Category: WWdN in Exile

I leave for GenCon in about 3d12 hours. While I'm not thrilled about getting up at 4am on Thursday, knowing that the reward for dragging myself out of bed at areyoufuckingserious o'clock is three days of gaming and geeking makes it all worthwhile.

I'm blessing dice, taking pictures, and signing books, pictures, bodies and other interesting things for about 3 6 hours each day. I'm trying to set it up so I have a 2 3 hour session in the morning and a 1 3 hour session in the afternoon, but I won't know precise times until I'm on site, and I get a sense of how many people want to get stuff signed and whatever. I'll announce times on Twitter once I'm at the con.

I don't have any books, because I ran out and wasn't able to order new ones in time for GenCon. However, I'm bringing a limited-edition Chapbook in the style of Wil Wheaton's Limited Edition Chapbooks. This one is entirely gaming-related stories, and I'm really, really happy with how it has turned out. Here's the introduction:

Of all the things that make me a geek, nothing brings me more joy, or is more important to me, than gaming. I am the person I am today because of the games I played and the people I played them with as I came of age in the 80s.
This is a small collection of stories about gaming in its various forms, from cards to dice to computers to our beloved tabletop RPGs. Most of these stories were originally published in 2009, when my son Ryan was away at college, and my son Nolan was 17.

Keep playing games. Games are important. Games matter. When you play a game – any game – you’re using your imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time. When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn Diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. I suspect that for many gamers of my generation, that’s equally true … and I know that my kids will be saying the same thing in 20 years about people they’ve never met face to face, but interact with almost every day in an online game that will make Call of Duty look then like Pong looks today.

Roll 20s,
Wil Wheaton
August 3, 2010

I'm bringing 200 chapbooks. When I did this at PAX Prime last year, I sold out in about 5 hours, so plan accordingly if you really want one.

Oh, this is really important: I got the Swine Flu at PAX Prime, and it was the worst two weeks of my life. When we went to PAX East, all of us (Jerry, Mike, Kurtz, Straub, Paul and Storm, The Professor and Mary Ann) all agreed that we wouldn't shake hands, give hugs, or engage in human contact with people, to limit the introduction of infection vectors. Most people understood, and we gave each other the old Iron Guard Salute (not the fascist thing, the gaming thing that looks like like "love" in ASL). The result: a few people were cheesed off, but none of us were too upset about that, because none of us got sick. It was the first con I've gone to in my whole life where I didn't get some form of Con Crud, and I'd like to repeat that until we turn out the lights on Planet Earth. So, tl;dr: I'm not going to touch people at the con. I know it seems weird, but I hope you understand why. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm trying not to get sick. (Edited to add: in comments, a non-zero number of readers seem to have a real problem with this, and people on the rest of the Internets are already giving me a hard time about it in very unkind terms. This makes me really sad; I hoped for a little more empathy and understanding. Not that it should matter, but I have Epstein-Barr, so my immune system isn't as robust as a normal person's; it is very easy for me to catch viruses and other nasty things. I'm not going to apologize for not wanting to get sick, especially after two weeks of Swine Flu. If you can't understand that, it's your problem, not mine.)

My panel is called I'm Wil Wheaton, and I'm a Gamer. It is on Friday morning, at 11. If you have one of my T-shirts from Jinx or shirt.woot, and you wear it to the panel, you can be in a group picture either just before or just after the panel.

The rest of the con, I plan to find and play as many games as I can, because holy shit I'm finally coming to GenCon!

Games I want to play while I'm there:

• Savage Worlds
• Dragon Age RPG
• Magic: The Gathering
• Zombie Dice
• Cthulhu Dice
• Button Men
• Munchkin
• A Penny For My Thoughts

I have one request, which I hope isn't unreasonable: I'd like to test the theory that you can't have too many dice. If I see you at GenCon, would you give me one gaming die? I'll bring home as many as I get, dump them all on my office floor, and take a picture. I think it could be pretty cool … or very, very sad. Either way, it will be something, you can be sure of that.

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from John Scalzi, reminding me that my Unicorn Pegasus Kitten fanfic is due on Saturday … I'm going to skip the part about how I began to hyperventilate at the thought of actually turning something in to John that people are going to read and OH MY GOD THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT ME AND —

Um. Let's just say that I've been working on it nonstop, so I don't blow the deadline, and I have what Anne calls "Writer brain."

(Witness: "You have writer brain." "Why do you say that?" "Because you just put the cereal in the refrigerator and the almond milk in the pantry." "Oh.")

Anyway, earlier this morning, I was typing as fast as my fingers could keep up with my brain, when my computer did this thing where the screen fritzes once, twice, then looks like something out of Videodrome, then locks up. (This has happened infrequently for a few months, and because I missed my Applecare renewal by one day, I don't have it so … I'm stuck with this until I can afford a replacement. #firstworldproblem.)

Luckily, I'd just saved, so I didn't lose any work. I stood up, sighed, and reset the machine. While it rebooted, I walked across my office and looked out the window just as a hummingbird flew around the side of my house and began taking nectar from of the flowers in the lavender bush beneath my office window.

The window was open, so I could hear the beat of its wings and its tiny voice when it chirped. It darted around the bush, and the sun turned the green feathers on its back almost iridescent. I think I caught a flash of bright red on its breast while BNL's Brian Wilson played on my Sonos.

It was an incredibly peaceful moment, and it calmed my frenzied mind. Though I hadn't planned to take a break from my work, I was glad I did. If I'd been working, I wouldn't have seen or heard it, and I was grateful to be in exactly the right place and time to have that moment.

When I was a dorky teenager, I was sort of thrust into the spotlight by Stand By Me and Star Trek.

I've written before about how weird the whole thing was, and how uncomfortable a lot of the attention made me, but it wasn't all bad; I got to do some cool things, and meet some cool people as a result.

Being a cable TV subscriber in the 80s meant that I watched a lot of Nickelodeon, so I was a fan of You Can't Do That On Television, Double Dare, Mister Wizard's World, The Third Eye, Dangermouse, and getting slimed. Because I was a kid, and because I was on TV, I was invited to lots of Nickelodeon events over the years, where I got to meet a lot of the people I'd seen on Nick (never got to meet Moose from YCDTOT, though, which was a bummer).

Once, I even got to host the Kids Choice Awards, where I met Bobby "The Brain" Heenan (Weasel! Weasel! Weasel!) and Debbie Gibson (I still get lost in her eyes, though it was painfully easy for her to shake my love.)

I really liked the people who worked at Nickelodeon, and I guess they liked me, too, because I was always getting invited to participate in things like this, which appears to have been filmed when I was 14, or right after I turned 15:

That's even more embarrassing than my Complete Dork Who Loves Batman picture (which was probably taken 6 to 12 months after this video was shot), because I am such a dork, bordering on obnoxiousness. 30 year-old me would have wanted to kick 14 or 15 year-old me in the nuts if he had seen that, but almost 38 year-old me is willing to give that kid a break; he was so excited just to be there, and he was such an awkward nerd, he really was doing the best he could.

Doing these things was so much fun, and I genuinely loved it at the time, though I really took for granted that I'd always be asked to do them. Over the years, as I faded from view and struggled, I regretted that I didn't appreciate them more (though I don't think I was capable of fully appreciating them at the time, being fourteen and fifteen and all) … so when things happen to me now, like getting to watch a private concert by the Barenaked Ladies from about 10 feet away – where Ed Robertson fucking namechecks me in a song – you can bet your Vorpal Sword I take a moment to be grateful, and take nothing for granted.

(Thanks to Joshua C who e-mailed the link)