Honest to goodness, we weren't even planning on going to the Wired Rave Awards, much less wandering in uninvited (we've been, it's not all that). We just dropped by to hand off some equipment we'd borrowed to cover the "Mary Carey for Governor" campaign-cum-promotional junket at the Virgin Megastore for another New York-based blog publishing empire (no, not Weblogs, Inc. -- they're based out of Reston, Virginia now). Maybe it was the Thriftown suit and tech-schwag tee combo, but nobody at the St. Regis or manning the check-in tables paid us any mind as we wandered up to the fourth floor. We absentmindedly stepped out onto the patio and, Hey! How are you doing? Haven't seen you in a while! They got free food and booze, eh? Well, maybe we'll stick around and chat for a bit.

After the jump, lots of lovable, huggable, hipster nerds!

Photo of Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen by Anil Dash.

Let's see, who can we remember recognizing off the top of our head... Gina Trapani, whom we think was probably the coolest and most genuinely worthy of Wired's honorees (and we're not just saying that because this SFist gets checks from the company). Annalee Newitz was there wearing her Wired Associate Editor hat. Violet Blue and Jason Defillipo were representing SF Metblogs along with their colleague Sean Bonner from LA. The past and present of media piracy enablers, Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were rumored to have been canoodling together. Venture capitalist, serial board member and all-around fun guy Joichi Ito was a late arrival. The irrepressible Mackie, who does community-something for YouTube, brought his mom (awwwww). Anil Dash and his wife Alaina Browne gave us a big SFist shout-out, and Valleywag's Nick Douglas was busily chasing down gossip from the likes of Second Life cult leader founder Philip Rosedale, James "Hot or Not" Hong and Lily Lin.

Sadly, another year, another reminder of why we've never actually purchased a copy of Wired, much less read one cover-to-cover. Guess who wasn't there? Rave Award winners Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney and Mark Cuban, for starters (they won for changing some sort of media paradigm or something). In the "Wow, way to really subvert the mainstream" category were winners for best podcast, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant -- because, you know, all their work on television has gone completely unrecognized. And with the award for "best spyware you have to pay for and attempt to institutionalize homophobia in online gaming," everybody clap your hands for the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard! We kid, we kid (just like a friend who's joke went something like: "It's the Whitey Rave A-whiteys!").

Any further attempts to insinuate ourselves into the festivities were cock-blocked by the award winners being whisked away in a fleet of gas-guzzling Range Rovers (and this from a magazine that just featured Al Gore and his crusade against climate change on their cover a month ago). But at that point we had nearly choked on snark and free tri-tip burritos. If Editor Chris Anderson had mentioned "the long tail" in his speech praising the winners, we may not have survived long enough to write this. Maybe we'd be less sarcastic if they'd at least tried to keep us out, but alas, we seemed to have been unable to avoid it. At this rate, we're going to come home one day to find the awards being held in our apartment.