pages upon pages

Posted on By Wil

We begin production on Monday, and I’m in the final lap of the writing marathon this week.

Yesterday, I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, until I got to a point where I just had to walk away, because I wasn’t getting anything useful out of my brains. This was really difficult for me to do, because I feel like I need another two weeks of work time between today and Monday.

Today, I went back to the stuff I wrote yesterday, knowing that I had to make lots of cuts for both time and budget. I honestly wasn’t sure where I was going to make those cuts, until I went through and just murdered some things that I liked, but thought didn’t need to be there.

Like magic, the whole piece came together and became something I love. That stuff I cut? I don’t miss it, and I can’t imagine that it was ever there…

…except I can imagine that it was there, because it needed to be there so I could write the stuff that I ended up keeping. It’s sort of like building a scaffolding in Minecraft, to make it possible to build the thing you really want to build, then tearing it down (or burning it down, if you make it out of wood around a stone structure, which is really neat).

So this is another thing that goes into my writer’s toolbox: permission to write and write and just keep writing, and not judge or edit along the way until the draft is finished. Because I may think that something is crap and needs to go, and maybe it is and does, but it needs to be there at this moment so I can find the good stuff.

so i throw the windows wide

Posted on By Wil

I’ve been beating myself up a little bit for not putting something new here every day, and for missing my self-imposed-but-flexible Monday deadline for Radio Free Burrito. I have a pretty great life! Why can’t I just do these simple things?

Well, if those were the only things I was doing, I would be justified in beating myself up. But those aren’t the only things I’m doing. I’m working my face off to get the RPG show up and running as production draws terrifyingly close (we have our actors coming in on Monday to create their characters! Already! I’m not in a panic! YOU’RE in a panic!)

But it’s not just the RPG show (which is about to be titled, officially) that’s making demands on me, creatively and emotionally. I’ve had to travel — well, that’s not right. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to some neat places to do some really neat things with some really neat people (fun fact: Sir Baldy hated it when we said “neat” in the old days. He never explained why. I said it a lot to troll him. It worked). I’ve had a bunch of meetings with really fancy people for some really fancy gigs. I’ve been doing a ton of work that I can’t talk about because of NDA.

I started to get anxiety just writing all of that. Sheesh.

So I give myself permission to accept that my creative output isn’t going to be writing stories and telling stories and adding something new to my blog every day. I give myself permission to miss a deadline on a podcast, because I’m making it for my own entertainment and hopefully some people come along for the ride. I mean, it’s free and everything.

One of the reasons I can give myself a little bit of a break was the realization, this morning while I was waiting for my coffee to brew, that I have told tons of stories and written hundreds of thousands of words here in my blog for over ten years, almost every day. That’s a really long time, on a really aggressive schedule, to create stuff. So if my creative energy is pointed away from my blog for a little bit, that’s okay. This isn’t a job. This is … well, it’s a lot of things, but it isn’t a job.

Help me out, here, Internet: what is this, again?

we have fun

Posted on By Wil

I’m working, I swear. I’m not goofing off and doing dumb things with my friends on Twitter…

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 17.10.58

… well, except for when I am.

UPDATE: It’s good to be easily amused.

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 17.24.47 Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 17.25.00

It turns out that there’s a lot happening today.

Posted on By Wil

First up, this is happening:

Wil Wheaton Big Bang Theory Season 8

We also have a new episode of Tabletop out today, and it’s one of my favorites of the season.

And after waiting almost a year to be able to talk about it, Nintendo of America has announced that I play the voice of Abraham Lincoln in their insanely awesome 3DS title, Code Name STEAM.

I am extremely proud of this game, and I can’t wait to play it. It’s got a great balance of humor and strategy, and there may be some awesomely weird stuff in it, too … you can confirm it for yourself with the trailer:

It turns out the Village People recorded a punk song in 1981

Posted on By Wil

I came across this punk rock masterpiece on one of my very favorite blogs, Dangerous Minds.

Now, look, I’m going to warn you: it’s the longest 2:27 of your life, and the video is sort of the ancient progenitor to a looping .gif, likely due to budget constraints, and the possibility that the band involved wasn’t particularly into recording a punk song because the band was THE VILLAGE PEOPLE.

Yes, those Village People.

BEHOLD:

Dangerous Minds says:

“Food Fight” is an anomaly in the Village People’s oeuvre: a first and last attempt to cash in on the punk audience from a band clearly grasping at straws, willing to try absolutely anything to stay relevant.

Musically, one can hear the best elements of DEVO, as well as The Dickies, and Hodo’s nerdcore vocals sound remarkably like Weird Al.

“Food fight” plays out like the music you’d hear in an early 80’s teenage T & A movie where there’d be some marginally “punk” band playing on the beach in wrap-around sunglasses and clam-diggers, while a bunch of girls in string bikinis did robot dances in the sand. Yes, it’s that good. The subject matter would seem to indicate the Village People’s new target demographic was middle school children.

I’m super conflicted about it, because on the one hand, it’s pretty epic … but it’s also pretty horrible, and it feels like ten minutes of repetition to me.

But, still, the fucking VILLAGE PEOPLE recorded a song that would have been perfectly at home in Valley Girl, or Night of the Comet, or Midnight Madness, or even on an episode of CHiPs, if they did something about the way old white people thought punk rock and new wave kids acted in 1981.

What do you think?