My WPBT Trip Report is currrently under
construction [insert totally awesome 1996 .gif of a man with a shovel
on a yellow diamond here. It’s retro-ironicool!] but I came across a
photo that so perfectly captures my Friday night at MGM, I had to post
it right now.

This comes from Flickr, via CujoFan’s blog. You will note that, even though I had position on Paul Phillips, he still managed to make me his bitch, which is probably easy when I’m playing near my gulp limit, and he’s playing below his "guess what I found under a couch cushion" limit.

I guess it goes without saying that Paul is a remarkable poker player . . . but until you’ve sat with him, and watched him completely pwn a table, you have no idea how scary good he actually is. Paul has said that he’s just about finished playing poker, which is a real shame. He could utterly destroy just about any WSOP field he enters, and I’d like to see him take at least one bracelet before he retires.

After two awesome months, I’m moving the WWdN Friday game at PokerStars to Tuesday, where it will henceforth be known as "The WWdN Friday Game On Tuesday."

Just kidding. It will be "The WWdN: [Donkey who outdrew me because I am so awesome] Invitational."

I’m moving it to Tuesdays in anticipation of SciFridays coming back, and so people who don’t want to give up their Friday nights to play poker with the most awesome group of future WSOP champions (and Poker Geek) ever assembled can still do so on Tuesdays.

The West Coast Warm-up will still happen at 7:30 PST on Thursdays, and is currently seeking a new name, since it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to warm up for something that happened on Tuesday, unless you’re warming up several days in advance, which is a silly way to spend your entire weekend.

So cut-n-paste this as necessary, and spread the word around:

The WWdN Friday game at PokerStars is moving to Tuesday, beginning December 20th. The game will play each week, except in the event of major holidays, starting at 7:00 PM EST. The buy-in will remain at $10+1.

A major announcement related to the Friday-but-now-on-Tuesday tournaments will come out tomorrow. Feel free to speculate wildly, in the hopes that the Associated Press picks up the story and runs with it. Also feel free to tell me I smell good and have nice hair. But don’t expect any funny business, because I’m not that kind of date.

I wanted to do something creative and cool for the booklet that comes with Just A Geek The Audiobook, so I bought a Molskine notebook, and hand-wrote an introduction, the chapter and track listings, and a bunch of liner notes in it. There may also be a few things like the surfer "S", a Van Halen "VH", an actual game of Tic-Tac-Toe that I played with my wife, and some of the other stuff that you typically find on a Pee Chee folder in seventh grade. The idea is that Just A Geek is sort of a journal (all about Star Trek, if you believe the cover and marketing), and I think that this booklet ties in with that theme quite nicely. It’s supermegatotallyawesome that I have the creative freedom to layer one creative mini-project over another creative mega-project.

I’ve finished the art work several times, but when I go to scan it and e-mail it off to the appropriate people, I end up with one of those "Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I just added . . ." moments, and the project keeps growing and growing, so now I have to edit out some of the stuff that it would be "cool if I just added . . ." so I don’t have to kick up the cost of the damn thing by twenty bucks to account for my unrestrained creativity. (Unless you really want to purchase the "holy shit I can’t believe I paid this much for an audiobook, but Wil Wheaton thanks me for helping him buy a boat" edition.)

I also have to write my trip report from the WPBT Winter Classic in Las Vegas this past weekend, and turn in a Games of our Lives column today, and I hope to record a new episode of RFB before the kids get home from school . . . so I guess I should probably stop blogging and get back to work.

Oh, the whole reason I sat down to write this was to point at this week’s Games of our Lives, Satan’s Hollow, which I think is pretty funny:

Gameplay: It’s 1982, so of course you have to enter Satan’s
Hollow in a spaceship. To pull this off, you build a bridge across a
river of fire by picking up pieces from the left side of the screen and
dropping them onto the right side of the screen. You have a shield that
will protect you (for about .08 seconds) from the gargoyles and demons
dropping World War II-style bombs. When the bridge is completed, you
cross into the game’s eponymous locale and face down Satan himself. If
you avoid his magic pitchforks and destroy him, you won’t save mankind
from eternal damnation, but you will earn bonus points and an extra
laser blaster for your space ship.

Before you complain that none of this makes sense, please remember
that the number-one song of 1982 was "Centerfold" by J. Geils Band, and
the number-one film was Tootsie.

One final thought before I really get back to work: You know who’s cool? Enoch Light.

Several years ago, I participated in a fund and awareness raiser in San Francisco for the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s chillingeffects.org, where I made a speech, and participated in a celebrity boxing grudge match with Barney the Dinosaur.

The whole thing was about fair use and parody rights, and it was the awesome. It was held at DNA Lounge, with an after party that I was criticized for leaving early (read: after three hours, rather than when the sun rose) by morally outraged and holier-than-wil participants who couldn’t be bothered to find out: 1) how many totally spun people got up in my shit and completely freaked me out, (the answer is one, but that was enough) and 2) how many hours I’d already been awake by the time I left a few minutes short of complete exhaustion (the answer is close to twenty, including six hours of "I’m-Entertaining-People" time, which is like eight hours of regular time.)

Before I so rudely left the party, I got to hang out with lots of awesome NorCal folks (thanks for the water, you guys — I’m running some out into the street right now, just for you), one of whom brought this rather . . . unique . . . sweater, which I was asked to wear.

I’ve been in the public eye long enough to know that doing things like wearing an incredibly ugly sweater and posing for a photograph while wearing said sweater is bound to result in something Not Good, but the sweater was hilarious, and in the spirit of the evening (not, I might add, in the spirit of lots of Guinness. I was too tired to avail myself of the DNA’s fantastic bar that night), I went ahead and posed for the picture you are now trying so hard to get out of your brains.

About once a year, this photo (which was taken by my friend loren, who never gets credit for it, you bastards) surfaces, and makes a brief run around The Internets, where it is the subject of much speculation by random people are are just positive they know what they are talking about, like "Well no wonder his career bombed." Oh! Burn! I am so nailed by your clever insight! Someday, I hope to achieve whatever it is you’ve achieved, Anonymous Internet Genius! Allow me to retort, in a vernacular you may understand. "Your leik so right! I am a such a looser!"

If anyone is still reading, and is interested in knowing exactly what the ugliest sweater in the world (sorry, Mr. Cosby, but it’s true, and you lost) is all about, take a look at the Clown Sweater Project’s page at Internet Archive, where we learn that

"I found this sweater at the Salvation Army thrift store on Valencia Street in San Francisco a few years ago. It cost me $3.75. It has proved to be a good investment."

There is also a page featuring photos of all the hapless souls who have had their careers ruined by the Curse of the Clown Sweater in one place, which takes about a year to load on my cable modem, or fifteen years if you’re on dial-up. If you’d like to find out what happened to that once-promising co-worker of yours, but you don’t have one to fifteen years to invest, try this page which breaks up the collection into slightly more managable chunks. Unfortunately, archive.org stops at the first page, so if you’re manic about looking at all the pictures, you’ll have to go to the page with all the photos. See you in ten to fifteen years. (If I may offer a bit of advice: spending one to fifteen years waiting for photos to load on The Internets may cause your career to bomb almost as fast as posing for one picture while wearing an ugly sweater. But do whatever you want, man. I’m not the boss of you.)

Whenever something like this hits a new unique online community (in this case, people who like to knit), a bunch of new readers will show up to see what all the fuss is about, with their preconceptions of me locked-and-loaded. If you’re one of those people, I’d like to welcome you to my bit of madness on the intarweb, and encourage you to read some archives before you send me e-mail about what a huge idiot I am for [your reason, which you’ve formulated in the span of fifteen seconds based on a quick skimming of one or two pages of my blog goes here]. Now, before you decide that I hate knitters, I should point out that my wife does Stitch-n-Bitch from time to time, making totally awesome hats for cancer patients, which totally rules. I do, however, really hate the Oakland Raiders, Toronto Maple Leafs, people who lie, dishonorable people, milk, neo-cons, paying too much for parking anywhere, and this pain in my right hip that just won’t go away.

Welcome to WIL WHEATON dot NET: in Exile. Enjoy your stay, and look out for the snark. It runs wild around here.