it’s so fun to relate

When I finished up my work yesterday, I walked out into the living room to see how Nolan was doing. He was playing Warcraft (non-MMO version.)

"Hey," I said, "how was your day?"

"It was good," he said. He drove his little hero dude across the map, and rained furious death down upon some other player. The game announced that Nolan was GODLIKE.

"Nice 1" the vanquished foe said in the game’s chat, in a shocking display of good sportsmanship.

"Dude, you owned that guy," I said.

Nolan looked up at me and smiled. "Yeah, I’m doing well this match."

I watched him for a minute, not because I care all that much about the game, but because I’d been working  since he got home from school, and I’d hardly seen him at all.

"Hey," he said, "the weirdest thing happened to me today!"

"Oh?" I said, "What’s that?"

"This girl came up to me and started talking to me about D&D, because of my shirt."

He was wearing the +20 Shirt of Smiting T-shirt I gave him last year.

"And she was all, ‘I used to play a dwarf, but now I play an elf, and I won’t play half orcs because they’re seriously ugly.’"

"Dude." I said.

"Yeah!" He said, "and she was hot!"

"Well," I said, "if you need a refresher course in D&D, you know where to find me."

"Thanks," he said.

WIL WHEATON dot NET: Version 1.5

Wil WheatonIf you’d like to read my most recent blog posts, head over to WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile, my backup blog at Typepad.

Hi there. WWdN is currently undergoing a redesign and some maintenance. If you’d like to know what the status of the redesign is, or see some of the older WWdN files, read this entry.

What in the wide world of sports is going on here?

Way back in September of last year, I attempted to upgrade Movable Type, the blogging software that powers WWdN. I also attempted to move a few thousand entries and hundreds of thousands of comments into a newly-created (and faster) MySQL database.

And, uh, I broke it.

Actually, I didn’t break it. Someone who left a comment broke it when they used a seemingly random string of characters to indicate a break in their comment. Unbeknownst to me and them, it was the same string of characters MT used to indicate the end of an entry and its associated comments. When MT was moving all the data into its new (did I mention faster?) database, it came to that string of characters, and said to itself, “Oh boy! I get to start a new entry now! Let’s see, what’s the TITLE of that entry?”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Uh-oh, there’s no TITLE. I’d better look some more.”

Look . . . look . . . look . . .

“Yeah, it’s still not there. Well, I don’t know what the next entry is TITLEd, so I’m going to just barf all over the server now, and fail. I’m sure one of the Users I heard about in TRON will figure this out and fix it quickly. There’s no way my User, Wil, would stay in some backup blog for six months!”

Ha! Stupid smug software. I’ve been in Exile for nine months! Who’s laughing now, jerk? Who’s your daddy! Say my name, bitch! Yeah!

Uh. Sorry about that.

Off to Exile

I didn’t know how long it would take me to figure out the problem, fix it, and get back here to WWdN, so I set up a backup blog at Typepad, called WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile. I intended to hang out there for a couple of weeks while I worked on this blog, but I quickly discovered that WYSIWYG editor at Typepad is great, and since it did all the heavy lifting for me (formatting, marking up links and inserting and modifying images) I had much more time to just take creative ideas and put them into my blog. Around this time, I also got some new writing jobs that actually put money into my pocket and food on my table — jobs writing about poker for CardSquad, writing a column on classic gaming for the AV Club called The Games of our Lives, and editing the geek news at Suicide Girls. In my spare time, I played a lot of Texas Holdem Poker at Poker Stars (where I’m a member of Team PokerStars) and did things with my family. I had one of my first real “grown up” moments the day I realized that there really are only 24 hours in a day, and I had to choose very carefully how I wanted to spend them. You know what I didn’t want to spend them on? hand-coding html and tweaking software settings. It’s sad, and I’ll probably lose a 3d20 geek points for saying it, but those days are way, way behind me. After a day of making freelance deadlines, the last thing I’d want to do is try to repair and redesign my website, and since I was happy in Exile, it just wasn’t that important to me.

The database was eventually repaired, thanks to the efforts of Mike Pusateri and his co-worker Yoshi, who managed to scrape the entire blog for me, and put it into a MT-readable format as an Xmas gift, and the technical support staff at Six Apart, who figured out what the hell was wrong with my dabase in the first place. Repaired database in hand, I found myself with a delimma: return to the now-totally-outated and badly-in-need-of-a-redesign WWdN, or continue using Typepad? Mostly, it was Typepad’s awesome WYSIWYG editor that was keeping me in Exile, but there was also the redesign issue: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with anything that I really liked.

A few weeks ago, the design problem was unexpectedly solved, when I wrote a series of posts in exile (part one, part two, part three) that helped me clear out a bunch of mental logjams. Seconds before I hit publish on the final one, the way I wanted the redesigned WWdN to look sprung into my mind fully-formed. I grabbed a piece of paper, sketched it out, scanned it, and e-mailed it to my friend, who is working on it at this very moment. I’ve found two great replacements for the WYSIWYG editor I loved so much: ecto, which is a desktop blogging application for Windows and Mac, and Performancing, which is a free Firefox extension that runs on just about any platform in the world, and is optimized for WheatonIX. (In fact, I composed and published this entry using Performancing. Yes, it’s that easy to use.)

So this post represents a bridge between WWdN, and WWdN 2: Electric Boogaloo. All the links you would see on the front page of the old WWdN are in this post, so if you’re new to WWdN you can explore some of the old (and massively outdated) sections.

WWdN will be re-launched very, very soon. Until then, you can use all the nifty information to explore what’s already here. You can also come over to WIL WHEATON dot NET: In Exile to find out where my mind is right now.

Thanks for stopping by.

Old WWdN Content

Nifty WWdN 1.0 graphics: get them before they are retired!

WIL WHEATON DOT NET

WIL WHEATON DOT NET

My first two books

Just A Geek

Dancing Barefoot

Did you read all the way down here? That’s awesome. Thanks! Everything else you want can be found in the archives, or behind your couch. Good luck.

[Hosting provided by Logjamming.com | This entry powered by Performancing]

West Coast – I’m on WPT tonight

Wil_wpti1_1
I just found out that I’m on the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel tonight. It’s the WPT Invitational from Commerce Casino, where I outlasted all the other celebrity players and finished 23rd to land $10,000 for City of Hope. I doubt I’ll get much screen time, but my friend Burns! just called Anne to tell her that he saw me.

So . . . now you know! If anyone gets an mpeg or something, let me know and I’ll link it up.

Update: WWdN:iX reader Andrew sent me the following captures:

XviD (9 MB)

mpeg2 (30MB)

It ‘s a great segment. I got a lot more camera time than I expected, and so did Darwin!  If anyone wants to seed .torrents, let me know and I’ll update again. Thanks, Andrew!

(image via Dr. Pauly)

broke the bonds and loosed the chains

Pauly:

If more Americans read books every night instead of watching TV, we’d live in a more productive society. If more Americans watched the news and read real newspapers and magazines, instead of crappy programs like American Idol, then I’m confident that George Bush would not be our president. But heck, that’s what our leaders really want deep down… a mindless, uneducated populous that will work 40 hours a week so they can earn enough money to buy things to keep them distracted from the evil deeds that our leaders and suits in Fortune 500 companies are conducting everyday under your noses.

Amen. It’s interesting to think of turning off the television and being less of a consumer as an act of rebellion, but I think Pauly has a valid point, at the very least worthy of consideration if not action. I know how happy and free I feel after cleaning a bunch of needless stuff out my house (and life) recently, and since I’m not completely overwhelmed by stuff that is ultimately not that important, I feel like I can address various mental and spiritual aspects of my life that need attention, now that I’m not constantly battling with a huge pile of material bullshit on a daily basis.

I’ve been making an effort to turn off the TV, walk away from the Internets, turn on the radio, and read lots of books. It’s nothing heady — I just finished Monster Island, and I’m in the first third of Cell — but I agree with Pauly. Reading activates and nourishes a different part of my brain than watching TV, even if it’s not Hemmingway or Feynman or something weighty. It also makes me want to write more, which is something I sorely need.

I’ve also made an effort over the last few weeks to unplug, and get out of the house every day, even if it’s just out into my yard, or my patio garden. Anne and I have been getting out of the house and walking like crazy, in preparation for the marathon this weekend (you can still sponsor our team here), and though we’re down to the “easy” six mile walks this week (we’re just tuning up to walk a half marathon, instead of running a full one, remember), it’s still great to get out of the house and breathe deeply for a couple of hours every morning. All the flowers in our neighborhood are in bloom, too, so it’s almost like walking through the best flower shop in the world, but it’s also filled with birds and those really friendly people who get up early to walk during the week.

My soul still needs nourishment, and my life is still out of Balance, but I’m getting closer to finding it. I think all this physical pain in my hip and up my back and on my shoulders is a physical manifestation of my current disarray, and I’m glad my body finally forced me into tuning up my diet and getting more exercise, both physical and psychic.