Category: WWdN in Exile

I’m having a lot of fun processing book orders. The floor of my living room is a carefully-designed collection of alphabetized order and shipping labels, numbered boxes of books, and the all-important List of 300. I should get through the first half today, and the remaining half should go out on Friday or Saturday. This probably means that all domestic orders should arrive before the end of next week. International orders seem to be taking about 2 weeks, depending on where they’re going.

Since I’m too busy to come up with anything worth reading on my blog, I thought I’d direct you to some offsite stuff I’ve done this week, starting with this week’s Geek in Review: Turkey Stuffing.

My new book was reviewed on Slashdot yesterday, and while I was writing
and reading comments, I noticed that the current Slashdot poll question
is, simply put, “Best Star Trek?”

I was actually surprised that in all the years Slashdot has been
bringing us news for nerds this is the first time this question has
been asked, and when I went to vote for TNG, I remembered a story I
liked to tell at conventions, back in the day.

In my first book, Dancing Barefoot, I wrote a story called
The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants (which, if nothing else, is a lesson
to all you aspiring writers out there, and a reminder to the rest of
us: put some fucking thought into your titles, guys, because if you
don’t, you’ll be talking about The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants for the
rest of your life.) The story is about my experiences at a convention
celebrating the 35th anniversary of the original Star Trek series. I’ve
excerpted it for the GiR before, but I’ve never shared the particular story that the Slashdot poll brought to mind until today.

My fellow blogging.la contributor and former SG News editor Helen Jupiter interviewed me for Gridskipper. The result is Wil Wheaton’s Geek Guide to Los Angeles.

I asked Wil, a fellow blogging.la
contributor of mine, to put together his own personal guide to LA. In
addition to listing popular destinations like Amoeba Records, LACMA,
and Dodger Stadium, and lamenting the loss of spots like the Pak Mann
Arcade, Wil let us in on some of his more original and admittedly geeky
favorites.

Finally, I joined some of the Geek Dads last night for this week’s Geekdad Podcast: Activate the Nostalgia Center – Zombies are the New Pirates.

Our special guest this week is writer/actor Wil Wheaton.  Wil joins us
to talk about his new book, the demise of the classic videogame arcade,
and why Tremors may be the Best. Film. Ever!  Enjoy!

And why does this post’s title stop at 3? Because if it went to 4, it would, by definition, suck. Ba-dum.

I took yesterday off, because it was a little more important to spend my wedding anniversary with the woman who was responsible for it than . . . well, than anything else in the whole world.

So I’m a day late on sharing this week’s Geek in Review, A Mind Forever Voyaging.

My limited time is the most valuable commodity I have. I can always
earn more money; I can always eat more food; I can stay up late if I
didn’t finish that load of laundry in the afternoon. (Curse you, Guitar
Hero III: Thief of Daylight!) But I can’t get back time that’s already
spent – in some cases, wasted (the time, not me) – on hollow pursuits,
so I think very carefully about how I invest
my limited free time, and my even more limited “me” time. Here’s a look
at a typical afternoon spent in a twisty maze of options, all enticing
. . .

LOOK
>A twisty maze of passages, all alike, is behind you. You face a wall with four doors.

EXAMINE DOORS
>There are four old doors: Movies, Television, Books, and Games.

Oh . . . this should be interesting.

This column is one of my favorites in recent memory, and I owe a lot of that to my editor, Andrew. Andrew used his Red Pen of Doom to give me some fantastic advice and edits on my rough draft of this column, and when he gave me back his version, I came to the unavoidable (and quite happy) conclusion that, without Andrew, I am half a writer. (He says that’s okay, because I’m the motivated half). I thanked him privately, and now I’m thanking him publicly.

While I was at PAX this year, I signed a sweet Guitar Hero controller for a pretty cool guy who waited in line a for a long time to put the pen in my hand.

Near the end of the convention, I saw him again, and he showed me that he’d gotten it signed by pretty much everyone there, from Gabe and Tycho to Jonathan Coulton to MC Frontalot, to . . . well, check out the whole list at Kotaku. It’s pretty awesome, especially if you’re a gamer.

He has put the autographed guitar hero controller up for auction on eBay, with 100% of the final bid going to the Child’s Play charity.

For the five of you who don’t know about Child’s Play:

With the help of hospital
staff, we’ve set up gift wish lists full of video games, toys, and
movies. You can go to each hospital’s list and buy a toy, and that toy
will be sent to the hospital. Some of these kids are in pretty bad
shape. Imagine being stuck alone in a hospital over the holidays,
getting something from a fellow gamer would really raise their spirits.
Some of the stuff the hospital will give away for kids to keep, while
other gifts (like consoles) will be kept by the hospital for patients
to use throughout the year.

So if you win this auction, not only do you get a guitar controller signed by me with the timeless inscription "FREEBIRD!!!!" you will be adding some awesome to the world.

I submitted this story to Propeller, and it would be awesome if it made the front page, so more people know about it.

(Image ganked from Kotaku)

Today’s xkcd is even more relevant to my life than it usually is, since I’ve spent a lot of time at the post office lately.