WWdN:iX readerJB wrote:

[I]f you don't read AssignBlame.com, you really should. You're the Goat of
the Week, evidently. Check it out.

Because I’m a fan of both goats and assigning blame, and because I am a huge fan of the word evidently, I headed over and took a look:

Honestly, I’d say Wheaton has been a big influence on other celebrities
starting up their own blogs. Whether they’re ghost written or
actually penned by the celebrities themselves, there is now a glut of
Hollywood claptrap flooding the internet. Pamela Anderson, Rosie
O’Donnell, Melanie Griffith, Barbara Streisand, William Fu***ng Shatner,
Tom Green, Al Roker, Hillary Duff, and freakin MOBY for chrissakes —
all of them have blogs out there on the internet. All of them are
spewing their “I’m so fantastic” bile onto what was once a pristine
electronic frontier.

In
the hands of these “You like me, you
really really like me” publicity whores, the internet is going to
slowly become yet another cog in the Hollywood Spin Machine. Celebrity
Drunk Driving? Repentant blog post. Paparazzi
caught you topless on the beach? Outraged blog post. Didn’t
get the part you wanted in the newest M. Night Shyamalan film?
Sympathetic, downtrodden blog post. With enthusiastic publicists and
greedy agents, we already can’t tell the honest, well-meaning actors
from those who are just using it as yet another publicity mouth-piece.

And it’s all your fault, Wheaton.

You
had to go and create something good. You had to start something
that was enjoyable for people to read. You had to make something
that we could rely on to provide us with a laugh, or a sniffle, or a
cry of outrage on a regular basis. You had to go and TOUCH us, Wil.

And now all these posers think they can do it too.

When I saw the title of the entry was alt.wilwheaton.die.die.die, I wasn’t exactly hopeful . . . but this is actually pretty goddamn cool. I would like to say thank you, and I’m sorry. 🙂

Tonight, WWdN West Coast Warmup #2 is happening at PokerStars.
Yesterday, I got heads-up in a $22 SNG, and had my kings cracked by 84d
(!) when the flop came 6s-5s-9h, and he turned the 7h for a gutshot. On
the very next hand, I had AKo. He raised, I called. When the flop came
Ah Jh 9d, he checked. I made a small bet, he raised and I pushed,
confident I was ahead, and hoping he’d put me on a tilt-push and call.
He called, and showed Ac 8d, and I was about a 4:1 favorite. The turn
was the 5d, improving me to about 9:1, and the river was the 8h,
reducing me to 0:1.

So what I’m saying is, I used up all my bad luck yesterday, and I’m dangerous tonight. If you’re going to come play, I suggest reading two posts I did for CardSquad this week, Blissful Buckets parts one and two. They are about enjoying the game, and having fun at lower limits:

Is it a coincidence that I just wanted to have fun, and I finished the night way way way ahead?

Maybe.
But I know this: I had as much fun when I was losing as I did when
I was winning. I enjoyed the company of my fellow players, and I did
not take a single moment for granted while I played with people I like.

So
I am left with a few points, which will guarantee low-limit and
small-stakes SNG success, as I’ve defined it. This assumes that you
have a basic skill set, and understand things like the Gap Concept, the
Dominated Hand, and the importance of position in no limit hold’em:

 

1. Always play within your gulp limit.
2. Don’t play with the rent money.
3. Do whatever it takes to enjoy the company of your tablemates.
4. Don’t be afraid of Monsters Under The Bed.
5. Read Zen and the Art of Poker.

Hope to see you all there tonight! The game is at 7:30 Pacific, and
is in the lobby under Tourneys -> Private. Password, as always, is monkey.

So I got the new Wilco CD, Kicking Television: Live in Chicago. It sounds great, and has one of the most incredible version of Spiders (Kidsmoke) I’ve ever heard, but it’s not much different from any other soundboard recording from the same tour earlier this year. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have a pile of recordings from that tour, because I am that big of a Wilco geek. I even picked up the actual CD, rather than buying it from the iTunes Music Store, hoping for a booklet or something inside, but there wasn’t anything that made me glad I’d driven all the way to the store for it. Still, it’s a great recording that Wilco geeks will probably enjoy, and the best reason to buy this CD is because you love the band and want to support them.

I finally watched 28 Days Later last night. I enjoyed it, but I think it had been built up way too much by my friends, because it didn’t blow me away like I was expecting it to. I wouldn’t consider it a zombie movie, at all. First of all, I don’t consider it a true zombie movie. That’s not to suggest that it’s a bad movie, it’s just the zombie elitist in me snorting from behind a too-tight sweaty T-shirt: When the infected die, they’re dead. The end. If they were traditional zombies, they’d be coming to get you, Barbara. They also don’t eat the living, they’re just out there trying to kill everything that moves and spread the infection. I really liked that, and I think the zombie comparisons aren’t necessary. (Yes, I know that Danny Boyle called it a "reimagining" of the zombie films, so I’ll defer to him on this point, but like a good nerd, I’m needed to snort and argue about it a whole lot, first, to feel important.) 

I really loved the way the movie looked, and I loved the score. I thought the performances were all fantastic, and the movie was truly scary and suspenseful . . . but when they got to the whole thing with the soldiers, I felt like the story took an unexpected turn, jumped onto a different track, and became and entirely different movie. Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose it could be an additional examination of how different people reacted to the epidemic . . . but it didn’t feel right to me in the context of the film. I watched all the alternative endings, and I really liked the one that ends with the two girls walking down the hospital corridor, without the coda.

It’s my turn to pull the early shift today, which means I get to see the sun rise this morning.

It also means that I get to see the full moon on its way down the Western sky, a brilliant white orb in a that part of the sky that’s still dark, though the Eastern horizon was on fire.

(Did anyone see the conjunction of the moon and Mars the other night? And could the skies over Los Angeles be any clearer the last few days?)

There isn’t a cloud in the sky, it’s already warming up out there, and the dull roar of the freeway was oddly comforting as I walked my dogs around the dewy grass in the back yard. The birds haven’t even woken up, yet.

And now . . . coffee and toast.

I first saw Star Wars in 1977, and watched Star Trek reruns in afternoon syndication throughout the early 1980s. I started reading SciFi literature around sixth grade, and by the time I discovered Larry Niven in high school, I was a full-on Sci-Fi Geek.

During the production of TNG, I could have very easily lost my love of Sci-Fi, because creating it was now my job (here is the part where I plug Just A Geek, because I talk about that conflict an awful lot in it. Thank you for your indulgence.) However, right around the second season of TNG, I officially became A Gamer, and serendipitously discovered The Prisoner and graphic novels like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. Whenever the joy of Sci-Fi was threatened by the daily grind of working on TNG, I picked up a comic, or went to The Village, played GURPS or painted Warhammer 40K Space Marines. To this day, I am one of the only (if not the only) actors you’ll find shopping for nerdy T-shirts and technical manuals in the dealer’s room, minutes before I go onstage at the convention. (And don’t think for a second that I’ve ever stopped counting my blessings for that!)

My point is, Sci-Fi always provided an escape for me, even when it was an escape from creating Sci-Fi, and though I liked other genres, especially horror and fantasy, nothing ever captured my imagination or stimulated my intellect like Sci-Fi did (and does.) I’ve always tried to explain to people that I love it because good Sci-Fi (not that action movie bullshit that pretends to be Sci-Fi) allows us to look at our world, and the human condition, in a safe way that still challenges us, but I’ve always felt that my explaination falls a little bit short.

I’ve been re-reading Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica blog today, and Ron explains, perfectly, not only why I love Sci-Fi but why Battlestar Galactica is the best Sci-Fi series in the history of the universe:

Galactica is both mirror and prism through which to view our world. It attempts to mirror the complexities of our lives and our society in turbulent times, while at the same time reflecting and bending that view in order to allow us to extrapolate on notions present in contemporary society but which have not yet come to pass, i.e. a true artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and the existential questions it raises. Our goal is to examine contemporary culture and society, to challenge (and sometimes provoke) our audience, but not to provide easy answers to complex problems.

Frakkin’ A, Ron.