WIL WHEATON dot NET

only i didn’t say fudge

Posted: 24 December, 2016

Sometime in the next 18 or so hours, I’m going to do the annual quoting of A Christmas Story on my Twitter. You should unfollow me now.

I came across this delightful interview that Peter Billingsley did with Buzzfeed News that made me really happy to read.

[After he auditioned for the film and] didn’t hear back from [Director Bob]Clark for weeks, Billingsley just thought, oh well, he’d lost the role. “Bob Clark said for whatever reason that I was the first kid that he saw,” says Billingsley. “But [he] thought, Well, jeez, you can’t just hire the first person you see. So my assumption was, ‘Well, that didn’t go well.’ But whatever. You were quickly onto the next thing.”

Thousands of kids later, and after an eventual callback, Billingsley did indeed land the film’s lead role, and shot the film in Toronto and Cleveland over roughly a month in the dead of winter. “This was a real little grinder kind of indie [film],” he says with affection. “It took [Bob] 12 years to get the movie made. Nobody wanted to fund it, this period movie about a BB gun. Nobody cared about it.”

I think about stories like this a lot. I think about how it’s almost always the little indie movies that nobody wanted to give a chance that end up becoming the films that define a generation. There’s a similar, likely made up by my mom and a publicist story, about Rob Reiner seeing me before anyone else for the role of Gordie in Stand By Me. There is also a similar story about how nobody wanted to release the film, no studio wanted to fund the film, everyone in the industry at the time had passed on it, and when we landed at Embassy (before it was bought by Sony), it still wasn’t a sure thing (HA A SURE THING THAT’S VERY CLEVER WHEATON) and the production was nearly cancelled just a few days before we were supposed to begin filming. We were already on location, and Rob Reiner called Norman Lear, who wrote a personal check to get the movie made.

So. For the five of you who don’t know, Peter Billingsley played Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both auditioned for the role, and even went to final callbacks together. I wrote about it way back in 2001:

I think that A Christmas Story is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. Each year, I watch it, over and over, on TNN or TNT or TBS, or whatever T-channel does that marathon, and I never, ever, get tired of it. Every year, when I watch it, I am reminded of the time, when I was about 10 or so, that I auditioned for it. The auditions were held on a cold, rainy day in late spring, down in some casting office in Venice, I think. I saw the same kids that I always saw on auditions: Sean Astin, Keith Coogan, this kid named “Scooter” who had a weird mom, and Peter Billingsley, who was very well known at the time, because he was “Messy Marvin” in those Hershey’s commercials. I sort of knew Peter, because we’d been on so many auditions together, but I was always a little star struck when I saw him. (One time, I saw Gary Coleman on an audition…now, this was HUGE for all of us kids who were there, because we’re talking 1982 or 83…and he was Arnold freakin’ Jackson, man…wow). [tangent] Whenever I see Sean Astin, I sob at him that he got to be in Goonies, and I didn’t, and he always says, “Hey, man, you got Stand By Me. I’d trade all my movies for that.” I haven’t seen him since he did Lord of the Rings…but something is telling me that he wouldn’t be so keen to trade that. 😉 [end of tangent]

So I remember that audition, for A Christmas Story. The scenes we had to read were the one where Ralphie is telling Santa what he wants, and panics, telling Santa that a football is okay, the one where Ralphie is decoding the Little Orphan Annie message, and the one where he thinks he shot his eye out.

There’s a similar, possibly apocryphal story about Stand Be Me that claims I was the first kid Rob Reiner saw for Gordie. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I do know that we were also a tiny indie movie nobody wanted to fund, no studio wanted to release, and was nearly cancelled literally the day before filming was to begin.

I sometimes look at movies that didn’t cast me, and wonder what I could have done with the role, if given the chance. Sometimes I feel sad when that happens. But I don’t feel that way about A Christmas Story. Peter is perfect in that role, and though I’d known he made a career for himself working behind the camera, I didn’t know what, precisely, he’d done. It makes me happy to know that he’s another survivor of the Child Actor’s Club.

Daily December 23 – Ziggy’s Gift

by Wil

Updated: 23 December, 2016

The only Christmas song you ever really need is Allan Sherman’s The 12 Gifts of Christmas.

We don’t really celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, here in Castle Wheaton. We aren’t religious, and we aren’t like Super Consumers Who Give Gifts To Each Other (the best of all traditions is not giving or getting gifts, and instead just having a nice dinner together with our family) so Christmas is pretty much just another day for us. That feels weird, kinda, because it was such a big thing when I was a kid, and then again when my kids were little. We don’t even have a tree this year, mostly because I couldn’t find an appropriately sad Charlie Brown tree to put in the living room.

But I did get you all a present! It’s a brand new TV Crimes podcast, with Mikey Neumann and the One Who Isn’t Mikey Neumann!

Episode 11 Ziggy’s Gift

the spice must flow

by Wil

Posted: 22 December, 2016

I first read Dune when we were filming Stand By Me. I remember that I loved it, even though I’m sure that most of it went over my head. I think about “I will not fear. Fear is the mindkiller…” and “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience” all the time. I imagine that reading Dune again, as an adult, will open some portals in my tiny little brain that weren’t accessible when I was 12.

My son, Ryan, recently read the entire series for the first time. He loved it, too, and has been talking about it so much, I decided that I’d finally reread it … but then I got stuck in this decision process that I’d illustrate with a Sheldonesque flowchart if I wasn’t lazy. It basically went like this: Should I get it as an eBook? That’s convenient and I can sync it across all my different devices. But maybe I should get it as an actual book, because actual books are beautiful, and I feel like Dune is something that I’d want on my bookshelf. But if I want to read it in bed, there’s that whole “risking the wrath of Anne when the light wakes her up” situation. Maybe I could listen to it as an audiobook! But I have so many story ideas in my head right now, my mind tends to wander when I listen to anything. So maybe an eBook is the way to go, but … and so on.

So it was a whole thing and I ended up not making a decision.

Then, yesterday, I picked up a bunch of mail from my manager’s office, and holy shit there was this package from Penguin Random House that contained the Penguin Galaxy Edition of Dune! Look at how beautiful this is:

It has an introduction by Neil Gaiman, titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Science Fiction”, which is amazing. So it turns out that, I chose not to decide, but still I made a choice … with a little help from whoever is writing the events of my life.

The reread begins today. Maybe I can find some inspiration and solace in a work of science fiction, before the world is engulfed in flame.

Daily December 22

by Wil

Posted: 22 December, 2016

Making myself post something every day this month has been an interesting experience. I expected that it would make it easy for me to post some dumb thing that I’d normally post on my Tumblr or whatever, but the old habit of making everything on the blog mean something just refuses to die. So instead of finding permission to just post a picture or a video and be done with it, I’m finding myself spending a lot of time thinking about what’s going to go up on the blog today or tomorrow.

The fully unexpected side effect of this has been a complete halt to all my other writing. Now, part of that may be that I finished a draft, sent it for feedback, got feedback, and I’m putting off applying the feedback because the stakes are higher now than they were when it was just a puke draft. Or maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe I’m getting creative satisfaction from making other things, and I don’t have the discipline to write every day on things that I consider capital-W Work. Or maybe I’m convincing myself that writing for the blog is capital-W Work, so it’s okay to go tinker with a computer for a few hours instead of getting to work on the rewrite.

It’s likely a combination of all those things, with the fucking horror of the incoming Cheeto Hitler administration as a force multiplier.

This is now a test of my discipline and work ethic, and I’m not entirely sure I’m going to pass it in its current form.

rediscovering the joy of general purpose computing

by Wil

Posted: 21 December, 2016

A few years ago, I got to narrate the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. It’s primarily about how creators can make a living online, and contains a ton of useful advice on doing that successfully. It’s also about the power and significance of General Purpose Computing.

I’ll try to paraphrase Cory in a way that makes sense: Until recently, a computer was a dumb collection of circuits and storage that did whatever its owner wanted it to do. You want your computer to play games? Done. You want your computer to be a word processor? Done. Want to change the operating system? Go nuts. Want to get into the guts of it and hack the hardware to do something nifty? You got it! You owned that computer, in every way that mattered, because it was General Purpose, and was able to do whatever you wanted it to do.

In the last decade or so, we’ve seen the rise of computers that are locked down, specialized machines which only do what their manufacturers want them to do. They do this not only by restricting your access to the operating system and the hardware, but by passing laws that made it a crime to take apart the thing you bought! Companies like Apple and Microsoft lobbied for and got laws that made it illegal for you to buy an iPad or a smartphone, and then modify the device that you paid for to do a thing that you wanted it to do.

There’s more to it, but that’s the basic gist of where we are right now. If this subject interests you at all, you will likely enjoy Cory’s book, whether you get it in print or ebook or via my delightful voice.

I say all this to contextualize why I am so magnificently in love with my Raspberry Pi, and why I have gone from a single Pi acting as a server under my desk, to having three Pis in my home, including one that’s being turned into a Picade, and one that’s about to become this smart lamp, because what I need in my life is another gadget that blinks.

No, seriously. It’s something I need in my life, because I can make it myself, using a general purpose computer to do a simple task, and I can use Tinkercad and my 3D printer to make the lamp case that will go around the LEDs.

The two computers I remember best from when I was a kid are the Atari 400 and the Ti99/4a. When you turned those computers on, you BASICally (that’s funny, kids, trust me and go ask an Old if you don’t) got a screen with a single prompt that usually told you the computer was >>READY while it waited for you to tell it what to do. If you wanted to run a game, you told it to >>RUN LODERUNNER or whatever. If you wanted to call a BBS, you typed in a string of commands that were like sanskrit to a 10 year-old, and hoped your mom didn’t pick up the phone in the kitchen while you were waiting for the second hour of the sexiest GIF you would ever find to finish downloading. Those computers did what I told them to do, and that usually meant that I had to learn how to make them do it. It made me curious about what was inside them, to understand how they worked, to push the limits of what they could do. It encouraged me to learn some simple programming, and it (usually) rewarded my curiosity and commitment to learning.

The thing those computers didn’t do was tell me that I couldn’t do something because a marketing department or executive or shareholder wanted to prevent me from doing it, so they could sell me something else that would do that thing. Once we bought the computer, we owned it, and as much as I enjoy my tablets and smartphones and iMacs and whatever, getting back to my Linux command line and learning Python and talking to other enthusiasts online about what they’re doing with their little Raspberry Pis is reawakening this passion and joy that has been dormant inside of me for a long, long time.