WWdN: In Exile

WIL WHEATON dot NET is open for business

After a long Exile, I returned home this weekend. Until the heat death of the universe or I stop blogging (whichever comes first), I'll be back at WWdN.

Follow me past the jump for some technical information and closing thoughts, if you're into that sort of thing.

Treat her like a lady, and she'll always bring you home.

In 2001, blogs were very new things. In fact, as much more time was spent arguing talking about what blogs even were, and where they fit into the media landscape than was spent actually, you know, writing in them. In fact, I don't even think the word "blogging" existed back then, and whenever it arrived on the scene, it was used pejoratively to describe the equally-distasteful "bloggers" who were on the verge of not just threatening the status quo, but disrupting and then changing it forever.

I read a lot of blogs (many of them were just called online journals or something similar), so when I made my first stupid website at Geocities (RIP) called Where's My Burrito, I put a blog in there, right next to my hit counter and guest book.

My first entry in that blog looks something like this:

So the votes are officially in.

Out of the total of 4 votes I got, all of them said it would be cool to have an online journal, so here it is.

Extra special thanks go to loren who directed me to blogger, a website that will hopefully make this whole weblog (the cool kids call it a “blog”) easy and painless.

I’m off now to make dinner for the family. You know what we’re having tonight?

Burritos. No shit.

That was posted on July 24, 2001. Goddamn, that seems like an eternity ago.

The next day, I wrote this:

My birthday is this Sunday, and we’re having the carpets cleaned this morning.
And my cat, Sketch, ran out of the house, and we can’t find him.
Sucks.

And then, later, this:

Okay, you can all stop worrying. We found Sketch. He was behind the couch.
Carpets are drying, and the yard is getting clean! Whee!

Those two posts are as hilarious to me as anything I've ever posted on Twitter, and now that I look at them again, they're similar to most of the stupid things I post on Twitter, so there's that.

Shortly after I started that blog, I got even more help from loren, and after an intense month of study, trial, and error (mostly error), I made my very own website at wilwheaton.net.

I announced it in the usual fashion:

The New Site Is Open!

Holy crap!! In 6 weeks, I’ve gone from knowing nothing about HTML and using the lame Yahoo! PageBuilder, to building my own site, using php and modifying entire scripts.

This weblog will no longer be updated. Go to the new weblog, and see what’s up!

I used Grey Matter for the blog, becoming an unintentional stress tester when the existence of my blog was discovered by Fark, Metafilter, and Slashdot.

Grey Matter couldn't handle the load, so when I discovered Movable Type, I switched to that software, and it took veyr good care of me for years, through a lot of ups and downs, through my entire journey from The Guy Who Used To Be Wesley Crusher to the person I am today.

Then, in 2006, I blew it all up:

Way back in September of last year, I attempted to upgrade Movable Type, the blogging software that powers WWdN. I also attempted to move a few thousand entries and hundreds of thousands of comments into a newly-created (and faster) MySQL database.

And, uh, I broke it.

Actually, I didn’t break it. Someone who left a comment broke it when they used a seemingly random string of characters to indicate a break in their comment. Unbeknownst to me and them, it was the same string of characters MT used to indicate the end of an entry and its associated comments. When MT was moving all the data into its new (did I mention faster?) database, it came to that string of characters, and said to itself, “Oh boy! I get to start a new entry now! Let’s see, what’s the TITLE of that entry?”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Uh-oh, there’s no TITLE. I’d better look some more.”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Yeah, it’s still not there. Well, I don’t know what the next entry is TITLEd, so I’m going to just barf all over the server now, and fail. I’m sure one of the Users I heard about in TRON will figure this out and fix it quickly. There’s no way my User, Wil, would stay in some backup blog for six months!”

Ha! Stupid smug software. I’ve been in Exile for nine months! Who’s laughing now, jerk? 

Who's laughing, indeed.

Well, I landed here in Exile, where I've stayed for over six years, because I'd reached a point in my life where just writing was more important to me than the software and publishing platform I used to do it.

I've been very happy here, mostly because TypePad has worked very well for me, and because these have been some of the best years of my life (hooray for hard work paying off!)... but there were these moments when I'd suddenly and unexpectedly feel sad about WWdN. I'd miss the URL, and I'd miss the satisfaction that came with knowing that it was mine, that it was something I made (mostly) myself.

So I started working on stuff and things, and after a few days of not-very-intense and stupidly easy work, I taught myself WordPress. I installed it on my server. I imported all my blog entries. I messed around with some themes and basic design things. I installed plugins and widgets and made it look like something that didn't totally suck. There's still a little bit of fiddly under-the-hood server stuff that needs to happen, but it's pretty much the way I want it.

So, this weekend, after way, way too many years (or, maybe, now that I think of it, exactly the right number of years) in exile, I’m finally returning home.

Wow. Typing that made me feel all the feels. I wasn't expecting that.

I'm going home.

Yep. It happened again.

Well.

*clears throat*

If you read my blog through an RSS subscription, you won't notice any changes (It's feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn), but you'll now go to WIL WHEATON dot NET to comment instead of WIL WHEATON dot NET: in Exile.

Woah. More feels.

Um. So. Yeah. I'm sure there will be a few bumps along the way while I figure out handling comments and stuff, but I'm sure we'll find a way to get through it together.

My TODO list for WWdN looks something like this:

• Get some of those nifty little icons for Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, etc., and put them up in the corner with links to their relevant accounts.
• Maybe rotate header images, because why not?
• Have a homebrew
• Potentially set a fixed page as the “front page” of WWdN, which has an excerpt from the most recent blog post, as well as dynamically updating feeds from Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, G+, etc.

WordPress veterans: Any advice you have for a WordPress noob is most welcome.

Everyone who first found me at WWdN, followed me to Exile, and plans to follow me back home*: I just can’t thank you enough for the years of support and encouragement you’ve given me. I sincerely hope it’s been worth it for you, because it’s meant a lot to me.

To everyone else out there: The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

*damn, all these feels are feely.

Further adventures in Homebrewing: This is the recipe I designed for Bronze Dragon Brown Ale.

This is the recipe I designed for Bronze Dragon Brown Ale.

I'm not sure what happened in Beersmith2, but when I opened it up a little bit ago, my entire recipe database vanished, so I had to manually enter all this stuff from my brewing journal notes (keep good notes, kids). It is telling me that there aren't any hops in it, but I can see them, so I don't know WTF is wrong with my installation. If anyone out there knows how to make it go, I look for things... things to make it go.

Anyway, this should be about 28 IBUs. When I do it again, I'm going to dial back the Chocolate Malt from 1 pound to maybe 8 or 10 ounces. 

Right now, it's got a nutty sweetness, maybe a hint of caramel, with just a bit of hops on the back of the tongue. I really like it. It's not especially carbonated (I think I messed that up) and it doesn't have much of a head.

Feel free to do whatever you want with this; I'm releasing it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license. If you brew it, I'd love to know hear your results.

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: Bronze Dragon Brown Ale
Brewer: Wil Wheaton
Asst Brewer: 
Style: American Brown Ale
TYPE: Extract
Taste: (0.0) 

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 2.60 gal
Post Boil Volume: 2.60 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 5.00 gal   
Bottling Volume: 5.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.058 SG
Estimated Color: 31.6 SRM
Estimated IBU: 0.0 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 72.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 72.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         
16.0 oz               Chocolate Malt (US) (350.0 SRM)          Grain         1        13.8 %        
4.0 oz                Caramel/Crystal Malt - 120L (120.0 SRM)  Grain         2        3.4 %         
6 lbs.                 Dry Extract (DME) - Light (8.0 SRM)      Dry Extract   3        82.8 %        
0.75 oz               Nugget [13.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min         Hop           4        0.0 IBUs      
1.00 oz               Mt. Hood [6.00 %] - Boil 15.0 min        Hop           5        0.0 IBUs      
0.50 oz               Ahtanum [6.00 %] - Aroma Steep 5.0 min   Hop           6        0.0 IBUs      
4.2 pkg               American Ale II (Wyeast Labs #1272)      Yeast         7        -             


Created with BeerSmith 2 - http://www.beersmith.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you can't see the recipe clearly, here's a plain text version you can download: Download Bronze Dragon Brown Ale

 

Here are my plans for PAX

Tomorrow, I'm heading up to Seattle for PAX Prime. This year, I hope to play a shitton of games, both of the Tabletop variety and the Video variety. To accomplish this noble goal, I'm not going to do a ton of signing like I've done in years past.

If you're planning to attend, and want to do things with me, or come see me do things, here's my schedule:

Friday Morning: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Friday Afternoon: Playing Ticket To Ride in the Tabletop gaming area with Anne and the first five people who show up to play with us.

Saturday Morning: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Saturday 3:30pm: Main Theater. Acquisitions, Incorporated. The Lost Episode. 

Sunday 11:30am: The Awesome Hour! Pegasus Theater. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS HAS BEEN UPGRADED. THE AWESOME HOUR IS NOW THE DON'T FORGET TO BE AWESOME HOUR, WITH PAUL AND STORM, AND HANK GREEN. Also, I'll be there telling stories and answering questions.

Sunday 1pm: Signing at Paul and Storm's table in Bandland.

Important note about signings: I'm going to PAX this year primarly as an attendee, so I won't have my own table in bandland. Instead, I've convinced Paul and Storm to let me crash their table for roughly one hour each day. For specific times I'll be there, check my Twitter account, which I'll update throughout the weekend.

I'm also bringing fifty of these silly Wheaton Paper Dolls with me for sale. Hopefully, I won't have to schlep 45 of them back home.

on a long run, on a long run

I've had this idea for a one-shot comic kicking around my head for close to a year. Until yesterday, I hadn't done anything with it.

Yesterday, I wrote out a page-by-page breakdown for the story*. Today, I wrote the first five pages, and stopped when I ran out of gas a few hours later. I'll pick it up tomorrow, and keep going until it's done. If I can do five pages a day, I'll have a first draft done before I go to PAX, which is great because I can just leave it alone and let the second draft start cooking in my head while I'm playing games.

I'm not going to discuss any details about the story until it's done, but I can say that I'm aiming for 22 pages in a 1970s indie style. At the moment, I have about 18 pages, and it's a little tight. I may be able to open it up a bit and spread some of the pages out to get to 22, or I may just keep it as-is and end up with four more pages of story when it's all done. Or maybe I'll do 18 pages, and have my friends make fake ads for the other four pages, like the books I loved from the 70s and 80s. I can do whatever I want, because this is my project for me! YAY!

This is the first purely creative writing I've done all year, and even though I don't even know if it'll be published, it feels so good to be writing, to not be hung up on making a perfect first draft, or to have my creative impulses drowned out by the Internal Critic. I'm writing. I'm creating. I'm telling a story! I'm looking into my head and scraping out what I find in there, and it feels really, really good.

 

* That's a trick I learned from Warren Ellis: I write down "PAGE ONE - BLAH HAPPENS PAGE TWO - THAT THING HAPPENS" and pretty soon I have the whole thing plotted out, so the writing is pretty much connecting the dots ... or hanging meat on the skeleton, which is probably how Warren would put it.

New #Tabletop: Elder Sign (or, in which I have a tentacle party with Felicia Day)

The newest Tabletop features a really fun dice game set in the Arkham Horror universe called Elder Sign.

Fantasy flight Games publishes an epic game called Arkham Horror that I just love. In the game, the players assume the role of Lovecraftian Pulp Investigators who are all working together to stop one of the Great Old Ones from devouring the world.

You know, like you do.

Arkham Horror is a complex, intricate, incredibly difficult, beautiful game. It's more like a guided role playing game where the board itself is the GM, and there really isn't another boardgame out there (that I can think of off the top of my head, anyway) that plays like it does. I would love to play it on Tabletop... but it takes a minimum of three hours, and if I put it on the show, I wouldn't do the game justice. There's just no way to edit a 3 or 4 or 5 hour game into 30 or even 45 minutes, while staying true to the heart and soul of the game.

Luckily for us, Fantasy Flight also publishes a cooperative dice game set in the Arkham Horror world called Elder Sign. Designed by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson (who also designed Arkham Horror), it takes about an hour to play, and while it isn't a scary and complex as Arkham, it is still beautiful and challenging. It was perfect for my show.

Follow this link, if you don't see the embedded video above, to watch Elder Sign at YouTube.

While I have your attention: 

At GenCon last weekend, the most frequently asked question I got was "When do you start the second season of Tabletop?"

The next most frequently asked question was, "What are you going to play on the second season?"

My answer to both of these questions is: "I have no idea, because we don't know if YouTube is going to fund a second season."

What usually followed was a series of confused noises and some stammering before the final question was asked: "How do I help you get a second season?"

Here is the answer:

The best and most effective way to support Tabletop -- in fact, the only way that Google even cares about -- is to subscribe to the channel, like and comment on the episodes (if you, you know, actually like them) and encourage everyone you know to do the same thing.

Google cares about interactions like that on their Premium Channels (like G&S), and while we all know we're never going to get the same numbers as the longtime YouTubers who are getting five million views per video, I think that if we can stay up in the six digits, we'll get another season.

It's amusing to me that we're not dealing with a studio or a network, but we still have to hit certain numbers to get more funding (just like we would if we were on broadcast television.)

Finally, I'll leave you with this:

You'll have to watch Tabletop's Elder Sign episode for context. But beware... there are some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong.

I met Neil Armstrong once, at a dinner to honor Jimmy Doohan in the early 2000s.

He was not much taller than me, but he was a giant of a man. He was as kind as he was intimidating. 

I don’t remember what I said to him, or what he said to me, because all I could think the entire time was “This man has walked on the fucking moon.”

Rest in peace, Neil. Because of your bravery and your courage, an entire species will forever look into the night sky and see not a mystery, but a destination.

Answering a FAQ: "Why do you play so many evil characters lately?"

Every actor has a particular type they can play well, for some reason or another. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with who we are in real life, but it's just what we do well.

Example: Travolta is amazing as the Lovable Loser. When he's in Welcome Back Kotter and Saturday Night Fever in the 70s, he is the biggest star in the world, because people can identify with him in a way they may not be consciously aware of.

Then, in the early 80s, the industry decides to make him The Leading Man. They put him in films like Perfect and Urban Cowboy, and his career tanks. Nobody can connect to those characters, because it's not the right type for him to play. He does those talking baby movies for awhile, and then he explodes back to the top of the A list when he plays a junkie hitman in Pulp Fiction. He's back to being the Lovable Loser, and audiences go crazy for him, because that's the type he's meant to play.

You can do this with just about every actor if you look hard enough and spend enough time on it. It's all about Jungian Archetypes and Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces.

So why do I play evil characters? When I was a kid, I played the sensitive, awkward kid full of self doubt who really wanted you to like him*. When I was in my 20s, I kept getting auditions for those roles and never booking them, because it's just not the type I'm meant to play. When Kim Evey cast me as a douchey agent in Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and Felicia wrote me into The Guild as douchey Fawkes, things started to turn around. I realized that I'd found my type, and I started looking for those roles.

It turns out that my type is the Villain You Love To Hate, so that's who I am in The Guild, Leverage, Eureka, and Big Bang Theory. I don't think it's a coincidence that, once I started playing these types of characters, my acting career began to come back to life, and I will be grateful for the rest of my life to Kim and Felicia for taking a chance on me.

I really don't know why this is my type, but whenever I try to figure it out, I start to feel like Lenny with the rabbit, and I really don't want to break something that's working out pretty well for me right now.

I do know this, though: the whole point of being an actor is to portray characters who are different from who you really are. The most important thing in the entire universe to me is kindness, so it's really fun to play characters who are antithetical to my personal ideals. Exactly why I seem to be so good at doing that, though? I'm not going behind that particular barn.

 

*Incidentally, that's pretty much who I've been in my real life since I can remember.

A few pictures from GenCon

Today and tomorrow, I'm narrating the audio version of Zach Weinersmith's The Trial of the Clone. I'm up nice and early because I'm apparently on the same schedule as my puppy.

In place of a proper post about GenCon (which was exhausting but lots of fun), here are a few pictures of awesome things I saw while I was there, starting with epic cosplay:

Walter, Donny (RIP) and The Dude.

The most terrifying and perfect Corinthian cosplay I've ever seen. She made the eye pieces out of soft leather and affixed them with spirit gum. Amazing.

Adorable Dalek and River Song

My favourite part of signing is meeting people who love the same things I love, and geeking out about those things. It's genuinely wonderful to talk with hundreds of people who are from The Tribe, you know? Signing for hours and hours at a time can get tiring, though, and one of the ways I restore HP and Mana during the day is by amusing myself when it's appropriate. Here are a few examples of me doing that at GenCon:

This is from a game called Edition Wars. GMs are trying to get players to play their system, and you can make your own GM. So I made myself.

I sign a LOT of Big Bang Theory things, and whenever I get a chance to sign a picture of Jim as Sheldon, I write something like this on it. It amuses me almost as much as it tends to amuse the person I'm signing it for.

Just, you know, ranking Moustaches on a scale of Hitler to Brimley. Like you do. And, yes, I realize I spelled Chaplin wrong.

I'm also asked to make Munchkin cards from time to time. These are two of the ones I did this year. Steve Jackson even made them tournament-legal for the duration of GenCon!

People make me amazing things, and give me wonderful gifts at cons. Here are a few of the things I got to bring home:

This is a handmade, hand embroidered dice bag with 8-bit me on it!

This Lego Sparks McGee is best in life.

Tabletop fan art!!

I was so busy signing, I only got to play two games: Fiasco with my friends, using a playset they wrote me for my birthday, and True Dungeon with many of the same friends, where we sent the Draco Lich (Formerly known as the dragon Smoak, who I kind of one-shotted in 2010) to the void. You're welcome, people-who-no-longer-live-in-fear-of-the-Draco-Lich.

I can't even count the number of people who told me wonderful, personal stories about how Tabletop has touched their lives. When I have some more time, I'll share a few of them.

Please meet the newest member of Team Wheaton

We were introduced last week at the Pasadena Humane Society, when Anne and I were there for a tour of the new facility WWdN readers helped raise the funds to build.

We were standing in the lobby, talking about how much we love Seamus, when a worker walked in with this puppy. She had the exact same dopey happiness and demeanor as Seamus, and as you can see, very similar markings.

Just like when we met Seamus, we weren't looking to add a dog to our pack, but Riley is almost 11 and doesn't want to play with Seamus as much as he needs to play, and after a few minutes with this pooch, we couldn't stop thinking about her.

A couple of days later, we made the decision to get on the waiting list and see if we could adopt her. Today, we took both of our dogs to the Humane Society to meet her, and the whole pack came together perfectly.

Riley made it clear that she doesn't want to play, but snuggling is fine. Seamus made it clear that he's a big old dope who just loves to play as much as a 4 month-old puppy.

New Dog (she has a name but we're keeping it secret until she comes to live with us next week) took correction from Riley and respected her limits immediately, and played with Seamus until they were both wiped out.

We love her. She's a little underweight, but the vet at the Humane Society checked her out and said she's otherwise healthy, so she'll be spayed in a couple of days, and come home to her new house and her forever family on Sunday.

...OMG THAT FACE AND THOSE FEET!