ur fascism by umberto eco

Four years ago, I recorded and released narrations of short material that I pulled from the public domain. I did my best to release one a week, as an experiment. I wondered if I could, one day, so something like this that actually paid some bills.

I had fun doing it. I picked pieces that were interesting to me, and didn’t spend any time at all trying to master perfect audio. It was a deliberately DIY effort. The audience wasn’t huge, but the people who listened to it really liked it. At some point, I even got a few requests, including this one.

This is Umberto Eco’s essential essay, Ur Fascism, originally written in 1995. It was shockingly relevant in in 2020, after four years of attempted tyranny, and it remains terrifyingly relevant after one week of ongoing tyranny.

I humbly submit this and ask for a bit of your time; I believe it’s an important, timely, essay.

squirrel appreciation day is a thing, i guess?

Last Spring, I entered into a pact with the local squirrels: I would give them peanuts and treats from my kitchen, and they would leave my garden alone. As the year unfolded, though, the pact became more of a protection racket that the squirrel mafia abandoned as soon as my pumpkins started to grow. They murdered all five of the best ones — and the little fuckers did it just a few bites in each one, just enough to let the mold and bullshit get in there and ruin them — leaving me with only one (a really fantastic, 28 pounder I still can’t bring myself to carve). Then they ate all the leaves off my parsley and cilantro, before I made an arrangement with the local Cooper’s Hawk, who is the guy you call when the Squirrel Mafia is getting out of hand.

That’s a lot of background to set this up:

My sister texted me earlier today and asked me if I was celebrating squirrel appreciation day with extra peanuts.

“I am now,” I replied, and there was much rejoicing (up in the oak tree).

This was funny to me, because even earlier today, before I knew that squirrel appreciation day was not only a thing but was also upon us today, I shared this photo on Bluesky:

I’m not sure who that is but it could be Cruise Director Julie or Alex P Keaton based on their size (yes, we have named several squirrels in the neighborhood and that isn’t weird at all why are you looking at me that way) but I am sure that they are enjoying what’s left of a very small late season pumpkin that came up after the rest of the vine had died off.

I mean, I could have put it inside to finish ripening, and it would have been ADORABLE as a little jack-o-lantern (which we can make whenever we want to, don’t let Big Halloween tell you when and how you can enjoy the spooky season). I could have done that. But I knew I’d get more joy if I set it out and waited for a picture like this to happen.

Which I didn’t intend to post on a day I didn’t know existed, but sometimes a plan just comes together.

So, uh … a happy squirrel appreciation day to all who celebrate! Get out there an appreciate some squirrels!

odds n ends

I spent some time in the booth this morning, recording some pickups on an audiobook I still can’t believe I was chosen to narrate. I believe it will come out in March, around the same time as two other books I narrated.

March could be a big month for me, professionally. A project I have been developing and working on for almost two years may be ready in March, as well. After years of gratefully doing what I call “other people’s work,” I have been focusing intensely on something that is all mine. I’m even spending my own money on it, something they tell you to never do.

Whatever. They aren’t the boss of me. It’s worth it, and I believe in it.

Anyway. Since I’m coming home to my blog, how about one of those old school posts about random stuff I’ve been doing? It’s on the other side of the thingy.

Continue reading… →

smash that subscribe button

Note to self: before you make a post on Facebook about how you’re leaving Facebook on account of Zuckerberg is a piece of shit, and tell everyone who reads it that they can subscribe to your blog … ensure that WordPress didn’t change the theme on you when you weren’t looking, hiding the formerly obvious subscribe button.

Here’s what I wrote there:

As an OG blogger who did everything in html, I resisted Facebook for years. I didn’t like the idea of being inside someone else’s garden, where I didn’t own or control my writing, photos, and so on.

But I ended up here because it’s where the people were, and I stayed here to the detriment of my own writing and my own website (that I worked so hard to build on my own in the Before Times).

Over the years, I’ve been put into Facebook jail for absolute bullshit, usually because of bad faith reports from dickheads, but also because a machine did a comically bad parsing of something I said. (Hey, die in a fire, machine!) As a consequence, I have ended up self-censoring, or even writing and creating to serve whatever the fucking algorithm wants, instead of what I want. It’s always bothered me, but at like a 1 on a 10 point scale. I’ve lived with it, and I’ve accepted the compromise.

And it’s been so frustrating to contort myself into all sorts of non-euclidean shapes, while literally every single time I report someone for hate speech, impersonation, scamming, a different kind of hate speech, terrorist threats, even more hate speech, the machine waits for weeks before it tells me that all of that hate speech was just peachy with Facebook and the gigantic piece of dogshit who owns it.

I’ve had one foot out the door on this website for a couple months, and now that Meta will allow and encourage hate speech against marginalized and vulnerable people (obviously so that right wing fuckfaces can do the thing, officially, that they’ve been doing all along) I am leaving for good.

There’s no reason for me to be here. Whether it’s because I’m boring or the algorithm is squashing me or some combination of both, engagement is way, way down over the last half of last year. And there is just way too much harassment, noise, bots, scammers, and overt fucking Nazism all over the place. If I’m going to reach a smaller audience, anyway, I’m going to reach it via my own blog where I actually care to keep that dogshit in the trash where it belongs.

I’ll let my blog crosspost here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m just going to let this account go fallow.

I sincerely hope that, if you have enjoyed following me here, that you’ll come over to my blog. There’s a simple form there, so you can get my posts by email, probably more reliably than you ever saw things here.

I also have Bluesky, though I’m going to use it minimally — the fire hose of social media is extremely bad for my (and your) mental health — and even then, mostly to let folks know when something I made is out in the world.

The people who work for me are going to be unhappy about this. I have a major project coming out in March, and it’s not the best idea to walk away from an account with a few hundred thousand followers … but when I walked away from three million followers on Twitter when fuckface von nepobaby turned it into a fascist propaganda tool, absolutely nothing changed for me, from a business perspective.

Put another way, my experience over the last 25 years has shown me that there is a core of people out there, you are likely among them if you’re still reading this (hi, Aunt Dorothy!), who care enough to go where I am. I’m counting on that pattern holding as I leave what has become yet another tool for fascists, authoritarians, bigots, Nazis, and other disgusting and deplorable people to use in their efforts to hurt people I love.

I’ll keep my Instagram up a little longer, unless or until this Zuckerberg approved policy of hate and toxic masculinity (why is it always the weakest little men who are so toxic, he asked, rhetorically) metastasizes there, as well.

Please come with me, back to my blog, where it all began.

On another note, I’m sure that the block editor is great when you understand it, but I am entirely lost when I try to use it. Nothing makes sense or follows a logical flow (that’s obvious to me, anyway), and it makes me feel stupid.

So I appreciate all of you who came here from wherever you came here from, and I am doubly grateful to all of you who have actually looked for that subscribe option. Because if it was anything like my experience, it was a massive pain in the ass.

Of course, at this moment, I believe you get annoying SUBSCRIBE stuff all over the place, including something you had to click to even see this (I think? Again, the documentation is confusing to my dumb ass) … but at least you can see it. And the layout is going to change a whole lot over the next couple of hours, while I figure this thing out.

If I can wrap my head around this, someone reading this late today or tomorrow will hopefully have no idea what this is all about, and if you are that person, I encourage you to celebrate by subscribing to my blog, so you never miss a post.

Thanks for your patience and support, y’all.

it’s in a book

I know I am not the only person who experienced this, yet I have struggled for years to find any kind of logical explanation for it, or actionable advice to address it.

Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book.

Or a magazine.

Or a short story.

Or more than a news item, blog post, or some intellectual empty calories online.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop loving books. I didn’t lose my genuine, lifelong love of reading. I just couldn’t find a way to stay focused, to step out of the corporeal world for a little bit, and just enjoy where the words took me.

A friend of mine suspects that it’s an expression of hypervigilance, a consequence of how unimaginably terrible things got, and how fast. (Oh, you sweet Summer 2016 Child, you have no idea how much worse things can and will become). That rings true for me, but it’s incomplete, and I still don’t know what is missing.

“But Wil Wheaton,” you are likely saying at this time, “you are an award-winning audiobook narrator. You read to me almost every day!”

Yes, I can confirm that both of those things are true, and I will gently tap the sign in my house that says “You must go to work, Wil Wheaton.”

So I was able to read, but only when it was for work. See, I wasn’t just dropping into a chair and reading for fun, I was supporting my family. I will crawl over broken glass for my family, so reading a book (which I enjoy!) isn’t a heavy lift. I mean, that’s a huge privilege, and I am grateful for it.

Last year, I think I read … I don’t know, fewer than 10 things of substance — well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate. I’m working on my short story writing skills, so I have read a lot of individual entries in a few Best Of sci-fi collections, and I revisited Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. But, again, that was in pursuit of developing a skill … using the work excuse again. And I somehow convinced myself that a short story — which is a lot of work to create — somehow didn’t count because it wasn’t a whole book. Well, maybe don’t do that this year, Wil.

But whatever it takes, right? The important thing is, I was making some time to read (and as Stephen King admonishes all of us, gently, but still, if you don’t make time to read, you don’t have time to write.)

This is where I dip off the main spine of this post for a moment to share, without going into specifics, that I made a deliberate choice about two years ago to begin a Season in my life. A Season is, according to whoever suggested it to me a million years ago, a broadly-defined choice to make some changes without the pressure and overwhelm of big and specific goals. The common example comes out of New Year’s Resolutions: “I want to lose X pounds” can be daunting, and when we inevitably stumble, demoralizing, and we give up. Rather than that, choose a Season instead: “This is my Season of Healthy Habits”. What are those healthy habits? Maybe walking more, maybe going to the gym regularly, maybe it’s about food choices. The thing is, I am now doing what I would be doing to lose the weight, but it isn’t about losing the weight. It’s about being focused on these other things that will support losing x pounds all on their own, and I’m not obsessed with the scale. I’m not going to get frustrated and demoralized, and ultimately give up, because it’s about the journey instead of the destination.

So I constantly ask myself, “how does this support my Season?” And I make my choices without judgment, doing my best to choose wisely.

I feel like I’ve oversimplified it, but if that’s intriguing to you, and you want to try it yourself, you have a place to start.

The writing, narrating, and publicity cycle for Still Just A Geek was wonderful, and exciting, and something I will cherish forever. It also uncovered a metric fuckton of trauma that I hadn’t worked through. So I started my Season of Healing, and it’s been ongoing ever since, with truly meaningful results. I still have CPTSD, I still struggle with anxiety and panic from time to time, but it’s getting better. I am in such a better place than I was when I started. The Work continues, and that’s its whole own post.

As 2024 was ending (and the end of the year REALLY crept up on me this time) I began to wonder if I could invite a new Season to overlap with the current one, like those magical days of Winter becoming Spring.

I know it’s only four days into the year, but I did make the deliberate choice — not a Resolution — to begin The Season of Writing More Fiction.

And since you really can’t write if you don’t read, whatever was blocking me from reading since 2016 has simply vanished. Just like that. I know it’s only four days, and I am not getting out ahead of my skis or spiking the ball before I even begin the return. That struggle to stay focused, to find joy in the experience, may come back. If it does, I’ll have to muddle through it, which is something I feel capable of doing, since this is a Season and not a Resolution. This is just a choice, not a test, and there is so much freedom in that. I feel this excitement to devour stories and characters from other creators, to fully experience their worlds while I let them inspire the creation of my own. I feel this desire and excitement in my body in a way I haven’t in so long, I’d forgotten what it felt like. I feel the part of me who identifies as a Reader, the part of me I guarded so closely and protected from all the abuse and exploitation, waking up and getting excited in a way I haven’t felt in at least eight years.

Which brings me to the “tiny little thing” I was “just gonna write real quick in my blog while I have my coffee”:

I started a book yesterday called The Ministry of Time. I’m only 18 pages into it, but I am already captivated by the setting, characters, and the author’s voice (note to self: earn your readers’ attention this way, as quickly as you can, Wil).

This is on the jacket, so it doesn’t spoil anything for you:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

Sounds great, right? It is. I am megahyped to get back into it as soon as I publish this post.

I noticed something about the way I read books, yesterday. When I start a book, it’s like I’m sitting in an empty space, completely surrounded by the fog of war. Over some number of pages, that fog is pushed back and the world in the book begins to populate the formerly-empty space. Eventually, that space is on the other side of a portal that I step through as effortlessly as I open the cover of the book. I guess I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I didn’t actually notice and note it until yesterday.

And that’s because, while I was greatly enjoying the world building and meeting the characters, I was really struggling to hear Commander Gore. My brain defaulted to this sort of grandiose, bombastic, entirely wrong voice that seemed to be inspired wholly by Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen.

This was weird, because I have never done this while reading silently. Sure, when I’m narrating I use voices, but never while reading on my own. I have always heard character voices in my own inner voice, or a neutral voice which is really just my inner voice not admitting it isn’t fooling anyone.

I read a few more lines. The author described him as being 37, and even though he’s from 1845, I knew immediately that he sounded like The Guy From The Gentlemen (Theo James, I’m not proud that I had to look him up). It just clicked perfectly.

And I was like, “I just cast an actor to play a role in the book I’m reading. Holy shit. That’s so cool and I can’t believe I have never done that before.”

He’s playing opposite Billie Piper, if you were wondering, and they have fantastic chemistry.

I have never done this before. But now that I stumbled into it, I don’t think I can’t NOT do this with every novel I read.

And now I’m left to wonder if casting actors for character voices when you read silently in your head is a thing that people do, and I’m just late to the party, or if this is some weird thing that only happens in my weird brain.

If it’s just me, that’s a bummer. It’s satisfying and kind of fun to try out different actors in the same role and see who gets the job.

Maybe this is part of the change in my head that’s happening as I begin my season of reading and growing as a short fiction writer?

Maybe it’s best at this time to simply accept the gift with gratitude, and enjoy it.

Yes, that feels like a good Seasonal Choice.