my awesome brother

Posted on By Wil

A couple of years ago, my brother and his wife moved to a ranch in Montana, and while I miss them both every single day, my personal loss is blunted by how happy they are up there. Jeremy and I keep in touch with e-mail and phone calls and stuff, which I thought would make me miss him less, but actually makes me miss him more.

Anyway, this is probably the funniest exchange I’ve ever had with my brother:

Him: I just bought 10 baby chicks today, we’re going to be building a hen house and everything!

Me: That's awesome. I'm totally buying you overalls.

Him: I already have them, and they’re insulated so I can stay warm during winter, all 16 days worth.[1]

Me: Check one:
            [_] I have a cap and pitchfork.
            [_] I am totally fakin'

Him: [X] I live in Montana

Me: [::Spits genmaicha tea all over the desk::]

 

[1] Our mother, in an effort to convince the whole family to move up there, once made the outrageous claim that winter only lasts in Montana for three weeks. We joke about this almost every time we talk.

from the vault: my awesome dog

Posted on By Wil

When you break the world down into dog people and cat people, I guess I'm mostly a dog person, even though I've loved every cat I've ever owned.

Sometimes, though, my dog tests me, like in this entry from the vault…

When I was at CES [a few weeks ago] for InDigital, I got a phone call from Anne.

"I
just had to tell you how totally awesome your dog is." She said, in a
tone that indicated "my dog" (what Ferris is called whenever she does
something particularly irritating) was anything but awesome.

"Oh?" I said, "please tell me what my awesome dog did."

"Well,
I took some bacon out of the fridge for the kids, and put it on the
counter. Then the timer on the dryer went off, so I walked into the
laundry room –"

" — you mean the garage?"

Ha. I am so funny.

" . . . yes. The garage."

Oops. Pressed my luck a little bit, there. Shutting up, now.

"Anyway, when I got back into the kitchen, the bacon was gone, but your dog was licking her chops, awfully close to an empty bacon package on the floor."

". . . bitch!" I said.

"Uh.
Yeah. So you don't worry, I already called the vet, and it's nothing to
worry about. " She went on to tell me about her conversation with the
vet and why we shouldn't worry. We expressed our undying love for each
other, and I hung up the phone.

"Hey Hahn," I said, "want to hear how awesome my dog is?"

Fast
forward to yesterday morning. In my kitchen, on the counter, is a
jalapeño pepper in a plastic bag from the grocery store. I love
jalapeños, and I frequently slice and dice them into all sorts of
things. Like ice cream.

Anne woke me up at 7, holding the jalapeño in front of my face.

"Want to know how awesome your dog is?" She said.

"This couldn't wait until I woke up?" I said.

Grrr. Wil grumpy. Wil stay up too late playing poker. Wil sleep now.

"Your awesome dog grabbed this off the counter, and chewed the hell out of it."

"She didn't eat it, though, I see," I said.

"No, and I don't think she'll be jumping up on the counter any time soon."

At that moment, Ferris walked into the room, with the very adorable were you talking about me? look on her face.

"You know what she's saying right now?" I said. "'Mom, dad, I don't want to alarm you . . . but there's something really wrong with the bacon.'"

Ferris had a small tumor cut off her hip about six weeks ago. It wasn't a big deal, but it had the potential to turn into a big deal, so we had it removed. The surgery went perfectly, the surgeon's margins were completely clean, and now she's on some medication for a couple of months to make sure that whatever caused the tumor to appear goes off to the Land of Wind and Ghosts, and stays there.

The thing is, the medication she's on makes her extra antsy, extra thirsty, and extra hungry. For the last six weeks, she's been getting into everything, taking things off the counters in ways that I've always thought required at least one opposable thumb, digging holes everywhere, bringing all kinds of random junk into the house from outside, and generally being a huge pain in the ass.

It's not her fault, and we know she isn't trying to be disobedient, but we've had to dog-proof the house the same way we once child-proofed it, and it's worked out pretty well.

Um, until about an hour ago, when I walked into my living room and saw this:

Ferris_is_a_bozo

Yes, that would be the trashcan from my bedroom, caught on my dog's collar. This would also be a copy of the crappy cameraphone picture I snapped and sent to my wife with the caption, "Your awesome dog."

wil wheaton vs. text 2 speech

Posted on By Wil

There's quite a dustup at the moment about an editorial the president of the Author's Guild wrote in the New York Times, railing against Amazon's Kindle 2, which has a text to speech feature that he claims creates unauthorized derivative works and should be stopped at all costs.

I'm not the only author who thinks this is ridiculous: John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Neil Gaiman all agree. (Um. Not that I'm comparing myself to them; they're just people I know, who I respect and admire, who also have a stake in this.)

Scalzi says: "I pity the person who thinks a bland computer text reading of Zoe’s Tale is an optimal experience, especially when Tavia Gilbert’s spectaular reading of the book exists out there to get. Yes, one is free and the other isn’t, but you do get what you pay for."

Cory says: "Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome
of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish
posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it
represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang
of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online."

Neil says: "When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud,
have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car
trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.
This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the
voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an
audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are
thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal
case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and
promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."

But what if we're all wrong? As an author, performer, and consumer of audiobooks, what does this mean for me?

To find out, I picked a short passage from Sunken Treasure and read it. Then, I took the identical passage, and let my computer read it. I recorded the whole thing and put together something I call "Wil Wheaton versus Text 2 Speech" so you can hear for yourself.

It's about 5MB and just about 10 minutes long.

Download Wil_wheaton_vs_text_2_speech

Edited to add: My friend Jamais wrote an extremely insightful and thoughtful commentary
on the whole text 2 speech issue. He's really smart and you should read
it, regardless of where you currently fall in the debate.

Here's John Scalzi's rebuttal, which everyone should also read, and Neil Gaiman's final word which is also a must-read. Not that it matters, but I totally agree with both of them.

Also, this post has attracted a lot of traffic, and people are asking me about my own audiobooks. I'll point you to my virtual bookshelf, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about all my books, including the audio versions.

end user blog: the slacker media player (or, the good kind of nostalgia in the palm of your hand)

Posted on By Wil

This month’s column for the End User Blog is now online for your enjoyment:

Kids, I want you to take off your jetpacks, and step out of your flying cars for a minute. Come sit down over here, and let Old Man Wheaton tell you a tale of a time when television didn’t have a pause button, renting videos meant actually going to a store – during hours that they set – and listening to the radio meant hearing the same 27 songs every two and-a-half hours, with ten to eighteen minutes of commercials every 60 minutes.

Now, I realize that some of you think I’m just making this up to scare you, but it’s true. We didn’t have any control over how we got our entertainment back then. We couldn’t skip songs we didn’t like, and we couldn’t tell the radio how frequently it should play certain songs. It was a different time, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and the King of England would just show up at your house and expect you to make him a cup of tea.

Those of you who have grown up in a world where you have unprecedented control over your media (DRM, which is beyond the scope of this story, notwithstanding) may have a hard time believing that we who came before you would actually wait for a song we hated to go away, or sit through loud and obnoxious commercials and DJs because we knew a song we loved was coming up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true; that’s just how the world worked back then, and we accepted it without question.

Then it gets weird. Well, not really, but I can’t think of a better segue. Anyway, give it a read if you want to know what I think about the Slacker portable media player.

Warning: it’s way longer than I thought it would be, probably because I spent so long fighting my brain to actually let me write it, and once I beat my brain into submission, I couldn’t turn it off.