Category: blog

the unbearable lightness of sleeping

Posted on By Wil

I wrote this on my Facebook thing yesterday:

I’ve been trying to get myself on a sleep schedule that is consistent with the rest of humanity in my timezone. This isn’t easy, because my brain naturally wants to sleep between 2am and 10am, and has been that way pretty much my whole life. But in summer, especially, I like to get up early before it’s close to 100°, walk the dogs, and feel like I’ve actually accomplished stuff before noon.

So I’ve been getting myself into bed around 10 or 11, as I attempt to slowly move the clock back. I read until I’m ready to close my eyes, and I set my sleep thing on my phone to wake me up 8.5 hours later.

By the way: if you like science fiction, you probably want to subscribe to Lightspeed Magazine. It’s what I’ve been reading every night, and it’s always spectacular. It’s delivered to my Kindle once a month, and it’s one of my favorite subscriptions that I have. Also, keep your eye on the Humble Book Bundles, and Vodo.net.

They *always* have great, inexpensive, amazing books on sale.Okay, back to … whatever this thing is.

So last night I got into bed a little later than I wanted — around 11:30 — and picked up my Kindle. Which had a dead battery. Shit. No worries! I picked up the actual book I’ve been reading (Imbibe! is a book about cocktail history, culture, and recipes), and read for awhile. I turned off the light when my body signaled that it was ready to go to sleep, and put my head on my pillow.

You know what’s coming, right? Just like the comics, my brain went from being sleepy to being WIDE AWAKE WITH LOTS OF STUFF TO THINK ABOUT in under a minute. It’s okay, I thought, I can power — err, the opposite of power, I guess, since I’m trying to go to sleep — through this. I began doing this relaxation/breathing/self-hypnosis thing that has always worked for me… but it didn’t work for me.

A side effect of one of my brain meds is that, occasionally, my left leg will twitch like crazy, and my whole body won’t let me get comfortable. Last night, it set itself to eleven and went bananas.

I think it was finally 3am when I just gave up, and sat up in bed. I grabbed my phone, and looked at Twitter for a few minutes. I hoped that occupying my mind would somehow work some voodoo or whatever on my legs.

It didn’t.

So I fired up Bejweled, and played a game … that lasted to level 11. I don’t know if that’s as good as I think it was, but it felt pretty great to play that long (until I realized that it was nearly 4am) and I got a badge that I can turn in for nothing at a redemption counter that doesn’t exist.

So at 4am, whatever the hell was going on with my leg finally stopped, and I turned off the lights again. This is when Luna, my cat, jumped up on me, snuggled into my chest, and began to purr. It turns out that the warm weight and soft purring of my cat on my chest really helped me fall and stay asleep.

Until the goddamn jackhammer started four hours later.

I got up at 9:30, because I am committed to going to sleep earlier and getting up earlier, even if it means that I didn’t get as much sleep last night as I wanted or needed.

I’m fairly sure that I won’t have much of a problem with that in about 10 hours.

—

So last night, I watched a pair of movies that I really liked: It Follows, and Ex Machina. I think it was about 12:30 when I got into bed. I read almost a full page of my book before I felt sleep coming on, so I powered off for the night … and didn’t fall asleep for two hours. Sigh.

Take Care of Yourself

Posted on By Wil

“Take care of yourselves, watch the people around you carefully, and cordon off the ones who are toxic, so that the universe can decontaminate them for you through exposure and death.”

-Warren Ellis

This is always very good advice (I’ve written some version of it myself at various times), but it’s especially poignant for me to read it from Warren, now, because I’ve just had to remove a profoundly toxic, dishonest, manipulative, bad, bad, bad person from my life, who was in my life for years. You’d think it would be easy, but it wasn’t.

So, speaking from experience: it’s not your fault that a toxic person fooled you, even if they fooled you for years. It’s not your fault, and while it is entirely expected that you go through the normal grieving process that is associated with any loss, try not to spend any time blaming yourself for not seeing all the things that you can see now in hindsight much sooner than you did.

Take care of yourself, as Warren says.

in my head

Posted on By Wil

Today, I got to do something that is so amazing and unexpected, I can’t believe it was real … and I have to keep all the details of it a total secret for a very long time.

That seems to be the story of my life these days. I’m not complaining, but everything I work on has this huge list of NDAs and terrifying agreements that make me responsible for millions of dollars in damages if I give up the secrets. Seriously. I had to sign an NDA recently where I affirmed my understanding of the value of the information I would be holding in my head, and that I further understood that if I leaked this information out of my head before a certain period of time, I agreed to be responsible for a minimum of a million dollars per bit of information, up to several millions of dollars. I was so afraid of something happening when the materials were out of my hands, I destroyed them — first in a shredder and then in a fire — to ensure that nobody could somehow dig through my trash for some reason and go through the improbable and difficult series of events necessary to put me on the hook for the millions of dollars that I do not have. It was a little weird, in retrospect. And don’t ask me what it was, because I won’t say.

This is pretty awesome, because it means that I get to work on projects that a lot of people are really excited about, including me! This is also a bummer, because one of my first loves, narrative nonfiction writing, doesn’t have as deep a well to pull from as it has for the last decade that I’ve been writing it almost every day.

Over a decade. Wow. That’s …. a thing.

I’ve been telling Anne that I need to take some time away from my on-camera work, so I can focus on storytelling and creative writing. I have lots of ideas that can be turned into things, and there’s a very good chance I’ll get to pitch at least one of those things to a comic publisher this week. Fingers crossed. I’m also working on narrative fiction pitches for Geek & Sundry, Nerdist, and Legendary Digital, so I can do that sort of thing in addition to the games and the hosting and stuff that’s been most of my professional life for the last couple of years. These are all first world problems, I know, and they are good problems to have, on balance.

I have stories to tell. I just need to find a way, and find the time, to tell them.

chewin’ gum for something to do

Posted on By Wil

Chapter 3 of Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana is online, like, RIGHT NOW.

The Beer Baron and Keg-E bid farewell to the party after considerable celebration and revelry. In an attempt to learn more about their mysterious orb, the group heads to Nestora in search of Farkiah the Antiquarian. Excited for an opportunity to bargain, barter, and more importantly, shop, the heroes quickly head to the market district, but they soon find that it holds more than goods. What does the city-state have in store for our heroes? Tune in to find out.

Looking for sweet Titansgrave loot? Check out the store here!

This is a reminder, because we think this seminar will fill up quickly, and if you care about that sort of thing, I want you to be able to join us:

TitansgraveAtGencon

And if you do care about that sort of thing, you probably want to be reading Chris Pramas’s blogs about the game design. for Titansgrave.

This happened last night:

Screen Shot 2015-06-22 at 20.46.50

I was checking my network speed, because Netflix was trying to stop me from watching the end of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and nothing would stream off my media server in the house. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong (I even tried turning it off and back on again), and the whole troubleshooting experience felt like trying to get the Babel Fish. But, eventually, things sorted themselves out and I got that insanely fast network speed, so I could finish the show.

In general, I liked it. The first few episodes were fantastic, and some of the middle ones were real stinkers, but I kept watching all the way to the end because Ellie Kemper is just so fantastic and such a joy. The show has a lot of problems that have been discussed to death elsewhere, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Finally, this is a show I’m doing for Playstation Network:CwCWithWilWheaton

We’ll release new episodes, every Tuesday in the US and Canada, on PlayStation Store. You’ll get them for the low, low price of FREE on your PS3, PS4, and PS Vita. What’s that? You loaned your device to your cousin and she went out of town, locked it in her house, and didn’t give you the key? Don’t worry. If you don’t want to try out those lock-picking skills just yet, we’re also going to make our episodes available on PlayStation’s YouTube channel.

So, I hope you’ll join me and some really interesting people as we talk about games like Destiny, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War and more. I’ve already taped a couple of episodes, and I’ve had some really fascinating conversations about the similarities and differences between videogames and movies, the origins of Destiny, and exactly how The Last Of Us scared the hell out of us all, while simultaneously making us care about Joel and Ellie more than we care for actual people we work with in our real lives. Yes, Mark, I’m looking at you. You are never going to get a spot in my zombie survival compound, Mark.

I’m actually on my way to the studio in about ten minutes to do interviews with the team that brought us Black Ops, and the Santa Monica Studio team, who brought us God of War and Journey, among others.

Let me tell you this: I am profoundly late to the party on Journey, but it’s maybe the most beautiful and emotional experience I’ve ever had playing a game. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.