In which wil goes “O_o” but retains his grip on reality

Posted on By Wil

I thought I’d completed this week’s LA Daily column on Friday, but when I opened it up yesterday afternoon to give it one final look, I realized that it didn’t work at all. It’s fine for a blog post (and will likely show up here sooner or later) but it just doesn’t work as a column.

As you can imagine, I panicked, and spent the next five hours trying to come up with something to replace it. (Pro Tip: The hard part isn’t writing the column; the hard part is figuring out what the hell to write about every week.)

Around 10 last night, I stopped banging my head against my desk and took a sanity break online. While I was looking at TotalFark, TwitterFox popped up with the following Tweet:

@wilw we need you to cameo on HEROES. how bout it? Let me know, it’s Greg Grunberg from Heroes. Parkman.

Normally, I’d think this was a prank, but my friend David (who plays Eric Doyle on Heroes) mentioned to me last week that he’d joined Twitter, and that he was following me and Greg Grunberg. So I went O_o and replied:

@greggrunberg How cool and random to hear from you … we have a mutual friend in @dhlawrencexvii! I’d love to be on your show, for serious.

I think I replied appropriately, right? Considering that the alternative was something like OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG, and all.

A few minutes later, he replied:

@wilw I’m sure Tim would LOVE to have you. I will talk to him tomorrow and see what he thinks.

I couldn’t put it into 140 characters, but I’m pretty sure I know what Tim’s going to think, and it’s going to rhyme with “No way, that guy sucks.” See, I’ve had two opportunities for good roles on Heroes, and both times I was so excited about the opportunity, I completely tanked the audition. It was like the audition was a cute little bunny, and I was Lenny Small. I mean, I fucked them up badly. It was embarrassing. The room I read in at Universal is still blocked off by the HazMat control team because the stink I left there is so horrible.

I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t love it, especially if I got to play a villain, but I’m keeping my squee level really under control at the moment. I’ve done this long enough to know that actually working on Heroes is a real long shot for me. But if it does happen, it would be super awesome on countless levels, not the least of which is the whole thing happened because of Twitter, which pleases my inner geek greatly.

desert bus for hope 2008 begins

Posted on By Wil

Hey Kids, it’s your old pal Wil Wheaton here, and this is a post about a whale.

WAIT! NO IT ISN’T! IT’S A POST ABOUT AWESOME PEOPLE WHO DO AWESOME THINGS THAT MAKE WITH THE HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!

Ahem. Allow me to introduce a few things:

There’s this fantastic charity that my friends from Penny Arcade created, called Child’s Play:

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 3.5 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

This year, we have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With around 60 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map above that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child’s Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, so please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own.

When gamers give back, it makes a difference!

There’s are these guys up in Canadia called LoadingReadyRun. They’re really funny, and I did a sketch with them last year at the Child’s Play dinner in Seattle:

Inspired in name and appearance by the Commdore 64 Home Computer System, LRR is a site run by-and for-geeks. You have to be at least a bit of a geek to think writing, shooting and producing a new, original short sketch every week is feasible. But you have to be a giant geek to actually do it. Since LoadingReadyRun’s start in 2003, it has consistently updated with a new video, every week. Often more!
LRR videos have been featured in film festivals such as the Comic Con International Film Festival in San Diego, and shown on major TV networks, including G4 TechTV, The CW and even CNN.

There’s this horrible old game called Desert Bus, that’s really more of a cruel practical joke than an actual game:

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends).

So, if you put all this together, you will get the guys from LoadingReadyRun playing a marathon of Desert Bus to raise money for Child’s Play charity! It’s hilarious to watch them play it, especially as the hours go by, and this year it’s going to be even more entertaining as they will be joined by the cast of ‘The Guild’, Sean from Harmonix, the Joystiq Podcast’s Justin McElroy, John Davison of What They Play and 1Up Yours, Microsoft’s Major Nelson, Jeremy Baker of http://www.thezone.fm, and Sam Logan of Sam and Fuzzy.

They will also be joined by yours truly, sometime on Sunday afternoon (Pacific time). If you’ve got nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon (or evening, or whatever time it is where you live) and you want to hear me and some hilarious Canadian sketch comedy geeks – who will most likely be in Batcountry by the time I get there – engage in the high quality grabassery and shenanigans you’ve come to expect from us, watch my Twitter Tweet-o-thingy for the announcement.

Throughout the entire marathon, you can watch them play, via the driver or bus cam (links on the top of their webpage). There’s also a live chat where we can go encourage them and tell them how awesome they are. Of course, this entire thing is for charity, so if you can part with a couple of bucks, we could all join forces to make a real difference in the life of a child.

awesome news that is awesome

Posted on By Wil

For those of you who are wondering about the audio version of Happiest Days of Our Lives : it’s currently in post-production. My producer/partner/engineer/friend David, who should be working on it 24/7 and only stopping to occasionally eat and pee, had the nerve to go get cast as Eric Doyle on Heroes, and I guess the producers “like him” and “want to keep working with him” all the time, so he’s “kind of busy” with “that” and he’s working on the audiobook in his diminishing free time. GOSH! Uh, I hope it will be finished and available in the very near future. Like, maybe next week, but you didn’t hear that from me.

I mention this because I’ve come up with something cool and special that involves the audiobook and the special expanded edition of the book that I’m doing with Subterranean Press.

Months ago, I talked with Bill at Subterranean about taking something from the audiobook and putting it at Subterranean Online to help promote the special edition, and hopefully sell audiobooks. Everyone wins!

The thing is, David and I are already very busy, and it’s unlikely that we will be able to coordinate and record the extra material and get it edited together in time for a holiday release. I don’t want to do two versions of the audiobook, so I’ve decided to kill several birds at once, make a necklace from their skulls, and attach their feathers to football shoulder pads, just like that guy in Mad Max: using my rig at home (which isn’t nearly as nice as David’s, but is good enough) I will record audio versions of the stories we added to the expanded edition, and give those to Bill to put on Subterranean Online.

For free.

Yes, you read that correctly: it’s for free, as in, “Hey, look what Wil gave me for free! He sure is a neat guy!”

I hope that this will help sell the expanded edition by letting people who aren’t familiar with my work hear me perform it, and I hope that it will create interest in the audio version I did with David. It may even generate sales of Just A Geek: teh Audiobook, but I don’t want to get too close to crazy talk, so I won’t count on that. Additionally – and this is really important to me – the people who don’t want or can’t afford the expanded edition, but already have the MP edition will have a chance to hear the stories that they’re missing. This special edition wouldn’t even be possible without those people, and this is my way of saying thank you. It’s really important to me to take care of my customers, and I hope that this effort will convert unhappy people into happy people.

This plan was formulated in the middle of the night, when my brain wouldn’t let me sleep and not even the pouring rain could drown out its incessant babbling, so I haven’t worked out a release schedule yet. When it happens, I’ll be sure to post about it.

Hooray for awesome news that is awesome!

in which wil is interviewed by the LA Weekly

Posted on By Wil

Long before I was hired to write a column there, I gave an interview to a reporter for the LA Weekly. The piece never ran, which made me sad. I spent a lot of time sitting in the corner, listening to The Queen is Dead and crying softly while I wrote 88 kinds of bad poetry with a crazy kind of urgency. On a Pee Chee folder, of course.

Today, via one of my favorite blogs, Hero Complex, I saw that the Weekly ran the interview:

It’s three o’ clock on a weekday afternoon and I’m in an Old Town Pasadena bar having drinks with a former child star. Were this person a faded pop tartlet, or perhaps named Corey, we might be planning a trip to a nudie bar or recollecting days spent riding the silver bullet. But this star is Wil Wheaton, and instead of strippers and blow, we’re talking science fiction with the bartender — a squirrelly looking but pleasant British fellow who looks as if he’s been playing this moment on loop in his head for a decade, waiting for it to finally come true.

“I’d have to say the past two seasons of DSN [Star Trek: Deep Space Nine] are as good as anything I’ve seen on television,” he tells Wheaton provocatively. “The storyline with the Cardassian war is unparalleled.”

For many former Star Trek actors — Wheaton played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, or TNG in today’s parlance — I imagine this is the kind of conversation they dread getting sucked into. Out for a quiet afternoon drink when suddenly a nerdy fan-boy wants to talk phasers and Cardassians, the stuff of Galaxy Quest parody. But for Wheaton, such a statement can’t go unchallenged.

“No way!” he responds with genuine incredulity, jumping to his Chuck Taylor–clad feet to lean over the bar. “Better than Battlestar Gallactica?”

Wheaton, you see, is an unabashed geek. “It’s like high school,” he tells me later, “you’re either one of the cool kids or you’re not — and I am definitely not.”

I irrationally despise the term “child star.” It conjures up images of total fuckups who are complete failures as adults. I could have easily followed that path, but I worked very hard to stay off of it. Sure, I was an actor when I was a child, and for a brief time in my early teens, I was one of the stupid famous kids who was in the damn teen magazines, but I don’t think I was ever a child star in the common understanding of the words.

Nevertheless, it’s a great interview that was a lot of fun to do, and to my great delight, Matthew Fleischer captured the moment perfectly.