Category: WWdN in Exile

Tomorrow morning, I leave for Portland, where I'll spend an all-too-brief week working on Leverage. 

For those of you who don't know, I'm a recurring character on Leverage. I play a computer hacker called Cha0s, who is a nemesis to the Leverage team, but especially to Hardison. I first played this character last season in The Two Live Crew Job, which was written by my friend Amy Berg (who also brought me to Eureka this season), and from the first day on set, I hoped they'd bring me back. I'm so excited to go to work tomorrow, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve.

I'll be Twittering and Twitpiccing from the set as much as I can without revealing spoilers or losing my focus as an actor. I'm in this episode a lot, which is awesome, but also means I won't get to spend much time doing the PDX things I love (though a trip to Ground Kontrol is obviously in order, likewise a trip to Powell's to get Charlie Stross' latest Laundry book.) Maybe this will be the trip to Portland where I finally go to Voodoo Donuts!

Yesterday, Anne and I pulled up this hideous old carpet that we've wanted to tear up for years. Beneath it, we uncovered a beautiful parquet floor, made from 3/8" mahogany wood. It took us about 3 hours to get the carpet up, pull out all the old staples, and then clean up what we figured must have been at least twenty years of accumulated dust and sand and FSM-knows-what.

I'm incredibly sore today from all the lifting and stuff, but the end result was entirely worth the effort:

We've wanted to do this for years, and waited so long because thought that we'd have to sand it, stain it, seal it, and spend thousands of dollars we don't have on it. A friend of ours who does floors for a living looked at it recently, and told us that it was such good quality wood, we could probably just take up the carpet and clean the floor with some Murphy's soap. It turns out that he was right, and the entire thing just cost us a few dollars and our time.

After we finished, we stood there, in our semi-renovated living room, and looked at it together. Our house felt different; it felt lighter, cleaner, more ours, than it had that morning.

"I love it that we spent the afternoon doing this," I said, "because we got to do something together that wasn't that difficult, didn't cost us anything, and made our house feel more like our home."

"I just wish we hadn't waited so long to do it," she said.

Our dogs wandered in from the family room, and cautiously sniffed around the room, frequently looking up at us for what I assume was some sort of pack leader reassurance.

"Now you guys don't have to compete for space in the entry way, because you have a whole room with a cool floor to sleep on when it's hot," Anne said.

Riley wagged her tail, and Seamus stretched out, lowered his head to the floor, and then lowered his entire body down. He thumped his tail against the floor. It was a moment of serenity, at the end of a decidedly non-serene week.

"I'm excited to go work on Leverage, because I love being an actor, and it's always fun to be in Portland … but I'm really going to miss my family and my house while I'm gone."

I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately. I just started watching Daleks in Manhattan, and the 1930s recording of Putting on the Ritz they play near the top of the show reminded me of something cool that happened at PAX East that I meant to write about, but never did.

The con was over, and Anne and I had some time to kill before we needed to leave for the airport. 

"We're going to be on the plane for a long time," Anne said while we finished packing, "so I think we should take a big old walk before we go to the airport."

"That's a great idea," I said, "but the weather has other plans." I pointed to the window, where thick rivulets of water ran down the glass, barely revealing the city beyond, beneath thick and dark storm clouds.

"We don't have to go outside. While you were signing yesterday, I went exploring, and found all these covered walkways connecting lots of buildings. We could probably walk a mile or more without ever going out."

"Oh, that's cool," I said. "Let's do that."

We finished packing our suitcases and went downstairs. A few PAX attendees were playing boardgames in the lobby of the hotel, keeping the con going as long as they could. I stopped and conversed with a few of them in the language of gaming geeks while Anne checked our bags with the bell desk.

We began walking through a mall that was connected to the hotel and convention center. It was easy to spot my fellow gamers and geeks, because we were all wearing the appropriate T-shirts, PAX Scarves, and other nerd gear. We all traded greetings and Iron Guard salutes, sharing an unspoken gaming brotherhood, as well as sadness that the con was over.

Eventually, we walked through all the space that building had to offer, and we ventured across an above-ground walkway to another part of the mall that was across the street. It was one of those malls that was designed and built in the 80s. "This feels like a cross between Logan's Run and Dawn of the Dead," I said.

"Yeah, it's a little surreal," Anne said.

"There is no carousel!" I said, a little too loudly.

Anne gave me a blank look.

"It's from —"

"Logan's Run. I know."

"I love you."

After a few laps in that mall, we began to make our way back to the hotel. As we neared the bridge that connected the two buildings together, we decided to stop at Starbucks to get some coffee. While we waited in line, I realized that they were playing some uptempo 1940s jazz, like Duke Ellington. I looked out the window toward the street. The rain was heavier now than it had been when we were in our room, and it ran down the window in thick sheets. Through the window and to the right, I could see the glass-covered bridge we were going to cross, and across the street, the buildings – barely visible through the storm – disappeared into the clouds.

"Where are you?" Anne asked, after I'd apparently been silent for some time.

I smiled. "This music, and this view … it makes me think of Rapture."

She looked out the window with me.

"That's from —"

"Bioshock. I know."

"I really love you."

We got our coffee, and I vigilantly watched for splicers while we walked back to the hotel lobby. 

I've known about this for over a month, but I couldn't even hint at it until today: I'm returning to Leverage later this season, as superhacker Cha0s. WIRED's Underwire talked to me a little bit about it, and broke the news earlier today.

I also wrote another column for Techland, about how I got screwed, again, by DRM (for the last time):

Everyone on Reddit has been talking about how great Matt Smith is, so last night, I decided to meet him. I felt a surge of excited anticipation as I woke up my iMac, made sure Rivet could see the /iTunes/TV Shows/ directory, and turned on my Xbox. I browsed to The Eleventh Hour, hit play … and got an error message that the Xbox couldn't play back the protected format.

Son. Of. A. Bitch. Fucked by DRM, again.

So listen, I know that a non-zero number of you are laughing at me, and I realize that I should have thought about this ahead of time, but I want to use this as yet another example of DRM screwing an honest, paying customer, who could just as easily have gone to the seedy underbelly of the Internet to acquire these episodes without paying anything to BBC.

There has got to be a better way to balance the needs of consumers with the rights of creators to be compensated for their work. I don't know what it is, but I think it has to be a change in philosophy and thinking, because what the way they're doing it now just isn't working for anyone.

A couple of nights ago, Anne and I spent over an hour watching cold war propaganda and education films on the Internet Archive. Those movies are just fascinating to me, and I've often wondered what it would have been like to live in the world portrayed within them, as opposed to the way the world actually was at the time.

I think there is a sinister beauty in all the propaganda posters from World War II, especially the Soviet designs, so when I saw these Retro Videogame Propaganda posters at Think Geek, I wanted to insert coins for victory:

There are four five different posters including this one. I won't tell you what they are, because I wouldn't want to rob you of the joy of discovery when you click on the thumbnail and realize what game they're referencing.