January 2018 – WIL WHEATON dot NET

…and then Pete Townsend says, “Can anybody play the drums?”

Posted on 23 January, 201831 August, 2018 By Wil

I was thinking about reinstalling Rock Band again recently, but I decided that, even though I really loved playing it back in the day, I am at a point in my life where I would rather spend that time actually learning an instrument, instead. I have played bass guitar and ukulele in the past. I also played guitar in the way that every lame college dude does, which means I never learned any theory, but I memorized some guitar tabs and chords, and sort of faked my way through a few songs for friends who were either too polite or embarrassed to tell me how bad I was.

I was sort of thinking that doing it as a game would be fun, so I gave Rocksmith guitar a try, but after about two hours of different game modes, it’s not for me. It was like all the frustration of Rock Band or Guitar hero, but without any of the fun of pretending that I was a rock star. I may plug in my old bass guitar (which is now a vintage instrument because I’m old) and try that mode, but for now, I’m going to try something different.

I have always wanted to learn to play the drums, and I was pretty good at the Rock Band drums when we played all the time, so I decided to pick up a small, inexpensive, student kit, and use YouTube videos to master the basics. While I was shopping around about a week ago, there was a shiny little kit on sale at woot, and it had more pieces and cost less than the three piece kit I was looking it, so I bought it. It was delivered today.

I’ve been putting it together, which is really fun, but murder on my old hands and knuckle joints, so I took a break to write this dumb post about the new experimental hobby thingy I’m doing: Is it possible for a 45 year-old dude like me to learn how to play the drums, using only the resources available online?

I intend to find out. I’ll document the process here.

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who lives who dies who tells your story

Posted on 8 January, 201831 August, 2018 By Wil

The airplane shakes as violently as I have ever experienced in a flight, and I can hear the engines whine as the pilot cranks them up. I push down into my seat just a bit as we begin to climb. Two years ago, this kind of turbulence would have terrified me to the point of white hot panic, but I am calm. Ever since I got medical treatment for my depression and anxiety, I have been able to rationally accept things that I was once irrational about. I am able to react to things the way I imagine a normal person would (my doctor discourages me from saying “normal” in this context, because it makes me sound abnormal. He wants me to say “healthy” or “non-depressive”, but he’s not the boss of me). I know what’s happening: we are flying through the leading edge of a storm front that is on its way down the Pacific coast. The winds that are pushing and pulling that front are shaking the plane, so I imagine that I’m on a boat in heavy seas, or in a wagon on a rough dirt road.

We dip slightly, and my stomach goes weightless for half a second before we resume our climb. Anne grips my arm so tightly it hurts a little bit. I glance at her, and she frowns. She does not enjoy this. I close the book I haven’t been able to read, lean my head back, and shut my eyes…

(more…)

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thanks for listening.

Posted on 2 January, 201831 August, 2018 By Wil

I wrote this on my dumb Facebook yesterday:.

At least three blogs linked to my blog about the minifigs today. All three of the ones I saw essentially quoted the entire thing, and then added commentary that misrepresented what I said, and what my intention was when I said it.

Another blog, home to one of the most pathetic, sad, empty, angry, hateful failures in the universe also linked to it.

The resulting flood of toxic and cruel and hateful people into my life has been appalling and revealing.

Unsurprisingly, when a shitty person is shitty, they attract other shitty persons to their blog. When a blog that presents itself as news writes shitty posts that are intended to make shitty people feel better about themselves by attacking and tearing down other people, those sites attract shitty people.

And now a lot of those shitty people are all up in my business. I can ignore a lot of it, and I block and move on, but it’s frustrating and disheartening to see so much hate and cruelty projected from people who I don’t know and wasn’t writing for in the first place. It’s gross and it makes me feel … well, the only word I can come up with is “icky” and that’s not the best word. I just feel like the stink of toxic, terrible people is around me today, and it makes me grateful for the millions of you out there who are not that, who choose to spend a little bit of time in the same virtual space as me.

Dickheads are gonna be dickheads, and I have to be better at just ignoring that (Hardwick is the Zen master of this, if you’re looking for inspiration). But those news blogs that reprinted exactly what I wrote, but then recontextualized it (and me) to create a false narrative … that’s frustrating to me. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my post, so I left it open to interpretation. Maybe I didn’t make it clear that I was answering a question, sharing a raw and unfiltered emotional response to something, and concluding that I was disappointed. I wasn’t mad, I wasn’t ranting, I wasn’t furious, I didn’t call for a boycott. I just said I was disappointed, and I explained why. I thought I was clear, and I thought it was dispassionate (as much as it can be when it’s talking about something that has been a bit of a raw nerve for thirty years). So if I wasn’t extremely clear, I guess that’s on me.

But I can’t help but feel like these blogs deliberately used sensational language to create a narrative that justified their writers essentially quoting everything I wrote, adding no new information or informed analysis, and collecting the ad revenue. That’s frustrating to me, because they get to move on to their next bit of sensationalized bullshit, while I spend days dealing with the trolling and associated garbage from people who will read their sensationalized headlines, accept their sensationalized framing, and then come after me on social media or in the comments of my own blog. It’s ironic that I had to block some shitty people here, because one of the founding principles of my blog, over ten years ago, was for me to have a place to speak for myself, after a lifetime of being spoken for by publicists. It was to give me a place to set the record straight, after years of being talked about by people who knew little to nothing about me. And here we are, a decade later, and I’m doing the same thing I was back then: speaking up to say, “that’s not what I said, and you know it’s not what I said.” There’s an argument to be made for just ignoring it and moving on, and there’s an argument to be made that I’m doing this all over again ten years later because I’m screwed up, emotionally. Maybe that’s the case. I have to live with this brain that lies to me all the time, and I’m coming off of 24 hours of shitty people telling me to kill myself, so maybe I’m not the most objective observer in this regard.

But all of that is prelude and context to what I hope will be the real takeaway from this stupid thing: I am genuinely grateful that I interact with kind and good people in real life and online almost every day. I am grateful that we work with intention to create a positive and uplifting place when we are together, and I am grateful that, even when I was a shitty teenager, I never would have wanted to be around cruel, unhappy, nihilists who have little to no empathy in their lives, and use anger to give their lives meaning.

Thanks for listening.

Note: Because I’m dealing with trolls and dickweeds right now, I’ve set comments to go into moderation, unless you have a previously-approved comment. Thanks for understanding.