Category: blog

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Exciting and New

Posted on By Wil

When I was … 22 or so, I bought my first house (very young, too young, to be a homeowner, but that’s a whole other story for another time).

It was a small house, built in the 30s. I bought it from the man who built it, which was really cool.

I didn’t know how to decorate my house, because I shouldn’t have even owned a house. I should have been in an apartment somewhere. Again, another story for another time. I decorated it the way a child decorates his dorm room, because that’s about how mature I was.

Anyway, I was at Hollywood Book and Poster or some shop like that, and they were selling cast photos from pretty much every television show that had existed to that point, so I bought a bunch of pictures of the cast from The Love Boat, and I put them in frames all over my house, like they were my family.

Not a lot of people noticed, or got the joke, but this girl I was dating at the time got the joke, appreciated the joke, and has been married to me for twenty years.

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I am having the hardest time staying positive

Posted on By Wil

I spent almost the entire day, yesterday, working really hard on something really awesome that I can’t talk about.

It felt so good to be working, to be creating something I know will eventually entertain people when it’s released. It was several days of prep and several hours of work, and I am grateful for every minute of it, because during the time I was working, I was focused on creating and entertaining. For a few hours, I didn’t have the overwhelming sense of doom and hopelessness that’s been knocking on my door for weeks. I’m grateful for that.

And yet, here I am, not even 24 hours later, right back in fear and worry.

For almost five months now, there’s been little to separate one day from another. Every day is a struggle to stay positive, and remember that there’s a small circle around Things I Can Affect, and a huge circle around Things I Can Do Absolutely Nothing About. I can usually accept that, but this week, Things I Can Do Absolutely Nothing About has just been too much to handle, and I feel like I’m going to cry, all the time.

I’m emotionally exhausted, and I’m struggling every single day with depression, feeling overwhelmed, low-key anxiety and the persistent background buzz of fear.

I know this doesn’t make me special, and I know that things could be so much worse (and I know that they are for so many people. I’m grateful I’m not one of them).

But I’m a person, and I bleed just like anyone else does, and I am just having the hardest time staying positive. I’m scared, I’m confused, I’m sad, I’m overwhelmed, and I’m doing everything I can to not slide into depression and despair, but today, I am REALLY feeling it.

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No child deserves to be treated the way the man who was my father treated me.

Posted on By Wil

Father’s Day is tough for me. I don’t have a dad, because the man who was my father made a choice, when I was a child, to be my bully, instead.

For my entire life, this man was implacable, inscrutable, and entirely unwilling to have any kind of relationship with me … yet he still felt entitled to my adoration an attention. Every day was a new puzzle to be solved, a new set of circumstances I had to figure out, so I could somehow evade his wrath and his cruelty.

In short, the man who was my father is an awful, selfish, cruel, racist, narcissist, and he made a choice to withhold his love and affection from me. Instead, he poured his rage, his shame, his scorn, and his cruelty into me. In my dysfunctional family, he made me the Scapegoat, and my mother went along with it.

I didn’t deserve it. No child deserves to be treated the way the man who was my father treated me. While he was bullying me, humiliating me, making me feel small and unworthy, my mother was enabling and protecting him.

And every Father’s Day, I was expected to worship and laud and celebrate that man, who may have contributed DNA to my existence, but is in no way, at all, my dad. I don’t have a dad, and I never did. I had a bully. Now, I have an endless black void where a father’s love should be, and it hurts every day. That man could have built a relationship with me, could have been a father to me, could have worked to build the same relationship with me that I’ve built with my sons, but he chose to bully me, and he invested a LOT of time and energy making sure I knew how contemptuous he was of me, and everything I did. (He didn’t have any compunctions about spending all of the money I earned when my parents put me to work against my wishes, but that’s a whole other thing. I’ve been able to earn more money; he’s the only person on this planet who could have been my dad).

So today is hard for me. I see pretty much everyone I know celebrating their awesome dads, who loved them unconditionally, the way a child deserves to be loved. I see them sharing memories of time spent with their dad, which I never got, because the man who was my father never made the effort. I’m doing my best to focus on how happy my friends are, and how lucky their children are, but it’s really hard for me to do that without feeling the massive black void where my father’s love and affection should be.

I want today to be a reminder of all the joy my own kids have brought me. I want to celebrate my own existence as a dad, to stand up and say that I did the work, I broke the cycle. I am not the selfish bully I had the misfortune of being born to. I’m a good man, and a good father. I love my sons, and we have a close and loving relationship. We don’t need a Hallmark holiday to celebrate and acknowledge the love we share, and my wife and kids know what a bastard my father was, so they’ve never imposed a celebration on me. But it still feels good when my boys call me their dad, and it still feels good when they tell me they love me. Being their dad is such a privilege, and I choose, every day, to be grateful for it.

Today, I’m going to make a deliberate choice to focus on my own children, my own experiences being the dad I never had, and I’m going to give a very special shoutout to my fellow children of bastards, who have the same complicated relationship with fatherhood that I have. This is a tough day for us, and if you grok what I’m saying, I’m so sorry. I see you, and I know.

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A typical day on the set at Tabletop

Posted on By Wil

This is from my Tumblr Thingy. I thought it would be relevant to some of your interests.

QUESTION: Hello, I have a question about Tabletop (don’t worry, it’s not “when will you make more 😋). When you would film an episode, when would the interstitial commentary from the players be filmed? Because it seems like they should be like, during breaks in the game, so that people can give their thoughts as they come up, but during extended episodes I can’t see where that would cut and film them and rejoin, so maybe it was after? I can no longer sleep at night, this question haunts me. Ok bye now 😊

ANSWER: Good question, and you have it mostly correct.

What we’d do on a given day went like this:

  • I arrive and we run through the day’s schedule.
  • I shoot the introductions for the two episodes we are filming that day.
  • The players for the first game arrive, go to makeup and wardrobe, then spend about an hour with the game publisher’s rep and Ivan Van Norman, our games expert, to make sure they understand the game and its basic strategy.
  • While they do that, I shoot the rules explanation for each game.
  • Players are seated at the table with me, and we begin. Each game has a rough halfway point, usually determined by the points scored, and we’ll break at that halfway point. For a narrative episode like an RPG, we’d break around the end of the second act.
  • The players and I are interviewed about what we did in the first half of the game. We call these OTF interviews. I believe that’s a documentary term of art which means “On the fly.”
  • We play the second half of the game, until there is a winner.
  • We shoot the loser’s couch segment.
  • We shoot the trophy segment.
  • Now we shoot the OTF interviews for the second half of the game.
  • The players are finished, and we break for lunch. They can stay and eat lunch with us if they want, but most players choose to get on with their day.
  • The players for game 2 show up right as lunch ends. They’re always welcome to come before lunch, if they want to eat with us. I’d say about half of the players did that.
  • We sit down, and play the first half of the second game.
  • We break and shoot OTF.
  • We finish the game.
  • We shoot the loser’s couch.
  • We shoot the winner’s wall.
  • We shoot my OTF for the second half of the second game, so I can be finished and sent home as soon as possible. My union rules guarantee me 12 hours between when I leave set and when I come back, so we always try to get me wrapped (finished) early, so we don’t have to start later the following day.
  • We shoot the remaining OTFs.
  • Everyone goes home! That’s a wrap.

I’m glad you asked this question, because I got to revisit some of the joy that I felt when we were making Tabletop, Geek & Sundry was the greatest place in the world to be making awesome content, and I got to play games for my job.

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drive the car around the world

Posted on By Wil

Nothing is more important to me in my life than to be the father I never had.

Since we came into each other’s lives, I’ve worked so hard to love, nurture, guide, and cherish my boys. It’s so important to me that I never make them feel humiliated, small, unworthy, unloved, or any of the ways my father made me feel every day of my life.

I feel like I may have succeeded, because we are incredibly close, the three of us. We play games together, we hang out together, they seek my advice and my counsel, and I love it when they come to my house to spend time with their mom and me.

This quarantine has been tough for everyone, but it was especially hard to not have my family together. Ryan is an essential worker (on a medical leave right now. He’s fine, don’t worry. Thank you for your concern) so we couldn’t be in the same room as him until just about a week ago, which was two weeks after he took his leave from work.

Now that the four (five, counting my daughter in law) of us have been isolated for so long, we feel like it’s safe for us to do family activities again, like take long walks or get together for family meals.

Ryan came over a little bit ago, just because he wanted to be around his family. As I write this, my boys are playing Frisbee in the street, right outside my open window. They are laughing together, supporting each other, and enjoying the experience of being together, sharing some time together.

It makes me so happy when I see my boys love each other, and care about each other. It makes me feel like I did a good job raising them with core values of empathy, compassion, and respect for each other.

I keep seeing these stories of people who are going nuts because they’re forced into tight quarters for an extended period of time with their families. I have massive empathy for that. I especially empathize with single parents, and parents of smaller kids (and the hormonal teens) who are really struggling to adapt to our current circumstances. But I’m also intensely grateful that I don’t feel that way about my wife and kids. I’m intensely grateful that we all love and respect each other, that we’ve found ways to support each other, give each other space, and never stop loving each other through all of this.

Oh! The boys are coming into the house. Maybe I can convince them to do something with me.