Anne’s 2015 celebrity pet adoption calendar is available!

This is our dog, Seamus:

Seamus Wheaton

Seamus is part of our family because we walked him in the Wiggle Waggle Walk a few years ago. The Wiggle Waggle Walk is an annual fundraiser for the Pasadena Humane Society, and a few years ago after our dog, Ferris, died, Anne and I formed a team to raise money for pets in her honor and memory. Readers of my blog contributed so much, our little team shot to the top of the contributor’s list, and PHS asked us to walk a shelter dog at the event, as a thank you.

Seamus was that dog, and we adopted him about a week after we met him.

Two years ago, Anne and I were at PHS to see how the expansion they were building at the time was going (as donors, we occasionally were invited to see how our money was being spent). While we were there, a staff member brought a beautiful little pit bull puppy who I immediately fell in love with. We adopted her a week later. That little puppy is now fifty-six pounds of snuggle named Marlowe.

But if I sit here, I can haz it!

Marlowe and Seamus quickly became the best of friends.

Seamus Wheaton and Marlowe Wheaton are buddies

Here’s Marlowe, on her first Wiggle Waggle Walk:

Here’s our oldest dog, Riley, who says I’M A DOG!

I'm a dog!
I’m a dog!

We had so much fun at the Wiggle Waggle Walk, and PHS has brought so much joy and love into our lives, we’ve made it an annual commitment to give back, by raising as much money as we can to help them help animals.

Last year, Anne put together a wonderful celebrity pet adoption calendar to help raise money for Pasadena Humane Society, and to encourage people to adopt pets instead of buying them from breeders.

Here’s the video I helped her make for it:

Lots of people loved the calendar (if you own one, you get to see us with our dogs all this month!) and we ended up raising a little over $50,000 for Pasadena Humane Society.

This year, she did another calendar, with all new people, like our friends Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Ed Brubaker, James Gunn, Tricia Helfer, and my space mom, Gates McFadden.

Here’s the video I helped her make for the 2015 calendar:

If you’d like to get one of your own, and help us help PHS help animals, go to teamwheaton.org and make a contribution of $40 or more.  We cover all the costs with our foundation, so 100% of your donation goes to PHS. We will ship worldwide, and we can only offer one per household, because quantities are limited.

Thanks for supporting our team, and thanks for helping animals!

Indie RPGs for Tabletop Season Three

I’m in official pre-production mode for Tabletop Season Three, so I’ve been looking at tons of games (seriously, thank you for all the suggestions), and playing as many of them as I can with my friends, or on my iPad (Suburbia on iPad is pretty much perfect, if you were wondering).Idea that I’m putting here, so I don’t forget: include information about tablet versions of games that we play on the show, if tablet versions exist.I’m also beginning to look at indie RPGs, because we had such a great time playing Fiasco. So far, candidates include:

  • A Penny For My Thoughts
  • Monsterhearts
  • Durance
  • The Quiet Year
  • Carolina Death Crawl
  • Microscope
  • Dread

I don’t know if we’ll be able to make any of these work (Dread has player elimination, for example), but I just love GM-less storytelling games, and I think Tabletop is the perfect place to show them off, because most of the people who come to play with us are inherently good storytellers.I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Indie RPGs that fit with this bunch, and also if you’d like to watch us play some of these. Keep in mind that we’d be able to, at most, split it into two episodes, which means we’d have to play a satisfying session in about four hours.

As before, please leave your suggestion here, so it’s easy for me to find. Also, publishers and writers: please don’t use this as an invitation to mount a campaign to get me to play your game.

if you enjoy sitting on counters…

A massive hurricane is currently tearing up the ocean just off the coast of Mexico, and the surf here in Southern California is huge. Waves between fifteen and twenty feet have been common, and on Wednesday, Anne and I went down to the beach to see them for ourselves, and take a long walk along the sand.

School has just started, so there weren’t many people down there. Parking was easy, and after a quick walk across the hot sand, we got to the edge of the water. We stood there for a few minutes and watched enormous waves explode into foam, before the ocean seemed to completely flatten out into deceptively serene beauty between sets.

We walked about four miles down the sand, and another four miles back. We shared a meatball sub for lunch, and a little after 2pm, we got in the car to head home.

We were about a quarter mile from our house when my cell phone rang. I vaguely recognized the number, so I picked it.

“I have [Syfy Network Executive] for you,” a disinterested assistant said.

“Okay,” I said. The line fell silent, and I knew that my work with Syfy was over.

“How are you?” He asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said, honestly. “I just got back from a nice long walk with my wife, and it’s been a pretty great day.”

“Well, I’m about to make your day less great,” he said. Then, he told me that Syfy will not be ordering more episodes of The Wil Wheaton Project.

He assured me that it wasn’t the quality of the show. He told me again and again how much he loved it, how funny he thought it was, how much he liked me, how much he wanted to find other things to do together.

Ultimately, he told me, the executives in New York just didn’t think we had enough viewers to justify more episodes. I didn’t say anything about the total lack of promotion off the network, or point out that our ratings were on par with The Soup, or that ratings are always lower in summer than the fall. I didn’t  bother saying any of that, because I know he knows that. I was reasonably confident that he made those arguments with New York when he was trying to get the show renewed. I presume he fought hard for us, but ultimately couldn’t sway executives in New York who never seemed — in my opinion — to really understand what kind of show we were doing, who I was and why I was hosting it, and how to engage with and promote to the audience who would like it.

I thanked him for the call, thanked him for the opportunity to do a show that Syfy had never tried before, and sincerely thanked him for all his creative support. He’s a good guy in an industry full of bad guys, and I genuinely enjoyed working with him. I know that he’s trying really hard to put the sci-fi back into Syfy, and if anyone can do it there (which is going to be incredibly difficult, I think), he’s the guy who can make it happen.

I hung up the phone, and told Anne that we weren’t being renewed.

“How do you feel about that?” She asked me.

“I’m really okay with it,” I said. “I’m super sad that I won’t get to work with my writers and producers, and I’m sad that we don’t get to keep writing jokes, but I did everything I could to help the show succeed. I promoted it the best way I could, I worked hard to write stuff that was funny, and I tried so, so, so hard to get the network executives in New York to understand how they could help the show succeed.

“I can only do so much, and we didn’t get a lot of promotional support. I did everything I could, and I’m proud of the work we put on the screen. On the one hand, it’s a shame that they stopped us right when the show was hitting its stride, but on the other hand, we went out with some great episodes.”

I’m disappointed that I won’t get to keep working with people I really like and respect. I’m sad that we won’t get to do more silly segments like How Will They Bite It? and Skeletor Reads Angry Tweets. I’ll miss the scarecrow most of all.

I’m grateful, though, to the people at Syfy who believed in us and gave us a chance to succeed. I’m grateful for the creative support we got, and I’m grateful that I got to spend my summer working with wonderful, talented, funny people. I grew a lot of levels in comedy writing over the last 18 weeks or so, and I owe it all to the amazing people I got to work with.

I had made a decision the day we wrapped the show, that I was going to be okay whether Syfy picked us up, or not. I can honestly say that I am really okay with where I am today. I’m looking forward to doing Tabletop and our upcoming RPG show. I’m looking forward to writing more stories, getting excited, and making more things.

Thank you to everyone who watched our show. Thank you for your kind words, and for being part of a pretty great summer.

Until next time: Play more games!

Oh, and let me just stop this before it starts: we nerds have a penchant for letter-writing campaigns and stuff to try and save shows we like. Please don’t do that here. It’s not going to happen, and we should instead put that energy into something else, like getting #butts to trend.

Thank you for all your game suggestions

I’ve combed through hundreds and hundreds of suggestions (and nearly 2000 comments holy crap) since I asked what you’re interested in seeing us play on the next season of Tabletop, and I have come away with a lot of great ideas.

At the moment, we’re looking at about 60 games. That list will be narrowed down to about 20, maybe more if we do a combo episode of a couple of mini or micro games.

A lot of FAQs popped up in that thread, so I’d like to point anyone who is interested to my episode of Not The Flog, where I talked about how we choose games for the show, why we simply can’t play certain games, and some games I freaking love, but simply won’t work for our format.

Finally, a quick note to publishers and designers: I know you’re enthusiastic about your games, and I know a lot of you would like us to play your games on our show. However, encouraging people so basically spam me with your titles isn’t helpful, and actually ensures that I won’t play your games. This is a giant bummer for everyone, because you may have a game that I’d genuinely like to play, but I’ll never even try it, because the spamming was so annoying and unhelpful.

A quick note to players: if you genuinely love a game, let me know, and let me know why. That is helpful information that us useful and welcome.

Okay, thanks. Back to it.