because it’s the recliner my nephew deserves right now

Posted on By Wil

When my sister found out she was having a boy, she and her husband decided not to tell anyone in the family what name they had chosen. I had to agree with this course of action, because I know how … strongly opinionated … some of the grandparents can be about things like names and also everything else in the world.

But I didn’t feel right just calling him “the baby” or “your baby” or “the tiny human growing inside your body”, so I decided to call him BATMAN.

Amy pointed out to me that if they named him BATMAN, she and her husband would probably end up shot behind a theater. I was pleased that she knew the history of The Dark Knight, especially since they are decidedly not nerds like me (they’re sports nerds), but had to correct her. “That would happen to you if his name was Bruce,” I said. “BATMAN is pure awesome and that’s what I’ll call him for his whole life.”

By wonderful coincidence, one of her friends got my nephew his very first easy chair for his 1st birthday last week:

batman_chair_ftw
His shirt was a birthday gift from his godparents (that’s me and Anne).

He’s probably watching the show with the creepy talking tractor who talks to farm animals, because that’s my nephew’s favourite show that isn’t creepy giant rats who sing and dance. Seriously, you guys, what the shit is going on with children’s programming? Are they trying to capture the Stoner/Burner/One-Year-Old market all at once or something?

No matter. He’ll be ready for Doctor Who and Star Trek and Firefly soon enough, hopefully before he outgrows his chair.

next time on tabletop: star wars x-wing

Posted on By Wil

My editors at Geek & Sundry are amazing, and work very hard to turn hours of footage from several cameras into an awesome episode of Tabletop.

This is what the timeline looks like for next week’s episode, Star Wars X-Wing.

Star Wars X-Wing edit timeline

You can click that to embiggen and get a closer look. For those of you who do editing, you are probably going O.o right now. For those of you who don’t, each one of those boxes and lines represents a cut or a graphic or some other thing my editor, Steve, had to do to create this episode. I think he spent about 40 hours on this one episode.

All creative work for television and movies is a collaboration, and everyone is working together in service of something that’s bigger than all of us individually. Everyone works hard on their specific part of the process, and if we’re lucky, it all comes together to be something awesome.

Not the Flog 3

Posted on By Wil

We are having entirely too much fun making Not The Flog.

This week, I’ll discuss some smartphone and tablet app versions of games we’ve played on Tabletop, forgetting to mention one of the very best, Forbidden Island.

Oh, and the intro that Sean Becker made is maybe the best thing on the Internet today.

Enjoy!

marlowe is happy that we’re home

Posted on By Wil

One of the best things about having dogs is how they make me feel like I’m the greatest thing in the world, just because I walked in the door.

We were up in Portland for a few days to celebrate my godson’s first birthday and have a Wheaton family reunion, and when we came home, Marlowe ran laps around the house.

She did a wall ride off our couch, resulting in this:

2013-07-29 16.28.50

If I were better at math, I’d write out the equation that expresses the transference of puppy’s exuberance into actual force energy with a variable for how long it’s been since the puppy last saw the human, and I’d put it here.

Edit: This is from Chuck, in comments:

Pe*(Ta+Wh^2)=Mf

Where:
Pe=puppy exuberance
Ta=Time away
Wh=Wheaton awesome factor.
Mf= Marlowe force energy.
Pe*(Ta+Wh^2)=Mf or moving furniture in a single bound.

Oh, and this is, according to WordPress, an image post. With six types of potential posts, it seems silly that I only make standard posts.