The Big Plan for this weekend was to go up North with Anne and the kids, because it’s their Spring Break, starting today.
So we get the *cough* rental minivan *cough* loaded up, and ready to go, and I get a call from my manager: I have two auditions on Monday, both pilots, and I have an audition on Tuesday, for an Indie. I’m also supposed to test for at least one, possibly two pilots on Wednesday.
So all of my stuff comes out of the rental beast, and I go from spending the weekend with my family to spending it alone, preparing for these three auditions, as well as writing an episode of Arena, which is due on Friday.
Holy crap, how things can change in an instant.
It’s not a bad thing, missing the vacation I mean, because I continue to make it down to the last handful of actors on all my auditions, (except for the call I had last week, where I got to spend all of 25 minutes with the material, and the producers were taking calls on their cell phones and leaving the effing room while I was doing my audition) and the more I have the better my odds are…but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss them.
It’s weird to be in my empty house, alone, without even Ferris to keep me company.
It’s just me and the cats, just like the old bachelor days…except I am under pain of death to “keep the $!%$#ing house clean” from my old lady.
So it should be interesting to see how I do on these three auditions, since I’ll have three whole days to prepare a character and memorize the sides, without any distractions.
Well, except one.
I finally broke down and bought that PS2 I’ve been staring at in the Toy Shop window all these long months.
Oh, and I saw this thing on Tech Live last night, where they were interviewing this guy who does the official website for Walter Koenig, who was Chekov on Star Trek.
The angle of the story was that this guy does a great job with the website, and that Walter’s fans know that it really represents him, because there’s only this one guy running the site.
This was fascinating to me, because I see a trend developing in Star Trek alumni websites.
See, I know this other Star Trek guy who has a website, and he’s got a pretty firm hold on it, and it’s a really good representation of who he is, because he’s fairly close to the webmaster.
He wasn’t even mentioned on this show, nor was he mentioned in the feature all about blogging, even though he’s got a pretty widely read blog himself.
I think we all know who I’m talking about.
Thought for today:

“For those about to rock, we salute you!”

Ferris is currently sitting behind me, chomping away at this chewie bone thing that we got her the other day. The thing that’s so cute about this is that she also has her Kong, and her Big Bouncy Ball protectively under her right front leg. Even though she’s really working this cornstarch bone thing, she is totally staring at me, just in case I decide to make a move for any of her toys.
It reminds me of this dog one of my friends used to have. His name was Boris, and Boris was insane. He would pee on everything, until they got him fixed, and even then he still humped everything in sight. It was pretty funny, when we were all about 22, to go to my friend’s house, and watch everyone jump out of the way, because once Boris got his heart set on your leg, or the leg of the sofa, or the cushion you’d just tossed on the floor, he was unrelenting in his expression of love.
Well, Boris had all kinds of toys, and he would move all of these toys from room to room in my friend’s house, depending on who he was happiest with in the family, at any given time. Usually, they all lived in my friend’s dad’s room. On those rare occasions that Boris was pissed at everyone, the toys would all be in the back yard.
This one time, in the early 90’s, my friend’s dad noticed that Boris, who was a little terrier dog, was getting really fat, so he put him on a diet. Strange thing was, Boris didn’t lose any weight. He actually gained weight.
Nobody could figure out what was going on, until my friend’s dad caught him jumping up near a wall in the backyard, grabbing and eating avocados off a neighbor’s tree, which hung over into my friend’s yard. It turned out that Boris had been eating all the avacados he could get his paws on for weeks, which is why he was getting fat in the first place. So my friend’s dad scolded Boris, fairly severly I guess, took the avocado away, and picked up all the pits and things that Boris had left under the tree.
Later that day, my friend’s dad went into his bedroom. Not surprisingly, all of Boris’ toys had been moved into the back yard. However, there was one thing left behind: an avocado pit, sitting in the middle of his bed.
True story.
Thought for today:

“Don’t forget your history
Know your destiny
In the abundance of water
The fool is thirsty.”

Boy, did this site get hammered yesterday!
Check it out:

• Hits 552263
• Files 414861
• Pages 77827
• Visits 45273
• Sites 37453
• KBytes 2873576

Then we had to put up the moose.
So I want to talk about this, for just a second, and how it came about.
I thought it would be cool to pull an April Fool’s prank, because I’ve never done it before, and I am always taken in by them. Matter of fact, the only reason I didn’t completely buy all the otherwise unbelievable stories I read yesterday is because I was spoofing one myself!
Here are the ideas I had, in the note I sent to my friends:

I want to do a good April Fool’s Day thingy on the site.
Current ideas include:
1. WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER DOT NET -funny on the face of it, but could be considered derivative of the parody SA did of WWDN.
2. A false news story revealing that I have signed a contract to appear as a regular, reprising the Wesley role, on Enterprise.
3. Put up a page that says something about “w3 o\/\/nxx0rs j00!”
4. Same as 2, but the story is that I’ve signed to be in Stand By Me 2: Back to the Body. It’s a horror film, this time, and The Body has come back to life.
I like 2 the best, because I think it’s the most plausible, and should be able to fool the most people.
Do you cats have any ideas?
Oh, and keep this secret, you bastards.

So that was the genesis of it. We all hammered it out, and you saw the results. What you didn’t know is that MT got completely borked on Thursday last week, and I’ve been observing a “minimal computer on the weekends” policy for about 4 weeks now. It was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it in time to do the story, so I downloaded the entire index page, and hard-coded the entry in notepad. That’s why you saw the date being all screwed up at the top.
A couple of things have come out of this: it would seem, at least on the face of it, that the ratio of Wesley (and therefore Wil) haters to non-haters has changed, from like 6:1 to 1:4 or so (well, maybe 7:5, thanks to pari-mutuel betting). This was a really surprising, and wonderful discovery. I really did begin to feel badly that people were congratulating me, and sending me all these warm fuzzies…but it really did make me feel good to know that so many people want me to do well. When I am really successful again, I will feel so good knowing that I’m sharing that success with everyone who reads WWDN, sends me mojo, and rides the insane roller coaster of the entertainment industry along with me.
Last time I’ll say it: I didn’t intend to do anything rivy. It was really just a prank, and I’ll apologize again to everyone who was taken in. I hope you’ll forgive me. Also, apologies to everyone else who is hosted by logjamming. I’m sorry that WWDN took the server down, and took your sites with it.
IMDB even picked up on it, saying, “April Fool’s Joke Backfires on TNG Actor.” I couldn’t disagree with that characterization more, but it’s pretty cool that they picked up the story!
The Think Geek WheatoniX joke was created a few weeks ago, and I had intended to send them a picture of me, surrounded by technical manuals and printouts and stuff, but then I got super busy with auditions and meetings last week…so they ended up using artwork that my friend Ben designed*. You may recognize that head drawing from the “Wil Has A Posse” T-shirts. I strongly encourage everyone to check out Ben’s portfolio, and consider him for some design work. He is such an amazing artist, and should be way more famous than he is.
Watching the dust settle, would I do it again? Yeah, I probably would. It was really fun, and the “god you suck, jackass!” emails have been vastly outweighed by the “oh man, good prank! you totally got me!” emails. I also think it may have brought a few new people to the website, which is always a good thing.
I’m out. I have a meeting, then an audition, then a commute.
I hope everyone is having a great day! 🙂
(*Yeah, I know that the link is currently down, but I’m sure it will come back up soon enough.)

Well, most of you have figured it out, by now, but the truth is…
…I’m not gonna be on Enterprise. Even as a computer voice, or within the secret, dirty, late-night thoughts of Capt. Archer.
I hope everyone takes this in good humor. Lots of people sent really kind and sweet congratulatory messages, and I actually feel pretty badly for fooling such nice people. All the idiots who thought it was a really good idea to fill my inbox with “Wesley is gonna ruin Enterprise” crap should get a life, and direct any further comments to 1> /dev/null.
To be honest I was surprised at how many people were wishing me well; I was expecting the Kill Wesley Crowd to come out instead.
I think the greatest highlight of the day came when my mom called Anne, while I was at work.
The conversation went something like this:
Mom: Do you have something to tell me?
Anne: Uh, no.
Mom: Do you have some big news about Wil?
Anne: Oh, that. Uh, what day is today?
Mom: It’s Monday!
Anne: Right. And the date is…?
Mom: It’s April Fir– OH! Damn you!
Heh. I guess my dad was all pissed off, stomping around my parent’s house because I didn’t tell them myself, and he “had to read it on Wil’s $%@#!ing website!”
Thanks go to the Frodo Crew(tm) who helped me take this scheme from stupid idea to stupid fruition: Spudnuts, jbay, JSc, Cherish, Roughy, Bobby The Mat, and Greeny. Also to /. and FARK, for getting on board.
A couple of cool things did happen today: with the help of Ben Trott, I was able to get MT working again. Still ironing out some trouble with the templates, but at least I can write again, and login to 2.0. Just as soon as I get the template thingies fixed, I will turn comments back on. 2.0 has IP banning, which is a good thing.
I also spent the entire afternoon skateboarding with Nolan all around our neighborhood. I think we skated for close to 3 miles, up and down hills, past peacocks and squirrels (none of whom went “weeeeee”, strangely enough), with Nolan skating up next to me to hold my hand, and telling me that he loved me and that it was really fun to skate together about once a block.
God, I love that kid. 🙂
Thought for today:

“Peace is the dream of the wise. War is the history of man.”

Good morning, everyone, and happy April! I hope everyone had a nice weekend.Okay, let’s get straight to business: here’s the bad news: the entire site has crashed, and we can’t figure out why.I don’t know when the crash happened, or why, because I was offline all weekend, but I’m working on it. I suppose that if you can read this, it means things are working again, which will bring us to our second bad news: I tried to upgrade to Moveable Type 2.0 on Friday, and it broke. Goddammit! I swear, I am farking cursed. I know what went wrong, and I’m going to start pleading with the authors for some help. They seem like cool people, so hopefully they will be willing to give me a hand. *sigh*
On to the good news! Oh, this is such amazingly good news, and it’s been so hard to keep this to myself, but there have been contract talks, and all sorts of negotiations, and all that…but I can finally make the big big announcement:
The official announcement will be made on Thursday, but I’ve been given permission by Paramount’s hired goons to make the announcement today.
In four weeks, I will be joining the cast of Enterprise in a recurring role!
The details are still being worked out, but basically what they plan to do is have Wesley use his Time Traveler abilities to move through space and time to the NX-01. He’ll be written more like the dark, troubled Wesley of “The First Duty” and “Final Mission”, and less like the gee-whiz Wesley of days gone by.
Here’s a little history: Nemesis is testing very well, and Paramount is extremely excited that this lame little website has generated such a huge following. I guess some people started a letter-writing campaign, without my knowledge, and Paramount listened. I spent most of last week on conference calls with Rick and Brannon, as well as some of the brass at Paramount, working out the details, making sure that Wesley will not be saving the NX-01 all the time. * grin *
I’ll be in 8 of 22 episodes for the two seasons, with an option to renegotiate at the end of the second season. I’m only recurring to allow me the freedom to participate in other shows, as well as continue working for G4.
I’m so freakin’ excited, I don’t even know what else to say. I can’t believe that I’m going to be working on Star Trek again, and I can’t believe that I’m going to be working on Stages 8 and 9 again.
I have to go to a fitting right now. I’ll write more when I have more details. I hope everyone has a great day!!