“that’s the picard maneuver. you can’t do that.”

There’s a post in r/startrek collecting some of the more memorable stories we have told, and fans have remembered, over the decades.

I added one of my own, which I know I’ve written about before, but not here, I don’t think.

It’s about Patrick Stewart tugging on his tunic top, which always wanted to ride up when he (or anyone wearing the uniform) sat down. Because Patrick can’t do anything halfway, he made it very dramatic. Over time, he began to use it as a little bit of business in appropriate moments.

This is a story about that.

We were filming on the bridge. The scene started with Wesley standing, and after half a page or so, he sits down at the conn and I think plots a course or something.

Whenever Wesley sat down, he pulled his jacket tight, just like Picard always did. If you look, you’ll see that we all do that. That’s an important bit of context: we all did that.

So it was like take four of the scene. After we cut on take three, this producer came into the set and stood off camera, just to the right of the viewscreen, as we were looking at it. We do take four, and while we are resetting for take five, this producer comes over to me, leans down so nobody can hear him, and says, “You can’t pull your tunic down like that. That’s the Picard Maneuver, and only Picard can do that.”

So, first of all: this guy is so far out of his lane, he isn’t on the map. If anyone is ever going to talk to an actor, especially in between takes, it always goes through the First Assistant Director, and the Director. It’s a matter of professional respect, and it’s important for our work. If anyone can come up and give us notes or whatever, we will end up with all these conflicting notes, unsure which one to actually listen to.

I’m just 17 or so, and even I know all of this, but I don’t want to get in trouble, so I just say, “…okay. How am I supposed to stop it from riding up to my tits when I sit down? Because that’s what happens.”

He looks so annoyed at me, and sort of bark-whispers, “Just don’t touch it.” And he scurries away into the darkness of the stage.

I am so tired of being treated differently than these same people treat the adults, and I still haven’t learned how to speak up for myself, directly. But I am about to engage in a bit of malicious compliance, the only form of resistance I know how to employ.

We reset, they roll, and when Wesley sits down, his tunic comes all the way up, just like I said it would. It exposes my fake muscle suit, my bracers holding up my trousers, and absolutely ruins the take.

“Cut!” The director calls from offstage.

“Wil, you have to pull your tunic down,” he says, with this tone of utter confusion. Like, obviously.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, looking straight at the guy who is about to wish he’d stayed in his lane, “but [his name] told me that I wasn’t allowed to do the Picard Maneuver, so…” and I shrug, the tunic still bunched up.

That guy turned so bright red, he lit up in the darkness. Everyone on the entire crew looked at him. He sputtered something, and quickly fled the stage.

I made eye contact with Brent and with Frakes. They both looked back at me, communicating their approval. It felt great.

I can’t say for sure that we printed the next take and moved on, but it’s a great way to end the story so let’s go with that.

That guy never gave me a note again. If I recall correctly, my little tunic tug (similar to, yet legally distinctly different from the Picard Maneuver) is in the final cut of the episode

ur fascism by umberto eco

Four years ago, I recorded and released narrations of short material that I pulled from the public domain. I did my best to release one a week, as an experiment. I wondered if I could, one day, so something like this that actually paid some bills.

I had fun doing it. I picked pieces that were interesting to me, and didn’t spend any time at all trying to master perfect audio. It was a deliberately DIY effort. The audience wasn’t huge, but the people who listened to it really liked it. At some point, I even got a few requests, including this one.

This is Umberto Eco’s essential essay, Ur Fascism, originally written in 1995. It was shockingly relevant in in 2020, after four years of attempted tyranny, and it remains terrifyingly relevant after one week of ongoing tyranny.

I humbly submit this and ask for a bit of your time; I believe it’s an important, timely, essay.

i did some great work on some audiobooks that are about to be released, and i want you to know about them.

I closed out last year with two straight months of audiobook work on a number of projects I am so thrilled to be part of.

One of them was just announced yesterday, and as many of you correctly guessed, it’s When The Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi:

The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

I could quote more, but I feel like the people who are going to love love love this book like I did don’t need to know any more than that. You can pre-order the audiobook right here.

Another is Picks and Shovels, a new Marty Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification, from Cory Doctorow.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It’s an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The year is 1982, and PCs are weird. Marty Hench is not yet Silicon Valley’s most accomplished forensic accountant, scourge of tech-bro finance scams. In 1982, Hench is a newly arrived MIT washout with a community college degree and his first job: working for Fidelity Computing, a PC company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Sounds like a joke, right? But the joke’s on their parishoners, who are recruited into a pyramid selling faith scam that exploits social bonds to sell junk PCs that are locked in – from the gimmicked floppy disks that only work with their high-priced drives to the gimmicked tractor-feed paper that only works with their high priced printers.

Marty’s job is simple: figure out how to destroy Computing Freedom, a rival company started by three women who broke away from Fidelity, whose products are designed to unlock every customer the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity have locked in. Marty isn’t that far into this assignment when he realizes that he’s on the wrong side, and he throws his lot in with Computing Freedom’s founders: a queer orthodox woman who’s been expelled from her family, a nun who’s thrown in with antiimperialists liberation theology radicals resisting America’s dirty wars, and a Mormon woman who’s left the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

But when Marty sends his resignation to the Reverend Sirs, he learns that Fidelity isn’t just a weird PC company running a faith scam: it’s a violent criminal enterprise. Suddenly the stakes get a lot higher.

Picks and Shovels is a rollicking tale of the AIDS crisis, queer hardware hackers, gifted punk rock Unix programmers, Reaganomics-fuelled pyramid schemes, and the moment where the seeds of tech’s enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley.

Cory is one of my favorite authors and thinkers. He is going to be remembered and lauded in the future for his work in this moment, when we find fascist tech broligarchs threatening to take complete control of how we communicate and how freely information — true information — flows in America and the world. His novels are not just incredibly fun and satisfying to read (or listen to me read to you), they address very serious and meaningful issues of freedom, security, equality, and human rights.

Both of these books, as well as the not-yet-announced book, were tremendously satisfying to narrate. And something wonderful happened during the sessions. My favorite director, Gabrielle, gave me a simple note at the top of a page, a suggestion that I approach this part of the text with this particular thing in mind (I’m not going to get into more detail now. I may in the future.) and when I did that, something inside of me fundamentally changed.

Imagine a few elements all sitting next t each other on a workbench. You can put them together in various orders, and get generally the same thing with some subtle differences that most people won’t notice because they don’t know to look for them.

Now imagine you are handed a catalyst — a catalyst that was sitting on another table the whole time, that you just didn’t notice — and when you pour that catalyst across the elements, they suddenly reveal something new that you didn’t even know you could create from them. And that new thing looks an awful lot like the things you’ve built from them before, only this thing is clearly different than all those other things. It’s richer, more interesting, more complex, more satisfying … it’s just more.

That happened near the beginning of these sessions, and all the work I did after that was built using this new skill. People have told me for years that I’m a good audiobook narrator, and I have the awards and stuff to sort of back that up, but I’ve never really felt it. I’ve always been afraid that I’m barely sneaking past a guard, and at any moment someone will see me and shout out THAT GUY IS A BIG FAT PHONY!

I know that’s not true, but anyone else who knows the secret handshake absolutely understands what I’m talking about.

Well, for the rest of my life, every time I sit down to narrate a story, I will be using this updated skill set, and all the confidence and serenity that comes with it.

I’m very excited for y’all to hear these books. I hope you like them.

squirrel appreciation day is a thing, i guess?

Last Spring, I entered into a pact with the local squirrels: I would give them peanuts and treats from my kitchen, and they would leave my garden alone. As the year unfolded, though, the pact became more of a protection racket that the squirrel mafia abandoned as soon as my pumpkins started to grow. They murdered all five of the best ones — and the little fuckers did it just a few bites in each one, just enough to let the mold and bullshit get in there and ruin them — leaving me with only one (a really fantastic, 28 pounder I still can’t bring myself to carve). Then they ate all the leaves off my parsley and cilantro, before I made an arrangement with the local Cooper’s Hawk, who is the guy you call when the Squirrel Mafia is getting out of hand.

That’s a lot of background to set this up:

My sister texted me earlier today and asked me if I was celebrating squirrel appreciation day with extra peanuts.

“I am now,” I replied, and there was much rejoicing (up in the oak tree).

This was funny to me, because even earlier today, before I knew that squirrel appreciation day was not only a thing but was also upon us today, I shared this photo on Bluesky:

I’m not sure who that is but it could be Cruise Director Julie or Alex P Keaton based on their size (yes, we have named several squirrels in the neighborhood and that isn’t weird at all why are you looking at me that way) but I am sure that they are enjoying what’s left of a very small late season pumpkin that came up after the rest of the vine had died off.

I mean, I could have put it inside to finish ripening, and it would have been ADORABLE as a little jack-o-lantern (which we can make whenever we want to, don’t let Big Halloween tell you when and how you can enjoy the spooky season). I could have done that. But I knew I’d get more joy if I set it out and waited for a picture like this to happen.

Which I didn’t intend to post on a day I didn’t know existed, but sometimes a plan just comes together.

So, uh … a happy squirrel appreciation day to all who celebrate! Get out there an appreciate some squirrels!

odds n ends

I spent some time in the booth this morning, recording some pickups on an audiobook I still can’t believe I was chosen to narrate. I believe it will come out in March, around the same time as two other books I narrated.

March could be a big month for me, professionally. A project I have been developing and working on for almost two years may be ready in March, as well. After years of gratefully doing what I call “other people’s work,” I have been focusing intensely on something that is all mine. I’m even spending my own money on it, something they tell you to never do.

Whatever. They aren’t the boss of me. It’s worth it, and I believe in it.

Anyway. Since I’m coming home to my blog, how about one of those old school posts about random stuff I’ve been doing? It’s on the other side of the thingy.

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