The last two months have featured sleepless nights, 10-hour work days, and constant battles with the voices of Self Doubt, You Suck, Why Did You Agree To Do This, You're Boring me Zoidberg, and They're All Going To Laugh At You.

But a little earlier, when I finally got to turn this:

into this:

I could tell all those voices to shut the hell up.

I know that this speech is going to be compared to the one I gave in 2007, and quite frankly, that scares the hell out of me. My 2007 keynote was probably the best speech I've ever written or delivered, and I don't think it can be equalled, much less topped, by anything I'm capable of writing at this moment in time. But things are different in 2010 than they were in 2007, so this is a different speech with different goals. I'm way too close to it right now to be objective, but given a chance to stand on its own, I think it's got some entertaining and inspiring stuff in it. I'm really excited to deliver it on Friday.

…

*blink*

*blink*

Holy fuck. I'm delivering this speech on Friday. Well, shit, now I'm terrified again.

(I'm sure people will ask, so: the "WW_AH_WW…" on the title is how Andrew and I track our revisions on each draft. As you can see, we spent a lot of time perfecting the first draft of this one.)

James Randi says:

Well, here goes. I really resent the term, but I use it because it’s recognized and accepted.

I’m gay.

From some seventy years of personal experience, I can tell you that there’s not much “gay” about being homosexual. For the first twenty years of my life, I had to live in the shadows, in a culture that was — at least outwardly — totally hostile to any hint of that variation of life-style. 

[…]

Gradually, the general attitude that I’d perceived around me began to change, and presently I find that there has emerged a distinctly healthy acceptance of different social styles of living — except, of course, in cultures that live in constant and abject fear of divine retribution for infractions found in the various Holy Books… In another two decades, I’m confident that young people will find themselves in a vastly improved atmosphere of acceptance.

I hope he's right. I hope that, one day, we will live in a more tolerant and enlightened world, where people won’t feel like they have to keep their identity hidden from all the ignorant bigots who reflexively hate them. Until then, I applaud people like James Randi who have the courage to speak up, and the greatest sympathy for those who feel like they can’t.

Last night, Anne and I watched The Fantastic Mister Fox. I completely missed this movie when it was in theaters, and didn't know a single thing about it except that, according to our friends, I'd really like it.

About fifteen minutes into the movie I turned to her and said, "This is awesome. It's like Wes Anderson made a stop-motion movie."

…like I said, I didn't know a single thing about it, and for those of you who are like me, it was a Wes Anderson movie.

Anyway, I don't think it's available on DVD yet (we watched a screener), but when it is, I highly, highly recommend watching it. It's one of those movies that is entirely appropriate for children, with some humor for their parents that will fly harmlessly over their heads.

As some of you know, for the last six weeks, I've been working night and day on my PAX Keynote, which I deliver in 176 hours. It's been a long and sometimes agonizing road but after intensely bouncing drafts back and forth with Andrew this week, I have a draft that I can begin polishing.

This means that, today, I'll be reading it aloud in my office so I can time it out, find places where I can move words around, maybe add a phrase, and maybe take something out if it doesn't sound quite right (for example, I changed a "didn't" to "did not", because the words around it obscured the n't just enough that it could confuse people who didn't – I mean, did not – hear it clearly; stuff like that.)

I don't own a stopwatch, so I grabbed my iPod Touch (I mean my iPad mini! HA! HA! HA!) and fired up the little stopwatch thingy that comes with it. Here's what I saw:

(Please forgive the crappy Blackberry photo; I don't have my "real" camera handy.) 

I guess I started it about 5710 hours ago, and forgot to press stop. Now I don't want to reset it, because it would be 237 days before it happened again. Also, this is probably only funny to me.

In other news: OMG my keynote speech for PAX East is so close to being finished!

This picture was taken after we'd been working all day on all the scenes that take place in the bowling alley. It turns out that shooting pretend bowling sequences is really complicated, and just a few minutes of final cut takes several hours to film.

What you can't see is how Jim and I are trying like crazy not to crack up, on account of something that was said just before the picture was taken. 

…no, I'm not going to repeat it. I have to keep some things for myself, guys.

Obligatory Tune-in Reminder: The Wheaton Recurrence airs April 12 on CBS.