my design is available at shirt.woot!

Wil Wheaton's shirt.woot
So if you ever wanted to get a geeky shirt I designed for shirt.woot, now's your chance.

I wanted to call it Critical Mass, because I thought that would be cool and work on a few geeky levels, but I think that idea fell through a hole in the 'tubes.

I chose a d6 instead of a d10 because I thought the d10 looked too much like the d8. The gamer geek in me won't shut up about how lame the d6 is compared to the d10, but the rest of me thinks it was a good choice.

If you like it, give a lot of credit to the person who actually drew it and did the hard work. All I did was think it would look cool, draw a very rough sketch of what I thought it would look like, and make sure the numbers were on the correct faces.

If you don't like it, blame me, because it was my idea.

This little bio they wrote for me is also awesome: "A man of wide and diverse enthusiasms, Wil Wheaton has played in the
World Series of Poker, been a member of the Onion A/V Club, met The
Suicide Girls, authored several books (including Sunken Treasure, out just now), maintained a widely-read and influential blog,
and now ascended to the highest honor of all: featured designer on
Shirt.Woot. Oh, he’s also had a couple of acting roles, we hear."

Edited to add: I just woke up and saw that my shirt is sold out. Um. Wow, that's cool, I guess, but also sad. (Like being drunk, which TV told me makes you feel strange, but also good.) I don't know if this means that it's gone forever, or if they reprint it, or what. I'm just glad that I ordered some of my own for me and my kids last night.

Edited again to add: Happytimes! Reader Steven says:

Come back tonight at midnight and use this link:

http://shirt.woot.com/Friends.aspx?k=8110

It'll be $15 instead of $10… and it will be that way until it falls below the top 20 of the 27 currently printed shirts.

Yay!

one more from orccon

I just remembered this moment form Orccon on Monday that I thought was amusing enough to put in its own entry.

On the way down to the con, Nolan told me that he really wanted to buy some of his own dice to go with the dice I’d already given him.

“I want a huge bag of dice, like the one you have.” My heart swelled as he continued, “Do you think I’ll be able to do that thing you told me about where they give you a cup and you fill it up for like five bucks?”

“I can’t remember the name of the company that does that, but if they are at the con, I’m sure you’ll be able to do it.” I thought for a second. “In fact, it’s kind of a rite of passage, so I hope you do get to do that.”

“And it would mean more to me than you could ever understand to get to be part of it with you.” I thought.

We walked through the whole flea market, twice, and he couldn’t find any vendor who was offering the cup-o-dice, but while I was buying my giant d20, he picked through the little cases of dice on the table, eventually picking up up one of those d100’s that you always see at cons.

“What is this?” he said.

“A d100,” I said.

“Who uses that?” He said.

“Someone who doesn’t know how to roll 2d10,” I said.

We laughed together, and the vendor joined us. It was funny, because it was true.

Note: In the original draft, I misquoted my son. I recalled him saying “who needs that” but what he actually said was “who uses that.” It’s an important difference, and I wanted to correct my error.

i’m not going to lie to you: there’s a lot of awesome packed into this post

Hi there, I’m Wil, and I’m the luckiest guy in the world. Why is that? Well, allow me to present the following items to support this outrageous claim:

Quite some time ago, I engaged in correspondence with one of the guys who makes woot go. One thing lead to another, and I ended up designing a T-shirt for shirt.woot.com.

According to the woot newsletter, it’ll be available tomorrow (THURSDAY):

Ever Bought A T-Shirt Designed By Somebody On Star Trek? You Wil. Speaking of Shirt.Woot, noted actor, author, gambler, blogger, and android Wil Wheaton adds ”t-shirt designer” to his CV this Thursday, and it’s all going down at Shirt.Woot <http://shirt.woot.com> . This is like a true-cross thing for hardcore geeks (like us), except that Wil himself will never have laid eyes on your actual shirt, much less hands. But still. As for the design, we don’t want to give too much away, so we’ll just thank Wil for rolling the DICE with us to release this to-DIE-for tee.

Speaking of DICE, The first episode of the Penny Arcade/PvP/WWdN/D&D4E Podcast (MP3 link) has been released! Even if you subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, you owe it to yourself to go check out the D&D Podcast page, because Mike and Scott did incredibly awesome art to go with each episode.

Returning to Woot for a moment: there’s a woot-off happening right now, and you can follow wootoff on Twitter to get almost as many updates in an hour as I occasionally send.

Speaking of Twitter, as of right now, there are 105,547 accounts following me. Um. What? How the hell did that happen? I thought I was freaked out when it was at 51,000, but I didn’t know what freaked out truly was until I tried to compose a tweet, and ended up staring at it for five minutes before I sent it because the thought of sending it to that many accounts paralyzed me.

What was that tweet, you ask? Allow me to show you: When I got this invite today, I thought it was too good to be true, but it’s real: I get to see WATCHMEN *tomorrow* for this MTV thing!

Yeah, for at least four hours today, it won’t be so bad that MTV doesn’t play music videos like they did when I was a kid. They do a movie show called SPOILERS, and one of their producers invited me to come see the move. Because just seeing the movie wasn’t cool enough, the entire cast will be there. Because that wasn’t cool enough, Zack Snyder will be there, doing a Q&A after the movie. Because that wasn’t cool enough, they’re also going to show some preview clips of the new Star Trek movie. Because that isn’t cool enough, they want me to go on TV and talk about all this stuff as some kind of expert.

Don’t tell them I’m just a geek, okay? Or at least wait until after we’re done. I don’t want to mess this up.

The show will air on Saturday, but I think they’re putting some live updates on their website somewhere today. I’ll try to take my phone with me so I can Twitter about what’s going on, (without spoilers, of course) but I suspect this will be one of those “don’t bring your shitty little cell phone into the theater because the studio thinks you’re going to pirate the movie with your tiny 3MP camera that can’t even focus on the screen” kind of things.

I’ve gotten to do some really awesome things lately, and for the last week or so, I feel like I’m dreaming — in fact, last night, I dreamt that I was at PAX, and woke up all excited to go there — and I’m afraid that I’m going to wake up, and find out that none of this incredibly cool stuff has actually happened, so I’m working extra hard to appreciate every moment and not take a single thing for granted.

LA Daily: this is the way I remember it…

This week’s LA Daily appears to be about playing T-ball when I was six, but it’s actually about a whole lot more than that.

Not that it matters, but most of this is true.

When I was six years old, I set foot onto on a T-ball diamond for the first time.

I was skinny, awkward and unsure of myself – basically a smaller version of the teenager I’d eventually become – and I didn’t have very good coordination, but my dad loved baseball, and I knew that if my dad loved it, I loved it too, because that’s the way things work when you’re six.

It was the spring of 1978, when smog alerts were as common as reality shows are today, and hazy, reddish gold sunlight shone down on the field at Sunland Park. The sounds of other kids playing on the swings and in the giant rocket ship at the playground mingled with the smell of barbecue smoke as I stepped up to the plate to take my first practice swings.

My first swing connected with the middle of the tee. The baseball – in those days of gas lines and national malaise, we didn’t have the soft RIF balls my kids got to play with – fell off and landed in the batter’s box on the other side of the plate. The other kids giggled while the coach clapped his hands and shouted encouraging words to me as I picked the ball up and put it back on the tee.

I looked up and saw my father’s expectant face through the chainlink fence near the dugout. I slowly and deliberately lifted my bat, held it out at arm’s length, and aimed at the top of the tee with one eye closed. I stuck out my tongue and furrowed my brow. I tasted sweat on the corners of my mouth, and felt my heart beat in my ears.

The bat touched the ball, and it fell off again. The kids giggled again. The coach clapped again. I replaced the ball on the tee again.

“Come on, Willow,” my dad said. “You can do it!”

I took a deep breath, held the bat as tightly as I could, and swung for the fences.

It’s a busy, busy day for me. I got up early to write this morning, did some voice over work early this afternoon, and now I’m racing to beat a pretty important deadline, so I can announce something awesome tomorrow.

very quick orccon recap

The Orccon gaming convention took over the Radisson hotel down by the airport this weekend. I love this con, and when I was a teenager, it was my first experience with packing eight friends into a hotel room, sleeping in shifts, playing hobby games with strangers, and really, truly getting my maximum geek on (and not sleeping more than two hours at a time.)

The convention went from Friday until Monday, and my initial plan was to go down on Friday by myself, take Nolan on Sunday, and go back on Monday by myself, if I still needed to recover any HP*. I hoped to find some ghosts of my youth lurking around the open gaming area or in the bargain bin at the flea market, take in a couple of panels, play some games, and do all the other the things that you do at a convention.

Ah, the best laid plans, as they say. Nolan ended up spending much of the weekend hanging out with friends, I ended up staying home and working, and we didn’t go to the con until Monday.

It was clearly winding down when we got there around noon yesterday. There weren’t many people at the show, and we didn’t get to watch a single panel because there weren’t any happening. We didn’t get to do much more than just wander around the flea market, but it was still a good time for both of us. I got to show Nolan a ton of classic games that I used to own — including Illuminati and Car Wars, still in their original keep cases. Awesome. He got to geek out about Magic with some dude who, unlike me, kept playing beyond Ice Age, and we both got to meet and talk with some fellow indie publishers who are also game designers, who hooked me up with two of their RPGS that look awesome.

As we waited for the rudest valet in the history of paying too much to park your car to bring ours around, I told Nolan, “There’s usually more going on at a con than just walking through the flea market, but we’re here right at the end of the show, and –”

“I totally get it, Wil,” he said. “Will you bring me to the next one, and we’ll go on a Saturday when there’s more to do?”

I felt like I’d rolled a critical success on the giant d20 I bought on the way out.***

“Absolutely, Nolan,” I said. “I would love that.”

*Non-gamers: characters in role playing games have hit points to measure how healthy they are. The fewer hit points your character has, the weaker and closer to death he is. During a gaming session, characters will go to taverns, inns, camps, and other places to recover their hit points, or “recover HP,” so gamers frequently use this term or a version of it to describe doing something that brings them joy or otherwise makes up for being forced to live in a mundane world. For example, Steve Jackson, a noted game publisher and important influence on my life, said that when he finished reading my book Dancing Barefoot: “(OK, I’m a geek, I’ll say it: I got some hit points back.) Because this is a real guy, with a real life, and he tells good stories.”

**I haven’t had time to read them, but steampunk fans probably want to take a look at them right now: Sons of Liberty and Full Light, Full Steam.

***It’s the size of a billiard ball, and I had to have it, you see, because I’m committed to seriously stress-testing the theory that says one can never have too many dice.