Author: Wil

My arms hurt so much today, I can hardly lift a cup of coffee, and I feel quite silly. This is how it happened…

I played ice hockey all through high school and into my early 20s. I loved being a goalie, and after going to lots of Kings games with Nolan in January, I decided that I was going to put on my pads and play again before the 2009 was over.

Well, due to a series of unexpected events, it didn't happen, so I pushed the goal (ha! ha!) into this year and started going to a gym three or four days a week to get back into shape. I've been doing lots of cardio conditioning for the last 6 weeks, and this last week I finally added some light weight work.

Now, I'm not talking anything serious, just some very light weight work. Like ten pounds in three twenty rep sets. Hey, stop laughing at me. I haven't lifted anything heavier than a pen in at least five years.

I deliberately started out light and easy so I wouldn't hurt myself or overdo it. It felt a little silly to be putting the three machines I used on their lightest settings, but I got over that pretty quickly … especially when doing my third set of incline presses was rather difficult.

This was two days ago, and even though my arms ached a little bit and felt a little heavy all day yesterday, I was glad for it. It made me feel like I was leveling a little bit, and gaining muscle XP (yes, there is nothing in the world that I can't view in gaming terms).

So yesterday, I got Bioshock 2. Anne was out all evening, so I settled in for a return trip to Rapture. Just like the first time I played Bioshock, I didn't open the manual or learn anything about the game; I just started playing and let the world and the story unfold while I was playing. I won't spoil it for anyone, but the first 60 minutes or so of the game was more exciting and compelling than any blockbuster movie I've seen in recent memory.

Here's a quick spoiler-free mini-review of Bioshock 2, based on my 7(ish) hours of gameplay: I really like it. I loved Bioshock because of the story and the world, and Bioshock 2 had some very big (daddy) shoes to fill. The story is still unfolding, but so far, it's very compelling. And Rapture … well, things have really gone downhill since the last time I was in Rapture. So I can't say definitively that it's the best thing ever because I haven't played it all the way through, but it's not every day that I pick up a sequel to a game I loved and play it for seven hours straight without complaint.

I took a brief break to eat dinner and watch the Kings (8-1-1 in their last 10) make the Oilers (3-7-0 in their last 10) look like the 1981 Islanders. It's like the Kings decided that the Oilers, being the worst team in the NHL this year, would be a cakewalk, so they didn't need to, you know, show up to play. I gave up after two incredibly frustrating periods and went back under the sea. (Kings eventually lost in a shootout after coming back to tie it while I was fighting with [SPOILER] in [SPOILER] and holy shit [SPOILER] was [SPOILER]!)

"Man, I could keep playing this all night," I thought. "I could take the day off tomorrow, too. I could totally sleep in tomorrow and nobody would care."

"Are you fucking serious?" My dad voice said. "Anne's off work tomorrow. You're planning to clean the house together, get started on the taxes, and work on your PAX East keynote. How the hell are you going to do that if you sleep all day?"

"But … Rapture!" It was the best I could do, on account of I was trying not to let [SPOILER] kill me at the time.

"Hey! I'm talking to you. Pause the game," My dad voice said.

"Sorry."

"You need to act your age, be responsible, and go to sleep. Bioshock isn't going anywhere."

I mumbled something under my breath.

"Excuse me?"

"I said 'okay,'" I lied.

"That's what I thought you said. Now save the game and go to sleep."

"Oh, I have to, uh, get to a save point," I said.

"Nice try, mister, but I've played this too, remember? You can save and exit whenever you want."

I mumbled something different under my breath. Ten minutes later I was in bed.

When I woke up this morning, I tried to lift myself out of bed with my right arm, like I do every day, and I couldn't do it. I had to roll over to my left, all the way across the bed, and hop out on Anne's side (which, to be honest, was kind of cool and ninja in retrospect).

I initially thought that the pain was due to exercising my arms for the first time in years, but the more I thought about it, the more I noticed that the pain was localized just above my right elbow, while my left arm really didn't hurt that much. I replayed yesterday's marathon Bioshock 2 session in my head, and realized that I'd been so into the game, I was fiercely gripping the controller the entire time I played it, engaging all of those muscles that had, just 24 hours earlier, been subjected to ten pounds of weightlifting horror.

Feeling very stupid, and hoping that my dad voice wouldn't find out, I walked into the kitchen and yelped when I tried to make myself a cup of coffee.

"What's wrong?" Anne asked.

I told her.

This is where, were our lives a movie, we'd just go to stock footage: she looks at me for a second, cocks her head to one side, starts to say something, stops, and just slowly shakes her head.

"I know, I know," I said. "Let's not tell my dad voice though, okay?"

"Your what?"

"Uh, never mind … can you help me with this coffee?"

When my friend Sean first told me about Twitter, I just didn't get it. "I already have a blog," I said. "Why would I want to tell anyone where I am or what I'm doing … and why would anyone care?"

Still, I signed up so I could have an account (I have to do a lot of this "defensive registering" on social networks, which is lame, but a fact of life) and that was that.

I don't know when it exactly happened, but I recall Warren Ellis saying that our friend Rich Stevens used Twitter not just to tell people what he was doing, but to say funny things and share whatever thoughts he had, 140 characters at a time. That was, as they say, the lightbulb moment for me. Shortly after that, Sean and I ended up at the wedding of our friends Kathleen and Atom, where we ended up twittering the whole reception, almost in real time, to our mutual amusement. It was just a few months later that Twitter really exploded, and though I'd been using it regularly, I felt compelled to write this.

I guess you could say that I was a reluctant early adopter who was rather quickly transformed into a passionate and enthusiastic early adopter, and I've never looked back, even when the spambots were out of control.

If history takes nothing else away from Twitter, I hope it will be something like this: communication is incredibly powerful. Making it easy for people to communicate, to directly talk to each other can change the world. We saw it in Iran, we see it during natural disasters, and I've seen it directly in my own life, in ways that don't even compare, but are still pretty damn profound for me, personally.

And that's what this post is about today: it's about how Twitter fundamentally changed my world, and how grateful I am for that.

From podcasts and pictures to books and audiobooks, I am compelled to create. I've tried to fight it – it's not the easiest life in the world, especially when you're responsible for a family – but I can't deny that I'm an artist any more than I can deny that I'm a human being. Most artists will tell you quite honestly that they would create their art for free. I know from personal experience that that is absolutely true. I loved writing and performing sketch comedy so much, I did years of shows at ACME for no other return than the joy of making people laugh, and the camaraderie that came with being in an ensemble cast. Ultimately, I had to leave ACME because I couldn't afford to invest the time and energy in the shows, but the years I was there remain some of the happiest and most creatively rewarding of my entire adult life.

While the experience of creating something artistic is rewarding and satisfying all on its own, it's not enough for me. I want to share my work with an audience. I want to affect people emotionally. I want to make people think. I want to entertain, I want to challenge, I want to inspire. I can't do that solely by creating things that are satisfying to me but never find their way to an audience.

Way back in 2002, when I decided to write and self-publish Dancing Barefoot, I knew that the world was changing, because it was easier than ever before for creators to connect and directly interact with our audience. At least a year before The Long Tail was formalized, I was thinking about a similar paradigm shift in publishing: why compete with huge publishing houses and established authors for shelf space, when I had built up a small audience by writing on my blog, who I could reach directly with the Internet? I never would have thought about publishing my writing (back then, I was still determined to just be an actor) if so many blog readers hadn't told me over and over again to do it, so why wouldn't I just go directly to them and give them what they asked for? The Internet made it easy to give anyone who wanted my books an easy way to purchase them … I just had to let those people know how to find them.

Back then, the only way I could do that was by promoting my work on my blog, and hoping that other websites with large audiences, like Fark, boingboing and Slashdot, would be interested enough in what I was doing to link to it. There were no guarantees, because communicating directly with large numbers of people (I once heard that a 3% conversion of audience to customers is really good, and 5% is nearly impossible) wasn't quick or easy. 

This is where Twitter comes in.

My last two books, Sunken Treasure and Memories of the Future, Volume One, sold more copies, faster, than The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I've earned more from Sunken Treasure, which was published in 2009, than I did from Just A Geek, which was published all the way back in 2004. I don't have a scientific way to separate correlation from causation, but I just don't believe it's a coincidence that Happiest Days and Just A Geek were published before I had Twitter to make it easy for me to directly interact with a large number of people, and let them all know that these new books were available.

(It's important to me to make something super duper clear: if you think that simply using Twitter to advertise your stuff is an easy path to financial success, you should probably grab the nearest Pets.com sockpuppet and have a serious heart-to-heart talk.)

When Paul and Storm and Adam Savage and I started talking about w00tstock, our plan was to mention the shows on Twitter, and then approach other blogs and online journals, in the hopes that they'd talk to us about the show, and we'd get some promotion. We never got past mentioning it on Twitter (and our own blogs, which we would have done anyway) because the show in San Francisco sold out so fast – propelled almost entirely by word-of-Twitter - that we added a second show, which also sold out. Using Twitter as our primary means of letting people know – and encouraging them to let their friends know – about w00tstock worked better than any of us ever thought. That's just … that's just incredible.

But Twitter has done more than help me remain a moderately successful independent publisher and independent performing artist. Twitter made it possible for me to reconnect with old friends like LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner, and it made it possible for me to meet and interact with people I'd never come across in my daily routine, like Greg Grunberg.

Which brings me to the next point in this rambling love note to Ev and Biz.

One night a long time ago, I logged into Twitter and saw that Greg Grunberg, an actor who I loved in Alias and Hero
es, had sent me a message, asking if I was interested in working on Heroes. I told him that I was, but there was no way I'd ever get cast on his show; I'd had a couple of chances in auditions, and I'd been so excited that I sucked out loud. If anyone in a position to hire me for Heroes was interested in hiring me, they'd had the opportunity and (wisely) chosen an actor who didn't let his nerdsquee overwhelm his performance in the audition.

As it turned out, I was right … but Greg and I kept talking in DMs, @'s, and via e-mail. In one of those e-mails, he asked if I'd be interested in doing some voiceovers for Star Trek. Over a year later, I could finally reveal the awesome results of that particular conversation. 

Back in the old days, the only way something like that could have possibly happened is if I ran into Greg at a party or some other social situation. This assumes that 1) I would ever be invited to something like that, and 2) I'd have the courage to talk to someone I know from TV. Because I've only been to one Hollywood party that I actually enjoyed – less than 4 months ago – I was never really in a position to meet and interact with people in that kind of social situation. It sounds funny to me to put it this way, but that was really the first time I used a so-called "social network" to, uh, network in any way … and it wasn't even intentional. Twitter has made it possible for me to meet and talk with people, in a professional and purely social capacity, like nothing else that came before it. Maybe this seems self evident to everyone else in the world, but it's pretty incredible to me, and makes me grateful to be, as I so often say, living in the future.

In fact, now that I think about it, my role as Evil Wil Wheaton on The Big Bang Theory came directly out of my mentioning on Twitter how much I loved the show. Steven Molaro, one of the writers on the series, saw my comment, and apparently went directly into Bill Prady's office with the suggestion that they cast me as Sheldon's nemesis. Again, this is another one of those things that simply never would have happened without the immediacy of Twitter.

The last thing I wanted to mention isn't as life-changing or profound as the others, but it's just as cool as anything else in this post, and it happened just last week, when Anne and I got to attend The Pee Wee Herman show.

This was totally unexpected, because I'd forgotten that Paul was on Twitter at all when I said in reply to many queries, "Regarding Star Trek Online, I will borrow a phrase from Pee Wee Herman: I don't have to play it, Dottie. I lived it."

Somehow, Paul saw that and retweeted it. Shortly after that, we exchanged DMs and he invited me to come see his show – which I'd wanted to see since it was announced last summer – as his guest. There is no way I would ever be in a place where I could be overheard by Paul Reubens as I referenced one of his movies, totally unaware that he could hear me. This never would have happened without Twitter.

And now, the obligatory wrap-up.

I've always believed that when you work hard and are kind to people, wonderful things will happen, and some of those wonderful things will happen to you. (It was awesome to hear something similar from Conan O'Brien recently; that made me feel like I've been on the right track.) I've always hoped that the work would just speak for itself, but in all aspects of the entertainment industry, just being good at what you do or just being good to work with aren't enough. Just being an entertaining author or filmmaker or performer isn't enough; you need to get your work in front of an audience, especially if you hope to make a living from your art. There is a whole lot of reality at the root of the old cliché about who you know and networking. I didn't expect it, and it's not even my primary reason for using it, but Twitter has ended up filling that gap in my professional life, and the results have been nothing short of astounding.

So thank you, @Biz and @Ev, for founding (and maintaining, for free) something useful and fun and awesome and life-changing. Thank you to everyone who follows and interacts with me on Twitter. And thank you to Sean Bonner, for introducing me to Twitter in the first place all the way back in 2007, when none of us had any idea about where this whole thing was heading.

I love that this line has been immortalized in T-shirt form, not only because it's one of the funniest in the episode, but when we were rehearsing the scene it comes from, I grew a level in comedy acting:

During one of the run throughs, when Jim did his Klingon bit, I turned to Kevin and asked him, "Did he just say 'revenge is a dish best served cold' in Klingon?" like I was trying to figure out if that's actually what happened, like maybe I misunderstood him. Chuck Lorre told me that it would be funnier if I was more exasperated. "You're just here to play this game, and now some guy is quoting Klingon at you. This happens everywhere you go," he said. 

I sighed dramatically, and said, "Oh, it does." Everyone laughed, hard, and Chuck pointed his finger at me. "Yes. That is exactly the way to play that beat."

When Chuck gave me that note, I grokked how to play Evil Wil Wheaton (The Big Bang Theory version), and I could see the comedy in every beat I played for the rest of the show. I totally grew a level in comedy acting, and learned something about letting go of who I really am, so I could embrace the Delightfully Evil version of myself (who I seriously hope will return in the future, because OMG was it fun to play him.)

You know, it occurs to me that some of you may have questions about what it was like to work on Big Bang Theory. If you leave them in the comments, I'll do my best to answer as many of them as I can today.

Anne and I got to go see The Pee Wee Herman show last night. It was phenomenal, and I realized about 20 minutes into the show that I was sitting on the edge of my seat, grinning and jumping around like a little kid … because that's pretty much how I used to watch Pee Wee's Playhouse.

After the show, we were fortunate enough to listen to Paul Reubens do a Q&A with about 100 people. As much as I loved the show, I would go back every night just to listen to him talk about acting, writing, comedy, and performing.

I asked a question about the scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure that I talked about on RFB #19. I wanted to know if he improvised that, or if it was all in the script, and hoped that he would just talk about it a little bit, because I think that it's one of the most hilarious, perfect, subtle comedic acting performances I've ever seen.

He said that it was all in the script, confirmed that it was tremendously fun to do, and then told us how he did a show at the Groundlings a few years ago where he used that scene as inspiration. The show was a fake actor's showcase, where all the performers did actual scenes, but they did them the way really bad actors would do them. (The thing about showcases is that actors hope casting people to come see and hire them, but they never do. The audience ends up being friends and family – the same ones who have suffered through all the other showcases you've done – and it's all a little bit depressing.) The only catch was that, to be in the show, you couldn't do the same bad acting bit that someone else was doing. This was a tall order, because the were some extraordinarily talented comedic actors in the show. Paul said that he and Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne) did an actual scene from an actual play, and he made the bad acting choice to mouth every single word of dialog she said, just like he did in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. He said that it was the only time in his career that he had to focus and concentrate really hard, so he wouldn't break and end up laughing.

Anne and I also got to meet him very briefly, and I talked with him for about 90 seconds, before I realized we were holding up the other people who wanted to meet him. He was incredibly gracious, humble, and kind. When I thanked him for providing me with a lifetime of joy, he thanked me back, and I could tell that he meant it, and I kind of wanted to hug him.

But all of that isn't the reason I wrote this post. The reason I wrote this post is to share with you a video he mentioned after the show. In a discussion about Jim Nabors and Charo, he told us to go to YouTube when we got home, and search for Charo doing Love Will Keep Us Together. He said it would change our lives.

Well, he was right, and now it is my great honor to change your lives. (You know, paying it forward and all).

Thank you, Pee Wee Herman, for a great show, a lifetime of joy, and changing my life through the magic of Charo.

If you're of a certain age, do you remember the first time you saw AKIRA, or any of the Dirty Pair or original Macross cartoons? Coming from a steady diet of Hannah Barbera cartoons, it was like trading a transistor radio for a high-end stereo or seeing the grand canyon with my own eyes. The cinematic scope of the entire thing just blew me away, and my world was fundamentally changed.

The first time I saw AKIRA, I was 13 or 14, and it was on a fifth generation VHS bootleg, purchased for some ungodly sum at a con. My friends and I watched it over and over again, without the benefit of subtitles or dubbing, developing our own storyline that we would eventually learn had nothing at all in common with what was really going on.

It was a very different world back then if you were into anime or just about anything outside of mainstream culture. The Internet didn't exist at all like it does today (the closest we had were large closed networks like GEnie and Compuserve – this even pre-dates AOL) so we just didn't have tons of cartoons and communities at our fingertips like we do now. We relied on whatever we could find at cons – often at great expense – or what we heard though a grapevine that was nearly as reliable as the one in Johnny Dangerously.

So when I saw a post on Reddit titled "I saw AKIRA for the first time last night. Would someone explain WTF happened at the ending?" this morning, it was with great amusement that I left the following comment:

You damn kids today. When I saw AKIRIA for the first time, it was a fifth generation VHS bootleg, without dubbing or subtitles. We had to make up our own story to go along with the animation, and when we finally saw the movie with dialog we could understand, we discovered that everything we thought was wrong. And we liked it!

I'll tell you what happens at the end of the movie: Tetsuo gets off my goddamned lawn, and then I call Kaneda's parents.

For those of you looking for a serious and more insightful answer, Redditor themanwhowas has got you covered. I highly recommend checking it out.