poker tournament just for bloggers

I don’t have as much time to play poker as I did in days gone by, but I still love a good game of cards, whether I’m sitting at a kitchen table with my friends, a casino with strangers, or at PokerStars.

A few years ago, PokerStars started this freeroll (that’s what you call a tournament where you don’t pay anything to enter, but there’s still a big pile of money to win) for bloggers, called the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker. I played in it when I was on Team PokerStars, and I’m pretty excited to play in it this year as one of the thousands of bloggers hoping to scoop up part of the prize pool.

Anyone with a blog can enter the tournament. All you have to do is sign up and paste some code into your blog that gives the following SEOtastic result:

Texas Holdem Poker

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 5575088

And as long as we’re talking about poker, if I convinced PokerStars to
do a freeroll for people who signed up via my blog, would you all come out
and play in it?

oh my!

Scientists have named an asteroid in honor of my friend and fellow Enterprise navigator dude, George Takei!

An asteroid between Mars and
Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known
for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and
movies.

The
celestial rock, discovered by two Japanese astronomers in 1994, was
formerly known as 1994 GT9. It joins the 4659 Roddenberry (named for
the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry) and the 68410 Nichols (for
co-star Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura). Other main-belt
asteroids have been named for science fiction luminaries Robert
Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

 

Just so nobody thinks this is one of those scams where you give some shady guy in an alley a double sawbuck and you get a sixth generation photocopy certificate in return:

The renaming of
7307 Takei was approved by the International Astronomical Union’s
Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. About 14,000 asteroid names have
been approved by the panel, while about 165,000 asteroids have been
identified and numbered, union spokesman Lars Lindberg Christensen said.

Unlike
the myriad Web sites that offer to sell naming rights to stars, the IAU
committee-approved names are actually used by astronomers, said Tom
Burbine, the Mount Holyoke College astronomy professor who proposed the
name swap.

"This is the name that will be used for all eternity," he said.

That’s so totally awesome. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting George, you know that he’s one of the kindest and most joyful people in the universe, and I know this actually means something to him. I can just hear him saying, "Oh my!" When he got the news.

one of the the happiest days of my life

Today is one of the happiest days of my life, because The Happiest Days of Our Lives officially goes on sale, starting . . . now. (Well, actually, starting about 96 hours ago, but you only knew that if you follow me on Twitter. Soft launch FTW!)

I love everything about this book. I loved writing the stories in
it. I loved working with Andrew to put them together into something that is more than just a collection of blog entries. I loved working with Sean to design and create the cover. I loved working with Russ to shake the cobwebs off of Monolith Press and restore power to this fully-operational battle station. I love the excitement I feel
right now, as I get ready to share it with anyone who wants to read it. I love the way it reminds me so much of how I felt when Dancing Barefoot was first published.

But what I love the most is
taking back control of my work and releasing it, marketing it, and
publishing it myself. The Happiest Days of Our Lives
is going to live or die based entirely on my efforts to promote it (first note to everyone: It’s not
a Star Trek book), which can be a little overwhelming if I think about
it too much, so instead of thinking about that, I’ve been thinking
about the path I’ve walked to get here, starting six and a half years ago, when I created Where’s My Burrito? at Geocities. As I wrote in Just A Geek,

My life as a husband and stepfather was very rewarding, but a desire to regain the success I’d enjoyed as a child and teenager pulled at me constantly. It kept me awake at night, and was a constant distraction. Like the Not Me ghost from Family Circus, Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake slept between my wife and me in our bed, and ate with us at every meal. When I could have been playing with my stepkids, Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake and I would sit and stare vacantly at the TV, wondering what could have been.

The weekend after the Hooters Incident (as it came to be known), my wife was out of town and Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake and I found ourselves in front of my computer. I surfed the Internet, played Diablo II, created WinAmp playlists . . . I did everything I could to get that Hooters waitress out of my mind.

Yes, that’s how badly it hurt me: I was actively trying to get a Hooters waitress out of my mind. While my wife was out of town.

Somewhere in that day, while I was battling the forces of polygonal evil on Battle.Net, Prove To Everyone tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Dude. You should make a website, and let the world know that you are still alive, and still acting."

I paused the game and looked back at him. I had wanted a presence on the Web for a long time, but I didn’t have the skills to build a website. I’d been given the names of several designers, but wanted to do the whole thing myself, for better or for worse.

"Oh my god. That’s a fantastic idea! Maybe we’ll even get noticed by Hollywood again!"

"Just make sure you make the website edgy." He said.

"If you were real, I’d cock-punch you for that." I said.

I quit the game, and went to Yahoo! Geocities where I created an account called “tvswilwheaton.” (Get it? "TV’s Wil Wheaton!" Because I’m still on TV, except I’m not.) Because I had absolutely no idea how to write HTML, and I knew nothing about tables, CSS, RSS feeds, or the W3C, I spent the next few hours clumsily learning my way around the Yahoo! Pagebuilder. I used their WYSIWYG editor to Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake — ahem — “design” my very first webpage. The result was incredibly lame, but it was mine. I named it “Where’s My Burrito?” after one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons.

When it was done, Prove To Everyone That Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Mistake and I shared a high-five. I was proud of what I’d created and I posted a link to it in a small Wil Wheaton online fan club and wondered if anyone would care.

Boy, did they care! I had over 700 visitors in a couple weeks, without being listed in a single search engine. The response excited me, and I started updating the site quite frequently, by hand-coding “news updates” into the main page.

I soon traded those news updates for this thing called a blog. I liked writing the blog so much, I eventually started my own website where I could update the blog more regularly. Just like Where’s My Burrito? it was lame, but it was mine. On the advice of my friend Loren, I moved the blog to the front page, and eventually made it the centerpiece of the entire site. Neither of us knew it at the time, but with that advice, Loren dropped a pebble into a pond, and the ripples it created have been incredible.

As I write this post today, on a day very much like the one I started writing the manuscript for Just A Geek, which lead to Dancing Barefoot, which lead to writing for the AV Club, which lead to writing for TV Squad, which lead to writing the Star Trek Manga, which lead to . . . well, everything else that I love about my work now, the whole thing feels kind of surreal. When I started that silly little page at Geocities six years ago, I had no idea that it would lead me down the path I walk today. If you’d asked me back then what I thought I’d be doing in six years, my answer would have included something about acting, even though I was having serious doubts in the dark of night about my ability to support my family while trying to be a full-time actor.

I never expected that I’d become a full-time writer, but today, I can’t imagine doing anything different with my life. In fact, as long as I get to keep doing voice acting, I don’t really care if I’m ever on camera again. Telling stories about the things that unite us and celebrating all things geek seems to be my purpose in life. I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile that matters to people, if your comments and e-mails are any indication, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. They say that making a living doing what you love is how you know you’re living the dream. If that’s true, I don’t ever want to wake up.

The Hooters Incident

The entire story behind the creation of my blog is detailed in my book Just A Geek (which makes a lovely gift for any occasion) including this bit, which is as tragic and hilarious as it is true . . .

The Hooters Incident
(originally published in 2001)

On a hot June afternoon in 2000, I joined my best friend Darin for lunch at one of our teenage haunts, Old Town Pasadena. An afternoon in Old Town is a trip to a time when we were free of responsibility, and the world was filled with possibility and opportunity.

The changes in Old Town reflect the changes within ourselves. Thanks to the efforts of the Pasadena preservationists, the historical building facades haven’t changed, but they are the only thing which remain the same. The empty doorway where a punk rocker once sneered at passing businessmen is now a Pottery Barn, occupied by a San Marino yuppie who screams into her cell phone. The eclectic record store where we’d buy imported Smiths singles is now a Sam Goody, its windows plastered with posters announcing the latest release from Justin Timberlake. Tourists stand uncomfortably at crosswalks, trying to ignore the homeless who have come to enjoy the trickle down economics of a prospering shopping thoroughfare.

All of this progress is not without its benefits, though. Old Town is safe, if sanitized, and several good restaurants have moved into the area.

On this particular afternoon, Darin and I walked down Colorado Boulevard, following the same route as Pasadena’s claim to annual fame, the Tournament of Roses Parade. We passed The Cheesecake Factory, several trendy Japanese noodle houses, and walked straight into Hooters.

Hey, Darin was engaged, and I’m married. Sometimes a guy’s gotta know if he still has it.

We walked in ahead of the lunchtime rush, so we could sit wherever we liked. Through a speaker above us, Bob Seger rhetorically asked, ain’t it funny how the night moves? We looked around the mostly-empty restaurant, and chose the section with the hottest waitress in the joint.

As we took our seats, our waitress came over to our table: a cute-but-not-beautiful girl in her early 20s. Bleached-blonde, fake tan, long legs. Hooters. Her name tag said “Destiny.”

She flirted with us as she took our order, all smiles and giggles. We ordered wings. Super Fire Hot, baby.

She stood up, and left to put in our order. Darin and I stared at each other, grinned, and exchanged a mental high-five. We still had it, and it felt good.

She’d only walked a few steps, when she stopped suddenly, turned around, and came back to our table.

She looked at me, lustily. “Can I ask you something?”

“Oh, hell, yeah, Willie,”I thought to myself, “The ladies still want your sweet action!”

My face flushed and my pulse quickened.

“Sure,” I said.

She screwed up her courage and leaned close to me, her full, pouting lips just inches from mine. Her perfume embraced me. Her ample cleavage seductively longed to bust out from beneath her thin cotton T-shirt. She drew a nervous breath, bit down on the corner of her mouth, and asked, breathlessly,“Didn’t you used to be an actor?”

“WHAT?! USED TO BE?! I STILL AM!” I hollered, as mental images of a hot Hooters threesome were replaced with the cold reality of myself on Celebrity Boxing.

She immediately knew that she had made a mistake. She thought quickly, licked her lips, self-consciously fussed with her over-processed hair and tried again:“Oh, I mean, weren’t you an actor when you were a kid?”

All I could do was numbly answer,“Yeah, when I was a kid,” as I hung my head and ordered the first of many pints of Guinness.

Funny story, right? Yeah, funny like when you watch another guy get kicked in the nuts. In the days that followed, I tried to write it off. Tried to bolster my wounded self-esteem by telling myself that she was just a Hooters waitress, so she didn’t matter. But the truth was, that simple, scantily clad waitress had driven home with painful acuity my deepest fear: I was a has-been. I “used to be” an actor, when I was a kid . . .

Don’t worry, dear reader. Eventually, everything worked out and I’m a better person for it with a new career and everything. You can read all about it in my blog, or in my newest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

a bite at the golden apple

The manga signing at Golden Apple last night was awesome. We drew a very large crowd by comic book in-store signing standards, and it was more like an informal party than anything else.

I’m telling you, if you’re local and into comics or Star Trek, you should come out to one of these things, because we have a lot of fun getting our geek on.

At last night’s event, the SoCal contingent of Enforcers from PAX was in full effect, so we posed for a picture to protect our rep against the Seattle Enforcers, who I understand are always taunting the SoCal Enforcers with tales of awesome. Well, who’s awesome now, beeches?!

I also got to meet filmmaker John Singleton, who was on his way to a dinner, but stopped to get his comics on the way.

"Wow, I am a huge admirer of your work," I said when we were introduced.

"I’m an admirer of yours, as well," he said, and I could tell that he meant it. A lifetime in the entertainment industry has given me a nearly flawless bullshit detector, and I was totally floored by his sincerity.

I stayed at the shop until they closed down, and picked up Batman #668, which will wrap up Grant Morrison’s outstanding run on the series. I also grabbed a 100 Bullets trade, a 1602 hardcover, and a book for Nolan called The Big Book of Hoaxes, which I think he’ll like. I now have so many unread comics, trade paperback, and graphic novels, I will have to take a full day to do nothing but read them. It’s a sacrifice, I know, but I’m willing to make it. Stiff upper lip and all that.

I met a bunch of people from TokyoPop, including the publisher. In the film and television world, this would be the equivalent of meeting a network or studio head, and those guys are always douchebags, but Mike from TokyoPop was a cool guy. In fact, everyone from TokyoPop was cool, and I felt like I was talking to people who are in this because they’re passionate about the work and excited about the future of Manga in America.

And speaking of the Manga, there’s another review out today, from activeanime.com:

The first volume really had a fan fiction feel to it, and frankly, the
art work left a lot to be desired in many cases.  In this volume, the
stories have more punch, and the design is better.  Perhaps some of the
talent behind the stories is to account for this.  One of the writers
is Wil Wheaton- yes, that Wil Wheaton of TNG fame.  He shows he has the
right stuff as a writer for the franchise with his work “Cura Te Ipsum”
which headlines the book.  Damaged engines, Scotty getting new crystals
from the middle of a war zone, and McCoy wrestling with his conscience
and the Prime Directive whilst seeing a civilization tear itself apart
are prominent elements in the classic tale that could easily have been
an episode in the original series.  You can see the author has caught
the essence of what the classic shows were all about and has cleverly
distilled it in a compact manga format.

Dude! I’m 2 for 2! Awesome.

Our next stop is at the West Hollywood Bookfair this Sunday, where we’ll have a Q&A, then we’re down in Manhattan Beach next week at Comic Bug for the final comic shop stop on the tour.