stuff and things and another thing

I’m nearly finished with Ravenswood, and just about ready to give it to my editor for his Red Pen of Doom. Before I jump back into the short story that became a novella that is dangerously close to being a novel, I’m going to reward myself with a couple of fun non-writing projects. One of them is building and configuring (and hopefully playing) my PiCade kit. The other is just an idea, but I think it’s doable: I have a 7″ Android tablet that I don’t use very often, because the battery on it is crap. But I have this idea to keep it plugged in all the time, and use it to display a scrolling news ticker, the current weather, and my security camera feeds. It’ll live on my desk. Does anyone know if there’s an existing Linux or Android project that does that sort of thing? I don’t have the knowledge or ability at the moment to put all that together on my own, but I think I could learn, given enough time.

I’ll be on the pre-game show tonight, before the Kings vs. Bruins, on Fox Sports West, around 7:15pm, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

My friend, Robyn, is an amazing woman. She made a video this morning that I want to signal boost.

Anne and I are way late to the party, but we saw What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? the other night, and it made me want to rewatchWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sunset Boulevard. I’ve mostly been watching genre films (SF, Horror, Anime) and I realized this week that Classic Amazing Hollywood Studio Pictures is also a genre that I need to watch more of. I’m also on Team Bette Davis Forever, now.

I finished Dune. As I hoped, it affected me much more deeply and significantly than it did when I was 12 and didn’t have the ability to fully appreciate it. I kinda want to dive straight into Messiah, but I’m going to read Neil’s new book, first, and then maybe I’ll finally read Fall of Hyperion.

Daily December 27

Slurms has to party all night every night or he's fired. — This image has nothing to do with this post. I just wanted an excuse to use Morbotron.

It was almost 130am before I went to sleep this morning. For the first time in what feels like weeks but is probably longer, I actually wanted to to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and this time instead of my brain just refusing to shut up, I had to stay awake because there was turkey stock being made in the kitchen. When I woke up this morning, after not enough sleep, it was worth it. We’re going to have some pretty boss turkey soup tonight, I tell you what.

So while I was up late, waiting for the turkey bones and stuff to turn into stock, I worked on getting RetroPie up and running, so I could be certain that the software was working before I started the complicated part of building my Picade. It was incredibly easy, even though I had to use tools on Windows to make the micro SD card stuff work, and I think it’s my favorite emulator I have ever used. Emulation Station is gorgeous, and easily the nicest emulation frontend I have ever used. If you’ve been dying to play abandonware from the old DOS days, Atari 2600 games, or replay those NES games that you totally own legally but don’t have a machine to play them on, it’s just fantastic.

Christmas was quiet and relaxed, here in Castle Wheaton. My boys were both here, as were their significant others. Ryan’s married now, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of addressing his wife, Claudette, who I absolutely adore, as “the other Mrs. Wheaton”. We all had a huge dinner, watched Gremlins and A Christmas Story, and embraced the simple joy of being together.

I find the whole idea of a War on Christmas to be incredibly stupid, a scam perpetrated on mostly well-meaning people (and some incredibly stupid people) by grifters who know better. It seems like a lot of of the “Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men” part of the Christian myth is intentionally disregarded or otherwise ignored by the folks who have signed up to be soldiers in the war to defend the whole thing, but I still sincerely hope that everyone who chose to celebrate Christmas was as happy and surrounded by love as we were, in this house of heathens.

It’s also two years in a row that Anne held up her end of the Don’t Get Each Other Anything bargain. Two years out of 21 isn’t that great, to be honest, but two years in a row is a very big deal.

I feel like I should get back to work, but it’s really hard to find the motivation. 2016 is really setting fire to the world as it races toward its end, isn’t it? Someone on Twitter said that they were staying up until midnight on the 31st for the first time in years, just because they wanted to see this year of so much awful shit finally fucking die already.

Oh, and I had my own idea for the end of the year:

At 11:59pm on December 31, we'll all get a text alert from an unknown source that just says "THE ARISTOCRATS!" and 2016 will make sense.

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) December 26, 2016

Finally: Rest in peace, Carrie Fisher. If you only knew her from Star Wars, please take some time to find out about all the other amazing things she did. She was a brilliant writer, one of the most talented and prolific script doctors in Hollywood, an outspoken advocate for mental health care and addiction treatment, and just one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.

It would be great if 2016 could stop taking the brilliant artists we love. These daily reminders of the brevity of our lives and the fragile mortality we all cling to are getting to be a little much. You made your point, 2016. We get it.

My speech to the 2016 USA Science and Engineering Festival

On April 17, I was given the great honor and privilege to speak before the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC.

These are my prepared remarks. I mostly stuck to them, and didn’t improvise as much as I usually do, because I was more nervous than usual at this conference. I knew that I had to speak to children, their parents, and their teachers. I hoped that I would inspire them all to keep doing awesome things, and to do more awesome things. I also hoped that some of my remarks would be heard beyond the walls of the conference, because I’m doing my best to make a positive difference in the world.

Please keep in mind that these remarks are written to be read and performed by me, so they are probably not as strong when read as I hope they are when they are heard.

Continue reading… →

Hello, world.

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 400. I spent hours sitting in front of that thing, copying programs from magazines and running the games I’d made from them. When I wasn’t writing my own (even though I was copying things from Atari Age or whatever, I was slowly learning how BASIC worked and felt like they were “my” programs), I played the hell out of Star Raiders and Pac-Man, and States & Capitals (which was loaded from a cassette, because that’s how we did things back then).

After the Atari 400, I got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I loved that computer so much, and it was in that machine’s TI-BASIC environment that I truly grokked BASIC programming. I wrote text adventures, a rudimentary database to store news events I made up for a UFO research project that I also made up, and when I wasn’t doing that, I played the hell out of the weird and wonderful video games that machine offered.

Around 1984, I got my first Macintosh, and the first thing I bought for it was whatever BASIC ran on the 128K OG Macintosh back then. I was so excited to get into that language, and start doing things that took advantage of the GUI and this thing called a mouse, but 12 year-old me just couldn’t wrap his head around the language. I don’t know if it actually, objectively sucked, but in my memory, it really sucked. Nothing made sense, nothing followed the conventions I had grown used to, and just getting programs to respond to the mouse was beyond me.

So it was, in 1984, that I gave up trying to open BASIC to write computer programs, and instead opened MacWrite, where I began to write stories. I also played the everlivinghell out of every Mindscape game I could get my hands on.

Fast forward to a a few weeks ago. I was looking through my Humble Bundle library, and noticed that I had a book in there that teaches Python. I flipped through it, and the curiosity that I had as a kid bubbled up to the surface of my mind. I went back to the beginning of the book, and began reading. I downloaded Python for my Mac, and I started copying down the examples, starting to figure my way around the most basic aspects of the language. I’m a few chapters into it, now, and bits of it are beginning to stick. I’m having a lot of fun breaking things and then putting them back together, and just remembering the joy of turning a set of instructions into something useful and fun, like I did when I was a kid.

I have no idea if I’ll see this through to the end, and I have no idea what I’d actually use the skills (if I can even master them) for, but I really need a hobby that isn’t also part of my job, and this seems as good as anything.

Who knows? Maybe I can finally finish that dungeon adventure I started when I was 10.

unblock the block

I may have blocked you on Twitter by accident. Rather than unblock all the stupidsphere and #GarboGuts idiots who I meant to block, if you check my Twitter page, and see that you’re blocked, leave a comment here with your Twitter name, or email me with your Twitter name, I’ll fix it.