Category: blog

The beer I helped design with Drew Curtis and Stone Brewing Company is officially available. It’s called the Farking Wheaton W00tstout, and it’s a massive 13%ABV Imperial Russian Stout made with pecans and quarter-aged in bourbon barrels. I’ve had a taste, and I love it. Best of all? It’s designed to age for a decade or more, so get some, cellar it, and open on every few months to see how it develops.

As I write this, there’s about 25 hours left on the current Humble eBook Bundle. You can pay whatever you want and get a ton of great books. If you pay above the average (which is $10.41 right now) then you also get The Last Unicorn and Just A Geek. Remember that you get to decide where your money goes, to charity, to authors, to the Humble devs, or some combination of the three.

We’re just about 2 days away from w00tstock 5.0! We’re nearly sold out, but there are a few tickets left. I can’t tell you who the surprise guests are, because duh, surprise, but I strongly encourage you to get to the show early so you don’t miss the beginning.

I am still hoping that I can play a ukulele cover of a popular tune the young people will enjoy, but I’m struggling to get to that point where I feel like I can perform in public, so it may have to wait until the Fall Wil Wheaton vs. Paul and Storm tour, coming soon to a city near you if you live in the Northeast or Texas.

A few months ago, Hank Green invited me to join DFTBA Records to sell some cool things like posters and T-shirts. We announced it today with this really awesome poster, among other things:

I wrote this thing on my Tumblr yesterday. I’m putting it here for reasons:

“Don’t let yourself get caught up in popularity contests. When you care about winning a popularity contest, or maintaining some kind of popular status, you make pleasing other people more important than being true to yourself.

One of the keys to happiness is not having a fuck to give about popularity contests or worry about what THEY will think. THEY don’t know a goddamn thing, THEY don’t care about who you are when you wake up terrified in the middle of the night. THEY aren’t worth your time and energy, so don’t put your sense of self worth and control of your happiness into their hands

Be kind. Be honest. Work hard. Speak up. Be honorable. Be silly. Be you.”

Whenever someone tells me they’re not going to [read | follow | subscribe | whatever] because I’m not dancing precisely the way they want me to, as if I should listen to their threat and immediately modulate who I am to please them, I usually think, “oh how adorable that you think I have a fuck to give for someone who thinks being popular is so important to me that I’ll do whatever it takes to keep their (conditional) approval”. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I thought I’d take a stab at putting those thoughts into something affirmative that I wish someone had said to me when I was younger, and worried all the time about being popular and cool.

I may work on this a little bit, and see where it leads, but this is off the top of my head in about five minutes.

EDIT: By popular demand from educators, here’s a non-swearified version of the above. You have my permission to use it as you see fit, and my thanks for being teachers.

“Don’t let yourself get caught up in popularity contests. When you care
about winning a popularity contest, or maintaining some kind of popular
status, you make pleasing other people more important than being true to
yourself.

“One of the keys to happiness is not caring about popularity contests, or
worrying about what THEY will think. THEY don’t know anything about who
you are inside, THEY don’t care about who you are when you wake up
terrified in the middle of the night, or struggle just to get to the end
of the day. THEY aren’t worth your time and energy, so don’t put your
sense of self worth and control of your happiness into their hands.

“Be kind. Be honest. Work hard. Speak up. Be honorable. Be silly. Be you.”

Finally, I am struggling with massive anxiety about Comicon, because I have such a huge pile of things to prepare for, and not enough time to prepare them. If you wanted to see me do some of the things, here’s my schedule:

Wednesday – HopCon at Stone’s Liberty Station

Thursday – w00tstock at the Balboa Theatre

Friday – Gaming in Geek & Sundry land (Star Trek Catan tourney, among other things) from about 11am until 3:30pmish.

Moderating the Falling Skies panel at Comicon from 4:30-6:30.

Moderating The Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman Panel with Adam and Jamie from 7:30-8:30pm.

Saturday: I’ll be part of the Geek & Sundry panel at Comicon at 11am.

Sunday: I’ll be back in my house sleeping and decompressing.

I’m not doing any photo or autograph things, but if you see me feel free to give me a Sci-Five or holler “WHEEEEAAATTTOOONNN!!”, because that always makes me giggle.

Oh, one last thing I forgot: I’m in a video with Alan Tudyk that we made for NASA, which explains how gravity holds things in orbit … explained by a brain parasite living inside an astronomer. It’s really cute and clever, and full of delicious SCIENCE!

For those of you who don’t know who Sparks McGee is … first, shame on you. Second, here’s the canonical Tumblr and the post that started the whole thing.

Now, here is the trailer for Sparks McGee: Into Darkness that I didn’t know about until now, three months after it was given to the world as a GIFT, YOU BASTARDS. IT WAS A GIFT TO HUMANITY.

And I didn’t know about it, which is my greatest failing.

You guys, this is one of the greatest examples of Get Excited And Make Something that I’ve seen in a long time, and I think you should make your own Sparks McGee thing RIGHT NOW.

So last night, I had nothing but nightmares from the instant I fell asleep. I woke up five or six times that I remember, each time unable to remember the dream but clearly able to remember the terror and dread.

I have been so unsettled and upset since I woke up, and I can’t even remember the clear details of the dreams so I can at least try to process them and get on with my life. I’ve had a ton of generalized anxiety all day, so I went to NAMI to do some research and see if there’s something I can do to help myself. It looks like it’s just my brain being a dick (exhaustion from travel, jet lag, and missing my regular medication time because of all the timezones I’ve been in recently will contribute to that) and it’ll get steadily better as the day goes on.

And yet, I feel like this right now:

• ?: KNOCK KNOCK.
• Me: Who’s there?
• ?: ANXIETY.
• Me: Anxiety who?
• Anxiety: BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT’S WHO. LOL.

Gallows humor, y’all.

It’s especially frustrating to know that it’s just a thing I kind of need to wait out (everyone’s anxiety is different, but this is how my particular version of it works), but it’s also incredibly reassuring to know that I just have to wait it out while my brain gets back into normal balance … and now I have a (mostly) guilt-free excuse to watch The Avengers when I should be doing other things. The thing is, I wouldn’t know that it’s going to get better if I hadn’t spent lots of time talking with my doctor and other humans who suffer from depression and anxiety. I wouldn’t know how or why it happens to me without warning if I hadn’t gotten professional help, and I wouldn’t know how to handle it and make sure that I don’t let it completely take over my life.

So because I was visiting NAMI this morning, I wrote about it on my Tumblr. I’m reprinting what I wrote there because it’s important to me that as many people as possible see this: You are not alone in the fight against mental illness.

NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) is an organization that I am proud to support. NAMI helps people with mental illness get the treatment they need so they can get their lives back.

One of their major campaigns is to remind people YOU ARE NOT ALONE in the fight against mental illnesses like Depression. The link above goes to a webpage full of stories (likely trigger warnings, gang) from people who have battled Depression and are currently winning the fight.

Please know this: if you have Depression, you do not have to suffer. There is help available, including talking therapy and safe, effective medications to help balance the chemicals in your brain so you can feel normal again. To borrow a phrase from my friend Jenny Lawson: Since I got treatment for my particular flavour of mental illness, I may have Depression, but Depression doesn’t have me.

Here’s my blog on my personal battle with Depression, if you’d like to get a firsthand account of my experience with mental illness.

Please, if you’re suffering, know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE and you don’t have to suffer. You can get help. Please do.

A magazine I don’t have much respect for contacted my manager, and said it was doing a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the death of River Phoenix. Would I be willing to talk to their reporter?

I declined, because I don’t trust them to be respectful and accurate, but since the request came in a few days ago, I have been thinking about River a lot.

Yesterday, I was looking though my office bookshelves, and I came across some teen magazines I have from the 80s, when I was on their covers. I think they came out of Wilhouse 13 when I cleaned up the garage, or maybe my mom gave them to me when my parents moved out of their house a few months ago.

Anyway, on the cover of a magazine from 1988, there’s a picture of River Phoenix, and it says, “Find out what River will be like in 10 years!” I kept looking at it, past the pictures of me and Sean Astin and Kirk Cameron and Alyssa Milano and the other kids who were popular with teen girls in those days, and something about that was kicking me in the stomach, making me feel sad. I couldn’t figure out why, until I did some maths and realized that River died five years later, in 1993.

We’ll never find out what he would have been like in 1998, because he didn’t make it to 1998. Just thinking about that made me incredibly sad.

I said I Twitter that I don’t think of him often, but when I do, I miss him, and hope that we would be close if her were alive today, because he was good people. I don’t know what kind of 43 year-old he would be, if we’d have anything in common, or if we would be friends. Hell, we hadn’t been close for a few years when he died, mostly because our lifestyles were incompatible and I wasn’t especially interested in his recreational activities of choice.

But he was, in his heart, a kind and loving and caring person. He loved his family more than anyone I can think of, and he did everything for them, maybe — I think — to his own detriment at times.

But he was good. River was good, and he had so much talent within him to share with the world, so many characters to play, songs to sing, and stories to tell … and we’ll never get to experience any of them. That makes me sad.

Like I said, I don’t know if we’d be close, or if we’d have anything at all in common, but when I think of him, I remember the 16 year-old who I looked up to, who taught me chords on his guitar and played video games with me while we listened to music on a tiny mid-80s boom box in Oregon.

I miss him, or at least the memory I have of him. He was good people, and he left us far too soon.