Category: WWdN in Exile

Follow-up to Radio Free Burrito Episode Four: Like I thought, I did a great job on the voice audition, and they loved what I did. Also like I thought, my voice is too deep for the character, so I didn’t get the part. Sadtimes, made less sad by the casting director telling my manager that everyone at Nick likes what I do, and they’ll bring me back until they find a project that I can be part of.

Follow-up to the Walter post: Like I thought, I sucked out loud, and they were kind enough to simply say, "it’s not going any further." I hope I didn’t suck so hard they don’t bring me back for future projects.

This week’s Games of our Lives is an extremely fun game that never really caught on, called Peter Packrat.

Gameplay: Okay, Peter, there’s a ton of junk scattered around
your neighborhood, just waiting for you to get your disease-ridden
claws on it. You can climb, jump, and crawl your way around your
neighborhood as you fill your nest with bottles, rings, watches, and
cans.

However, you’re a dirty little rat, and you’re at the bottom of the
Flatbush food chain. Enemies like Scrapper the dog, Clawd the cat,
Sticky the spider, and the resident tough guy Riff Rat would love to
make you into a nice snack. You can avoid them with deft footwork and
judicious use of hidden shortcuts, or attack them by throwing some of
your precious junk. If you manage to score a hit, you can turn the
tables and ride them around, with the exception of Riff Rat, who isn’t
anybody’s bitch, in spite of what you may have heard around town.

Could be mistaken for: Cheeky Mouse, Bagman, a walk along the Los Angeles River

It’s a moderately amusing column (the bio is the best part, if you ask me), lacking the rapier-like wit of Jungle King and Triple Punch, but not every at bat can be a home run, you know?

Anyway, WWdN:iX Reader Larry Hastings (who wants you to know that he is so old skool, he remembers
Battlezone when it was on field test as "Future Tank") sent me the following Peter Packrat story, which he’s given me permission to reprint here:

Just a personal story about Peter Packrat… a footnote to history.

At one time in my life I was Intergalactic World High Score Champion at
Peter Packrat.  That’s because there was only one–on field test at
Merlin’s Castle in San Jose right near my house–and I was the main
person playing it.

The game is deterministic; you develop patterns which will work every
time.  I had worked out patterns for, I /think/, the first five levels
or so… that was as far as I generally got.  One day while playing I
discovered a bug: the "spider" in the creepy cavern level would
occasionally stray out of its web, and if you conked it on the noggin
with bric-a-brac you could stun it and ride it around.  Since it wasn’t
on the "spider web" anymore, the game didn’t think it was a spider… so
it decided it was a bat!  It even made the bat sound effect.  This
delighted me, and it actually improved my pattern, so I worked it in.

One day I came in to Merlin’s Castle and Peter Packrat was out of
commission.  Some guy had the back open, where I could clearly see… a
Commodore 1541 floppy drive, like you’d use with a Commodore 64.  After
a minute or two of grinding and buzzing, it finished doing what it was
doing.   He took out the disk and they restored the machine to active
service  I started playing only to discover that the bug was fixed and
my pattern didn’t work anymore.  I think I mostly gave up on the game
after that.

About ten years ago I corresponded a little with Lyle Rains, a
now-ex-Atari guy, and mentioned all this.  He opined that the animations
on Peter Packrat were just fantastic–really cute–and it was an utter
shame that Atari botched it as a product.

And a bit of news that is quite exciting for me: Peter Packrat is internally known as "gool#52", which means that I’ve been writing Games of our Lives for one full year. How much does that rock? The answer is: totally.

I made the (mistake?) of ordering a Venti coffee this morning, and I feel like a little hummingbird right now.

So how about a whole bunch of random crap?

• I love Colin Hay’s album Company of Strangers, especially How Long Will It Last? and No Win Situation.

• Sen. Harry Reid (D, NV) nails it:

"After reviewing the Republican record, I know why Ken Mehlman and Karl
Rove want to play politics with national security in 2006 instead of
having an honest debate about who can keep Americans safe. It’s because
this is a debate Republicans cannot win.

Republicans run good campaigns, but when it comes to actually governing
and protecting Americans, they have a record of incompetence."

Right on, Senator. Think you can get the rest of the Democrats together on this one, or are you guys going to totally screw it up again?

• We just added a bunch of new bloggers to blogging.la. I can’t wait for the hazing to begin. I have my paddle and everything.

• Those people who freaked out at me because of my last post? Get a life. Failing that, get a sense of humor.

• I’ve read two amazing books recently, which I’ll mention and recommend later on this week.

• One of the points Stephen King makes in On Writing . . . over and over again is that people who wish to be writers must make time to read. I find that the more I read, the more I want to write, because my writing monkey only digs his claws into my brains when I read something and think, Oh! I can do that, too! Watch me now! I can’t wait to write about Friday night.

• Stephen King has a new book out today, about people who become zombies because of cell phones. It sounds really fun.

• iTunes Music Store use is up 247%, according to a survey which includes some rather interesting facts:

The survey also noted that iTunes Music Store customers were 2.2 times
more likely to drive a Volkswagen than any other car. They also
discovered that iTMS customers liked to drink cider and imported beer.
So I guess that on the road of life there are passengers, and teenaged
drunk drivers.

• One of my favorite bits on Futurama was, "I’m Roseanne, your guide to the world of facts." I love that line so much, I wish I could use it whenever I share some useless bit of information with someone, like, "Did you know that a baby’s head weighs the same as a brick of gold on the moon? It’s true. I’m Wil, your guide to the world of facts."

• I think I already knew this, but forgot: Good news, everyone! There’s a Futurama movie in the works, and there’s even a chance that Futurama could have a Family Guy-esque revival on television.

• Nolan told me the other night, "I love it when Professor Farnsworth says things like, ‘I’m sending you on a mission to Planet Certain Death, where you’ll have your faces crushed by killer robots as soon as you land . . . Enjoy!’"

• I got The Wilco Book + CD for Xmas, right before Santa came down and rained death upon the whole world, and it is really amazing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because it’s Wilco, after all, that the CD is as good as it is, but it wouldn’t be shocking if they threw together some "B" material to release with the book (which is awesome on its own, by the way). They didn’t. Several of the tracks have earned a coveted five star rating on my iPod.

• I watched I am Trying to Break Your Heart over the weekend. The best moment in the entire film is when Jeff Tweedy’s son plays drums on his lap, and makes Jeff guess which song he’s playing. When Jeff guesses that it’s Heavy Metal Drummer, he starts to sing it while his son plays the drums on his legs. It’s one of the sweetest and most awesome moments I’ve ever seen. In fact, it was awesome and a half.

• Mt friend Kat is taking me to see Jeff Tweedy when he comes to LA. Ding!

• Night before last, we had 70-80 MPH gusts of wind at my house, which knocked out our power for about 18 hours and destroyed several million-year-old oak trees in my neighborhood. One of them almost took out one of my neighbor’s houses. Yipe. Last night, we expected the wind to come back, but it never did. On the way home from school yesterday, the kids and I discussed the wind, and came to the following conclusions:

• I hate the wind, because it’s so destructive and loud.
• Nolan sleeps through it at night, and if he had to pick between wind and rain, he’d take wind.
• Ryan loves the wind, because it feels like it’s cleaning everything up, and it’s got all this raw, unfocused power.
• We all love days like today, after the wind has gone away, where it’s so clear you feel like you could see to the other side of the world, if the damn horizon wasn’t in the way.

• I had a bit of a panic recently when my Powerbook began acting weird. None of the disk utilities on my install discs worked, and I was on the verge of freaking out, when I was pointed toward Disk Warrior. I can’t praise Disk Warrior enough. It completely fixed all the problems, in about an hour, and my Powerbook doesn’t show any of the obvious signs of the abuse it takes from me, up here on the second floor.

• Though you won’t be able to tell when you read this entry, I’m stopping right now to call Allentown, PA, to do an interview. I really liked the reporter, and we talked for about 45 minutes. I hope I made sense, and I’ll link the article when it comes out.

• This post has way too many indents and sub-indents.

• Bill Hicks just came on iTunes. Who is the modern day Bill Hicks? I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head.

• The movie The Comedians of Comedy is really great, and almost made me forgive Zach Galifianakis for completely stealing a bit from me that I used to do on the J.Keith vanStraaten Show, and using it on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.

• Isaac Hayes’ Joy just came on iTunes. Good thing Anne isn’t home, or this post would be delayed by at least another three minutes.

• Eww! Gross!

• What?

• This post is really fun to write. I think I’ve been taking myself, my blog, and everything in general too seriously lately. (Deadbeats really fucking suck, man, and they can really take a lot of the happiness out of your life) Who cares if everything I write isn’t so goddamned great or important? And who cares if I over-use italics?

• A friend of mine just pointed out to me that I’d created another Prove To Everyone . . . rather than write an entire book about it to slay it, the simple act of identifying the existance of this beast was like turning on the light and realizing that the monster I kept seeing in the corner was just a jacket slumped over the chair. In other words, it was never really there, and only existed because I created it. Wow. I feel like I’ve been breathing through a straw, and I just got to take my first deep breath in months. Thanks, J.

• I think I’ve said everything I need to say, and I’m incredibly satisfied right now. Where is my mind? It’s right here. Rather than push it, I’m going to hit "publish," and go outside to enjoy a little bit of this amazing day we’re having.

I’m Wil, your guide to the world of facts.

An interesting (there’s that word again) follow-up to my previous post, which was a funny follow-up to its previous post: Way back when I was eighteen or nineteen, my friend Damion, who wrote and directed  Neverland, stood in front of the Tower Records on Sunset the day Fabio’s CD came out, with a cardboard sign which read, "I need twelve dollars to buy the Fabio CD." It took him about fifteen minutes to successfully panhandle his way into his own copy of Fabio After Dark.

A few years later, Damion was Garfield for Halloween, but not just any Garfield; the Garfield that was stuck into car windows all over Los Angeles in the early 1990s. He had the giant suction cups and everything, but what really made the costume was after a few drinks, when Damion told anyone who would listen, "Garfield has gingivitis!" It was a very surreal All Hallow’s Eve, to say the very least, and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the drag queen got into some sort of quasi-erotic (or disturbing, I suppose) dance off with a stripper that, strangely, had something to please almost everyone in the ad-hoc audience.

A funny follow-up to my previous post, that had completely washed out of my brains until moments ago, when for some inexplicable reason the theme to Get Smart made me remember:

About a year ago, Anne and I were driving home down Santa Monica near Highland in Hollywood. It was the beginning of afternoon rush hour traffic, so when I saw a person waiting to make a left from a side street, I stopped to let him go across in front of us. See, I try to do nice things like that, because I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone made an effort to do little things, like hold doors open, let people with fewer items cut in front in the checkout, say "thank you" . . . things like that.

Anyway, I stop to let this guy pull out across in front of us, and Anne says, "Dude! That’s totally Fabio!"

"What? Where?!" I said.

"Driving the car you just let in front of us!"

I laughed, because Anne and I occasionally play the celebrity look alike game, too.

We were silent for a second or two, and we both realized that that the car was a Bentley, and the driver was, indeed, Fabio.

"Oh my god!" I said. "It really is Fabio!"

Anne and I decided that this momentous occasion warranted an immediate and vigorous high-five.

Fabio waved his hand at me in the universal "thank you," gesture, turned West onto Santa Monica, and drove into the Sunset. We continued East into our mundane, non-Fabio lives.