SCARLETT’S BRAIN. You sound like a 40 year old woman who has pictures of him in his Wesley Crusher uniform glued to your bedroom wall. As I was digging in my purse for a long, sharp object to shove up my nose and prevent my brain from saying anything else, he paused for a moment and seemed to glance at my husband with a puzzled “should I call security” expression on his face, and said in a very sincere voice, “No, that’s very sweet” before I hobbled off feeling reeeally awkward and let him sign my husband’s D&D book (and *I* am the awkward one here?).

What made that little exchange uncomfortable for me was the fact that it was true, I have enjoyed growing up with him. In our society, we get wrapped up in celebrity in an obsessive way. We want to meet celebrities, we want to be celebrities, we want to know everything about them and emulate them. I think part of that is because celebrities can fill voids in our lives we may not even know we have. When Jim Henson died, I wept as if I had lost a member of my family. Why? Kermit the Frog was my first best friend. He cared about me, he made me laugh, he sang me songs while I ate my after school snack. Did I think this was real? No, of course not. I know felt and ping pong balls when I see them. But the emotional response was the same. I may have been 19 when Jim Henson died, but deep inside me there was 5 year old who’s loss would not be denied her pain.

In my late teens, when Wil Wheaton was on Star Trek TNG as the much maligned Wesley Crusher, I was a geeky goth girl in high school, growing up in a dreary, boggy town where my best hope was to get a job as an office assistant or a waitress (since I didn’t have the math skills to work for Boeing and Microsoft was still fairly new). There was no money for college, and I spent too much time smoking cloves behind the school and listening to New Order to get a scholarship. I was fat, I had braces… and, well, as illustrated above I have somewhat “quirky” social skills.

Me at 15, trying to hide my braces while my hair eats my head.

I had a love for scifi cultivated by my dad, but was never a huge Star Trek fan (uuughhh… Shatner). I was, however, dating a guy who was (yeah, I dated in high school. I may have been a geek, but I had a rack that wouldn’t quit). TNG was required viewing for us, and at first it was just something I had to watch while waiting for a righteous snog. Eventually, the show grew on me (Pavlovian conditioning from all the snogging?), and I began to notice Wil Wheaton. He was cute, with those doe-like eyes and slightly crooked teeth. His acting was good, but a little awkward. His dialogue was terrible. His character was fairly useless. His sweaters were things Bill Cosby crapped out and flushed in disgust. But there was something about him, something sweet and clumsy and familiar. Was it a teenage crush? Sure, maybe a little. The man is adorable. Mostly, there was just something about him that said “kindred”. He seemed smart and weird under all that cable knit and spandex. It wasn’t until decades later, when I started to read his writing that I realized why. He WAS smart and weird. Mr. Hollywood actor, flying around in his spaceship, and he was just as hormonal, confused, inept, and lost as the rest of us. He had listened to the same music as I had, watched the same movies, made similar mistakes, and basically experienced life as we had- in all its humiliation and glory.

“Gen X” is often criticized for being more focused on pop-culture hipsterisms and sarcasm *cough cough this blog cough* than social change, but I would argue that this is simply the language we use to communicate with our cohort (omg, geekgasm! I could totally drop a “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” here!). When I mentioned my reaction to the death of Kermit, many of you reading understood that emotion. You felt it too. You know what these things mean, what they represent. To me, Wil Wheaton is this great unifying force for many people of our generation, someone who can hold up the mirror of our collective, media saturated youth and say, “Look! Look where we’ve been! look where we are now! And we were never alone!”.

I guess he’s sort of like Glinda the Good Witch in the Wizard of Oz, when she tells Dorothy home was inside her all along**. Jeebus Christ! At least THAT’S not what I blurted out at him at the show!

So, yeah… sorry if I creeped you out, Mr. Wheaton. I think I was trying to tell you I consider you a spokesman for your generation and quite possibly the catalyst for a new cultural movement. But, you know, me talk good to pretty man-boy.

Me at 39, the night of w00tstock. My husband knows the exact wrong moment to take a picture.

*This was filmed near where I was sitting, and I swear to you, the woman with the goofy “heeheehee” cackle at 0:26 is me. Yes, I really do laugh like that. I also laugh like Betty Rubble, which you can sort of hear later in the video, and leads me to believe that may, indeed, be me.
**BTW, WTF? Did she and Gandalf get together beforehand and decide to fuck with people for their own amusement??
INNOCENT VICTIM: “So, uh, how do we do this thing?”
GANDALF/GLINDA: Oh…. uuuh… well, you need to… go on a long and potentially lethal journey on foot (that’s the ticket)…. and people are gonna die along the way. People you care about. But, uh, yeah, that’s pretty much the only way outta this. *snick*
INNOCENT VICTIM: You sure about that? That sounds pretty miserable. Can’t I just, you know, ride on a giant eagle or, I dunno, click my heels together a few times??
GANDALF/GLINDA: NOPE! *heeheehee*

Stuff Like This...

• February 5, 2009 -- Vulcan Matter Streams

Photo by ashoe

So, I am letting the rest of the internet do the work for me today. Behold, Topless Robot’s most excellent list of “14 Incredibly Disturbing Moments in Kids’ Movies (Besides the Entirety of E.T.)“.

Some of these are scenes we have already covered, but really, can you get too much of Bambi’s mother’s assassination?

Stuff Like This...

• March 4, 2009 -- Bambi – Shot in the heart