in which wil has a good day

Posted on By Wil

Today was, as the song goes, and the movie says, a good day.

I woke up before my alarm, feeling rested and relaxed. My dog met me before my feet hit the floor, and followed me to the kitchen, wagging her tail and nuzzling at my side the entire way. I grabbed a cup of coffee and wrote for about two hours, before I headed down into Hollywood to have breakfast with an old friend who I never get to see as much as I would like.

We talked for a couple hours, and then he had to go meet a director.

"I love it that I get to say, 'I have to go to Hollywood to meet a director,'" he told me.

"Yeah, when you get there, he'd better be wearing a beret and holding a megaphone, or I'm going to be disappointed."

It was wonderful to see my friend, who I'm keeping anonymous because I didn't ask him if I could blog about hanging out. He's awesome, though, and it meant the world to me to get together and catch up.

When he went to meet his director, I went to meet my friend Shane for lunch. Shane and I met at the ACME Comedy Theater years ago, and we've been friends ever since. I also don't get to see Shane as much as I'd like, but I always love it when we get together.

Lunch was awesome, and when it was over, Shane said that he was going to send something to Twitter about it.

"Dude," I said, "we have to do a coordinated message. It'll be hilarious."

We looked at each other for a second while we thought about it.

"Where do we start?"

I opened my phone and started typing. "How about … Having lunch with @ShaneNickerson. Cleverly coordinating tweets."

We giggled like idiots.

"That's funny," he said.

"But then what? Is it only going to be funny to us?"

We both looked up and typed simultaneously. "This is only funny to us."

"I still have a bunch of characters left," I said. "What are we going to do next?"

We thought about it a lot longer than we should have, and kept laughing about it the whole time.

"Let's take this to the writer's room," I said.

"Yeah," Shane added, "and we'll see how we can punch it up before we take it to the network."

We were really giggling like fools, now.

"How many characters do you have left?" I asked.

"Fourteen."

"I only have six."

"Wait. How do I have more than you?"

We looked at each other's phones.

"Oh," I said, "because my Twitter name is shorter than yours. Dude, you totally win at Twitter."

We shared a look, and knew what we had to do. We both erased whatever it was we thought we were going to send, and entered the new text.

"This is only funny to us, right?" I said.

"Probably, yeah."

"That's the best reason to do it. Okay, it's 3,2,1 and then we post it."

We steadied ourselves, and got ready to go.

"3, 2, 1, send!" I jammed my thumb down on the send key, and Shane did the same.

Here's the result, as seen by Twitteriffic (click to embiggen):

Simultaneous tweeting

We walked back to Shane's office, working on one of my Crazy Ideas on the way.

"What are you going to do with this thing?" He said when we were done with it.

"I have no idea, but I really, really like it."

"Yeah, it's awesome. I totally love it."

We approached some paparazzi, who were staking out a film set.

"For about two minutes in the 80s, I was a guy who those jerks
bothered. I don't ever want to be that guy again," I said. "It really
sucked. I do not understand why people crave that kind of attention."

We passed them, and I resisted the urge to say anything. They're just guys doing their job, I guess, and standing on the sidewalk is certainly less intrusive than ambushing people at the airport.

"You know who they don't care about?" I asked when we were about a block away.

Shane held his hands out wide and pointed his thumbs inward. "These guys," we said in unison.

We waited for a light to change, and I looked around. We were right near Sunset and Gower, and had walked past Hollywood and Vine just a few minutes earlier.

"I love being here," I said. "Even though it's a dump, it feels like it's my dump."

Shane looked at me.

"That didn't come out the way I intended."

Shane looked at me again.

"Poop."

Yes, we're hilarious comedians (in our own minds) when we get together, and poop jokes are gold, Jerry. COMEDY GOLD! As the light changed and we walked across the street, I continued. "I mean that coming down here recharges my batteries, and reminds me why I haven't completely given up on being an actor."

"I know what you mean," he said.

"Even though going on auditions is like Sideshow Bob versus a dozen rakes."

I was quiet for a moment while every frustrating audition in my life flashed through my minds in a matter of seconds.

We got back to his office.

"It was great to see you today, Shane."

"Thanks. Good to see you too."

"Let's get together sooner than later, okay?"

"Yeah, totally."

I drove home, along the same route I took to get to Paramount in my teens, and drama school in my early 20s. Though my thoughts kept drifting to youthful dreams unrealized, I couldn't feel too sad. I don't have the acting career I wanted, but I have a writing career that's pretty awesome, and today I got to see two people who mean the world to me. When I got home, my dogs nearly knocked me over, and my family greeted me with open arms.

It was a good day.

Books I Love: The Hacker Crackdown

Posted on By Wil

Now that we've figured out which one is Pink, allow me to welcome you to the machine…

In the late 80s, I kind of knew a bunch of people who were involved in what we called The Computer Underground. They weren't my friends, and I couldn't even tell you what their handles were (well, I could, but I won't) but I learned a ton of stuff about technology and other mysterious subjects by dialing into BBSes and reading the textfiles they left behind.

By 1990, I was spending less and less time online, while I continued to struggle with my existential acting crisis. I read books about acting, and all of them left me cold. I read books about filmmaking, and I just didn't care about them.

Then, in 1992, I saw this book called The Hacker Crackdown on the front table at a book shop. I was intrigued, and I started reading. After standing at the table for a long time and getting deeper into the book than someone who is standing at a table near the front of a bookshop should reasonably get, I bought the damn thing. I finished it within a day, and before a week had elapsed I had read The Cuckoo's Egg and Cyberpunk, the only other books on the subject that I could get my hands on at the time.

On one level, The Hacker Crackdown is about how the US Department of Justice launched a nationwide operation to bring down a bunch of hackers in something called Operation Sundevil, but it's also about a subculture and its people who remain misunderstood to this day. Most importantly, introduced me to a world where information and intellect were incredibly valuable, and it inspired me to learn all that I could about the online world I'd eventually call my home. On the way from there to here, I met a lot of the people who are in the book, and formed some friendships that lasted for years.

Cory Doctorow said that The Hacker Crackdown changed his life and it "inspired me politically, artistically and socially." He's not the only one. I can draw a very short and very straight line between reading this book and learning how to navigate the World Wide Web, which is what we called the Internet before you damn kids today were born.

In 1994, Bruce Sterling released the book online, and in 2007, Cory Doctorow recorded the entire book as a series of podcasts. If you want to understand how we got here, I'd say The Hacker Crackdown is required reading.

next time: the prince of wales

Books I Love: A Saucerful of Secrets

Posted on By Wil

I’m very busy working on a few different things, including the craziest idea yet, but it’s important to me to maintain momentum and keep posting in my blog, so it’s time for another series of Things I Love.

This week, I’m going to highlight some books that were important to me when I was becoming an adult in my late teens and early twenties. All of them will be instantly-recognizable to certain people, but I think it’s likely that they’ve flown beneath the radar for most of you, and are worth pointing out. All of them, though, were very influential on my young life, and played a significant part in shaping the person I am today.

First up is a wonderful biography of Pink Floyd.

A Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey starts in the late 1960s when the band was formed by Syd Barrett, and continues all the way through A Momentary Lapse of Reason. It chronicles the band’s rise, the tension among them, and their eventual breakup.

I read this when it was published in 1992, at a time when Pink Floyd – especially The Wall and The Final Cut – spoke to me on a visceral level. I still enjoyed performing, but I was struggling with my distaste for the film and television industry. I was lurching from one shitty forgettable movie to the next, and wondering just what happened to my once-promising acting career. I felt like everything I’d spent my whole life working on was falling apart, and I wasn’t even sure if it’s what I really wanted to do with my life in the first place.

When I read this book, and followed the entire history of this band that meant so much to me, including all their creative struggles, it was comforting and inspiring, and I think it may have played an unconscious role in my decision to leave Hollywood (literally and figuratively) and go work for NewTek on the Video Toaster 4000.

Even if you’re not having a Seldon Crisis about your life, it’s still a great book. While a lot of the information contained in it can be found online in various places, it’s well-organized and enjoyable to read it in this format, and the hardback edition I have comes with a bunch of great art, as well.

next time: the ghost in the machine

in which sunken treasure is revised for a second edition

Posted on By Wil

There's a brand new layout of Sunken Treasure, which looks beautiful and has earned the Second Edition designation.

A ton of readers have sent feedback about Sunken Treasure, and some common themes have emerged:

1. You like the stories. This makes me so happy I want to do the Snoopy dance.
2. The layout needs work. This makes me realize my own limitations.
3. You really want a digital version that's native to the Kindle, or other eReaders. This makes me wish my eReader-Fu was stronger.
4. You want an audio version of the whole book.

I took this feedback to heart, and over the next few weeks I will address every request. Today, I wanted to announce that I took some of the earnings from the first month's sales, and reinvested them into making the book even better: the US edition has been revised and redesigned by my friend Will Hindmarch, with a beautiful new layout and gorgeous new fonts. Will is a honest-to-goodness professional designer, and he made the gutters deeper, fixed some of the typos that eluded both me and Andrew (curse you, signing! You kept looking like singing!) and improved the overall flow of the whole book. (Note: The World edition has not been changed; we're working on it, and it'll be updated soon.)

Here, take a look at this comparison, starting with the original:

Original Sunken Design

And now, the new design:

New Sunken Design

I'm not sure if the change comes across on the screen, but it looks beautiful on paper. Also, the margins are vastly improved since I did them myself, which will address the number one complaint from customers.

Also, if you're a knowledge nerd like I am, you may enjoy learning this from Will:

If you’re curious, the new design is set in the classic transitional
typeface, Baskerville, which debuted from John Baskerville in 1757 (the
same year The Last of the Mohicans is set, I think). The interior title is in Effloresce, designed around 1999 by the great Ray Larabie.

Woo! Neat!

Whenever I revise and update my books, some people who've purchased the first printing get upset with me. If you're one of them, I hope you'll understand that I always want to make my work better, and now your first edition just became limited. Yay!

Now, about the other points people have raised:

At the moment, Lulu only supports PDF for downloadable eBooks, but I think they will let me sell other types of digital files if I don't put it into their eBook category. If I understand it correctly, I could make a .zip file that has html, .rtf, .txt, and as many native formats as I can successfully create (or pay others to create for me). If I'm right about that, expect to see that kind of offering – still for just $5 and still without DRM – as soon as I can pull it all together.

There's an audio version on the way, as well. I just haven't had time to record it.