that’s no moon . . .

Plaid Stallions is one of my favorite stops on the Internets for Gen X nostalgia. While Propelling this morning, I came across their scans of Kenner’s 1978 Star Wars toy catalog.

If you’ve read The Trade from Just a Geek and wondered just how awesome my Death Star play set was, take a look at Plaid Stallions’ Death Star play set page.

Once you’ve fully appreciated how awesome and magnificent the Death Star play set is, scroll to the bottom of the vehicle page and take a look at the Landspeeder.

Then, if you will, join me in sending a nasty curse word back in time to the little bastard who convinced eight year-old me that it it was an equitable trade.

hear me on this week in geek

I don’t do a lot of interviews, but for reasons that are best left a mystery, I’ve done a whole bunch recently.

One of those interviews was with a podcast called This Week in Geek. My episode is now up, so if you wanted to listen to me talk about geeky shit and don’t want to wait for a new Radio Free Burrito, your long painful wait has come to an end.

Hey, when you’re done, check out the Radio Free Burrito Mix Tape. My iPod thought I should hear it recently, and it totally doesn’t suck.

Geek Tour 2008: San Jose Super-Con – Updated

This weekend, the 2008 Geek Tour rolls into San Jose for Super-Con!

Original Announcement:

May 17-18
Super-Con
San Jose, CA

When I worked on NUMB3RS, I met the guys in charge of Super-Con in
San Jose. In fact, they were a big part of making Alt Con 9 (the fake
con in the show) look and feel as real as it did. I haven’t been to San
Jose for a convention since the only way to get there was via mule
train, so I’m looking forward to traveling up the coast in more modren
style, perhaps by zeppelin or auto-gyro.

I don’t have a lot of details for this one, and I don’t even know if I’ll get a chance to perform from my books, make balloon animals or just stand around making lists of things.

However, I’ll have a booth of awesome, where I’ll be hanging out on Saturday and Sunday, trading books and pictures for shiny gold rocks. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to visit with some cool people while and angry guy complains about it. That’s always pretty fun.

I’m hoping the copies of Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot that I ordered at great expense to myself arrive today, because if they don’t, I won’t have any of them for this show, which would be sad. [see Update at bottom]However, I should have shiny new copies of the second printing of Happiest Days, and 2008’s chapbook-o-rama, Sunken Treasure.

Uh, this is also pretty goddamn cool: The original cast of MST3K will be getting together — reuniting, if you will — for the first time since the exciting rock climbing portion of the film began. I’m kind of excited to listen to whatever they have to say, and hope I can trade them shiny gold rocks for their automagraphs on my copy of Manos: the Hands of Fate.

UPDATE: FedEx and UPS came through for me. I have the second printing of Happiest Days, as well as copies of Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot. This means that, if you like, you can trade me shiny gold rocks (or Kongbucks) for The Complete Works of Me, Wil Wheaton.

Of course, now I have so much stuff to take and no time to ship it, so it looks like me and the 101 are going to spend about 5 hours of quality time together tomorrow. And again on Sunday. Good thing I have Dimension X on my iPod.

crying hey man this is babylon

I came to Soul Coughing at almost the same time I came to Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Underworld, and jazz that went beyond Kind of Blue.

See, this is why the loss of Tower Records is going to seriously hurt a generation of young artists, because it was in a Tower Records that I found all of these things. Sure, it’s great to have the convenience of buying and instantly downloading records and stuff, but the damn kids today who will grow up without ever setting foot in a record store or talking to a hardcore music geek who works there just don’t know what they’re missing.

And they’re missing a lot.

It was one of the most inspiring and eye-opening times of my life, and whenever I listen to Ruby Vroom (which I’m doing right now) I’m reminded of that time. I can feel it in my brain and in my bones. I remember staying out all night with my friend Dave just because we could, not really doing anything more than listening to music and being "artists" — whatever that meant.

We had no real responsibility other than getting home alive, and it was when I really started writing. I filled up tons of thick spiral-bound notebooks with my efforts to figure out who and why I was. When I read them now, they just make me sad.

It was a great time. I miss it sometimes. Okay, I miss it often.

I miss it right now.

introducing sunken treasure

Tuesday night, I asked Andrew (my editor and good friend, for those of you who are just walking into the theater for the first time) if he thought we could put together a chapbook for the 2008 Geek Tour . . . and have it ready to give to the printer about 18 hours later.

Andrew is a fucking rockstar, and over the next 90 minutes or so of manic IMing we put together something that I’m massively proud of. The result of a fucos that can only be born in terror is something really, really special.

See, the other chapbooks I’ve done (and I try to do a different one each summer) are all pretty cool, with nifty bits of stuff that’s awesome, but this one is different than anything I’ve done so far.

My author’s note! Let me show you it!

Every summer, I make one of these limited chapbooks and  take them with me on the inevitable summer convention tour. In the past, I’ve pulled material from whatever I’m working  on, as sort of a fall preview, but this year the book I’m working on is so top secret, I’d have to print the chapbook on self-destructing paper, and while that would make it a very limited edition, the costs associated are kind of prohibitive.

So for 2008’s limited edition chapbook extravaganza, I’ve put together the first ever Wil Wheaton Sampler. With the help of my editor Andrew, who is a former ninja warrior and recreational time traveler, I’ve pulled together things I like from all three of my books, my blog, and this groovy collaborative fiction project I play with called Ficlets. I’ve also included, for the first time anywhere, one of the scripts I wrote for a sketch comedy show at the ACME Comedy Theater.

If you like what you see here, and would like to read more, come visit me online. I’m at wilwheaton.typepad.com.

Namaste.

Wil Wheaton
May 2008

I was going to call this Wil Wheaton’s Hot Cocoa Box Sampler (Farkisms FTW!) but I have a tradition of using song titles that I didn’t want to break, so this one is called Sunken Treasure, with the subtitle "Wil Wheaton’s Hot Cocoa Box Sampler." Hee. Awesome.

I am so proud of this. It’s one of the things I was working on during my massive deadline panic. The collected stories are some of my favorites, and I’m thrilled to include outtakes from Happiest Days as well as a script from ACME, which I’ve never reprinted anywhere before.

As always, this will be limited to 200 copies, and will become available at Super-Con this weekend in San Jose. If I’m lucky, I’ll sell about half of them this weekend, and I’ll have the remaining 100 to bring with me to the rest of the cons on the 2008 Geek Tour. I don’t have any plans to sell these online, but I like this little book so much I may change my mind on that later this year.

Oh, speaking of the 2008 Geek Tour, I’m adding another stop next month, which will be announced in its own post a little later today.