Category: movies

Seven Things I Did To Reboot My Life

Posted on 24 October, 201526 October, 2015 By Wil

About twenty years ago, I had a portable spa in the back yard of my first house. One day, the heater stopped working, so I called a repairman to come out and look at it. He told me that there would be an $85 charge no matter what, and I told him that was okay. When he got to my house, he opened up the access panel where the heater, pump, and filter lived. He looked inside, then looked back at me.

“Did you try pushing the reset button?” He asked.

“Um. No,” I said.

He pushed the reset button, and the heater came back to life.

“That’ll be $85,” he said. I paid him.

This post is about realizing that I was sitting in cold water, and not doing anything to turn the heater back on. This post is about how I hit the reset button.

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stuff i like that you may like

Posted on 5 September, 2015 By Wil

From the most recent Radio Free Burrito’s show notes:

This show’s theme music is Blank Space, by Taylor Swift.
The videos for Style and Wildest Dreams are so good.
Tove Lo’s Queen of the Clouds is the first pop concept album I think I’ve ever heard.
I did not expect to love the Mocking Jay Part One soundtrack, and yet.
TV Crimes is a new podcast I do with Mikey Neumann.
The Battle for Zendikar is going to be a really fun set to play.
Your long wait to have 13 minutes of commercials from Little Rock radio in 1971 has come to an end.
The Memory Palace is amazing.
You Must Remember This is your new favorite podcast.
There is not a single crystalline entity in Lore.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is an incredible book. I also just found out that it was made into a movie and now I have to see it IMMEDIATELY.
You can watch The Trip on YouTube.
You can see some wonderfully weird Kenneth Anger films there, too.
John Waters is my hero.
Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is really great.

In which a scene from a movie is recreated (or: further confirmation of the benefits of being easily amused.)

Posted on 3 May, 20154 May, 2015 By Wil

I’m in Toronto for a couple of days, working on a show, before I go to Ottawa later this week.

I’ve had a nice time while I’ve been here, though I wasn’t prepared for how profoundly lonely I would feel after just 24 hours away from my family. I guess after months of spending as much time with my wife, kids, and dogs as I want, I’d grown accustomed to their faces.

To help ease my loneliness, I went for a big walk all around the city today. I took a lot of pictures, and I shot a lot of video, with the intention of making a short thing that I could put on the YouTubes about my day and the stuff I saw. Being creative while I was also being a tourist engaged my brain and my soul in a very good way.

Toward the end of my adventures, I wandered into a train museum thing by the CN tower (TRAINS INTO TUNNELS…) and I got inspired to make this really stupid-but-amusing-to-me thing:

Not bad for something I put together in iMovie in about 15 minutes, I must say.

the point of view that creates the world

Posted on 19 February, 201519 February, 2015 By Wil

I imagine my creative process as a cycle of filling up a reservoir with inspirations and ideas, and then emptying it out into various creations. Sometimes that reservoir is drained in one explosive surge, but mostly it’s emptied out a little bit at a time, into different projects.

Recently, I’ve been using my creative reserves to power the writing on the Tabletop RPG show, and whatever is left is going into Radio Free Burrito. My stupid random thoughts and links, once the exclusive property of my blog, are filling up Twitter and Tumblr, and I haven’t had much to say here, anyway.

BUT.

I have a new Tabletop for you:

Most of the things I’ve been consuming are helping me power up and work on the Tabletop RPG show (all day today I have conference calls with our writers and designers!) and I would like to share some of the ways I’ve been refilling my creative reservoir, starting with books: