The beer I helped design with Drew Curtis and Stone Brewing Company is officially available. It’s called the Farking Wheaton W00tstout, and it’s a massive 13%ABV Imperial Russian Stout made with pecans and quarter-aged in bourbon barrels. I’ve had a taste, and I love it. Best of all? It’s designed to age for a decade or more, so get some, cellar it, and open on every few months to see how it develops.

As I write this, there’s about 25 hours left on the current Humble eBook Bundle. You can pay whatever you want and get a ton of great books. If you pay above the average (which is $10.41 right now) then you also get The Last Unicorn and Just A Geek. Remember that you get to decide where your money goes, to charity, to authors, to the Humble devs, or some combination of the three.

We’re just about 2 days away from w00tstock 5.0! We’re nearly sold out, but there are a few tickets left. I can’t tell you who the surprise guests are, because duh, surprise, but I strongly encourage you to get to the show early so you don’t miss the beginning.

I am still hoping that I can play a ukulele cover of a popular tune the young people will enjoy, but I’m struggling to get to that point where I feel like I can perform in public, so it may have to wait until the Fall Wil Wheaton vs. Paul and Storm tour, coming soon to a city near you if you live in the Northeast or Texas.

A few months ago, Hank Green invited me to join DFTBA Records to sell some cool things like posters and T-shirts. We announced it today with this really awesome poster, among other things:

I wrote this thing on my Tumblr yesterday. I’m putting it here for reasons:

“Don’t let yourself get caught up in popularity contests. When you care about winning a popularity contest, or maintaining some kind of popular status, you make pleasing other people more important than being true to yourself.

One of the keys to happiness is not having a fuck to give about popularity contests or worry about what THEY will think. THEY don’t know a goddamn thing, THEY don’t care about who you are when you wake up terrified in the middle of the night. THEY aren’t worth your time and energy, so don’t put your sense of self worth and control of your happiness into their hands

Be kind. Be honest. Work hard. Speak up. Be honorable. Be silly. Be you.”

Whenever someone tells me they’re not going to [read | follow | subscribe | whatever] because I’m not dancing precisely the way they want me to, as if I should listen to their threat and immediately modulate who I am to please them, I usually think, “oh how adorable that you think I have a fuck to give for someone who thinks being popular is so important to me that I’ll do whatever it takes to keep their (conditional) approval”. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I thought I’d take a stab at putting those thoughts into something affirmative that I wish someone had said to me when I was younger, and worried all the time about being popular and cool.

I may work on this a little bit, and see where it leads, but this is off the top of my head in about five minutes.

EDIT: By popular demand from educators, here’s a non-swearified version of the above. You have my permission to use it as you see fit, and my thanks for being teachers.

“Don’t let yourself get caught up in popularity contests. When you care
about winning a popularity contest, or maintaining some kind of popular
status, you make pleasing other people more important than being true to
yourself.

“One of the keys to happiness is not caring about popularity contests, or
worrying about what THEY will think. THEY don’t know anything about who
you are inside, THEY don’t care about who you are when you wake up
terrified in the middle of the night, or struggle just to get to the end
of the day. THEY aren’t worth your time and energy, so don’t put your
sense of self worth and control of your happiness into their hands.

“Be kind. Be honest. Work hard. Speak up. Be honorable. Be silly. Be you.”

Finally, I am struggling with massive anxiety about Comicon, because I have such a huge pile of things to prepare for, and not enough time to prepare them. If you wanted to see me do some of the things, here’s my schedule:

Wednesday – HopCon at Stone’s Liberty Station

Thursday – w00tstock at the Balboa Theatre

Friday – Gaming in Geek & Sundry land (Star Trek Catan tourney, among other things) from about 11am until 3:30pmish.

Moderating the Falling Skies panel at Comicon from 4:30-6:30.

Moderating The Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman Panel with Adam and Jamie from 7:30-8:30pm.

Saturday: I’ll be part of the Geek & Sundry panel at Comicon at 11am.

Sunday: I’ll be back in my house sleeping and decompressing.

I’m not doing any photo or autograph things, but if you see me feel free to give me a Sci-Five or holler “WHEEEEAAATTTOOONNN!!”, because that always makes me giggle.

Oh, one last thing I forgot: I’m in a video with Alan Tudyk that we made for NASA, which explains how gravity holds things in orbit … explained by a brain parasite living inside an astronomer. It’s really cute and clever, and full of delicious SCIENCE!

For those of you who don’t know who Sparks McGee is … first, shame on you. Second, here’s the canonical Tumblr and the post that started the whole thing.

Now, here is the trailer for Sparks McGee: Into Darkness that I didn’t know about until now, three months after it was given to the world as a GIFT, YOU BASTARDS. IT WAS A GIFT TO HUMANITY.

And I didn’t know about it, which is my greatest failing.

You guys, this is one of the greatest examples of Get Excited And Make Something that I’ve seen in a long time, and I think you should make your own Sparks McGee thing RIGHT NOW.