Author: Wil

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

the spambots on twitter are completely out of control

Posted on 22 August, 2009 By Wil

A few months ago, Twitter changed their @replies tab into something called @mentions. This had a significant impact on a lot of us who use Twitter, especially those of us with a large number of followers.

Originally, I'd only see a message with @wilw in it if that's the way the message began. It worked very well, and there was much rejoicing.

Then someone at Twitter decided to change the way it worked. From that day forward, whenever someone used @[your twitter name] anywhere in the body of the message, it would show up as a "mention" in tab that was until-recently-known as replies.

I know a lot of other Twitter users with lots of followers didn't like the change, because for many of them it turned an already-busy replies tab into an avalanche of mentions that was nearly-impossible to keep up with. I can only speak for myself, but I probably only see 10% of the actual @wilw messages that are sent now, because there are so many of them, I just can't keep up.

I have always said that Twitter is a free service, and it's pretty unseemly for us to complain about it because we're not paying for it, but I've also begged Twitter to let me give them money in exchange for a few features, or even just because I love the service so much. So far, my pleas have fallen on deaf ears (or maybe they're so buried in mentions that they never see them.)

Anyway, about a month or five weeks ago, I started to notice a severe spambot problem on Twitter. Obviously, some mother fucker douchebag pile of shit figured out a way to write a script that exploits weaknesses in the signup process, and every Friday (maybe to hide among the higher-volume "follow Friday" Tweets) my @mentions tab is flooded with these goddamn spam bots.

For example, here's a screenshot of my @mentions, taken just a few minutes ago:

I hope that Twitter is taking proactive steps to do something about this, but I don't see any mention of it on their official blog or status page. I hope that they're not just ignoring it, because it's not like there's a whole lot of random crap that needs to be sorted out here: The bots all post from API, they all use identical phrasing, and there is certainly enough of a pattern to the abuse that someone at Twitter HQ should be able to automate blocking them. I've reported dozens of them to @spam, but it doesn't seem to be having an effect.

It's gotten so frustrating that I'm not using Twitter until the problem is resolved*. I genuinely enjoy the interaction I get to have with other people via @messages (I often call Twitter "time-shifted, asynchronous instant messaging") and I since this started yesterday, it's just too much work – and too infuriating – to dig through all the goddamn spammer bullshit to find the legitimate messages.

I've used nest.unclutterer, but the spambots are smart enough not to follow too many accounts. I've tried to use Twitblock, but it chokes before it can finish (that looks like it's going to be an incredibly useful app, once it's out of alpha and beta and gets to lambda lambda lambda.)

I know other high-profile Twitter users have been targeted by these scripts, and I know that a lot of them are expressing similar frustrations. I don't know if they use Twitter the same way I do, but for those who use it as an actual communication tool, and not just a broadcasting platform, it's got to be just as annoying as it is for me.

I love Twitter, and I am incredibly grateful for how it's helped me reach out to and interact with hundreds of thousands of new people. I just hope that someone at Twitter is listening, and is trying to do something about a spam and abuse problem that is threatening to overwhelm an otherwise-awesome service.

* I want need to clarify: THIS IS NOT A BOYCOTT, and I wish people would stop suggesting that it is. This isn't some kind of stupid threat, or the suggestion that I'm taking my football and going home. It's more like deciding not to go to a place you've always loved until the owners clean it up, because it's gotten so filthy you can't stand it.

i never did national network tv interviews later on in life like the ones i did when i was twelve

Posted on 20 August, 2009 By Wil

When we filmed Stand By Me, none of us knew it was going to be the huge success that it became. None of us expected it to be part of that 50s revival that was so much fun in the mid-80s, and none of us knew that it would essentially launch all of our acting careers.

But I think that, if you asked any of us – actors or crew – who worked on the film, we'd all say that we knew we were working on something special, something that was definitely not going to suck, something that we could be proud of. The fact that audiences agreed with us was pretty awesome.

I don't know about the other guys, but I was totally unprepared for Stand By Me's success and the way it shoved a lot of us into the center of the spotlight. Maybe Corey knew what to expect, because he'd already been in a ton of popular movies (we all saw Goonies together while we were on location in Oregon) but I certainly didn't know what to do when I came home from a family vacation and saw several boxes on my porch, filled with fan mail.

You know, I haven't thought about this in two decades, but I just got this almost-photographic memory of sitting on my parents couch long after the rest of the family had gone to sleep, listening to Led Zeppelin IV on my dad's huge stereo (with the multi-band graphic equalizer component attached) on a very hot night in late August of 1986, trying to read and answer all of that fan mail by myself. I recall feeling embarrassed by it all, a little weirded out, but also a little excited. I remember thinking that maybe, in those boxes, was a letter from a girl who might want to go to the movies with me.

As I said, I was totally unprepared for the whole thing.

After about a year of being part of that whole Teen Beat crowd, I was totally over it, I thought it was stupid and fake, and really wanted to just get back to being an actor and having a normal life … but for the first few months, I will admit that it was pretty cool and a lot of fun to travel around the country for interviews on TV shows, like Good Morning America.

I forget what day this picture was taken, but it was 1986, right after Stand By Me had been released. There we are, sitting on chairs in the green room, waiting to go be interviewed by (I think) Ron Reagan, Jr. It was my first trip to New York, and I remember how excited I was to go to that huge, almost mythical city, see Times Square, ride the subway, visit the Statue of Liberty, and hang out with Jerry in his home town.

This photo captures our personalities perfectly: River and Corey are focused and serious (Corey is even wearing a tie and drinking coffee!) I am listening to the same person they are, but I'm not even trying to contain how excited I am to be going on a television show that I had been watching with my Aunt Val since I could remember, in front of the whole country, no less.

My favorite part of this picture, though, is Jerry. It's almost like he caught my mom or dad taking this picture of us, and decided to strike a pose, just to be silly. I just love that he isn't taking the thing too seriously, and that he's just having fun and enjoying the whole thing. As I got older and began to feel like the teen magazine publicity stuff was taking over my life, it stopped being fun, and it started to feel like a chore. I always envied that Jerry seemed to take it all in stride, keep it in perspective, and just have fun with it. I heard him on the Adam Carolla podcast about a week or so ago, and he hadn't changed a bit: still silly, still cracking me up, still keeping everything in perspective.

I've always said that Stand By Me was so successful because Rob cast four young actors who were so much like their characters, but I think it's spooky how the four of us ended up being so much like our characters: River died too young, Corey struggled like crazy to get his personal demons under control, Jerry found success and happiness, and I'm a writer.

…I have had a fucking weird life, man.

oh yeah, this is totally +5 to sexterity

Posted on 18 August, 2009 By Wil

Just in case you haven't seen it …

Congratulations to Felicia, the cast of The Guild, and everyone else involved in the creation and production of the Do You Want To Date My Avatar video. Ever since I saw a rough cut of it while we were shooting season three, I knew it was going to be a huge success (I made a note there, but I seem to have misplaced it. Dang.) so it's tremendously exciting for me to watch it take off like it has.

If you want to have a copy of it for yourself, and you want to support everyone who makes The Guild possible, you can buy the single at AmazonMP3 for 99 cents
and it's also available from .

Season 3 of The Guild premieres on XBox Live on August 25, and it hits MSN/Zune on September 1.

in which progress is made

Posted on 13 August, 2009 By Wil

A few months ago, while playing Left 4 Dead, I found myself cowering in a closet, absolutely terrified to go back out and face the horde. I knew that I had to move so the game would continue, but I just didn't want to go out and take my chances. I didn't know at the time that L4D has this sinister AI called The Director, which keeps the game constantly changing depending on what the player does, adjusting things to keep the game fun. For example, if you're cowering in a closet and think you're safe there, The Director will send a bunch of the Infected to claw down the door and give you a friendly little nudge so you'll keep going.

Eventually, I was dragged out of the closet by a Smoker, saved by Francis, and went on to finish the level, heart pounding and my hands trembling just a little bit. It was awesome.

The next morning, while I ate breakfast, I was thinking about what it would be like if that was real. What would it be like if you really couldn't just cross the street any more, because there were zombies everywhere who wanted to kill you? What would it be like if you knew that, whatever you did, wherever you went, there would always be more zombies coming at you, night and day, until you died? In zombie stories, the characters are always heroic and noble (with rare exception, and even then we know those characters are just there so they can get their comeuppance) so I wondered what it would be like to write a story where the main character looks around and decides that sooner or later the zombies are coming in, the survivors are going out, and either way, they're totally fucked.

I wrote the whole story, doing my very best to ignore the various voices of doubt and such that keep coming back (yes, like zombies) no matter how many times I think I've killed them. It was really fun to write. I knew more or less what I wanted to do with it, and I sort of knew who the characters were, but I didn't stop myself from making things up as I went along, if something caught my eye and seemed worth exploring.

Yesterday, I finished the major rewrites, and though it still needs some editorial polish and Andrew's Red Pen Of Doom, I'm anxious to publish it with some other shorts I've worked on recently.

announcing THE AWESOME HOUR!!1

Posted on 12 August, 2009 By Wil

The schedule for PAX 09 has been posted, and I am on it.

BEHOLD:

Wil Wheaton first came to PAX in 2007, when he gave the keynote address that your parents won't stop making you listen to in the car. In 2008, he returned for a panel that asked and answered the burning question, "Can Wil Wheaton really be a panel all by himself?" This year, Commodore Wil Wheaton welcomes you aboard the USS AWESOME for 60 minutes of story-telling, lingerie-dodging, mirth-making, myth-making, iconoclasting, and the obligatory burning-questioning … ing.

I'll be in The Serpent Theatre from 2:30-3:30 on Sunday at PAX. I think it would be kind of awesome if we did a massive How We Roll photo as soon as the panel ended, too, but we'll talk about that as we get closer to PAX.

Got PAX questions? Post them in comments and I'll do my best to answer them.