50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
My friend Andrew (who you’ve seen on the Chez Geek episode of Tabletop), sent me this gif with the note: “our network was running very slowly and Tabletop froze on an especially imposing face. Sam, our production manager, made it even worse. Enjoy.”
See you in your nightmares.
We wrapped production on season two of Tabletop on Tuesday night. When I got home from the set, Anne asked me how I was feeling.
“Do you feel sad that it’s over, or relieved that you get to catch your breath?”
I grabbed a glass out of the kitchen and walked across our living room.
“I’m tired, so I’m looking forward to a couple days of being a fat piece of shit on the couch, but I’m going to miss playing games all day for my job.”
I poured an Arrogant Bastard Ale out of my kegerator — a gift to myself — that’s been in the living room since it arrived a little over a month ago.
“That makes sense,” Anne said.
“Yeah, and I’m really proud of what we did this season, so I feel sort of sad to say goodbye to my crew for another year.”
I filled my glass and took a sip. “Ahhh that’s good beer.”
“This thing is the Leg Lamp,” she said, pointing to my kegerator.
“You mean it’s a thing of indescribable beauty that should be in the front window?”
“No, I mean that it’s a thing that really needs to be in your office and not the living room.”
I took a drink of my beer. “But if it was in my office, we’d have to walk all the way down the hall to get beer.”
She hesitated and I pounced. “See? That’s science. I win.”
I sat on the couch and she looked at me. “I’m going to move it as soon as I clean up the disaster that is where my office used to be*. Thank you for being patient.” I hoped she would not use up all the glue on purpose, as we settled down to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones.
Today, I’m starting to get back to normal. I’ve slept a lot the last two nights, so I only feel a little fuzzy in my brain. Also today, the newest episode of Tabletop was released! It’s Smash Up, with Rich Sommer, Cara Santa Maria, and Jen Timms.
Watching this today, I am once again blown away by the magnificent work of our editors. This game has a lot going on, and they worked very hard to make it understandable and entertaining. Tabletop is a show that is made in editing, and I realized while watching Smash Up today that the last five days of production, while very long and intense, represent only the beginning of the process that makes Tabletop possible. So, Yasu and Steve, if you’re reading this: thank you for your incredible work. I’m grateful to have you on my team.
*During production, my office becomes a huge pile of boxes and games and all kinds of stuff that just gets set aside until production wraps. It’s currently the worst it’s ever been, because in addition to the usual cruft from production, there are several boxes of things I brought home from conventions last month, as well as a whole lot of homebrew that’s bottle conditioning. It’s a hot mess.
This year’s PHXCC had everything from a brand new Awesome Hour to shenanigans with John Barrowman to a convention-center-clearing fire alarm.
It was certainly memorable, and a whole lot of fun for me and Anne.
We got to Phoenix Thursday evening, and prowled the con floor during preview night. I picked up some really great art and some Team Hawkeye stuff (Hawkguy is my favourite comic this year), and caught up with some friends who I only see at cons, but never have time to talk to when we’re there.
Friday was pretty quiet during the day, giving me tons of time to vist with the people who came to meet me and get my autograph on stuff. I never felt rushed, which made me really happy. The photo-ops at Phoenix CC were really brilliantly run, too. I never felt like a single person was rushed, I got to talk to everyone, I had all sorts of fun posing for silly pictures, and I think everyone left happy.
Friday night, I did my awesome hour, which ended up being an awesome hour and twenty minutes, almost 40 minutes of which was me doing a stand up set I’ve been working on since January. It ended up being way more dirty than I intended, but the audience (just over 1100 people!) didn’t seem to mind, and actually seemed to find it pretty funny. It was tremendously fun for me, and allowed me to introduce the concept of the cum-slick Zamboni to our mutual horror and delight.
Uh, you should probably not read the end of that previous paragraph if you’re easily offended.
Saturday was incredibly busy from the moment we walked into the convention center until we left about 9 hours later. The cosplay at the show was just amazing, as you’ll see in the photos I’m attaching at the end of this post.
Sunday was … eventful. After a morning of meeting people, signing things, an incredibly fun panel with John Scalzi that I hope ends up online, and picking up the last few purchases I wanted from the vendors, I was in my final photo-op of the convention, when the fire alarm went off.
Fire alarms go off at cons all the time (the fire alarm in my hotel went off on Saturday night, because teenagers think that sort of thing is awesome and hilarious. Memo to teenagers: you are wrong. It is not either of those things. It is childish and annoying and can end up actually hurting people if there’s a panic. Also, walking up 14 flights of stairs because the elevators were shut off makes me want to kick you in the face nine times) so I looked up, when “huh, some jackass pulled the fire alarm,” and prepared to keep taking pictures. But that’s when the staff of the con came into the photo area and made it clear that this wasn’t a joke, it was a real thing, and everyone needed to get out of the building. Right now.
Yeah. 40,000 people needed to get out of the building. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a lot, as it turns out … but nothing did. It further turns out that nerds are great at following directions, not panicking, and leaving the safe confines of our preferred gathering — the convention — for the deadly exposure of the outdoors and our natural enemy, the Sun.
We were outside for about 15 minutes before the fire department sounded the all clear and let us all back inside. I wasn’t ever able to get a completely official report, but I understand that there was smoke in a meeting room that had nothing to do with our convention.
I will share one observation: I’m 40, and I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing my whole life. Fire alarms go off, and most of the time it’s a false alarm. No big deal. But when I looked around at the younger people, the teenagers and the twentysomethings, I saw a real fear in their eyes as they waited to find out what was going on. I heard lots of them talking about the bombing in Boston, and how they were genuinely afraid that there was some kind of bomb or something inside the building. It says something about the different worlds we’ve grown up in, that my first reaction was “not this again” and theirs was “oh shit I hope it’s not a bomb.”
After the all-clear was given, we moved back into the building, and I went back to resume photos. It took a bit of time, but the attendees came back in, and I stayed for about another hour to get as many photos taken for as many people as possible, before I had to go to the airport.
A funny thing happened at Phoenix Comicon this year: I never got exhausted. I never felt completely drained or burned out. Sure, I got tired (it’s a lot of work and requires a lot of emotional energy), but I never felt … used up. I also felt this way leaving Ottawa Comicon, and I’m hoping to get a hat trick at Denver Comicon this weekend, because a week from today I start production on season 2.5 of Tabletop and it would be great to go into that energized, instead of wiped out.
I’ll explore why I’m feeling this way instead of the other way on a future episode of Radio Free Burrito. Now, it’s time for pictures from the convention, which I’m putting behind a jump, because there are a lot of them:
So John Barrowman is really, really awesome. Anne and I got to spend a bit of time with him in Phoenix at the comic con, and he was simply wonderful.
At one point, Anne showed him the picture of her and me with Nathan Fillion, and told him the story from Ottawa Comic Con.
“We should do that, only I’ll hold you and Anne will look sad,” John said.
I made a noise like a tween meeting Bieber, and then this happened:
Yep. That happened. For real.
I’m stealing this idea from my friend Warren, who does it better than I do.
My name is Wil Wheaton. I’m an actor, writer, champion of geek culture, and a guy who makes things on the Internet. This is my blog, but …
Thanks for stopping by.
(Awesomely disturbing image courtesy of Jack Crowder.)