Author: Wil

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

finally being included is everything to me

Posted on By Wil

Last night, TNG was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 51st Saturn Awards. (The Saturn is the sort of the Oscar for genre movies and television, if you aren’t familiar.)

I have never cared about awards (I think I’ve mentioned that being nominated is more than enough), and I still don’t. I’m not minimizing this, to be clear. It’s fucking awesome. But I didn’t need an award to know that I am part of something special.

Photo via TrekMovie.com I was standing on the other side of Dorn, until Gates insisted I stand with her. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

The thing about last night, though, is that for the first time in almost 30 years, when the TNG cast was recognized and celebrated, I was finally included. (Put another way, I was not deliberately excluded). I got to stand on stage with my TNG family, arm around my Spacemom, while a room of our peers, including people I idolize, cheered for us.

And I got to be part of it. After all these years, that meant everything to me.

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look what you made me do

Posted on By Wil

If I cared any less about the NFL, it would take effort. I get that it’s massively popular, and for some of its fans, “I like football” is their entire personality. Good for them. Sincerely. It’s just not my thing.

But! I love and admire Taylor Swift, which is the only reason I know that the Chiefs had some kind of huge comeback against Detroit and they are going to the Superb Owl against a team I can’t remember and don’t need you to identify. (EDIT: whoops. I mixed up the two playoff games. I still don’t care.)

I still don’t care about the NFL or the game, but oh my god do I love love love love love how outraged and furious and unhinged all these toxic right wing idiots are about Taylor Swift and her boyfriend the football guy. I love it so hard. I love how it’s waking them up at night, I love how they’re just so goddamn angry about it they feel sick. I love how self-inflicted it all is, and how they keep punching themselves in the dick about it, howling with what they think is righteous outrage, but sounds an awful lot like a toddler having a tantrum.

But the thing I love more than anything, the absolute best part of all of it, is watching a political party, under the complete control of the weakest, most pathetic, tiny little man, discover a new and novel way to alienate millions of voters they desperately need, while they push away countless voters who may have been open to their message, if only it wasn’t … this. LOL.

Republicans have already made it crystal clear that they hate women and want to have absolute control over every single thing a woman does. Voters have responded to that with record turnout to codify laws that protect women, and to replace as many misogynist lawmakers as they can.

So please join me in a robust round of mocking applause for whoever made the choice to attack and vilify and attempt to terrorize the most popular and influential woman of her generation, who polls more favorably than their entire party and all of their candidates.

Just a huge, roaring, standing ovation for whoever decided that the party of angry, toxic, predatory, authoritarian men will *absolutely* increase their support among a demographic they can’t afford to lose by picking a fight with their Joan of Arc.

Outstanding work, gentlemen. I have never seen a group of people slam their dicks in the door so beautifully and successfully. I wish you all the worst as you stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror.

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have your fondest wish, my friend

Posted on By Wil

In TNG’s first … we will generously say “uneven” season, Q gives Riker his powers, with … unexpected … consequences. He goes on this “wish granting” spree in the fourth act, which includes a moment with Wesley that’s memorable for maybe not the reasons the writers intended. (Here I am, talking about it on Memories of the Futurecast)

This episode and its moment set the stage for this, from Star Trek Wholesome Posting on Facebook.

Some number of you are laughing at this because you recognize the references. But I have noticed that this is the first time a lot of people are seeing The Infamous Clown Sweater, so this is how I answered what became a FAQ:

“I did this fundraiser for EFF in San Francisco in … 2001? 2002? Something like that. It was at DNA Lounge, and after we were done, this person came up to me with this horrific sweater (jumper, for you non-Americans). They told me it was part of The Infamous Clown Sweater Project. What’s that, I asked. They told me they are getting as many people as possible to wear it and pose for a photo, which they would then upload to their webpage — not website, webpage, because it was 2001 or so — for all to see.

“Of course I was down for it, and that face I’m making in the first photo is my very real reaction to the awful stank that was just infused in the acrylic fibers.

“The second picture is from a con about … 2014? Something like that, based on how I look. Someone actually made their own version of that horrible sweater for me. One arm is too long, on purpose, the neck is all stretched out, on purpose, and it fits poorly, on purpose. It’s so damn funny to me, and it came along at a moment when we were doing this “then and now” thing on Twitter (before the fascists took over).

“I still have the second sweater. I have no idea what happened to the original. Last time I checked, the website that hosted all those pictures — so old it was manually coded in html, predating even Flickr — was lost to the sands of time.

“But it never fails to make me smile when this picture comes back around. It reminds me of a specific time, when there was just so much hope for the online future we were all building.”

I’ve done a LOT of things involving The Infamous Clown Sweater over the years. It’s never not funny to me, it’s moment has long come and gone, but when it shows up (which is does, about once a year), I always enjoy it.

And for those of you who are too young to know what Riker giving Wesley his “fondest wish” is, well …

Wesley wanted to grow up to be a blue-eyed blonde who I’m pretty sure the costume designer wanted to fuck?

GEORDI! GROSS! You’re not helping!

Look. I love you, Commander Riker, but … you’re gonna want to try again. Wesley’s fondest wish rhymes with “marathon betazoid orgy on risa”.

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precious and fragile things

Posted on By Wil

I remember in the eighties our local ABC station did a summer promotion thing where they broadcast a different 1950s 3D movie every weekend for a month. I feel like we bought the glasses at 7-11; maybe they came with a Slurpee or something like that.

However we got them, I remember watching local weather guy Johnnie Mountain host a movie called Gorilla At Large. He shot the host segments wearing a striped suit and straw hat at Magic Mountain (and my memory insists that it had not yet been bought by Six Flags, but the timeline just as stridently disproves that, so we’re going with the data-driven argument while we stare real hard at people who ignore the data-driven argument because they don’t like the way it feels.)

I’m realizing as I type this that I just described Lyle Langley, so maybe my memory on that specific point is also unreliable. But, you know, print the legend I guess.

Gorilla At Large is the only movie I remember. I feel like there was one other gorilla-focused film, but I can’t say for sure. What I do recall about Gorilla At Large is that it was a lot of a guy in a suit who found reasons to lunge toward the camera, the 3D was cool, but not as immersive as I hoped it would be, Johnnie Mountain’s host segments were SO CORNY, and that I loved every second of it. I watched it on the floor in the den, with my brother and sister, on a huge pile of blankets and pillows we built, with all the lights turned out so there were no reflections on the TV. Mom made us Jiffy-Pop (we did the kind of helping where you watch), and dad must have been at work because I don’t remember him being there.

I just remember staying up past our bedtimes, watching a bad movie that was still fun, feeling the way I imagined families were meant to feel.

Wow. I’d forgotten all of that, but now I can see it as clearly as if the blue blanket was wrapped around me right now. Jeremy is wearing one of his hats, and Amy is still really little, so she falls asleep before the second or third commercial.

This must be from a time I call Before. It’s the most precious time in my life, before my mom sold me and my sister to The Curse, before I knew how my dad felt about me, before he decided to be my bully. Before sadness, loneliness, confusion, and fear filled up all this space in my life that I am still cleaning up today.

I don’t have a lot of clear and happy memories from my childhood, and when I saw this picture on Tumblr earlier, and thought it would be fun to write about watching a 3D movie on TV, I had no idea it would unlock this particular one, literally seconds ago.

But it’s like I’m looking at one of the pictures I don’t have because my mother still refuses to let me have any of my childhood. I can see it all so clearly, how much fun it was, how I felt like the big brother I always wanted to be, even if it was just for that one evening in the eighties.

I’m grateful for that. It’s nice to experience one of these memories, instead of the usual, for a change.

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two thousand nine hundred and twenty-two days

Posted on By Wil

January 9, 2016 is the day my life — a life that belongs to me, that centers my needs and dreams, that I built out of the ashes of my abusive childhood — began. It was the day I chose to stop numbing my pain and started a slow, deliberate, committed journey toward healing the trauma that I experienced at the hands of my abusive, neglectful, emotionally immature narcissist parents.

Here’s what I wrote about this in 2021, the first time I think I was ready to talk about this in public, on my fifth soberversary:

For probably three years, I knew that I was slowly and steadily killing myself with booze. I was getting drunk every night, because I couldn’t face the incredible pain and PTSD I had from my childhood, at the hands of my abusive father and manipulative mother.

It was unsustainable, and I knew it was unsustainable, but when you’re an addict, knowing something is unhealthy and choosing to do something about it are two very different things.

On January 8, 2016, I was out in the game room, watching TV and getting drunk as usual. I was trying to numb and soothe the pain I felt, while also deliberately hurting myself because at a fundamental level, I believed the lies the man who was my father told me about myself: I was worthless. I was unworthy of love. I was stupid. The things I loved and cared about were stupid. It did not matter if I lived or died. Nobody cared about me, anyway.

I knocked a bottle into the trash, realized I had to pee, and — so I wouldn’t disturb Anne — did not go into the bathroom, but instead walked out into the middle of my backyard and peed on the grass. I turned around, and there was Anne. I will never forget the look on her face, this mixture of sadness and real fear.

“I am so worried about you,” was all she had to say. I’d been feeling it for a long time, and I faced a stark choice that I had known I was going to face sooner or later.

“So am I.”

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