Two Charity Auctions to Benefit the Pasadena Humane Society

Posted on By Wil

Today, I spent a lot of time in the hot garage, working on Operation Get The Bullshit Out Of The Garage.

While I was in there, I found a lot of things things I just don’t need and can’t believe I’ve held onto for so many years. I may have lamented that I would probably qualify as a hoarder, if those goddamn TV Hoarders hadn’t wrecked the curve.

But I did find a few things that are wonderful, and would make for a nice charity auction. I also found a dented ping pong ball, but more on that in a minute.

The first thing I came across was this old DVD copy of Stand By Me.

I thought that it might be cool to autograph this and auction it on eBay, giving all the money to the Pasadena Humane Society, via our Wiggle Waggle Walk team (which is cleverly named Team Wheaton).

So I went ahead and did that. I set the minimum bid at $20, and went back to the garage, hoping that it would maybe get up to $100 in three days.

While cleaning out my garage to make room for my homebrewing and tabletop gaming supplies, I came across this old DVD of Stand By Me. There’s nothing special about it, except that it comes from my personal collection, and it lived in my garage for a few years. I mean, it’s probably seen some things, man.


It’s in perfect condition (it was in a sealed box with some books), and I will personally autograph it to the winning bidder.

All the money I receive from this auction will be given to my Wiggle Waggle Walk team, to support the Pasadena Humane Society.

For information on the Wiggle Waggle Walk, you can see my page here

For confirmation that this is legit and not a scam, here’s the post I made on Twitter announcing this auction.

Um. About that. It’s currently at $625.

That’s pretty awesome, and I’m really excited that someone is going to get us that much closer to our fundraising goal. I’m also going to throw in a signed copy of Different Seasons from the mid-80s, which features Stand By Me on the cover.

Now, about that ping pong ball.

It’s best to experience that by looking at the original post I made on Twitter about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Oh! Wait! I can embed the tweet! Neat! Check it out:

So anyway, when I announced the DVD auction, a bunch of people — like, a huge bunch of people — asked for me to auction off the ping pong ball.

So I set that auction up, too. The only probablem was, the DVD took me past my monthly limit of $500, so I had to confirm or verify or whatever myself to get my selling limit increased. The call went something like this:

Me: Hi, I need to increase my limit.

eBay Rep: Sure. Why?

Me: Because the DVD I auctioned went for over 500 dollars and I now I can’t auction off this dented ping pong ball.

eBay Rep: …

Me: Yeah.

eBay Rep: Well, let me ask you a whole bunch of questions that you can’t repeat on the Internet because holy shit would that make it easy to steal your identity.

Me: Do your worst, lady.

Then, after questions, answers, and some delightful hold music :

eBay Rep: Okay, you’ve been verified and now you can sell up to $3500 a month.

Me: DUDE THAT IS SO MANY DENTED PING PONG BALLS.

eBay Rep: I’m going to hang up now.

Please note that the call may not have gone precisely like that.

So I put up the auction, which looks something like this:

A crappy dented ping pong ball I found in my garage and made popular on twitter

This beautiful ping pong ball is almost completely caved in on one side, providing an exquisite, built-in stand to properly display the smaller dent that runs across the other side.

This particular ping pong ball, named Silas, was used in many games of ping pong. It also delighted no less than two cats when dropped on a hardwood floor. Silas was the one ping pong ball in the box that all the other balls made fun of, because he had a name they didn’t understand and he liked to read books instead of going to parties — what the hell is wrong with those other balls? Not everybody likes to go to parties, okay, mom? Maybe I just want to sit in my room and read the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy and maybe look at some dirty pictures on the internet when I’m done. GOSH!

But now the joke is on the other balls in the box, because nobody remembers them or even cares where they are, and now Silas is Internet Famous for, like, maybe two whole days.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: THIS PING PONG BALL WILL NOT OPERATE IN A GAME OF PING PONG. THIS BALL WILL NOT BOUNCE OR RESPOND TO A PADDLE IN THE USUAL MANNER.

This ping pong ball is probably worth less than the cost of shipping. You will probably laugh a gerat deal when you place your bid, but will likely have the worst case of buyer’s remorse since that one celebrity wedding. Yeah, that’s the one I’m talking about. You’re probably going to feel like that, without all the attention and free drinks that come between the closing of the deal, and the overwhelming regret.

HOWEVER. This ping pong ball will be placed into a lovely padded envelope, perfectly suitable for opening, and it will be shipped to the buyer’s address with my compliments. You will open it, and you will probably say to yourself, “Well, crap. Now I have this stupid ping pong ball that I have to deal with. I suppose I’ll build an expensive display case to show it off at dinner parties.” And then you’ll invest lots of time and money to get that display case, money which could have been spent on whisky or many yards of colorful ribbons to braid together into a whimsical belt. Also, you need to learn to juggle, because it’s a useful skill that doesn’t impress many people, but WOAH is it satisfying when you throw torches around and don’t catch yourself on fire.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO JUGGLE TORCHES UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN TRAINED BY A PROFESSIONAL JUGGLER. A PROFESSIONAL JUGGLER CAN BE IDENTIFIED BY THE FOLLOWING:

 

  1. Is wearing a jaunty hat, of many colors.
  2. Asks you for money.
  3. Arrives and departs on a unicycle.
  4. Is profoundly offended by this list.

ALL OTHER SO-CALLED JUGGLERS ARE MERELY ENTHUSIASTS, NOT PROFESSIONALS. DO NOT TRUST THEIR TRAINING.

 

Now, back to the truly important thing, here: All money raised in this auction will be donated to the Pasadena Humane Society’s Wiggle Waggle Walk, specifically to Team Wheaton.

 

Shipping is free, because it seems silly for you to pay more in shipping than Silas is worth. But don’t tell him I said that, or his feelings will be hurt, and Silas has suffered enough. Please give him a good home. Think of the children.

I don’t even.. I mean, I can’t… okay, in under 30 minutes, the crappy dented ping-pong ball named Silas is selling for $500.

I’m not going to lie, Marge, it will delight me if the ping pong ball sells for more than the DVD. Because of reasons.

Oh, and if all of this isn’t enough, Anne has offered to #VandalEyes Silas, if the winner wants her to:

As Andrew said on Twitter: “This is the weirdest episode of Storage Wars I’ve ever seen.”

Yep. This is one of those days when I love the Internet.

Welcome back to WIL WHEATON dot NET

Posted on By Wil

After six long years, I can finally say:

Massive thanks to Mysterious Kevin for all his help making my return home easy and painless. I couldn’t have done this on my own.

Please note that the first time you comment (whether it’s with a WordPress account, or your Twitter, Facebook, or Google login), you’ll get tossed into moderation while it waits for me to ensure you’re not a robot or a dick. This should only happen once.

mv /mnt/exile/wil /home/

Posted on By Wil

That moment when, after over six years in exile, you push the Big Red Button™ to go back to your original blog…

 

…and find yourself too overwhelmed by the personal significance of the moment to say anything meaningful.

So, um, here’s a picture of me feeling  happy:

The Hover Wil
Usually reserved for Kings Stanley Cup wins, the WilHover is a close cousin to the WilFlail.gif

Enjoy your weekend! Thanks for coming by.

EDIT: We’re having some strange issues with commenting and building the RSS feed. Don’t worry, it’s being taken care of right now by top men.

…Top. Men.

I’m gonna go ahead and put this back here for the time being:

 

SECOND EDIT: The best thing about having Top. Men. work on a thing is how quickly they fix it.

I’m leaving the GIF, though, because it amuses me.

WIL WHEATON dot NET is once again officially open for business!

Treat her like a lady, and she’ll always bring you home.

Posted on By Wil

This is the second to last post I made at WWdN:in Exile. I’m copying it here for completion’s sake.

In 2001, blogs were very new things. In fact, as much more time was spent arguing talking about what blogs even were, and where they fit into the media landscape than was spent actually, you know, writing in them. In fact, I don’t even think the word “blogging” existed back then, and whenever it arrived on the scene, it was used pejoratively to describe the equally-distasteful “bloggers” who were on the verge of not just threatening the status quo, but disrupting and then changing it forever.

I read a lot of blogs (many of them were just called online journals or something similar), so when I made my first stupid website at Geocities (RIP) called Where’s My Burrito, I put a blog in there, right next to my hit counter and guest book.

My first entry in that blog looks something like this:

So the votes are officially in.

Out of the total of 4 votes I got, all of them said it would be cool to have an online journal, so here it is.

Extra special thanks go to loren who directed me to blogger, a website that will hopefully make this whole weblog (the cool kids call it a “blog”) easy and painless.

I’m off now to make dinner for the family. You know what we’re having tonight?

Burritos. No shit.

That was posted on July 24, 2001. Goddamn, that seems like an eternity ago.

The next day, I wrote this:

My birthday is this Sunday, and we’re having the carpets cleaned this morning.
And my cat, Sketch, ran out of the house, and we can’t find him.
Sucks.

And then, later, this:

Okay, you can all stop worrying. We found Sketch. He was behind the couch.
Carpets are drying, and the yard is getting clean! Whee!

Those two posts are as hilarious to me as anything I’ve ever posted on Twitter, and now that I look at them again, they’re similar to most of the stupid things I post on Twitter, so there’s that.

Shortly after I started that blog, I got even more help from loren, and after an intense month of study, trial, and error (mostly error), I made my very own website at wilwheaton.net.

I announced it in the usual fashion:

The New Site Is Open!Holy crap!! In 6 weeks, I’ve gone from knowing nothing about HTML and using the lame Yahoo! PageBuilder, to building my own site, using php and modifying entire scripts.
This weblog will no longer be updated. Go to the new weblog, and see what’s up!

I used Grey Matter for the blog, becoming an unintentional stress tester when the existence of my blog was discovered by Fark, Metafilter, and Slashdot.

Grey Matter couldn’t handle the load, so when I discovered Movable Type, I switched to that software, and it took veyr good care of me for years, through a lot of ups and downs, through my entire journey from The Guy Who Used To Be Wesley Crusher to the person I am today.

Then, in 2006, I blew it all up:

Way back in September of last year, I attempted to upgrade Movable Type, the blogging software that powers WWdN. I also attempted to move a few thousand entries and hundreds of thousands of comments into a newly-created (and faster) MySQL database.

And, uh, I broke it.

Actually, I didn’t break it. Someone who left a comment broke it when they used a seemingly random string of characters to indicate a break in their comment. Unbeknownst to me and them, it was the same string of characters MT used to indicate the end of an entry and its associated comments. When MT was moving all the data into its new (did I mention faster?) database, it came to that string of characters, and said to itself, “Oh boy! I get to start a new entry now! Let’s see, what’s the TITLE of that entry?”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Uh-oh, there’s no TITLE. I’d better look some more.”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Yeah, it’s still not there. Well, I don’t know what the next entry is TITLEd, so I’m going to just barf all over the server now, and fail. I’m sure one of the Users I heard about in TRON will figure this out and fix it quickly. There’s no way my User, Wil, would stay in some backup blog for six months!”

Ha! Stupid smug software. I’ve been in Exile for nine months! Who’s laughing now, jerk?

Who’s laughing, indeed.

Well, I landed here in Exile, where I’ve stayed for over six years, because I’d reached a point in my life where just writing was more important to me than the software and publishing platform I used to do it.

I’ve been very happy here, mostly because TypePad has worked very well for me, and because these have been some of the best years of my life (hooray for hard work paying off!)… but there were these moments when I’d suddenly and unexpectedly feel sad about WWdN. I’d miss the URL, and I’d miss the satisfaction that came with knowing that it wasmine, that it was something I made (mostly) myself.

So I started working on stuff and things, and after a few days of not-very-intense and stupidly easy work, I taught myself WordPress. I installed it on my server. I imported all my blog entries. I messed around with some themes and basic design things. I installed plugins and widgets and made it look like something that didn’t totally suck. There’s still a little bit of fiddly under-the-hood server stuff that needs to happen, but it’s pretty much the way I want it.

So, this weekend, after way, way too many years (or, maybe, now that I think of it, exactly the right number of years) in exile, I’m finally returning home.

Wow. Typing that made me feel all the feels. I wasn’t expecting that.

I’m going home.

Yep. It happened again.

Well.

*clears throat*

If you read my blog through an RSS subscription, you won’t notice any changes if you’re reading feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn, but you’ll now go to WIL WHEATON dot NET to comment instead of WIL WHEATON dot NET: in Exile.

Woah. More feels.

Um. So. Yeah. I’m sure there will be a few bumps along the way while I figure out handling comments and stuff, but I’m sure we’ll find a way to get through it together.

My TODO list for WWdN looks something like this:

  • Get some of those nifty little icons for Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, etc., and put them up in the corner with links to their relevant accounts.
  • Maybe rotate header images, because why not?
  • Have a homebrew
  • Potentially set a fixed page as the “front page” of WWdN, which has an excerpt from the most recent blog post, as well as dynamically updating feeds from Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, G+, etc.

WordPress veterans: Any advice you have for a WordPress noob is most welcome.

Everyone who first found me at WWdN, followed me to Exile, and plans to follow me back home*: I just can’t thank you enough for the years of support and encouragement you’ve given me. I sincerely hope it’s been worth it for you, because it’s meant a lot to me.

To everyone else out there: The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

*damn, all these feels are feely.