I once wrote a Geek in Review, called 8 Bits High and Rising (Content SFW; Site is NSFW), about my love of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I liked it so much, I adapted a great deal of it for my keynote address to PAX in 2007.

Here's part of it that's relevant to this post:

I was invited to a celebrity charity thing in Hollywood, which was sponsored by Nintendo. In addition to all the usual photographs and teen magazine interviews, shoulder pads and Aqua Net, there would be a Super Mario Bros. competition.

This wasn't some silly Starcade competition with modified versions or timed levels on certain games. It was a serious high score competition, and Jeremy and I were determined to take down the Grand Prize: a complete NES system, featuring a light gun, a robot, over twenty games, and possibly First Prize: a 20 inch color TV. While all the other young teen heartthrobs were busy being seen, signing autographs and getting their picture taken, my brother and I prepared to claim what was rightfully ours. You see, we'd been unintentionally preparing for this very moment all summer long.

Since that fateful day in Zody's, my brother and I had developed an affinity for Nintendo games. In fact, you could say we were protofanboys. We'd always liked Donkey Kong and Punch Out!!, but when a Super Mario Bros. machine was installed between Arkanoid and Pinbot at our local 7-11, we played with a cult-like dedication. Over that summer, we were those guys who nobody could beat, thanks largely to a trick we learned from one of Jeremy's friends at school. He called it "the turtle trick," and it was a way to earn almost limitless free men by freezing and jumping repeatedly on a turtle at the end of world 3-1. Though we never managed to actually beat the game during that time, using the turtle trick, we obtained and held the high score for months. (For you damn kids today, not just earning – but maintaining – the high score on an arcade machine was a very big deal back in those days.)

The competition rules were simple: every kid in attendance could play twice and keep their highest score. At the end of the afternoon, the four highest scores would win prizes.

Thanks to the turtle trick, a lot of patience, and a singular focus that the presence of several young starlets tested (Christina Applegate, Alyssa Milano, and Nicole Eggert among them,) my brother and I completely obliterated everyone else there, and took home the the grand and first prize. 

Earlier this morning, a bunch of people messaged me on Twitter about a column at 1UP, which not only describes that fateful competition, but includes a picture of me and my brother that filled me with such joyful nostalgia, my vision temporarily blurred. You'll have to hit 1UP to see the awesome picture, but please indulge me this quote:

…all we know is that Wil Wheaton is better at Super Mario than Jason Bateman. Please feel free to pull out this fact the next time you are at a party.

Bam, said the lady.

Hey, speaking of my brother, have I mentioned that he takes phenomenal pictures and made awesome things with them?

It was just above freezing when I got into the car Tuesday morning. The rising sun had just barely cleared my neighbor’s roof, and did its best to melt the frost off of my roof and windshield.

Anne and I sat in the passenger compartment shivering, surprisingly thick clouds of fog blooming in front of us with every breath, while we waited for the engine to warm up.

“We should have started the car five minutes ago and waited in the house,” I said, hugging myself to keep warm.

“When we build the time machine, we’ll make sure we do that.”

After a couple of minutes, the frost on the windshield began to soften, helped along by judicious use of the wipers. As we drove up the street, I noticed that every house, lawn, car — hell, every surface — that was still in shadow had at least some frost on it. I’m sure people who live in parts of the world that actually have seasons wouldn’t be moved by it, but it made me happy to observe some tactile evidence of winter’s impending, full-throated arrival.

About fifty traffic-filled minutes later, Anne dropped me off at the airport. Four flight-delayed hours after that, I walked into the Seattle airport, and five hours after that I walked into the Child’s Play Charity Auction.

Seventeen hours after that, I walked out of my hotel into a crystal-clear thirteen degree Seattle morning that shocked me so much, I didn’t actually feel how cold it was until I’d been sitting in my cab for almost a full minute.

Finally, about thirty-two hours after I’d walked out of my house I walked back inside. My pets greeted me at the door, and made me feel like I’d been missing for a week.

I took my Mac into the shop for some work last week, and for a variety of reasons that are as complex as they are boring, I haven't been able to get my wilwheaton.net e-mail since I dropped it off. If you've been trying to get in touch with me for business reasons, I'm not ignoring you; I just haven't seen your e-mail (though I should see it by the end of the week.)

I didn't have to look at the weather forecast to know that a storm is on the way; I could feel it with the first step I took outside this morning with my dog.

As I stood on my patio and watched the steam rise off my coffee and swirl up through golden shafts of golden morning sunlight shot through a cloud-filled sky, I remembered a day like this one fifteen or sixteen years ago.

I'd just gotten home from Nice, where I'd lived and worked on a film called Mister Stitch for a few months. It wasn't the most pleasant movie in the world to work on (the other lead actor was an unprofessional nightmare) but the time I spent there working on it remains some of the best time in my life. I'd been acting since I was a child, but it wasn't until I lived in Nice and worked on Mister Stitch that I truly felt like an artist. I was fundamentally changed by the experience, seeing the world – especially entertainment – differently than I ever had before.

The day I got back from location, sometime in mid-January of that year, my friend Dave picked me up from LAX, and we went directly down the road to Manhattan Beach, to wait out the terrible rush hour traffic which stood between the airport and my house. After ten hours on an airplane, another 120 minutes to crawl 40 miles up the freeway wasn't exactly an appealing notion.

We parked in a mostly-empty lot and walked down toward the water. There was a winter storm on its way, driving powerful waves ahead of it that were so huge, they crashed up against the bottom of the pier and occasionally broke over the end of it. Wrapped up in the irrational immortality that's endemic to 22 year-olds, we walked dangerously close to the end of the shuddering pier, angry waves boiling beneath, and dared the Pacific Ocean to reach up and touch us.

I don't recall specifically what we talked about – I'm sure I regaled him with slightly-exaggerated tales of glamor and excess and artistic awakening along the French Riviera – but even now I can I clearly recall the terror and exhilaration I felt whenever foamy, freezing sea water splashed up through the spaces between the planks and soaked into the tops of our shoes.

Since I grew up and became a husband and a father, I've gone out of my way to avoid anything more dangerous than driving on the Los Angeles freeway system, so I can't imagine defying a Pacific winter storm like I did when I was in my early twenties … but standing on my patio in my late thirties, not really defying as much as tolerating the morning chill, I was grateful for the memory.