Author: Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.

What would you like to see us play on Tabletop Season Three?

Posted on By Wil

Anonymous asked:

Second Season of Wil Wheaton Project. Yes or No? I hope SyFy channel has the foresight to keep it going.

So for those of you who don’t know, earlier this summer, I did 12 episodes of a silly comedy show on Syfy called The Wil Wheaton Project. It was basically The Soup for people like me who enjoy sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, as well as jokes about those things. If you’d like to see a bunch of clips from the show, they’re right here on my YouTube thing.

We’re officially on hiatus right now, and we don’t know if the network will order more episodes. I know that they liked us in a creative sense, but the ratings weren’t very good (ratings are generally not very good in summer, and while I don’t believe that ratings are as important as they once were, my opinion on the matter isn’t particularly important to the decision makers), but the people who did watch us really liked us. So I won’t know for a few more weeks, but until then, I’m on hiatus, which means I get to write more, play more games, and prep for season three of Tabletop, which goes into production in October.

Part of that preparation includes finding 20 games to play on the show, and as of today, I have eight (maybe nine) that are strong contenders.

What do you want us to play on the show next year? Would you tell me the game, the publisher, and why you like it?

Keep in mind the criteria for Tabletop game selection:

  1. Plays well with 4 people.

  2. Plays in under 90 minutes.

  3. Can be generally explained in about 5 minutes.

  4. Has a high ration of luck to strategy, so everyone has a chance to win the game.

  5. Looks great, has clear graphical design and photographs well.

  6. Is not something we’ve played before.

I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

home again

Posted on By Wil

Last night was the first night in almost two weeks that I haven’t had a series of horrible nightmares that woke me up at the end of every REM cycle. I woke up this morning next to my dogs (Anne is still in New York) who seemed as happy to snuggle next to me as I was to snuggle next to them.

GenCon was, on balance, awesome. I played some fantastic new games, spent some great time with friends, and ate a couple of fantastic meals. The only bummers were a day of fucking awful anxiety that threatened to keep me in my hotel room, and a single person (out of hundreds) who was a dick to me when I explained that I can’t stop to take pictures because it draws a crowd and then I get pinned down in one place, unable to enjoy the convention.

There’s lots going on right now that I want to write about, and being on hiatus from The Wil Wheaton Project should afford me time to sit at my desk and be a proper writer for the first time in months, but today I am home, and  I need to rest and reload my HP and Mana.

More to come.

Akira and me

Posted on By Wil

So last night my wife and her friends went out to dinner, and I stayed home for a quiet evening alone with my dogs, a homebrew, and ​Akira. If you haven’t seen it, and you like anime, science fiction, cyberpunk, or some combination of those things, I highly recommend it. In the US, it’s streaming on Hulu Plus, and the Blu-Ray is amazing.

This is the movie that introduced me to anime, way back in 1988 or 89. I remember buying a bootleg VHS at a comic convention, which had a photocopied paper wrapped around the outside, entirely in Japanese. One of my friends said he had heard it was a great movie, so I dropped the twenty bucks or whatever and picked it up. When we got home, we put it into the VCR (kids, ask your parents – it was like a streaming media server that only served local files to a single device, off of very inefficient, removable storage medium) and watched.

It wasn’t dubbed, it wasn’t subbed, and we had absolutely no idea what was going on, but we loved it. In 1988 or 89, there just wasn’t anything like this movie. We had Voltron and Robotech and Battle of the Planets, and they were all pretty awesome, but the breathtaking beauty of Akira was unequaled. We watched it over and over again while we played tabletop games, until we wore out the VHS. We invented some sort of story, where Kaneda and Tetsuo were fighting the espers for some reason, and were eventually defeated by them when Akira is reborn. I remember finally seeing it with subtitles in the mid-90s, and being blown away by the story that was actually being told, which was quite a bit more interesting and complex than the one we’d made up.

I loved Akira so much, it lead me to Ghost in the Shell, all of Miyazaki’s movies, and unintentional hentai (boy, it sure was a shock to us when we picked up a thing called Demon City, only to discover that it was all about tentacle dicks fucking everything in the world. I don’t recall the story, but I can clearly recall how we were all traumatized but unable to look away from it.)

I don’t keep up with the world of anime now, because I have too much other stuff to keep up with and not enough time for everything, but I will always have time to watch Akira.

True Facts About the Octopus

Posted on By Wil

Two video posts in one day? I must be going craaaaaaaaaaazzzyyy!!!!1

Alright, settle down.

So earlier today when I was avoiding doing something productive, I came across a video on Reddit of an octopus escaping from a boat. I adore octopuses (I have a large tattoo of one on my arm), so I watched it. Then I read the comments and came across this fantastic video called True Facts About The Octopus. If you have five-ish free minutes, I highly recommend watching it. In fact, when people ask me why I have an octopus tattoo, I’m just going to tell them to watch this video, because it covers how fucking hardcore and amazing the octopus is.

Oh, and get this: I didn’t know until I went to YouTube to grab the embed code that this was made by internet legend and Ur-vlogger Ze Frank! Now I have to do actual work so I can reward myself with viewings of his other True Facts videos.

The Real Batman v Superman

Posted on By Wil

We made a thing for last night’s Wil Wheaton Project, and I think it’s pretty great.

As of today, we have one episode left. We won’t know if Syfy is going to order more episodes for about 5 or 6 weeks. We all need the break (it’s a lot of work to make this show, and I think it’s safe to say that we’re all feeling a little worn out), but I’m sad that we’re going to take the break now, when I finally feel like our show is firing on all cylinders.