214 thoughts on “Wow, nice shirt . . . Moonpie.”

1. Heh. I actually have a picture of me sitting in Sheldon's spot. It's a polaroid, though, and my scanner isn't talking to my Mac (Apple blames HP and HP blames Apple. Yay.) so I can't scan and post it.
   Any reason you're playing 3.5 and not 4e? I found 4e *massively* more friendly to new players than 3.5.

2. Not a BBT question, but since you are going to be at PAX East, are you planning on being available at some point to sign your books?

3. Oh, how I wish I had the opportunity to accept or pass on a regular job!
   Assuming that something came along, yes. I'd love to get paid to work every day as an actor on a show that I'm proud of. Something like BBT or LEVERAGE would be awesome.

4. You know, it hardly ever happens, but nearly everything we did on the set made it into the final cut of the episode, including all of my beats.
   I don't remember what it was, but there was one alt take in the first scene, where Penny said something about playing card games that normal people play. It was really funny, but the producers all thought it was too mean, so they changed it.

5. Yes. I'll post my schedule when it's all nailed down.

6. Thanks for the reply.

7. Noted, pali.

8. Chicken. Fine — I’ll wait for Kunal to make the announcement.

9. Wil, I have a second and more esoteric question – this one is regarding Evil Wil.
   For the BBT universe version of you, did you invent a back-story for Evil Wil that differs from your own? In essence, do you know why Evil Wil can treat a fan so poorly?

10. Because Evil Wil Wheaton doesn't follow Real Wil Wheaton's Law, of course.

11. After you were on, I finally put the show to top of my Netflix queue, and we’ve been greedily watching it marathon-style.
    My favorite quote so far: Penny, you don’t want to get into it with Sheldon. The guy is one lab accident away from being a supervillain.
    My question is about the laughter. When I’m watching an episode, the audience doesn’t bother me because I’m laughing myself- but re-watching it or seeing a commercial, I’m struck by the sitcom-laugh-track feel. How does it feel on set? Is there a live audience for everything?

12. So, do you kids consider you cool now that you were on Big Bang or did they always think you were cool?
    p.s. I am looking forward to your next book. You writing is always uplifting and funny.

13. Re: 3.5
    I’m coming into an existing campaign that’s been going on sporadically over the last 2 years or so. The group felt pity on me and instead of stranding me with them as a 1st lvl Elven Cleric, gave me all sorts of power ups and such to make me lvl 14. So, that’s why the 3.5.
    As for your scanner issue… you could try what I’ve done. Frame it up well with your digital camera on a neutral background (black sheet or similar), and just take a picture of the picture. You may need to watch flash/reflections/etc. But it should work out alright.

14. I've heard this complaint from a lot of people, and I honestly don't hear it, myself.
    The audience in the stage during taping is so loud, so into the show, and so responsive, Johnny told me before taping, "We're going to feel like we're in a foxhole when the audience is in here. Be prepared to get really close to everyone and shout between takes to hear each other." He was totally right; the audience was phenomenal, and laughed just as hard the third time they saw a scene as the first time. I've done audience shows before, but never with an audience as raucous as the BBT audience, so I was grateful to Johnny for preparing me; it could have been a real shock if I hadn't known about it.

15. I don't think I'm ever in danger of my kids thinking I'm cool.

16. HAHAHAHA thank you Wil, you have given me many laughs this morning. Now back to spacing out in an office alone in Burbank….more thunder please???

17. I agree that the BBT writers are amazing, and I won’t question your assertion that you can’t write like them, but what about sitting in on one of their writers’ roundtables (assuming they have them)? I’d be shocked if you didn’t feel the need to toss a few “hey, what ifs” into the mix by the end of it.

18. Actually, this kind of sticks out on general linguistic grounds — that word has no vowel. You don’t have to actually know anything specifically about Klingon, other than that the morphology is more or less conventional, to catch that.
    Not to diminish your awesome nerdliness, you understand. It motivated me to check, and there’s support for your supposition — the phrase is one of the examples, and on p. 171 of the 1992 paperback of Okrand’s book, it is indeed in a sans-serif font.

19. I would *love* to sit in the writer's room while they break a script. Hell, I'd go work as an intern on BBT if that's what it took to have that chance.

20. Whenever there are disagreements about spelling and pronunciation in Klingon, I just decide that there are different regional dialects.

21. Any way you can float the idea without breaking the rules of etiquette? Not to push you’ just wondering how that sort of thing works.

22. Oh…right. Some of the writers read your blog. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.

23. I had a fun experience with my wife while watching BBT last night. She refuses to admit that she is any kind of geek, so I often call her a “closet geek”.
    When Sheldon dumps the tray with 30 pieces of silverware on the table, my wife started laughing so hard, I thought she’d bust her gut… She had to explain to me about Judas and the silver…
    Who’s the geek now Amy? 😛
    BBT – Proving to geeks how geeky their “non” geek spouses really are!

24. This sentence – Irony FTW!

25. Yeah, we had to hold for laughs a few times, if I remember correctly, but I don't think it messed up the timing of any of the jokes. I don't think BBT should change anything, honestly, because what they're doing right now is working very well.

26. Thanks for the Q&A Wil. My only question: how did you happen to be wearing the Fruit Fucker shirt in that episode?

27. Oops, thanks for replying Wil. I deleted my comment after posting it since I didn’t see the earlier question about the laugh track above, and thought it was too similar of a question. Anyway, here’s the original comment so that your response still makes sense. (You are too quick!)
    Deleted post follows:
    There’s a YouTube clip going around of a scene from Big Bang Theory with the laugh track cut out between lines. (It just mutes the sound when the laughing is present.) Watching it gives me the impression that the actors of the show have to wait unnaturally long periods of time in between lines for the laugh track.
    Did you encounter this during filming? Do you think Big Bang Theory should lower the intensity of or remove the laughter altogether?

28. Since a lot of people are asking about your initial reaction to the show, I have a related question. I love Sara Gilbert’s character, but as 20-something engineering PhD student, I’m finding the series as a whole a bit alienating. (I’m not sure if the Wesley Crusher fangirls are really the types that solder circuitboards, etc.; maybe I’m more in the minority than I thought.) How do you feel about the dearth of geek girls on BBT? In your experience, is that representative of reality? I mean, I get that these guys don’t necessarily get out much, but surely if they manage to make friends with the hot girl across the hall, they could manage to meet some more females at work.

29. Grats on getting the keynote spot for PAX East! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me they are going to make a good quality audio recording of it again…the one of you from ’07 was amazing, and served to act as an introduction for my then-girlfriend-now-fiance into a new level of geekdom. w00t for j00!
    http://www.livingwithanerd.com

30. Awesomeness incarnate. Thanks for taking the time.

31. I have to admit that I leapt to the same conclusion and never gave BBT a chance, until your episode. Now I’ll have to watch it right from the start. WHEAAAAATOOOOON!
    So are you a DC or a Marvel guy then? I ask because http://twitter.com/SmilinStanLee is nation building on Twitter and it would be squee-worthy if you were to #FF (or #TuesdayFollow) him.

32. You may not be privy to such information, but I’ve always wondered if the creators of BBT had it in mind to make a kind of Americanized version of The IT Crowd. I love the IT Crowd, but know a show like that could never make it here. BBT seems like it’s trying to capture that magic and reformulate it for a US audience, which it seems to be doing quite well.
    If that’s too ephemeral of a question: How many types of cream cheese were available for bagels at craft services?
    (Brief, almost-funny story: I just got a new apartment and am trying to decorate it. I love the kitchen island on the set of BBT but couldn’t find it in any large stores. Before giving up, I looked up who the set designer for the show was, found his contact information, and sent him an email asking about it. Turns out they made it custom. Sucks. I want that island. Steal it for me next time you’re on the show. )

33. When I talked with the costume designer, I told her that I liked to wear T-shirts that were similar to those worn by the regular cast members. In fact, I own a lot of the same shirts they wear on the show.
    She asked me what kind of stuff, specifically, I'd wear, because I was essentially playing myself, so I told her that I'd love to wear something from Penny Arcade. Because PA are all my friends, I was able to put the right people in touch with each other, get permission to use PA merch on the show, and then waited for them to bring me my clothes on the tape day.
    Originally, I was wearing the FF shirt where it's just his shadow, looming over the water tower, but that just looked like a plain red blob on camera, so they changed me into the Fruit Fucker shirt that you saw in the show. It wasn't my intention to sneak my beloved FF into the show, and I was so focussed on acting at the time I didn't think about it until we had finished the show, but I'm really happy that it worked out the way it did. It's like I got to be part of the world's biggest inside joke.

34. Oh, I'm pretty confident there will be a high quality recording of the keynote.

35. I've always been mostly a DC guy, though I've recently expanded my reading to include Captain America, Avengers, X-Men, and Iron Man.

36. Well, I can't speak about this in any capacity other than just being a fan of the show, because I don't write for BBT. Having issued the appropriate disclaimer: Keep in mind that the show is, at its heart, a comedy, so it's more important to be funny than realistic when those things come into conflict. I think that it's probably funnier to see how these übergeeks relate to the non-geek girl across the hall than it would be to see them interact with girls who were just as geeky as they are. That said, Howard's new girlfriend is delightfully geeky, and Leslie Winkle is one of my favorite characters ever to be on the series, so I don't think the writers shy away from portraying geeky girls when it's funny and in the service of the story.

37. I’m so glad I’m not the only one…
    Just saw it on my RSS feed and had an “Oh… um… that’s really cool but, um… Dare I say this?” moment. Nevertheless, cool shirt immortalising a great moment. Qapla’, Wil!

38. Huzzah! I will be waiting in anxious antici…………..pation.

39. Wil, my wife suggests that TBBT might be a little weak with female characters because they lack female writers, and it’s sometimes hard for a male writer to write a female’s part authentically. When you write fiction, do you agonize at all about writing female roles?
    And a related question, if it interests you, have you ever played a female D&D character? If so, in what ways did you find that challenging? If not, I’d like to hear about it when you do.
    QA TLHO’ for this Q&A!

40. Wil,
    It is a great shirt, some people have asked about Bazinga & the other shirts, they too are available on Amazon.com for preorder.

41. Do you think the writers write Sheldon with Asperger’s Syndrome like traits? I have done quite a bit of reading on autism and Asperger’s because my son has high functioning autism and it appears that Sheldon fits that mold. It is believed that some of the greatest thinkers, geeks, nerds and artisans of the world had a form of Asperger’s and HFA. It seems to me that the writers had this in mind when they created Sheldon.

42. So you have been cast as Evil Will on TBBT and the Axis of Anarchy on The Guild. Is it strange that when these writers are casting an evil character they think of Wil Wheaton?

43. I don't know enough about Asperger's to say, but Sheldon does remind me of one of my closest friends. He's incredibly intelligent, and sometimes has trouble relating to people who aren't as smart as he is because he's thinking and operating in more dimensions than most people. One of the things I love about Sheldon is how he'd never willfully insult or hurt anyone, but ends up doing it all the time simply because his brain operates on an entirely different level than the rest of us.

44. They need to make action figures.

45. WHO PICKED UP THE PHONE?! I WAS ONLINE, DAMMIT!

46. Hey, Wil. Long time no see. Looking forward to that full write-up on your BBT experience.
    I’d be curious to know if/how your preparation changes when playing a comedic role like on BBT vs a dramatic role like on Criminal Minds. Do you focus on different things (like more on rhythm, pace etc), do you work on the backstory as much etc.. Can you take us through your typical prep routine for a role?
    Thank ya.

47. G’day Wil,
    Very new reader here, started yesterday (And started on podcasts this morning). Anyway not TBBT related (Though I did dig the episode) but as a DC fan have you been enjoying Blackest Night? ANy thoughts on how it will end?
    Also any plans to visit us down in Australia?

48. Hello there, no questions, just wanted to boast that i treated myself to a threat recently buying a new Alienware, and when anyone doubted the choice I just pointed out that it is the same laptop Sheldon has. So there.
    Keep up the good work, been following for sometime, first comment, and maybe not that illuminating 🙂

49. Damn, just re-read. It should be treat not threat. Not really my language, but I think there is a bit of a difference…

50. My reaction was exactly the same. I came back week after week and they changed the show significantly I think – or I understood what they were going for better.
    Still hate Chuck though. That show is just stupid.

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