I present this incredibly awesome song by my friend Chris Hardwick:
Author: Wil
Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.
From the Vault: the safety dance
Last night, Nolan went through my iTunes library so he could put some of my awesome music on his iPod. He’s been after me for months to give him Radiohead, The Beatles, Tool, Decemberists, and a lot of my 80s stuff.
While he looked, the following exchange occurred:
Nolan: Why do you have The Safety Dance in your iTunes library? Me: So I can dance, if I want to. Duh. Nolan: You are so weird.
He ended up taking a little over 5 GB of my music, and I enacted a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about Men Without Hats. Shortly after he went to bed, I was washing dishes, and remembered this old blog post from 2003:
Anne and I were listening to Fred while we were driving home from Burbank the other day. That stupid “Safety Dance” song came on, and I said to her, “This is the weirdest song, ever.”
“Yeah, who thought this was a good idea?” she said.
“I mean, think about all the steps that went into this: someone wrote down all these words, then composed music, then produced the whole thing . . . and at every step of the way, they believed that this was a song worth releasing.” I said.
“Hey, Neil,” she said, in a really bad British accent, “Let’s make a song about the Safety Dance!”
“Oh, that’s brilliant!” I said, in my own bad accent, “We’ll have them all hoppin’ and dancin’ and –“
I started to giggle, and was unable to continue.
“You can dance! You can dance! Everybody look at your hands!” I sang, involuntarily.
CLAP! CLAP! went Anne’s hands.
“You can dance! You can dance! Everybody’s taking the chaaaaa-HAAAAA-nnnncccceeeeee . . . ” I continued.
“With the SAFETY DANCE!” We shouted out in unison.
“We are such dorks,” Anne said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
We sang the remainder of the song with extreme gusto.
I should also point out that when we got home, Ryan told us that he wants to buy “Thriller.”
I think there’s something in the water here.
2003 seems like an eternity ago. I guess in some ways, it was, wasn’t it?
stupid murphy’s law can bite me.
My plans to spend last night with the Basic D&D Dungeon Master's Booklet were derailed when I got a late-afternoon phone call from my manager.
"You have a pilot audition tomorrow," he said. "I'm sending you all the material right now."
He described the show to me; it sounds very cool. He described the character to me; it became apparent that this is a guy I could easily bring to life.
"This is awesome," I said. "I'll let you know how it goes."
I spent the evening preparing the audition, and finally went to sleep when I felt like I had a good handle on the material. I woke up this morning feeling excited, and ready to go nail this.
I went over the material* again, put on a tie (the character's a doctor) and grabbed my wallet, keys, iPod and phone. As I jammed all that stuff into my pocket, I heard my phone make the "hey, guess what? My battery is about to die" noise.
"Crap," I said to Anne, "my phone is going to die."
"Why don't you just take it with you and leave it off? You can turn it on in case there's an emergency."
"Nah," I said, "I'll just leave it here and charge it while I'm gone. I hardly ever need it, anyway."
You know what comes next, right?
This is the part where, if this were a movie, we would cut to me, sitting in traffic on the freeway. I'm not moving. There is a shot through my windshield of a bunch of emergency vehicles about a mile ahead of me, and a matching shot of me looking concerned. The next several shots would cut between me and the clock in my car, as it gets closer and closer to my audition time, and then passes it. Repeated over this, my voice says, "I hardly ever need it, anyway … anyway … anyway … now batting … Manny Mota … Mota … Mota …" Finally, about 30 minutes after I'm supposed to be in Hollywood, and still at least 45 minutes away, I creep past the crash, hope that nobody was hurt, and wonder what the hell I'm going to do now. You can't just show up for an audition 90 minutes late without calling.
"Well, fuck." I said. I got off the freeway, turned around, and went home.
It totally sucks that this is the first pilot audition I've had in over a year, and everything that could have gone wrong on the way did.
This show looks great, and the character is absolutely one I can see myself playing for five years or more. I'm hopeful that they're seeing people late into the afternoon or early
evening today, or that there's another session I can go to. This time, I'll bring my cell phone with me, just in case.
Edited to add: Well, this worked out okay after all. I'm going back at noon tomorrow. Yay!
*The material was wonderful, and showed many different sides of this character. This seems like a no-brainer, but you'd be shocked to learn how many auditions feature scenes that tell us nothing about the character, and are little more than that horrible exposition all actors hate to say.
this isn’t a book; it’s a time machine
This is where it all began for me: the D&D Basic Rules Set. When I opened this book in 1983, I had no idea that it would change my life. Back then, if you told 11 year-old me that I’d be 36 and wiping tears from my face because reading it brought back so many joyful memories, he would have called you one of the names the cool kids called him for playing it. (Don’t judge him too harshly; he’s only 11.)
My original D&D Basic set was a garage sale casualty, but the book in this picture is a first printing that I bought at a game store about ten years ago. It’s perfect in every way, except for a missing character sheet in the middle, which I printed from the PDF copy I bought from Paizo last year.
The Keep on the Borderlands module beneath it belonged to someone named Randy Richards, who wrote his name and phone number (as we so often did in those days) on the cover. I don’t know who Randy Richards is, if he cares, or if he’ll even read this, but if he does, I want him to know: your book is in very good hands, Randy, and its current owner loves it as much as anyone could.
I’ve been on a real D&D kick lately (blame the Penny Arcade podcast, and how much I love 4e) but I hadn’t actually gone back to the beginning and read the Basic Rules for a very, very long time. So late last night, after my family went to sleep, instead of watching TV or reading blogs, I went to my bookshelf and grabbed the Player’s Manual you see in this picture. I read it cover-to-cover for the first time in over 20 years, and played the solo adventure, which was the very first dungeon I ever visited. I named my fighter Thorin, just like I did when I was a kid. I made a map on graph paper, rolled dice on the floor, and felt pure joy wash over me. I scared off a Giant Rat and killed the remaining two before I failed – like I did when I was 11 – to solve the riddle of O-T-T-F-F-S-S, losing all my treasure. I tried to talk to the Goblins … before I killed them and took their treasure: 100 sp and 50 gp. I battled the Rust Monster, who was just as tough and unreasonable an opponent for a first level fighter as I remember. Thorin eventually managed to defeat it with some … creative … trips back to town to replace his armor and weapons, just like he did a quarter century ago. Luckily for him, the Rust Monster didn’t heal between battles … just like the last time he faced it. I decided to leave the skeletons for another time, and walked back to town with my 650 gp and 100 sp. When I calculated my XP, I had earned 1084 … not too shabby. I closed up my book, and went to sleep happy.
When I was a kid, the D&D Basic Rules Set was never just a game to me; it was my portal into a magical, wonderful world that I still love. Now that I’m an adult, it isn’t just a couple of books to me; it’s a time machine.
The world I live in is filled with uncertainty and occasionally-overwhelming responsibility, but for an hour or so last night, I was 11 years-old again, and I went back to a world where the biggest problem I faced was trying to save up for a Millennium Falcon. When I read “You decide to attack the goblins before they can get help…” I could hear my Aunt Val tell me “That’s a game that I hear lots of kids like to play, Willow. It’s dragons and wizards and those things you liked from The Hobbit. The back says you use your imagination, and I know what a great imagination you have.” I could feel the weight of my Red Box, which I carried with me pretty much everywhere I went, and how huge the thing felt in my tiny arms. I could feel it get heavier as I added modules and characters, and my own dungeons, drawn on graph paper. I could hear the snap of the thick green rubber band I eventually had to wrap around it, and I could see the yellowing scotch tape I added to the corners.
I enjoyed it so much, I’m going to reread the Dungeon Master’s Rulebook next, and run the Group Game adventure it contains, “for use by a beginning Dungeon Master.” Then, it’s time to go back to the Keep on the Borderlands, using just the Basic Rules, where Magic-users can’t wear armor, Fighters have 8 HP, Dwarf and Elf are classes, and everyone dies at least once before finally taking a character to second level, because that’s where it all started for me, and sometimes you just have to go back to your roots.
Geek in Review: The Birth of an Avenger
This month's Geek in Review is about creating Aeofel Elhromanë, the Eladrin Avenger I played for the most recent Penny Arcade D&D podcast.
While all D&D characters begin as a collection of numbers (on paper, my Eladrin Avenger is 14,12,14,14,16,12) those numbers don’t mean anything without a story to bring them to life. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, maybe it’s because I have an imagination that I’ve always had to actively keep under control, but as long as I’ve been gaming, creating backstories for my characters has been as much fun – in some cases, more fun – than actually plunging them into a dungeon.
Though Wizards provides a spiffy character creation tool for 4E players, the Avenger class comes from the unreleased Player's Handbook 2, so those tools weren't available to me when I was bringing him to life. Undeterred, I designed and created Aeofel the way I've been doing it since I opened up my red box basic D&D set in 1983: I sat on the floor with some dice, some notebook paper, a bunch of open books, and – most important of all – my imagination.
I could have simply minmaxed my character, but that's just not how I roll. I wanted Aeofel to be more than a collection of numbers on a sheet of paper. Even though I knew we were playing a dungeon crawl with minimal roleplaying, I wanted him to be an actual person, because, as the first line of the basic set (my introduction to D&D) says, "This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine."
I let my imagination run wild, and as I got to know Aeofel, he told me a story that was much longer than the one of two paragraphs I'd intended to write…
Two days’ journey from Mithrendain, beneath a thick canopy of leaves in the Forest of Astranz, there is a school, where, for countless human centuries, Eladrin have lived and trained, under Melora’s watchful eye.
Aeofel Elhromanë lived in this school for his entire life, devoting each of his 142 years to the service of Melora. He trained beside monks and clerics, and though he never saw battle firsthand, many of his instructors were veterans of the war with the Drow. He never knew his parents, but his fellow students were his House.
Eight nights ago, during the Court of Stars, the school was attacked by Goblin and Kobold raiders, lead by a human warlord. The school’s alarm, which had been silent for a generation, shook Aeofel and his brothers from their daily trance, and they ran from their quarters, ready for battle.
Aeofel dashed across the training grounds, ready to push the invaders back, but all he found was a trail of bodies –– attacker and defender alike –– from the school’s entrance to its shrine. Near the gate, a few warlords skirmished with kobolds, and wild magic crackled in the field beyond, but the attackers had fled the grounds.
His master, the great Avenger Immafen, stood beside the shrine’s entrance. His sword was slick with Goblin’s blood, and he breathed heavily.
“Master,” Aeofel said, “what has happened? Why were we attacked?”
If you're interested, you can read the rest of the story, as well as some more insight into Aeofel's design, in The Birth of an Avenger at the SG Newswire.
Please note that, while the content of my column is SFW, the rest of the site is NSFW, so you should access it accordingly, and don't bitch me out if you get in trouble.