Monogram Sweater: Funny. Personal. Stories.

Posted on By Wil

12_8_ms_e_viteThis Thursday night, I’m performing in a show called Monogram Sweater, at The Second City Theatre in Hollywood.

It’s a monologue show, in a very small intimate setting. I’m going to perform my short story The Trade.

Sadly, once I was home and on the kitchen floor, the reality of the
trade did not meet the grand build up it had been given by my young
imagination. That single push did not send my heros to quick safety.
Rather, it sent them forward about 6 inches and to the left, coming to
an anticlimactic rest against the front of the dishwasher. Only the
constant presence of my grimy 8 year-old fist would give them adequate
propulsion away from danger. And the foot-peg technology was quickly
replaced by the more reliable scotch-tape-and-rubber band technology.

The novelty of rolling that Land Speeder around the floor quickly wore off, and I really missed my Death Star.

Tickets are just five bucks, which you can totally score in about thirty minutes on any freeway off ramp in Southern California, provided your cardboard sign is easy to read. Details, including address and showtimes are on the spiffy clickable flyer over there, but for those of you who like to cut-n-paste:

WHAT: Monogram Sweater (Funny. Personal. Stories.)
WHERE: Second City Theatre -8156 Melrose Avenue, next to the Improv
WHEN: Thursday, December 8, 2005. 8PM.
HOW MUCH: $5

a few random rfb thoughts

Posted on By Wil

The feedback on RFBep0 has been great. Everyone seems to like it, and the constructive criticism has been really helpful. Thank you, everyone, who left comments or sent in e-mail. I quite obviously still have
some growing to do, but the two major criteria (was it fun for me, and
did the audience enjoy it) seem to have been met. I think it’s worth
trying another one, and incorporating the notes.

(I was going to write down all my thoughts here . . . but I think I’ll just put them into RFBep1 🙂

I set up a new e-mail address for the show, too: questions can still go to ask at wil wheaton dot net and comments can go to podcast at wil wheaton dot net.

I figure that if I can do four of these things, and I can manage not to suck, RFB will get its own location, like radio.wilwheaton.net or something, so I can set up special podcast feeds with feedburner and have show notes and other exciting things. I’ll also figure out some sort of schedule, so the show is coming out on a regular basis.

Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero

Posted on By Wil

Alive
Well, here it is! It’s alive!

As I wrote earlier today, "It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly."
My initial feeling is that it falls somewhere in the middle: it’s
longer than I wanted, and it’s a little unfocused, but I’m willing to
allow myself the freedom to make as many mistakes as it takes to either
come up with something cool, or accept that I just don’t have what it
takes to make a podcast.

Observations on getting this thing from my brains to your ears: I
thought the recording would be very hard, but it was actually super
easy. I’ve tried in Audacity several times before, and it never wants
to work, so today I just followed the instructions from Apple for creating podcasts in Garageband,
and it was simple and easy. But holy shit the converting and the
uploading was so hard, I felt like I had no thumbs and an IQ of 24. I’m
sorry to report that this episode is only available in the stupid,
proprietary, Apple AAC format, but that’s the only format I could get
to upload (the .aiff file was over 300MB, and TypePad just wouldn’t let
me upload it. That was really annoying.)

So now I need to know what you, the audience, think. What would you
like more of? Less of? Is it too long? Is it too narrowly focused, or
not broad enough? Most importantly: when it was over, did you feel like
I earned your 30 minutes, or did you feel like you wasted your time?

Heh. The last time I felt this nervous about releasing something into the wild, it was the first version of Dancing Barefoot. This is both cool and scary.

Afterthought: I just realized that I stupidly recorded this thing in super-ultra-hyper-mega-stereo, when nifty-old-mono would have been just fine. The result is a ridiculously large file (71.8 MB) which I can only leave up for a few hours before I blow through all my bandwidth. I’ll see if I can convert the file I have to mono, and if not, look for Episode .05 to hit the airwaves in the next 48 hours. Yeah, I am really a moran. iTunes won’t let me convert it to mp3, and Audacity won’t even open it. So this file will stay up until about 8:00 PM Pacific time, when I’ll have to take it down. If someone wants to mirror the file, go nuts. Gods, I am sofa king stupid. I blame my nervousness for this ultrarookie error. When you mock, please mock me gently.

AfterthoughtAfterthought: I owe Shane Nickerson a huge debt of gratitude, because he pointed out to me my stupid mistake. I’ll reveal my shame a bit later on. In the meantime, here is a .mp3 file, which is much smaller: "only" 27.3MB:

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Oh boy! Several Mirrors!

Mirror one, from WWdN:iX reader buford: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror two, from my friend Kathleen: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror three, from WWdN:iX reader  UglyRedHonda: Unauthorized low-bandwidth-friendly re-encoding

And the coolest of them all . . . a .torrent. Man, do I feel like I’ve arrived now! Thanks, Brian! 🙂

 

WWdN podcast idea

Posted on By Wil

I am a big fan of the Family Guy Freakin’ Podcast. I love hearing the people who create the show talk about how they do it, and it’s especially awesome to hear how much they obviously like each other, and the work they do.

Near the end of the podcast, they always answer some listener e-mail (I sent one last week; I don’t know if they answered it or not and they totally answered it on the podcast for Fat Guy Strangler, and they didn’t even make fun of me. Freakin’ Sweet!) and it’s always funny and informative.

So I thought, "Hey, I can be funny and informative, and I want to do a podcast . . ."

So let’s give this a try: Send me a question or comment, and I’ll respond in a podcast. It’ll be sort of like Ask Wil Wheaton Anything but you listen to it and it’s not at Slashdot. It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly.

Questions or comments can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. When I have enough questions to fill about seven minutes of podcasting, I’ll produce and publish it.

UPDATE: Wow. A bunch of questions have flooded in today, and I already threw away a podcast that was over 40 minutes long where I tried to answer them all. I mean, I think I’m a swell guy and all, but forty minutes of me rambling on is about 32 minutes too much.

So I pulled out a few that I think I can give interesting answers to, and I’m about to start recording them. I should have Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero up in a few hours. Huge thanks to everyone who has sent in questions. 🙂

WWdN poker tourneys this week

Posted on By Wil

After taking last week off for holiday awesomeness with my family, the WWdN poker tournaments at PokerStars are back in action.

Today, we have the West Coast Warmup number three:

What: WWdN: West Coast Warmup #3
Where: PokerStars.
When: Thursday, December 1. 7:30 PST
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 15885231
Buy-in: $10+1

Tomorrow, we have the WWdN: ZowieZ Invitational

What: WWdN: ZowieZ Invitational
Where: PokerStars.
When: Friday, December 2. 7:00 EST
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 15886396
Buy-in: $10+1

I was doing really well in the HeyKidsItsBG Invitational, right up until I got sort of unlucky trying to bust a short stack. After a limp and a raise, I was getting 6-1 on my money with pocket fives, so I re-raised all-in to isolate the short-stack. I was in the lead, but just barely, against hands like KQ and AQ . . . until the KQ flopped two pair. Ouch. Two people went broke on that hand, and two others were crippled. Nice hand, well-played. A few hands later, I found AKo, and lost a race to a pair of eights. Here’s what I blogged at CardSquad:

He raised it 4x the BB, so I came over the top for 3x his raise, which
pretty much committed me. When he went all-in, I knew I was behind, but
getting 3-1 on my money, I thought it was a good call, since I was at
worst 50-50 unless he had an ace. Oh, there’s an 8 on the flop. D’oh!

I finished fourteenth, which was pretty awful, considering my chip position right before the debacle with presto (that’s pocket fives, for you non-BARGErs.) It illustrates the reality of a no-limit tournament: you can go from first place to the parking lot in just a few hands if you get stupid, unlucky, or both. Of course, you can also go from last to first just as easily. "That’s no limit, baby!"

Hope to see lots of players tonight and tomorrow!