I still don’t know very much about brain scans…

Here are three Star Trek-themed things that have come up recently. All of them made me laugh so hard I pooped a little, so they need to be preserved here for the ages.

First, from Jimmy James, Inc:

For the record, Wesley's dance crew was called Jiffy and da Popz.

Next: Last night, Paul of Paul and Storm made WesLOL Crusher:

It's a little uncanny how much it fits with the original image, isn't it?

Finally, this place is real and exists:

For those of you who are scratching your heads right now, that's the intersection of Crusher Avenue and Picard Lane, around the corner from WARP DRIVE. WARP-FUCKING-DRIVE!

BAM!

In which I am a Trolldad

Ryan's home for the holidays, before he moves far, far away for his new job (hey, check out my son! He graduated college last week, and he starts a great job in two weeks! Go Ryan!!)

The first night he was home, I told him that the warm covers for the bed he's sleeping on were in the dryer, so he could get them out when he was ready to go to sleep.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, it gets cold in my office overnight, so don't forget to put the comforter that's in the dryer on it before you go to sleep.

Him: Okay. Thanks. G'night.

Me: I love you, kiddo. G'night.

I went to bed, and the next morning at breakfast he told us how cold he was overnight, because we didn't give him any warm bedding.

See, even at 22, the damn kids still have brain damage.

I reminded him of our conversation. He recalled it (having apparently forgotten it, immediately after I told him goodnight, likely because that part of his brain is the part that also processes requests to put his goddamn dishes in the dishwasher), and that was the end of that.

Flash forward to later yesterday afternoon. Ryan and Nolan were out with some of Nolan's friends, and Ryan texted me, "Will you put the covers on the bed, so I don't forget them again?" I told him that I would do just that.

…then I got this idea to be a Trolldad. Instead of making the bed, I put the covers in a neatly-folded pile at the foot of the bed, and made this picture, which I printed out and put on top of them:

(Click all images to embiggen at Imgur)

I thought that was so stupidly funny, I made this picture, and put it in the middle of the blankets:

I was having way too much fun, so I put this on his pillow:

And finally, this was folded up and put under the sheets where it would crinkle and make him get out of bed after he thought he was getting into it to go to sleep:

When he woke up this morning, I asked him if he got my notes.

"Oh my god, that was hilarious," he said.

"It was pretty amusing to me," I said.

"The best one was the last one, because I thought I was done with your notes and I could just go to bed, and then I was all, 'OH GODDAMMIT!'"

"That was the idea," I said.

"Well done, sir," he said.

"I spent more time making those stupid pictures than I would have spent making the bed," I said. "I'm very proud of that."

"Oh, I'm sure you are. Good job," he said.

As we parted ways and I walked out of the living room toward my bedroom, I heard him say, softly, "…and it is on."

So I have that to look forward to for the next two weeks.

it’s a festivus miracle

If you can't watch the embedded clip, you can see it here.

You can see the whole thing on the Nerdist Holiday special, Christmas Eve on BBC America.

on the importance of making time to play the games you like with the people you love

In the introduction to my short collection of gaming essays called Games Matter, I wrote:

Of all the things that make me a geek, nothing brings me more joy, or is more important to me, than gaming. I am the person I am today because of the games I played and the people I played them with as I came of age in the 80s.

Playing games — from video games to role playing games to hobby board games — has been as much of a constant in my life as acting and creating stories. This isn't surprising to me at all, because gaming and acting and storytelling are all interwoven in my life.

About a year ago, my gaming group, who I've played with since high school, suffered a TPK. It's complicated, and it's genuinely tragic, but it's the reality I now have to deal with: getting a group together to play games is, for the first time in my life, much harder than simply sending out an e-mail or making a few phone calls.

I know, I know, #nerdworldproblems.

Still, I miss pulling a huge stack of boardgames out of my closet, putting them on the dining room table, and wondering what we're going to end up playing when everyone gets here. I miss investing in an RPG character I'm playing, or a campaign I'm running, and looking at that day on the calendar when we'll be back in that game's world.

Being a capital-G Gamer, it isn't surprising to me that I miss gaming with some degree of regularity… what does surprise me is realizing that I miss gaming as much — and with the same sense of emotional loss — as I miss acting and writing when I'm not doing those things.

For the last few days, I've been lucky, and I've had some friends around to play the hell out of a lot of games. We've played Last Night On Earth, Settlers, Ticket to Ride, Say Anything, Small World, Munchkin, Chez Geek, and more.

Last night, as I was falling asleep after an evening of gaming, beers and pizza with some friends, I realized that before this past week, I hadn't played games in so long, I had forgotten how much I need to play them. I realized how much I missed playing them, the way you miss a person you love when you don't see them for weeks or months at a time.

In a weird way, I'm grateful for the sadness I feel when I think about having three bookshelves that are filled with games I probably won't get to play as much as I want to, because when I finally do get to play them, like I have recently, I appreciate it that much more.

So let me close this by going all Voice of Experience on you: Keep playing games. Make time to play games with your friends and family, because it's surprisingly heartbreaking to wipe a thin layer of dust off a game you love, before you put it back on the shelf because the real world is calling you.

From the Vault: …the irrational immortality of youth

While I was digging through my blog archives yesterday for stories to tell at last night's Wil Wheaton vs. Paul and Storm show at Largo*, I found this post I wrote in September of 2009. I like it, and felt that it was worth reposting:

…the irrational immortality of youth

I didn't have to look at the weather forecast to know that a storm is on the way; I could feel it with the first step I took outside this morning with my dog.

As I stood on my patio and watched the steam rise off my coffee and swirl up through golden shafts of golden morning sunlight shot through a cloud-filled sky, I remembered a day like this one fifteen or sixteen years ago.

I'd just gotten home from Nice, where I'd lived and worked on a film called Mister Stitch for a few months. It wasn't the most pleasant movie in the world to work on (the other lead actor was an unprofessional nightmare) but the time I spent there working on it remains some of the best time in my life. I'd been acting since I was a child, but it wasn't until I lived in Nice and worked on Mister Stitch that I truly felt like an artist. I was fundamentally changed by the experience, seeing the world – especially entertainment – differently than I ever had before.

The day I got back from location, sometime in mid-January of that year, my friend Dave picked me up from LAX, and we went directly down the road to Manhattan Beach, to wait out the terrible rush hour traffic which stood between the airport and my house. After ten hours on an airplane, another 120 minutes to crawl 40 miles up the freeway wasn't exactly an appealing notion.

We parked in a mostly-empty lot and walked down toward the water. There was a winter storm on its way, driving powerful waves ahead of it that were so huge, they crashed up against the bottom of the pier and occasionally broke over the end of it. Wrapped up in the irrational immortality that's endemic to 22 year-olds, we walked dangerously close to the end of the shuddering pier, angry waves boiling beneath, and dared the Pacific Ocean to reach up and touch us.

I don't recall specifically what we talked about – I'm sure I regaled him with slightly-exaggerated tales of glamor and excess and artistic awakening along the French Riviera – but even now I can I clearly recall the terror and exhilaration I felt whenever foamy, freezing sea water splashed up through the spaces between the planks and soaked into the tops of our shoes.

Since I grew up and became a husband and a father, I've gone out of my way to avoid anything more dangerous than driving on the Los Angeles freeway system, so I can't imagine defying a Pacific winter storm like I did when I was in my early twenties … but standing on my patio in my late thirties, not really defying as much as tolerating the morning chill, I was grateful for the memory.

Someone on G+ pointed out that my son is now the same age I was when I stood on the end of that pier. Now I need to call him and remind him that he's not as invincible as he thinks he is, even though I know he'll think I'm just being paranoid… exactly the way I would have felt when I was his age.

Sigh.

*I took some silly video of our backstage bullshit, and I shot some film of Paul and Storm from the side of the stage. I broadcasted it live on Ustream, and you can see it in my channel archives.