Geek in Review: a Mind Forever Voyaging

Posted on By Wil

I took yesterday off, because it was a little more important to spend my wedding anniversary with the woman who was responsible for it than . . . well, than anything else in the whole world.

So I’m a day late on sharing this week’s Geek in Review, A Mind Forever Voyaging.

My limited time is the most valuable commodity I have. I can always
earn more money; I can always eat more food; I can stay up late if I
didn’t finish that load of laundry in the afternoon. (Curse you, Guitar
Hero III: Thief of Daylight!) But I can’t get back time that’s already
spent – in some cases, wasted (the time, not me) – on hollow pursuits,
so I think very carefully about how I invest
my limited free time, and my even more limited “me” time. Here’s a look
at a typical afternoon spent in a twisty maze of options, all enticing
. . .

LOOK
>A twisty maze of passages, all alike, is behind you. You face a wall with four doors.

EXAMINE DOORS
>There are four old doors: Movies, Television, Books, and Games.

Oh . . . this should be interesting.

This column is one of my favorites in recent memory, and I owe a lot of that to my editor, Andrew. Andrew used his Red Pen of Doom to give me some fantastic advice and edits on my rough draft of this column, and when he gave me back his version, I came to the unavoidable (and quite happy) conclusion that, without Andrew, I am half a writer. (He says that’s okay, because I’m the motivated half). I thanked him privately, and now I’m thanking him publicly.

Gamers With Jobs reviews Happiest Days

Posted on By Wil

Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives today at Gamers With Jobs:

Wheaton will forever get lumped into a bucket with "geek cred"
painted on the side. Yes, he’s "one of us." You need look no further
than his blow-the-doors-off keynote speech he gave at PAX this year.
Sure, it was funny. I mean hell, he opened with "My name is Wil
Wheaton, and Jack Thompson can suck my balls." But it was also well
written, well delivered, and something of an anthem for us over-30
geekdads. But we should pause for a moment and acknowledge the craft:
the guy knows how to tell a compelling story.

That pause is difficult. It’s hard to separate the work – the book – from the fact that he does
seem so much like everyone I grew up with and to be blunt, so much like
me. His stories of agonizing over Star Wars figures in K-Mart, of
escaping into the safety of Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 12 –
these are my stories. They are the stories of everyone I knew growing up who didn’t think I was a spaz. They are our stories.

Here we sit in the crucible of the internet, invented, maintained,
loved and obsessed over by geeks. Yet why is it we still look for our
muse? I’m not sure I have the answer. I don’t think Wheaton does
either. But I do know that there is an intersection between the
geek-as-consumer and the geek-as-creator that lies like a giant exposed
central nerve, at least in organism in which I live. Sure, there are
plenty of people writing about tech, and many of them write very well.
There are scads of bloggers and pundits and comics and storytellers.
And many of them (myself included, I hope) do a decent job of torturing
words onto the page now and then.

Wheaton’s different, not in an "oh my god he’s so dreamy" way, but
in the sense that blue and green are different. It would be easy to
think that Wheaton has somehow parlayed a child-star gig into a kind of
ambassadorship to planet Nerd. It would also be wrong. Wheaton’s
strength is not his provenance, it’s that he is slowly mastering the
craft of echoing the lives of a certain generation with simplicity,
un-feigned humility and striking clarity.

It was really cool to read a review from someone who took the time to put Happiest Days into context with my other books and online writing. I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I sat down and started putting together Just A Geek (and then Dancing Barefoot) and it’s pretty awesome to have that recognized by someone who isn’t married to me.

This is the second review that’s mentioned the length, though, so maybe I need to make it more clear in my marketing materials: this is supposed to be a short book that you can enjoy in little bursts, or read in one sitting. I could have padded it, but Andrew and I made a decision to eliminate stories that had different settings, but ultimately told the same thing (this resulted in cutting about 15000 additional words before we even got to the final rough draft of stories that made the cut.) I’d rather be accused of being short than stuffing the book with filler for the sake of making it longer. I know your time is valuable (hey, I’m writing this week’s GiR about exactly that subject) and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

Remember that you can submit your own reviews at Monolith Press, if you’re so inclined.

autographed guitar hero controller from PAX

Posted on By Wil

Paxgh
While I was at PAX this year, I signed a sweet Guitar Hero controller for a pretty cool guy who waited in line a for a long time to put the pen in my hand.

Near the end of the convention, I saw him again, and he showed me that he’d gotten it signed by pretty much everyone there, from Gabe and Tycho to Jonathan Coulton to MC Frontalot, to . . . well, check out the whole list at Kotaku. It’s pretty awesome, especially if you’re a gamer.

He has put the autographed guitar hero controller up for auction on eBay, with 100% of the final bid going to the Child’s Play charity.

For the five of you who don’t know about Child’s Play:

With the help of hospital
staff, we’ve set up gift wish lists full of video games, toys, and
movies. You can go to each hospital’s list and buy a toy, and that toy
will be sent to the hospital. Some of these kids are in pretty bad
shape. Imagine being stuck alone in a hospital over the holidays,
getting something from a fellow gamer would really raise their spirits.
Some of the stuff the hospital will give away for kids to keep, while
other gifts (like consoles) will be kept by the hospital for patients
to use throughout the year.

So if you win this auction, not only do you get a guitar controller signed by me with the timeless inscription "FREEBIRD!!!!" you will be adding some awesome to the world.

I submitted this story to Propeller, and it would be awesome if it made the front page, so more people know about it.

(Image ganked from Kotaku)

that’s just how i roll

Posted on By Wil

Last night, while we made dinner, Anne said, "I don’t speak geek, but I wanted to ask you . . . did you have fun at D&D?"

I stopped chopping onions and said, "Oh yeah! It was so awesome. It was a pretty classic hack and slash dungeon crawl that could have been straight out of The Keep on the Borderlands, and –"

She held up her hand. "Wait. Wait. Wait. You’re speaking geek."

"Sorry." I thought for a moment and added, "okay, there was one thing that happened that I think you can appreciate."

"Okay."

"Well, you know how gamers are really weird about our dice?"

She stirred a pot of rice on the stove, and covered it.

"Yes, like when you freaked out at Ryan for touching your ‘forbidden dice.’" She made little air quotes around the appropriate words.

"Exactly," I said. "So I played with some very experienced gamers. There were people in my party who have been playing longer than me, like back when it first came out."

She nodded, and pointed at the cutting board.

"What? Oh. Sorry." I went back to chopping onions.

"So we all brought our own dice, obviously."

"Obviously," she said.

"And at one point in our second encounter –" I finished chopping, and swept the onions into a dish with the knife. "Would you turn on that pan for me? So, an encounter is what we call it when we’re playing an adventure, and we deal with monsters or something like that."

"Mmmm," she said.

"Uh-oh, I’m losing her." I thought.  "I’d better speed this up and get to the point."

I stabbed the top of a Tofu pouch and drained its water into the sink. I dumped the tofu block out into my hand, and set it on the cutting board. While I sliced it in half, I said, "Anyway, in our second encounter, I had to roll a d20 for something, and while I was shaking it, it hopped out over the top of my hand, rolled across the table to my left, and came to rest against this other guy’s stack of dice."

The pan warmed, and I dumped curry powder into the rapidly heating oil.

"It was like time stopped for a second, and the only thing any of us could see was my d20 resting against his d4 — that’s the one that looks like a pyramid."

"Oh, the one that’s so fun to step on," she said.

"I said I was sorry about that," I said. I stirred the curry around, and put my tofu into the pan. It sizzled, and a delicious cloud of curry-flavored steam billowed into the kitchen.

"So while the other end of the table continued resolving their combat, he looked at me and said, very seriously, ‘Uh, your dice are touching my dice.’"

"Oh no!" She said.

"Yeah, and he was totally serious."

"What did you do?" She started chopping tomatoes.

"I said, ‘Sorry, it hopped out of my hand while I was getting ready to make my listen check.’ I picked it up, careful to not touch his dice with my hand."

"Like Operation!" She said.

I laughed. "Exactly like Operation."

"Was he mad?" She said.

I flipped my tofu over. "I don’t think he was. It was more of a breach of etiquette than anything else. Can I have some of those tomatoes?"

She brought the cutting board over to me, and I pushed a few chunks into the simmering curry. It turned from bright yellow to a deep reddish brown.

"Goddamn, dude," Anne said, "that smells so good!"

I put on my best Teen Girl Squad Voice: "So good!"

"Uh, anyway," I said, "shortly after that happened, it was his turn to roll. He picked up his d20 — which I’m pretty sure was new in 1980 — and when he rolled it, it went right off the table, bounced off my thigh, and landed on the floor between us."

I turned my tofu one last time, and switched off the burner.

"I looked up at him and I said, ‘Dude. Your dice touched me.’" I laughed, "it was pretty funny."

"Why are you people so weird about your dice?" Anne said.

"That’s just how we roll," I said.

She looked at me. "Did you just . . ."

"Yes." I said. "Yes I did."

She suppressed a smile, and shook her head.

"Nolan!" She called over her shoulder," dinner is ready!"

Bad Astronomy reviews Happiest Days

Posted on By Wil

Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives!

This book is really good. Are you a geek? Grew up playing video
games? Go to cons? Watch Trek? Have your own set of d10s, d12, and d20s
(and if you even know what that means, then yes, you count)? Yeah, you
know who you are. You are already one of us, whether you admit it or
not. Come. Join us. Be with Wil and Phil and countless others who enjoy
— nay, revel — in nerddom.

Wil’s writing makes this way of life less of the fringe it was when
I was a kid and more of a real thing, a legitimate lifestyle choice.
Sure, you get razzed by others, but this is really how we are.
You get a taste of it through Wil’s eyes, through his reminiscing.
There’s a nice mix of real-guy-with-a-life-and-family mixed in with
fanboy mixed in with being an actual TV and movie actor. Also, I play
poker, so his story about a Hollywood poker speakeasy made me laugh.

To mark this occasion, I am happy to announce that within the next 24 hours I’ll begin accepting orders from everywhere in the world. In addition to the US, we’ll ship to The Canada, The UK, The The European Union, The Australia, and The Everywhere Else. International customers: please understand that the shipping costs are insane, and because I have to fill out each custom form by hand, shipping times will take at least two weeks, but I’ll do my best to make it shorter.

I’m still working on a solution to sell the hardbacks. I’m getting closer, and I don’t think I’ll be able to use PayPal as a shopping cart and storefront, because the problem I’m currently having, item numbers aren’t showing up in multiorder shiping, has existed and remained untouched by PayPal since April.

We’re currently looking at lots of different cart and backend options, and we may have found something that is going to work for us, and is Open Source as a bonus! We looked at Yahoo shopping, Z Shops at Amazon, and Google Checkout, but they all had various deal-killing issues.