announcement three of four (collect them all!)

This announcement is probably more exciting to me than to anyone else in the whole universe, but I think it’s cool: I wrote the foreword to the next Penny Arcade collection.

This one is insanely cool for me, because way back when they put together their first book, Gabe and Tycho asked me to write a foreword for it. I was way too busy at the time, so they got Bill Amend (creator of Foxtrot, which sits on a shelf with The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes in my Library of Awesome) instead. I think they traded up. Way, way up.

Years went by, and they kept putting out books that I kept reading. We crossed paths at Comic-Con, but I never really got to actually know them at all, until I gave the keynote at PAX last year. (You know, I almost chickened out of that, for reasons I’ve gone into excruciating detail about before, and I’m really glad that I didn’t, because I believe it will end up being one of the most significant moments in my life. I can’t quantify those reasons now, but I have a feeling that I’ll hopefully be able to explain one day, Charles Foster Kane style.)

After PAX was over, Robert Khoo asked me if I’d be willing to write the foreword. It went something like this:

Robert: Hey, would you like to write th–

Me: YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!

So I’m pretty excited about it, and I think that what I wrote totally doesn’t suck, which is always a bonus.

I hope I can do more things with Mike and Jerry in the future, because even though I’m the pinky toe on the Voltron we make when we come together, it’s still a pretty bad ass robot.

a look inside Star Trek: The Tour

I just got an invitation to the opening of Star Trek: The Tour. I thought some WWdN readers may want to know what the thing’s going to look like, so I scanned this picture from the inside of the invite. This image is concept art, that pretty closely matches up to the blueprints I saw when we shot our thing last week.

Speaking of that film I shot, I wanted to clarify something: it’s only 4 minutes long, and I doubt it’s canon.

You can click the image to embiggen it at flickr.

Star_Trek_The_Tour.jpg

announcement two of four (collect them all!)

Last week, I mentioned one of those “so cool I can’t talk about it” projects. Today, I can go ahead and reveal what it was: I composed that post about an hour before I put on pointy sideburns and a space suit, brought Lieutenant Commander Wesley Crusher back to life as the Assistant Chief Engineer of the USS Titan.

Before I tell you why, I would like to point out that it was particularly gratifying to see that his rank, considering this, from Dancing Barefoot:

“One time, when we were renegotiating our contracts, we were all asking for raises.

“We all felt a salary increase was appropriate, because The Next Generation was a hit. It was making gobs of money for Paramount,” (I like that word – gobs) “and we felt that we should share in that bounty.

“Of course, Paramount felt otherwise, so a long and annoying negotiation process began.

“During that process, the producers’ first counteroffer was that, in lieu of a raise, they would give my character a promotion, to lieutenant.”

I pause, and look around. I wrinkle my brow, and gaze upward.

“What? Were they serious?”

A fan hollers, “Yeah! Lieutenant Crusher! Woo!”

I smile back at him.

“My agent asked me what I wanted to do. I told him to call them back and remind them that Star Trek is just a television show.”

Okay, that was risky to say. It’s pretty much the opposite of just a television show to these people, but I’ve gotten the audience back, and they giggle.

“I imagined this phone call to the bank,” I mime a phone, and hold it to my ear. “Hi . . . Uh, I’m not going to be able to make my house payment this month, but don’t worry! I am a lieutenant now.” I pause, listening to the voice on the other end.

“Where? Oh, on the Starship Enterprise.”

I pause.

“Enterprise D, yeah, the new one. Feel free to drop by Ten Forward for lunch someday. We’ll put it on my officer’s tab!”

It’s for Star Trek: The Tour, which starts in Long Beach on January 17th, where it’s going to live for about a month before it goes on a national tour later this year.

In addition to the encounter thing that I’m in, there are some really cool things for Trekkies on this tour, including full-size recreations of the NCC-1701 and NCC-1701-D bridges (where you can trade some of your gold-pressed latinum for the opportunity to sit in the captain’s chair and pose for a picture) corridors you can walk through, and more costumes and props than you could feed a Targ. Sadly, there is no Ten Forward where we can all have a drink on my officer’s tab, but there is a killer app that I can’t wait to try out: There is this thing where you step into a blue screen environment, and through the magic of teleprompters, multiple camera angles, and creative editing, perform in a mini episode of the original series, where you’ll get to act with Kirk and Spock. I’m hoping that I can improvise some dialog with Kirk about his, uh, luxurious maine of carefully-styled hair.

Two down, two to go! Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!

this post contains lots of swears

Those of you who read my blog via syndication see occasional ads which are inserted by Feedburner. I don’t make very much money from these ads (a very good month brings in about $300) but each year I accumulate enough to pay for hosting and offset some other blog-related costs. Occasionally there’s enough for a trip to Lucky Baldwin’s for Guinness and veggie curry, but I am not getting rich from these ads by a long shot.

When I was experimenting with ads on my site last year, I adopted an agnostic policy toward what I would and wouldn’t accept, figuring that to deny one thing was to implicitly endorse another. That didn’t work out, and my inability to fully embrace that philosophy, (combined with Federated Media doing fuckall to put the advertising inventory on my site they’d told me was coming Real Soon Now) lead to me eventually scrapping on-site advertising entirely.

Still, the feedburner advertising program is much better, and even though it’s not pulling in the kind of earnings people always claim I can get here, it does what it does quite nicely for me.

I mention this today because I don’t think I’ve ever pointed out that I review every single ad that gets put into my feed’s rotation, and I approve and deny things based on how I feel about the company, product, or service. It’s not an explicit endorsement, but if there’s something in the feed, you can safely assume that I don’t hate it, and think it’s somehow relevant to the majority of WWdN readers.

By way of example: Earlier today, I got an e-mail that there was an ad scheduled for insertion into my feed. I checked it out, and saw that it was for car insurance from the Automobile Club. The CPM was bullshit, but that’s not why I denied it: I denied it because Anne and I had used AAA for our insurance for almost 12 years without an incident, until her car was vandalized in our driveway a couple of years ago. It was going to be very expensive to repair the damage, and when we filed our claim, the AAA agent told Anne that, because she didn’t send in a photograph of her car when the policy was upgraded months earlier — a request that had never been made by AAA — they were denying our claim because they couldn’t confirm that the car wasn’t already damaged when we bought the policy. Never mind that it’s completely illogical to assume that we’d drive around in a car with three broken windows for months, and never mind that we’d never missed a payment or filed a claim before; the insurance company found a way to fuck us, so they did. As a bonus, their agents were rude and outright nasty to us throughout the entire ordeal.

We tried to fight it, but it would have cost so much, we just cancelled our policy and switched insurers.

So when I saw that the AAA wanted to advertise on my blog, not only did I deny the ad, I said, “Hey! Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you fucking assmasters!” when I did it.

I went back to work, proud of my useless act of rebellion. A few minutes later, I got another e-mail from that a new ad was scheduled for insertion into my feed. I looked at it, and — surprise — it was the same AAA banner.

“Hey, didn’t you fuckshits hear me?” I said, as I clicked DENY, “Go to hell!”

Five minutes after that, I got another e-mail.

“These guys are persistent,” I thought as I clicked over . . . and saw a third attempt.

This time I just laughed out loud. Even though it’s just an automated computer doing its thing, I imagined a hapless AAA agent, alone and cold in a dark cubicle that hasn’t seen natural sunlight in a decade, desperately hoping that I’d just give them another chance. (Yes, I know that nothing of the sort happened, but just let me have my stupid little moment, okay? Jeeze.)

I’m usually not petty like that, but I’m an honorable guy, so when a person or a company fucks me, I never forget. I don’t hold a grudge as much as I create a blood feud. The AAA’s insurance division is, as they say, On The List.

So this is all a longwinded and hopefully amusing way of telling all you syndicated readers that you can click those ads with some degree of confidence, if that sort of thing matters to you, because it matters to me.

get dressed

There are two new shirts in the Penny Arcade store that rock my world. One is inspired by this comic:

Slide_forever

The second needs no further introduction. Sadly, TypePad just flat out refuses to display the image I so carefully cropped and uploaded (three different times), so you’ll just have to go over to the Penny Arcade Store right now and see it for yourself. Rock.

This is yet another reason I love being a geek. We get stuff like this, while the cool kids are stuck with the same sports logos and brand names everyone else buys at the mall.