Tag Archives: geeks

memories of w00tstock 2.4

I walked across two sets of train tracks, through a tangle of nerds and normals, and navigated my way up Fourth Street toward the theater. My Bag of Holding, slung diagonally across my body, rested comfortably against my side. Inside, my costume changes (read: Nerdy T-shirts) and script (read: Happiest Days of Our Lives) waited patiently to be called upon for w00tstock.

It took longer than I expected to walk up to B Street, so I used the journey to prepare my introductory remarks. Instead of reading a modified version of the intro I'd used in the past, I was working off some bullet points, to keep the intro short, and to allow myself the freedom to improvise a little bit. What had seemed like a good idea earlier in the week was beginning to feel like the opposite.

I paused briefly at a red light. A pedicab rode by, blasting the Macarena. "That's a very effective way of announcing that you don't want any passengers," I thought.

The light changed, and I continued on my way. A few blocks later, I walked into the theater and found Paul at the sound board.

"…so, there's a little, uh, 'w00tstock wrinkle'," he said.

"…okay, what's that?" I asked.

"The venue is 21 and over, and there is some liquor law that prevents Molly from being inside the theater at all."

"Wait. What?"

"They have to have security escort her on and off the stage, and she can't even sit inside the theater with us for the rest of the show."

I waited a moment for the Bazinga, but he was serious.

"Wow, that … that really sucks," I said.

"Yeah. She's outside the stage door." He pointed across the theater.

"I'll be right back," I said.

I walked through the empty space while staff set up chairs and Marian Call waited to do her sound check on the stage. I waved to Jason Finn. "You better grow your beard back," I said, "the council of beards is trying to remove your seat. I'm doing my best to hold it for you, but there's a faction gathering strength against you."

I realize that this doesn't sound nearly as funny now as it did to me at the time.

"I'm glad you've got my back," he said.

A square of bright daylight streamed in through an open door and stretched out, almost to a rectangle, on one side of the stage. Motes of dust danced in it, and I squinted as I walked through them to the loading dock.

Molly and her boyfriend Chris were outside. She was sitting on a chair and didn't look nearly as sad or upset as I would have been.

I opened my arms, she stood up, and I hugged her. "This sucks," I said. "I'm so sorry."

We talked for a few minutes, and I was impressed by how good her spirits were. It was like she'd decided there wasn't anything she could do about it, and had decided to make the best of a bad situation.

"You know what you should do? You should totally play a cover of Save Ferris' 'Under 21'!"

Before we could talk about it more, I was called into the theater to handle other pre-show tasks. I went to our dressing room, where I was delighted to find lots of beer from Stone Brewing for our performers. We always try to get some local craft brew when we do shows (Portland presented us with an embarrassment of riches) to have backstage, and I was pretty excited that Stone hooked us up.

I set down my bag, and pulled out my notebook to go over my intro notes. I was seriously doubting my plan to simply give a brief history of w00tstock before the show. I felt unprepared, and a little queasy as a result.

About forty minutes later, an hour before the show was set to begin, I walked out to check on Molly again. She and Jason Finn were listening to Under 21 on her iPhone, and working out the chords and changes.

"I may add a key change here," Molly began.

"Yeah, that's hashtag-things-drummers-don't-care-about," Jason said.

We laughed for a long time about that. I left them alone to get ready.

About 20 minutes before showtime, all of the performers, including our super-secret guests, gathered backstage. Paul gave the pre-show pep talk, and I found an empty hallway to go over my introduction.

I paced around, talking through my points, directing myself, and trying to find that elusive intro I was convinced I should have just written.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but in the dim light of that corridor, with the growing murmurs of the audience filling the theater – the sold out and standing-room-only theater! – it came to me: this w00tstock is special because it's at Comic-Con. I didn't want to do this show, because I didn't think anyone would come, on account of how many things there are to do at Comic-Con. I was wrong, and that's awesome.

Once I had that, the entire introduction came together, and not a moment too soon. "You have about five minutes," our stage manager (who we call our Dungeon Master) Liz, told me.

"Thank you, five minutes," I said. For the first time since I walked into the theater, I felt more excitement than fear about talking the stage and introducing the show. I may have done a very subdued bit of pogo-ing in the empty corridor after Liz walked away.

The show began. The audience went crazy. We went crazy. We all threw themed underpants at Paul and Storm during Opening Band (mine had 8====D on the front, which is twice as funny if you know the reference). We all crowded around the side of the stage to watch the show.

Molly came out early, accompanied by security, and began her set. "Would you be Molly's music stand?" A voice said.

I turned around and saw Chris, holding a sheet of paper with lyrics written on it. Across the top, it said, "OMG LEARNING A NEW SONG!"

"I would love to do that," I said. I took the paper and carefully held it while Molly sang about breaking up with Wikipedia.

She called me up to the stage, and I had the most fun I've ever had being a music stand. If you were there, you know how great it was, and now you know that she and Jason learned the song and put it all together in a little less than one hour. (I know, right?)

One more Molly memory before I move on to the rest of the show: Molly played an all-request ninja show in the parking lot during the intermission that was watched by all of the performers, and about 1/3 of the audience. It was simply magical, and I am not ashamed to admit that I may have wiped a few proud tears off my face while she sang. I mean, when I was her age, if I'd found myself in a similar situation, I probably would have been pissed at how stupid and unfair the whole thing was, and that would have been the end of it for me. Molly, on the other hand, learned and modified a song – and performed it for a sold-out theater – and then played an acoustic show in the parking lot during intermission. I once said that Molly Lewis is a national treasure, and now you know why.

The majority of the show is a blur of squee and laughter and OMG. Adam observed that everyone came off stage just beaming with joy. As a performer, to have that feeling … it's one of the greatest things in the world. If you were in that audience, and you helped us feel that way: thank you.

A few things stand out for me, though, like how amazing Marian Call was live, how much Chris Hardwick killed with his set, how Jamy Ian Swiss blew our minds so thoroughly, nobody could hear me yelling "WITCH!" over the applause and cheering. I got to stand next to the stage while Rifftrax did Lunchroom Manners (aka Mister Bungle) LIVE. Matt Fraction destroyed the audience with THE BATMAN DREAMS OF HIERONYMUS MACHINES, just like he did at w00tPDX.

I know that I'm forgetting things, and for that I am sorry. Like I said, the show really was a blur of squee and laughter and OMG, and I know I'll remember things in the days to come, so until the updates begin to shake themselves out of my brain, let me close with this:

One of the great surprises for everyone was when my friend
Aaron Douglas, who played The Chief on BSG, came out during my Rocky
Horror story (the joke was, "Hey, I asked for toast, not a toaster!").
It was so much fun for me to introduce Aaron to everyone backstage, and
watch them squee to various degrees. It was especially fun for me to
stand on the stage when Aaron walked out – in his frakking flight suit from the show! – to thunderous applause. It was incredible.

When the four hour show was over (The Captain's Wife's Lament was especially fun, and clocked in at a relatively-reasonable 25 minutes), we all went out to sign autographs and meet the audience. We signed for close to two hours, and finally finished a little after 2am.

I traded hugs and thank yous with everyone, and headed out of the theater with Fraction.

"Do you want to take a cab to the hotel?" Matt asked.

"No, I need to walk off the adrenaline of the show, even though I feel like I'm going to fall down any second from exhaustion."

"I totally get that," he said.

We walked down Fourth Street, toward the convention center. Homeless people slept in doorways and drunk nerds staggered out of bars and clubs. An energy crackled through the cool, foggy air: It was Comic-Con weekend, and w00tstock was just the beginning.

never forget your roots

While walking through Comicon three or four years ago, I stopped to look at one of those booths that's filled with a hundred different T-shirts.

Somewhere among the various superhero crests and clever nerd phrases and obscure sci-fi homages, I saw a fairly simple design: an Atari joystick, sitting atop the word ROOTS. I grinned and reached for it, and noticed that it was folded next to a similar design that replaced the Atari joystick with a classic NES controller.

"Of course," I thought to myself, as I felt like Old Man Wheaton, "for a lot of the damn kids today, the Atari 2600 is as relevant as black and white television or a transistor radio."

This thought triggered a trip in my mental Tardis to long afternoons spent playing Yar's Revenge and Megamania, and I ended up wandering away in a fog of nostalgia, forgetting to buy either of them.

A few months ago, I was preparing my dungeon delve for the Emerald City Comicon. Rather than pull something pre-made out of the Dungeon Delve book, I created something entirely new. Though I would eventually do the final revisions with Dungeon Tiles, It was the first time I'd designed and built an adventure since I was a teenager, so I started the way we did in the old days: I sat on the floor with some books, some dice (even though I didn't really need them), and used a pencil to build my dungeon on graph paper. 

While I sketched out the first few corridors, counting squares and carefully making my lines as straight as I could, my brain slipped into a stream of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey … stuff … and it used that memory from Comicon as a lens to look back through years and years of afternoons spent alone in the sanctuary of my bedroom, building and refining hundreds of dungeons with nothing more than some analog tools and my imagination. 

Earlier today, my friend Scott Twittered:

Nobody has created an online toolkit for drawing D&D maps? This is ridiculous. I'm using graph paper and pencils like a monk from the 1800s.

replied:

@pvponline Using graph paper and pencils to design dungeons isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I couldn't help smile to myself when I saw Scott's Twitter, because I knew that later today … well, in this case, a picture is worth 1000 words. Here's the idea I had so many months ago, turned into a T-shirt:

Wil_wheaton_roots_t-shirt

As I said I Twitter this morning, I'm especially proud of this one because it's relevant to my interests. If you like it as much as I do, you can get your own in basic, premium (which is a softer fabric, and a slimmer cut), and women's from Jinx.

Hi, I’m Wil Wheaton. I’m not a dick, but I play one on TV…

the 8-bit bang theory by r. stevens

The first appearance of Evil Wil Wheaton on The Big Bang Theory is airing again tonight, so I thought I'd gather up all the posts I wrote while working on it in one place:

leveling up while geeking out on the set of the big bang theory

I remember being in drama school in my early twenties, and having at least a decade more experience than everyone else in the room except our teacher. I remember paying close attention all the time, even when I wasn't working on a scene in front of the class, or getting notes directly from her. I remember her telling the other kids in the school, many of whom were convinced that they were going to be The Next Big Thing (all of them except Salma Hyek were wrong) that they didn't learn anything about performing while they were actually doing it. They learned while watching other actors perform, and understanding why their choices worked or didn't work. 

I haven't done a show like this in years, and I want to make sure that I am completely back in shape, I guess you could say, by the time we perform the episode next week. To make sure I get there, I spent the entire day, even when I wasn't in the scene, watching and listening, and remembering skills that I once used every day, but haven't even thought about in a very long time. By the time we got to my last scene of the day (God, I wish I could describe it, because it's hilarious) I felt confident, I felt funny, and I felt weird but also good.

The Big Bang Buzz

Once we started rehearsing, I noticed something that had changed from yesterday's rehearsal: the script was just as funny, but it was more alive when we performed it. I guess that, having lived with the script for a full day and having run the scenes several times alone and together, those difficult-to-quantify things that make us actors (I guess we could call them "Dramachlorians") have started to do their thing. We're thinking about the scenes when we're not in them, we're hearing the characters in our heads, we're subconsciously applying the notes we got from the director yesterday, and what was a collection of notes and chords 24 hours ago is starting to turn into a piece of music.

unraveling the mystery

I can't get into any real specifics, because we've reached that point in the production where any new insights or revelations that have happened (and they have) are all related to things that would certainly qualify as spoilers, or are observations that I feel would be unprofessional to share without the explicit permission of my fellow actors.

However, during rehearsal, I got to watch them take something that was already very funny, and then try several different approaches to one particular bit, each one funnier than the last, until they settled on something that I know is going to kill when the audience sees it. You know you're working on a tremendously funny show when the stuff they throw away is funnier than the stuff that makes it on air on other shows. I also have a new appreciation for how perfectly the writers on The Big Bang Theory balance the extremely geeky jokes that guys like me go crazy for, with the non-geeky jokes that people like my wife enjoy. It's a lot harder than it sounds to gently push a time machine through the eye of the comedy needle every week without touching the sides and making that one dude's nose light up … which sounds kind of funny, but trust me, is not.

The Creepy Candy Coating Corollary

First of all, for anyone who is wondering, the show's art department made actual cards with actual graphics and rules on them, and we all spent a fair amount of time making up some logical rules to go with the Mystic Warlords of Ka'a. As far as I know, there aren't official rules or an official card set, but I'm sure someone will create one within a couple of weeks if the show doesn't. (Oh please, oh please.)

When he first talked to me about working on the show, Bill Prady told me that I'd be playing a "delightfully evil version" of myself. This sounded like a lot of fun to me, but it was more difficult to find that character than you'd think. When I'm playing Fawkes on The Guild it's easy to slip into his kilt and be a jerk, but wearing my own clothes and essentially playing a stylized version of myself made it a real challenge to hit "delightfully evil" without veering into "not committed to being delightfully evil" or "just plain evil." Keeping that twinkle in my eye, and knowing that Wil Wheaton (The Big Bang Version) is planning to scam Sheldon from the moment he sits down, was essential to this particular characterization working out, and I didn't completely find it until we'd run the episode a couple of times.

During one of the run throughs, when Jim did his Klingon bit, I turned to Kevin and asked him, "Did he just say 'revenge is a dish best served cold' in Klingon?" like I was trying to figure out if that's actually what happened, like maybe I misunderstood him. Chuck Lorre told me that it would be funnier if I was more exasperated. "You're just here to play this game, and now some guy is quoting Klingon at you. This happens everywhere you go," he said. 

I sighed dramatically, and said, "Oh, it does." Everyone laughed, hard, and Chuck pointed his finger at me. "Yes. That is exactly the way to play that beat."

When Chuck gave me that note, I grokked how to play Evil Wil Wheaton (The Big Bang Theory version), and I could see the comedy in every beat I played for the rest of the show.

Finally, I did a Q&A post about Creepy Candy Coating Corollary last month, before I knew I'd be returning to the show. You'll have to go through the comments to find the questions and my answers, but if you're interested in that sort of thing, I think you'll dig it. There is also a hilarious T-shirt in that link that you probably want to see, regardless.

Also, my second episode, which is titled The Wheaton Recurrence (!) airs April 12 on CBS. Tell all your friends, and that one guy up the street who washes his Camaro in jean shorts on his lawn every weekend … he needs friends.

in which w00tstock 2.0 and 2.0.1 are announced

When we did w00tstock 1.x last year, we all hoped it would be successful enough to warrant taking the show on the road to some of our favorite cities.

Well, w00tstock 1.x was so much fun for us and the audiences who saw it, it didn't just warrant it, it WINGER'd it. Hell, it may even have Damn Yankees'd it or Skid Row'd it … or Whitesnake'd it.

Whatever gloriously awful 80s hair band reference amuses you the most, the point is this: w00tstock 2.x is coming to Seattle and Portland in May:

This is the dawning of the Age of Geekdom–and its voices will ring true at w00tstock.

w00tstock v2.0: Friday, May 7 – Moore Theater, Seattle, WA (tickets available soon)
Special Guests: TBA

w00tstock v2.0.1: Saturday, May 8 – The Alladin, Portland, OR (tickets available soon)
Special Guests: TBA

So if you live in Seattle or Portland areas, go get your tickets now. If you don’t, then tell all your friends who do live there to go; because if these do well enough, we hope to do more of them! Go forth, geeks, and spread the good word!

Here's everything you ever wanted to know about w00tstock. Here's my recollection of the awesome w00tstock 1.x experience (a post so filled with awesome, it required an addendum. AN ADDENDUM, PAUL!) Finally, if you need to convince your non-geek boyfriend that you guys really will have fun at the show, you can show him a whole big mess of w00tstock videos.

Please note that all spelling and version-numbering errors are copied from the original source, my good friends Paul and Storm, who I have just thrown under the geekbus. Nyahh. Nyahh. Nyahh.

In which my friend @Muskrat_John is congratulated by me, @wilw.

The gaming industry, like the voiceover industry or the genre fiction industry is not very big, when you really get down to it. In fact, among creators, the overlap between "industry" and "community" makes almost a perfect circle. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and good news travels as quickly as bad.

Yesterday, one of the truly great people in the gaming industry, who I think we all believed had reached maximum character level, surprised us all and leveled up a little bit more:

John Kovalic's Dork Tower joins WIRED's GeekDad.

If you know of Dork Tower, then you’re already squee-ing in excitement right alongside us. If you don’t know what Dork Tower is, then either you’re about to add a new layer of happiness to the Photoshop composite of your life, or you’re slowly beginning to realize you didn’t click through to the Monkey Bites blog.

Dork Tower has, in its decade of life, existed as a standalone comic book, a featured comic in DragonScrye and Games magazines, and one of the earliest regular webcomics online. Its creator, John Kovalic, is also the illustrator and co-creator of world-renown games Munchkin and Apples to Apples. But perhaps his greatest creation is his new daughter, whose existence has transformed him from a simple, Bruce Banner–like comics and game illustrator, into a hulking green(bay) GeekDad. Which is where we come in.

This is kind of like my favorite indie television show getting picked up by a major network. It's such a perfect match, I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before. You know those people who are so delighted to be a parent, they sort of jingle and glow and levitate off the ground with joy when they talk about their kids? That's John. You know those guys who you know you can speak to in the most obscure geek dialect, secure in the knowledge that they'll grok you? That's John.

Congratulations to John and GeekDad, and to all their individual readers who are about to discover an awesome new level of the dungeon to explore.