This guest post comes to us from writer and designer Will Hindmarch, co-founder of Gameplaywright Press and author of RPGs, fictions, and other things.

At about three o’clock this morning, I was walking home from an event highlighting D&D and beers, where I DM’d a table of nine players through a short session of D&D new 5th edition. In orbs of light, clinging to street lamps and glowing in the gloom, I saw snow falling on an angle in the wind. Most of the neighborhood was under an inch or so of snow and it flicked off the toes of my boots as I walked, but I passed a monk shoveling paths on a local sidewalk. By the time I woke up later this morning, tree branches balanced three or four inches of snow on their tops.

So I’m pretty far removed from any Caribbean cruise, right now.

But! I’m in good company, because although we don’t have a literal boatload of nerderati here, we have a global information network in reach, which I hear the JoCo Cruise somehow lacks. So I can google pics of boats, play JoCo’s music on my computer, and—best of all—sneak onto WWdN to keep us all distracted (I won’t go so far as to say entertained) until the One True Wil Wheaton returns.

Good news for you: it’s not just me! Three other weird cohorts are around this week to share guest posts with us and, title of this post be damned, you don’t have to guess who they are…

• Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse writes fiction and non-fiction, excels at games, and is funnier than I am by a factor of ten.  He has a URL named after him.
• Shane Nickerson is a producer, writer, and actor who is funnier than I am by an order of magnitude. We have the same birthday, Shane and I, but he’s better at it than I am. This URL was named in his honor.
• Ryan Wheaton is a writer we all know for some of the best, funniest tweets to appear via @wilw, which makes him an approximate fuck-ton funnier than myself.

Some of are Wil(l)s, some of us are Wheatons, but we are none of us Wil Wheatons. Still, this week, we’re going to try hard to make Wil Wheaton proud. When we fail at that, we’re going to try hard to make Wil Wheaton laugh.

Either way, we’re in it together now, so let’s do this.