WIL WHEATON dot NET

50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

Read more..

I watched, and I remembered

Every now and then, I come across a science fiction image on Tumblr that inspires me to write an entry in the Unpublished Memoirs of Wesley Crusher. For those of you who don’t know, the basic concept is that Wesley (the character I played on Star Trek) discovered that he was able to exist outside of space and time (or maybe independently of space and time) when he figured out that space and time and thought are not separate things. Another way to think of it is that Wesley Crusher became a type of Time Lord who doesn’t need a TARDIS to travel.

So I occasionally write these things from that point of view, and it’s a lot of fun for me to imagine them.

I don’t make a habit of reposting them here, but I liked this one from yesterday enough to share it:

Signs of Intelligence - Michael David Ward

“Time, as I had understood it before, no longer existed for me. It had not existed for – well, I could say ‘a long time’, because I know that would make sense to you, but it  would be just words to me.

“I knew that I had gone many places, and seen many things, since the last time I had seen the Enterprise, and I knew that I was supposed to experience sadness, or great joy, but I did not. My thoughts were not for myself, but for the people on board, who were no longer part of my existence, though they once had been an important part of it.

“When I saw my old ship – my old home – part of me that remembered the before attempted to feel sadness, or ennui, or some sense of nostalgia, but those emotions were all distant memories for me. What I could do was hope that everyone on it was as happy as I was. I could hope that they were feeling as fulfilled in their travels as I was in mine.

“It would have been trivial to join them, to simply move myself to any place on the ship, but I chose not to. I had changed too much since I had been there. So instead I watched, and I remembered, and then I felt the echoes of emotion.

-From “Unpublished Memoirs” by Wesley Crusher

I’m frequently asked if I would play the character again, if given the opportunity. I don’t think it’s wise to ever say “never”, but I do feel like I’ve moved on from that time in my life, and that I’ve done all that I can do with Wesley as an actor … but there is something there that’s interesting and satisfying when I explore it as a writer.

1 January, 2017 Wil 23 Comments
Read more..

At long last this fucking year is over.

Just fucking end already, 2016.
Just fucking end already, 2016.

There are less than 12 hours left in the year, according to what my friend calls the arbitrary meridian that sweeps across the planet. I want to be playing RC Pro-Am on my RetroPie right now, but since I committed to a post a day this month*, wrapping it up with a look back at the year seems like a good use of my time.

Instead of looking back at all the terrible things that happened in 2016, I’m going to focus on the good things that happened this year, because to be honest, 2016 and its election of a fucking Fascist can fuck off and die in a fire.

I successfully rebooted my life. I’m healthier and more productive than I’ve been in years, and the minimal sacrifices and difficult changes I made to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish have been entirely worth it.

I rebooted myself because I was existentially unhappy most of the time, and couldn’t figure out precisely why I felt so frustrated and unfulfilled in a life that was, by all objective measurements, very good. It took most of the year and a lot of commitment through a lot of challenges to realize that I was unhappy and unfulfilled because I had wandered away from the Art (yes, with a capital A) that has always been such a fundamental part of my life.

I’ve struggled with this a lot during my life. I didn’t choose to be an actor, and I don’t know if I would have chosen to be an actor if given the opportunity. It was a thing that my parents wanted me to do, and because like most kids I wanted my parents to be happy, I did it to the best of my ability. I honestly can’t say, and I don’t think I’ll ever know, if I stuck with it because I loved it, or because it was all I really knew how to do, or if it was the only thing I was good at that (and I often feel like I’m worst at what I do best). I still don’t know, and I imagine that I’ll continue to struggle with that question.

But doing this reset and taking this honest and clear look at my life revealed that I love creating, I love telling stories, and I love entertaining. I’m 44 now, and maybe I’ll never get the chance to be the actor I could have been if I hadn’t gotten bad advice and gone from Stand By Me to a shitty horror movie to a TV show and never back to important, dramatic films. Maybe I never had what it takes to be the actor River Phoenix was, or maybe I do and I’ll never get a chance to find out.

I see that, in the effort to share some answers, I’ve uncovered more questions. Great.

Staying focused on the good things: I found the confidence to write the things I needed to write, so I could write the things I had to write, so I could write the things that I wanted to write.

I wrote a whole bunch of short stories that will be published as a collection next year.

I started writing a short story that became a novella that still wants to be a novel that’s almost done.

I wrote a children’s book about a magical farting unicorn that’s awaiting illustration so I can publish it next year.

I designed a world with my son, and set a story inside of it that ended up being one of the most popular webseries I’ve ever done.

I spoke to a university audience about bullying. I spoke to the USA Science and Engineering Festival about the importance of art in science. I spoke to MENSA about being a nerd with depression.

I didn’t do much on-camera acting of consequence (and I don’t know if I ever will get the opportunity — this is clearly something I’m struggling with a lot and will continue to struggle with) but I did a lot of voice acting that I’m super proud of.

I fell back in love with Star Wars.

I went to Scotland with Anne, and we had an adventure.

Anne and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary. Fun fact: we actually met exactly 21 years ago tonight.

But the best thing that happened, the thing that makes 2016 something I won’t want to forget ever happened: My son got married, and I love his wife as much as I love him. My family grew this year in an awesome way and I couldn’t be happier about that.

*It’s accepted as fact that daily posting increases audience and reach for a blog. So I wondered if daily posting in December would do that. Maybe December isn’t the best month to try this, because people are busy with holiday things, but my stats indicate that overall views increased a little over twice what they were last month, but are below the average for the first quarter of the year. Daily views increased by about fifty percent over last month, but did not get close to where they were at the beginning of the year. I have no idea what this means, but if I was doing this to specifically build audience or grow reach, I’d consider it a failure. Because I was doing it just to give myself something to do and make posting less precious, though, I’m glad I did it.

 

31 December, 2016 Wil 51 Comments
Read more..

“In time, a new hope will emerge.”

We dropped out of hyperspace somewhere near the edge of the outer rim. I was looking at the scanner, so I was the first to see the freighter. It was inside the Ghost Nebula, and appeared to be disabled.

The comm crackled to life. Between bursts of static, we heard “…distress … oxygen … please help…” 

Our mechanic wanted to help the ship. I was convinced it was a trap. Before we could come to blows about it, the captain ordered me to run another scan, which confirmed that the ship was, indeed, venting oxygen into space.

“I’m a droid,” I reminded them, “I don’t care about oxygen the way you meat sacks do. Pull up close to the ship and I’ll go investigate.”

Cap pulled us up alongside the freighter. We attempted to raise them on the comm, but they were silent. A quick scan showed weak life signs. “If anyone is alive in there, they won’t be much longer,” the medic said. The captain decided that we’d connect our airlocks, so we could evac the survivors more quickly. I volunteered to go first into the ship. I’m big, I don’t need to breathe, and I’m built to kill, so if it was a trap, I wanted to be first in, to protect my crewmates.

The airlock attached and I cycled through. The ship was dark inside, except for flickering lights.

“IG, what do you see?” The captain asked me.

“It looks empty, at least on this deck,” I replied. 

“What’s the oh-two situation?”

“Irrelevant to my existence,” I said. I sometimes make jokes. I’m not very good at it and my timing is usually bad, they tell me.

“Just check the level, Iggy,” he said. That’s not my name. My designation is IG-426. They call me Iggy. Biologicals are curious that way.

I looked at a scanner. “It’s … one hundred percent. The ship is perfectly pressurized,” I said. Before the captain could reply, a group of humanoids revealed themselves, blasters drawn.

In under a second, I scanned them all and identified their leader. In the next second, I raised my disruptor rifle. Before the third second had ticked by, I fired.

+++

Last night, I started a Star Wars RPG campaign with some friends. We are playing as a small rebel cell, five years before the events of Rogue One. My character is a reprogrammed imperial assassin droid (yes, because I think K-2SO is cool) who was given to this cell by a mysterious Rebel agent, which allowed me to drop into the campaign three sessions after it began, and fits into my real life situation of knowing one of the players very well, and being barely acquainted (until now) with the rest of the players.

I haven’t been a PC in a campaign in years, and I’ve never played a Star Wars RPG until now, and I’m already looking forward to playing next week, because it was so much fun. We’re using the Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion rule books. Our GM has us focused on narrative, instead of tactical minis combat, which is my favorite way to play any RPG, because it’s about the collaborative storytelling experience, rather than the boardgame experience.

It’s a really fun system, and there’s a ton of material that I’m looking forward to reading and incorporating into my character. I shouldn’t like the primary dice mechanic, because it requires proprietary dice, but it’s so well-designed, I don’t mind. Check it out:

The core mechanic of the Age of Rebellion is the skill check. At times, the GM will have the characters roll pools of dice to determine whether their actions succeed or fail. Whenever you roll a skill check, you compare a pool of “positive dice” and their results against the results of a pool of “negative dice.” Positive dice help your character accomplish a task or achieve beneficial side effects. These dice may reflect his innate talents or abilities, special training, superior resources, or other advantages that he can apply to the specific task. Negative dice represent the forces that would hinder or disrupt him, such as the inherent difficulty of the task, obstacles, additional risks, or another character’s efforts to thwart the task.

If your character’s successes () outnumber his failures (), the action succeeds. However, the situations of Age of Rebellion are rarely simple, and the game’s custom dice do more than determine whether an action succeeds or fails. Even as the dice indicate whether an action succeeds or fails, they determine if the character gains any Advantage () or suffers any Threat () as the result of the attempt. The sheer number of possibilities provides opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. Nearly anything can happen in the heat of the moment; even a single shot fired at an Imperial Star Destroyer might hit some critical component that results in its destruction. Players and GMs alike are encouraged to take these opportunities to think about how the symbols can help move the story along and add details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.

Even for someone like me, who has the legendary ability to roll dice in a statistically improbable and terrible way, the dice don’t get in the way of the fun, and instead of simply deciding if you succeed or fail, they sort of land you on a spot that’s in a spectrum between total success and rolling two 19s in a row doesn’t get you out of the acid pit for some reason not that I’m saying Chris Perkins deliberately murdered Aeofel because he is a monster.

cough

I really owe a lot to Rogue One, because it reawakened a love of Star Wars that I’d forgotten I had, after the disappointment from the prequels and the cluttered mess of the EU that never managed to land on me in a meaningful way. But after seeing Rogue One twice, The Force Awakens twice, and playing in this game last night, I have this desire to not just watch the original Star Wars films again (get the despecialized editions if you can because they are amazing), but to also dig into Rebels.

 

30 December, 2016 Wil 39 Comments
Read more..

Last night, KCAL credulously repeated Trump’s lies about Sprint.

If you turned on the news yesterday, you probably heard this story about Donald Trump taking a phone call from executives at Sprint, working that Make America Great Again magic, and hanging up the phone with the promise of Sprint creating 5000 jobs for Americans. Trump says that “Because of what’s happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they’re going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States.”

Wow. That’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? If it’s so easy for Donald Trump to get on the phone and make that happen, why can’t that loser Obama do it? Why does Obummer hate America so much?

Oh. Wait. Sorry. I fell into the Stupidsphere for a moment.

The truth is, Donald Trump lied yesterday, Sprint went along with his lie, and then an appalling number of news organizations repeated the lie so much, it’s become accepted as truth in less than 24 hours. This, in spite of the common knowledge that Donald Trump is constantly lying about everything.

Despite what Trump and the press release from Sprint said (and what its CEO recently tweeted), these jobs were part of a previous announcement from Softbank (Sprint’s parent company) CEO Masayoshi Son — not the direct result of working with Trump.

I saw this lie repeated last night on the 10pm broadcast of my local news on KCAL 9, here in Los Angeles. It was upsetting to me, because KCAL is a trusted local news source for one of the largest media markets in the country, and it’s one of the only local news sources available to people who live here and don’t have cable or satellite. Here’s what I posted on Twitter about it:

Trump lied when he said he brought jobs back by talking to Sprint. My local news, @KCBSKCALDesk just repeated his lie on the 10pm news. pic.twitter.com/4LnguT2lIb

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) December 29, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This happened on the 10pm broadcast. It wasn’t a fast-breaking story that needed to be covered as it unfolded. Trump’s claim that he worked his magic on the phone had been debunked many times, earlier in the day.

First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

As I said last night, there’s a huge difference between “Trump makes jobs happen” and “Trump claims he made jobs happen”.

Jennifer Pierce, who apparently works at KCAL, responded to me:

@wilw We should have been clear it's a mix of new & jobs coming back from overseas-Here's Sprint's announcement: https://t.co/3nZEIVMrdF

— ❄️Jennifer Pierce❄️ (@jenpierce12) December 29, 2016

The problem with this response is that it doesn’t address the fundamental issue: the lie isn’t about whether the jobs are new or not. The lie is that he had anything at all to do with the decision. I pointed that out:

Yes, but that press release is also misleading. The jobs will exist due to a fund that was established in October: https://t.co/rTk8UqNJvy https://t.co/DIFUtLoz7Q

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) December 29, 2016

All of this was easily researched and fact-checked in a matter of minutes by me, and I’m not a professional journalist whose primary job and responsibility is to inform and educate the general public. This leads me to draw one of two conclusions: 1) KCAL’s news director knew Trump was lying but went ahead and ran the story for some reason I won’t speculate about. 2) KCAL didn’t do simple and basic fact checking for some reason and reported a story that was fundamentally untrue as fact.

Either one of those is completely unacceptable for a news organization. A lot of people went to bed last night thinking that Trump did something he didn’t do. Today, they are telling their friends and co-workers that Trump personally made 5000 jobs happen, because they heard it on the news.

Once more, from Engadget:

This is where we are, folks: Our president-elect is tying his name to something he didn’t have anything to do with, much like he did with “saving” 1,100 jobs at HVAC company Carrier, including 300 that weren’t moving to Mexico in the first place. In November, Trump exaggerated that he stopped Ford from moving a Kentucky production plant to Mexico. In reality Ford announced it wouldn’t move production of one model line to Mexico.

The most troubling thing here is that Sprint played along, even though, when pressed, it admitted the claims weren’t the result of working with Trump.

I would argue that the most troubling thing here isn’t actually that Sprint went along with Trump’s lie (Sprint wants deregulation, Trump wants to take credit for something he didn’t do, so they both benefit by agreeing to deceive the public). The most troubling thing here is that news organizations whose only job is to inform and educate the public, became an integral part of spreading this lie, and giving it credibility.

In this morning’s Plum Line in the Washington Post, Greg Sargent advises that the media stop giving Trump the headlines he wants, and, you know, do their job:

I would like to propose a rule of thumb for these situations: If the headline does not convey the fact that Trump’s claim is in question or open to doubt, based on the known facts, then it is insufficiently informative.

[…]

Look, it’s obvious that Trump has adopted a strategy of actively trying to game such headlines in his favor. Trump’s claims about Carrier jobs staying in Indiana turned out to be significantly less rosy upon closer inspection. And remember when Trump falsely claimed credit for keeping a Ford plant here that was going to stay anyway? It really doesn’t take much to convey it in a headline when Trump’s claim is in doubt.

[…]

Now that it’s obvious that President Trump will strategically employ exaggerated announcements of “saved” jobs to rig the headlines in his favor, maybe it’s time to rethink how to handle that, too.

We need to hold news organizations accountable, so that they will hold Trump (and anyone in government) accountable..

A lot of people don’t have the time, energy, or resources to separate truth from lies, and it’s not unreasonable for those people — for all of us, really — to expect fact checking from news directors and their reporters. Last night, KCAL failed in that primary responsibility. The 10pm broadcast I watched didn’t report the truth of this story; it amplified and gave credibility to a lie. That’s not okay, and KCAL should apologize to its viewers and correct the story.

29 December, 2016 Wil 34 Comments
Read more..

Daily December 28

One of the inherent challenges in posting something new for 31 straight days is finding something worth sharing or examining or just talking about every day that feels worth the effort. To be honest, I don’t feel like writing a single word today. But I did get to play my friend Chris Kluwe’s upcoming game, Twilight of the Gods today, and it has me thinking about tabletop gaming.

Other than what we tested and played on Tabletop, I haven’t played a lot of games this year. Early this year, my group was broken up and scattered to different states and countries (thanks for taking another thing away from me, 2016), so when we were able to get the gang together, we only played Pandemic Legacy (which I highly recommend). We also played a little bit of Codenames and Splendor, but that’s pretty much been all we did.

It’s a weird feeling for me, to go from playing games almost every day (and at least once every week) to not playing really at all, and not really wanting to. I feel like a big part of my life has been put into suspended animation, and I have to decide if it’s worth taking it out of hibernation to make it part of my job, again. On the one hand, it’s really great to do what you love for your job. On the other hand, taking my favorite hobby and making it my job left me without something fun to do when I wanted or needed to unwind after work, and I know this is a first world problem that nobody cares about. So much has happened with Tabletop in the last year or so that is upsetting, I almost don’t want to play games at all, because it makes me think about stuff that makes me sad. I created Tabletop to put more gamers into the world. That was all I wanted to do, and I think we did that. I didn’t want a lot of the other stuff that came along for the ride, and I hope that, someday, I’ll be able to find my way back to the joy that I wanted to share in the first place.

28 December, 2016 Wil 56 Comments

Posts navigation

← Previous 1 … 73 74 75 … 772 Next →

It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton


Every Wednesday, Wil narrates a new short fiction story. Available right here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also available at Patreon.

Wil Wheaton’s Audiobooks

Still Just A Geek is available wherever you get your audiobooks.

My books Dancing Barefoot, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and Dead Trees Give No Shelter, are all available, performed by me. You can listen to them for free, or download them, at wilwheaton.bandcamp.com.

Wil Wheaton’s Books

My New York Times bestselling memoir, Still Just A Geek is available wherever you get your books.


Visit Wil Wheaton Books dot Com for free stories, eBooks, and lots of other stuff I’ve created, including The Day After and Other Stories, and Hunter: A short, pay-what-you-want sci-fi story.

  • About
  • Books
  • Tumblr
  • Bluesky
  • Radio Free Burrito

Categories

Archives

 

  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Member of The Internet Defense League

Creative Commons License
WIL WHEATON dot NET by Wil Wheaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://wilwheaton.net.

Search my blog

Powered by WordPress | theme SG Double