Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 106

in which the audience cheers

We taped Big Bang Theory last night, and between scenes, I realized that I could check in from Stage 25 on G+, so I did because of reasons.

There were numerous requests for pictures, presented in the usual manner. Considering that I still had scenes to film, getting the fuck out wasn’t an option.

So I took a picture that I thought was unlikely to get me in trouble. It looks like this:

Not bad for a cell phone picture, if I do say so myself.

The taping was a lot of fun. When I walked into my first scene, the audience cheered and applauded so loudly and for so long, it threw me off balance and almost knocked me right out of the scene. I mean, it was like Al Bundy Walks Into The Living Room In 1990 levels of cheering. I wasn’t expecting it at all. When we did the second take, the producers had to ask the audience to tone it down, even. I got to make a big production out of that, pretending to storm off the set and stuff. It was pretty funny.

The audience loved the show, and I’m super proud of the work we did. When the taping was over, I got a sad. But then Kaley told me that I’m like family to them and she hopes I come back for more episodes this season, and I had a happy.

 

Green is the cat’s eye that glows in this temple

The following 1000 words of mildly interesting thoughts are brought to you today by iTunes shuffling to Love At First Sting, which teleported me back to the living room floor in our house in Sunland, surrounded by M.U.S.C.L.E. figures while I tried to figure out which ones I was willing to trade the next day at school. Through the magic of memory, the scene shifts to my bedroom around the same time, where I carefully copy a program from a computer magazine into my TI 99/4a computer, and then to the same room where I fudge a roll because I really needed my WIS roll to be higher than 8 for the Wizard I was making. I’m at the desk where I do my homework, trying and failing for the nth time to draw Eddie on the cover of Piece of Mind. I am a child, a pre-teen, and always, always weak and weird and awkward and strange. But I have music, and that is comforting.

There’s this moment in a child’s life when they start to build a sense of self, as they develop their own likes and dislikes that are more complicated than “I don’t like milk” or “I want to have more ice cream” (ICE CREAM HAS MILK IN IT YOU STUPID KID! THAT’S WHY YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING! YOU’RE STUPID KIDS! JUST TELL ME HOW TO FIX THE FREAKIN’ SHOW! *cue Ralph Wiggum turning the dial to sad.)

For me, this sense of self is heavily tied to music, to the exclusion of almost everything else. My earliest memories all feature music in some sense, from listening to Fleetwood Mac and Elton John on my parents’ record player with the giant can headphones and the 20-foot curly cord to sitting with my first wind-up record player out on the lawn with a 45 of The Beatles Love Me Do that belonged to my mom. Those memories are from around 1975 or 1976, I guess, and in my memory, they look like the pictures in The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

My whole childhood, my dad had great taste in music: ELO, Boston, Steve Miller Band, Pink Floyd, and whatever was on KMET. My mom was … not so much. She was all about Barbara Streisand and Joni Mitchell and Christopher Cross and artists that just seemed whiny and wussy because they were. I spent a lot of time in the car with my mom when I was going on auditions, and  I still hear Streisand in my nightmares. When dad took me on auditions, we got to listen to The Doobie Brothers, mom! I MEAN JEEZE.

My musical awakening came in the fall 1984, when I was 12, and a kid I knew at school slipped me a cassette tape at school. It was Judas Priests’s Screaming For Vengeance. I thought the cover was cool, and when I got home that day, I played it on my little single-speaker tape player thing that was standard issue if you were a lucky kid in the 80s.

I wasn’t sure about this music when I heard The Hellion, but by the time Electric Eye was finished, I was on board. It was You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, though, that hooked me. I still can’t say why, but when I bought the album, I put that song on every single heavy metal mix tape I made for the rest of the 80s … even the ones with Metallica. I took the cassette back to him the next day, and asked him for more heavy metal. In the coming weeks, he gave me Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Dio, and The Scorpions.

I loved them all, saved my allowance, and bought my own copies of Diary of A Madman, Number of the Beast, and Love At First Sting at the local record shop. (I should point out that we were in a parochial school at the height of Reagan’s Conservative American Nightmare, and the Satanic Panic was about to hit its peak. It says a lot about my parents that they let me buy Number of the Beast, instead of freaking out like a lot of parents did at the time.) I loved the thick, heavy guitars. I loved the raw vocals. I loved — I mean, really loved — Iron Maiden’s lyrics, which were smart, literate, and about history and mythology instead of less important matters.

I wasn’t an angry kid, I wasn’t a particularly rebellious kid (though I admit that I’d already decided that religion was something I didn’t want or need in my life, so listening to music every authority figure in my life besides my parents deemed terrible and ZOMG SATANIC did give me a bit of a thrill). I just really liked the music, and the artwork, and how it seemed like a natural extension of Thundarr The Barbarian for some reason. There was real power in the music that didn’t exist in any of the rock-and-roll I was used to. This music wasn’t about just sounding nice, it was about kicking ass.

This music became a huge part of my sense of personal identity. It was one of the first big choices I remember making for myself, because it was something that I liked, not because my parents or a relative gave it to me, or because it was something popular in school that I wanted to have. )Metal was decidedly unpopular at my school, and since I was already a nerd, I really didn’t need to give the Cool Kids something else to use against me on the playground).

And yet.

It became the soundtrack to my life. While I made D&D characters and dungeons (a little on the nose, I know, but it’s true) I listened to Maiden. While I played with my M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, I listened to Dio. When I played with my WWF action figures, my Transformers, or my Stomper Trucks, metal was there. I made dozens of mixtapes featuring the same songs in different order, always using Dee from Blizzard of Ozz to fill in the space at the end of each side.

As I got older, my musical proclivities changed. I fell in love with punk rock, then British new wave, then grunge. Metal was still there, but less and less frequently. I think it was Metallica’s shitty Black Album that started pushing me away. Not even Tool could bring me back. Thanks a lot, Lars, you dick.

Interestingly enough, as my tastes changed over the years, the one constant was the musical comfort food of my youth: Pink Floyd, Boston, and ELO, which all came from my father, and The Beatles, which came from my mother (true fact: my mom once got to sit in on a Beatle’s press conference when she was a kid. The way she tells it, John Lennon made eyes at her. TAKE THAT YOKO.) I mean, I still listen to that stuff today, and probably will for the rest of my life. It’s my classic rock, despite what the goddamn radio says today when it plays music from when I was in high school.

There are people in the world who can take or leave music. They don’t really care what’s on the radio, or even if the radio is on. I am not one of those people. Music is profoundly important to me, because it has helped me define who I am at various stages of my life.

I guess that’s why I was able to clean 10GB out of my iTunes folder yesterday, and still have 60GB left.

I am easily amused

Yesterday, LeVar and I were making silly Star Trek jokes with each other (you know, like you do), and we ended up talking about how lucky we are to have the job we have, and how lucky we are to be so happy to do it.

“I have found that the key to being happy — well, one of the keys, anyway — is to be easily amused,” I said.

LeVar agreed with me, and then commented on how thin and tanned and healthy and awesome looking I was, and some other things that I didn’t also just make up.

Then we went back to our dressing rooms and I looked at pictures of cute pets on Reddit.

So I mention this thing about being easily amused (my fingers keep trying to type that as “amuzed”, which is stupid because that’s not how you spell it and if you were going to spell it that way it would be “amuZed” and it would be on a neon sign for a club in the 80s that’s just a front for Panda smuggling and Nick Nolte brings the whole thing down the day before he retires from the force.)

Where was I?

Oh. Right. I mention this thing about being easily amused because of an exchange Felicia Day and I had on Twitter shortly after LeVar and I had that conversation:

Hosting the IndieCade awards tonight!I’m doing my own hair, so if the back of my head looks janky…that’s just the indie way, lol.

— Felicia Day (@feliciaday) October 4, 2012

 

@feliciaday I’m hosting the Hipstercade awards. You probably haven’t heard of them.

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) October 4, 2012

A fellow Twitterer-er … er told me that that hipstercade.com was available, so I grabbed it, and put it to very good use.

Because I am easily amused. Or, you know, amuZed.

 

my land of make believe

I handed the security guard my ID and waited to get my pass. Neko Case sang, “I’m so tired … and I wish I was the moon tonight” on my iPod. I wanted to turn it up, but turned it down as he leaned into my car and taped my parking pass to the inside of my windshield.

“I usually come in through a different gate,” I said, “so I don’t know how to get where I’m going this morning. Can you help me out?”

“Sure can,” he said. “Mister Burton was a few minutes ahead of you, and I just gave him the same directions.”

He handed me a map of the studio, and showed me how to get to my parking space in front of stage 18. It looked very complicated.

“It’s not as complicated as it looks,” he assured me. I thanked him, and slowly drove through the gate and into the lot.

I’ve been working as an actor since I was 7 years-old. I can sort of recall a time in my life when I wasn’t an actor, but it’s almost an academic recollection, since most of my meaningful self-aware memories were formed after I started going on auditions and working in front of the camera. Often, during the last 33 years of my life, I’ve lamented the loss of a normal childhood, and envied kids who grew up going to arcades after school instead of casting offices … but in many ways, it’s like wishing I’d grown up on the moon. This is the only life I’ve ever known, so that lamentation is also academic, in a way. I don’t really know what I missed because of the life that was chosen for me, but I know what I’ve gotten: overwhelming joy and a sense of belonging when I’m on a set, especially when that set is on a studio lot.

I drove slowly and carefully, navigating through parking lots and around trailers. Golf carts and people on bikes passed me on their way to their various sets and offices. I got to the end of parking lot I, and made a right onto New York Street. I involuntarily took my foot off the gas and coasted to a stop.

In my rearview mirror, I could see the exterior of the hospital from ER. On either side of me, facades that have been featured in countless TV shows and movies. In fact, the theater we came running out of during the Raiders of the Lost Ark episode was a few feet ahead of me and to my right.

“Wow. I’m driving my car down the middle of New York Street,” I thought to myself. “This. Is. AWESOME!”

I realized I’d come to a stop and looked around, hoping nobody saw me, or — worse — was waiting for me to move. I was alone on the street, and imagined for a moment I was in a post-apocalyptic future where the streets are empty and I’m driving a car for some reason.

I got to the end of the street and turned right, into a dead end.

Aw, shit. I misread the map and made a wrong turn. I laughed nervously and turned around, then made my way down another backlot street toward my eventual parking place, which it turns out is right in front of the stage where they film Two Broke Girls. I have a bit of a schoolboy crush on Kat Dennings, and I was stupidly glad I washed my car, just in case she was around the stage when I was. (I think they’re on hiatus at the moment, making me even more stupid).

I grabbed my backpack and walked to Stage 25. I was greeted warmly by everyone I saw, and felt like I had come home after a long absence. Like I always do, I wished that I worked with these people every week, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend five days with them.

The cast, writers, producers, and crew all arrived and assembled around a giant conference table, temporarily built out of many smaller tables, for the weekly table read of that week’s new episode. Steve Molaro, one of the executive producers who is also the showrunner, praised everyone for their work on the previous night’s taping. It sounded like it was an episode destined to be a classic, and I was excited to see it … and a little anxious to be batting right after what sounded like it was probably a home run.

Hey! A sportsball metaphor! Go me.

The first Assistant Director called for quiet, everyone settled in, and we began the table read. It was really funny, and as nervous as I was, 33 years of professional acting experience served me well and I didn’t screw anything up.

After we finished, we had a little break before we started rehearsing on the set, so LeVar and I headed to craft service to grab some breakfast.

While we put food on our plates, I said, “Check us out. 25 years later, we’re hanging out together in the morning at crafty. This is awesome.”

LeVar high-fived me and said, “it sure is, W.W.”

While we ate breakfast, we caught up with each other. LeVar’s daughter is starting college, and I was in the very strange position of being able to advise him on being a college parent, having put two kids through school already.

After breakfast, we went to our dressing rooms, which are right next to each other outside the stage. I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and prepared to spend my break on Reddit (like you do). A moment later, LeVar appeared in my doorway and asked me to help him troubleshoot his internet connection.

“Did you run a Level 5 diagnostic?” I asked.

He laughed, I laughed, and then we fixed it.

LeVar then looked around, and I could tell that he was taking in the view.

“You know, W. W., after all these years, I still love being on a studio lot.”

“So do I,” I said. “I never feel more at home than I do when I’m here.”

“Did you get to drive down New York Street?” He asked me.

“Oh my god I did!” I almost shouted. “Why is that so awesome?! It’s way more awesome than it should be.”

“It’s awesome because we’re driving our cars down a make believe street that’s real.” He said.

We talked about wandering around the backlot at Warners, which is also known as “Every Episode of The Twilight Zone, Ever” or “Holy Crap, This Building Was In [Pick Just About Any Movie Of The Last 50 Years.]”

“I just love playing make believe,” I said, “and backlots are like … make believe brought to life, I guess.”

Just then, we were called into the stage to rehearse. We walked in, and spent the rest of the day getting paid to make believe.

You can tell that this is Wil Wheaton Prime and not Evil Wil Wheaton, because I’m not trying to sit in his spot.

This afternoon, while we were in between scenes during our run through, I asked Kaley and Jim if they’d take a picture with me for the Internet.

I expected Kaley to say yes (she’s all Internetty like I am), and I expected Jim to politely decline (he’s a very private person). I was very surprised when Jim not only said yes, but thanked me for including him.

I was just going to do the “turn the phone around and mush together” picture, but Kaley pointed out that those always look like you just turned the phone around and mushed together, so she got someone to take this picture for us:

You can tell that this is Wil Wheaton Prime and not Evil Wil Wheaton, because I’m not trying to sit in his spot.

You can see so much about how each of us is on the set in this picture: Kaley and I are goofing off like crazy, and Jim is just quietly awesome. I really love these guys. I’m so lucky they’re my friends. Spoiler alert: Jim and I have some fucking fantastic scenes together in this episode.

LeVar Burton is also in this episode, and when we were at craft service this morning, I said, “Check us out. 25 years later, we’re hanging out together in the morning at crafty. This is awesome.”

LeVar high-fived me and said, “it sure is, W.W.”

And I know I keep saying it, but I’ll say it again: this is awesome. I get to work with people I love making a show that I’m proud of, that is one of the most popular shows in the English-speaking world.

When you love what you do, the saying goes, it isn’t work … so I guess I wasn’t really at work today. I was at … play?

Whatever you call it, I’m grateful for it.

I love being on set at Big Bang Theory…

Because I get to hang out all week with people I love.

I am the luckiest person in the world.

The 2012 Wiggle Waggle Walk

We got back into Los Angeles late Saturday night (well, early Sunday morning, if you’re going to be all technical, like my parents were when I was in high school and missed my curfew by two goddamn minutes. I FLY THE ENTERPRISE MOM AND DAD I CAN STAY OUT PAST MIDNIGHT GOSH.

Um. Sorry. Yes.

So, we got into our house a little after midnight. It took about an hour to unwind (and snuggle the hell out of our pets, who we missed almost as much as they missed us, if the laps they ran around the house are a unit of missed-you-while-you-were-gone measurement). We woke up at 6, and blearily made our way out of the house around 730. The pets were confused, but Marlowe was excited to GO FOR A RIDE GUYS GO FOR A RIDE GO FOR A RIDE!

We joined a few thousand pet owners and their dogs — almost all of them adopted, and many of them adopted from Pasadena Humane Society — for a walk around the Rose Bowl.

Marlowe had a great time, and with a little help from me, she made a video about it:

I got something in both of my eyes when I made that video — er, I mean, when I helped Marlowe make that video — not just because I stopped to think about how much I miss Ferris and Quincy, or how much joy our rescued pets have brought into our lives, but because thousands of people from all over the world made small and large contributions to our team, helping us raise over $15,000 for pets just like ours.

As of today, all the walkers and teams raised just over $300,000 for the Pasadena Humane Society. More money will come in for the next few days (including another $700 from us for my autographed Stand By Me DVD), and all the money raised will make it possible for countless pets to find forever homes.

So thank you, from everyone here on Team Wheaton, for all your support over the years. You made it possible for me to create some great memories yesterday.

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today, A New Crew Went Boldly, Where No One Had Gone Before.

In place of the post I’d write if I wasn’t on vacation, I offer the following:

Today, Star Trek: The Next Generation turns 25 years-old.

When the show started, I looked like this:

and I couldn’t find a warp core with both hands.

Today, I look like this:

And I got a course you can plot.

Star Trek has been a huge part of my life, and a huge part of who I am, over the last 25 years, and it wasn’t always awesome.

But you know what is awesome? Talking to my friends and family from the cast today, celebrating not only that it’s been twenty-five years since we first Boldly Went When No One Had Gone Before, but that we still love each other, and still care about the time we spent together exploring the galaxy on the best starship to ever carry the name.

I know that Star Trek: The Next Generation has meant a lot to more than one generation since we debuted a quarter century ago today, and it means a lot to me in a lot of ways … but the thing that means the most to me, the thing that I cherish the most, is my family from the Enterprise D.

Happy Birthday, Next Generation. I’m proud and honored to be part of you.

Here’s my flabby, forty year-old, nerdy self, on the beach in Hawaii.

I’m on vacation in Hawaii (ON VACATION FROM WHAT WIL WHEATON HA HA I KNOW) with Anne.

We’ve had an absolutely amazing trip, relaxing and reading and swimming and having beers and mostly just enjoying that, after a year spent mostly apart due to my work, we finally get ten days together.

Well, today, a shitbag decided to intrude on our private vacation. He set himself up on the beach where we’re staying, pulled out a telephoto lens, and decided to take pictures of us for hours this morning.

I saw this guy around 10 this morning, and I thought to myself, “No, that guy isn’t taking my picture; I’m just being paranoid. Nobody cares about me enough to camp out on a beach and take that kind of paparazzi picture.”

Around 3, Anne and I got up from the beach, and walked back to our condo to make lunch. I saw the same guy, in the same place, with the same camera. I sort of glared at him, and he said something to me that I couldn’t hear.

“What?” I said.

“I said, ‘thank you, Wil.’” He said.

“Dude, I’m on vacation, and taking pictures like that of me and my wife isn’t cool. Would you please delete them?” I said.

“Sorry, brah,” he said, “I gotta make a living.”

“Are you serious?” I said. “I’m just trying to be on vacation with my wife, man.”

“Sorry, brah,” he said.

I absorbed the reality of what this parasite had done, and I said, “Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit.”

“Hey, if you don’t like it, go home, brah,” he said.

I was enraged. I was shaking and sick to my stomach. I walked back to my condo, and ate a sandwich (delicious PB&J with Guava Jam!) while I processed the invasion of my privacy I’d just experienced.

I was furious that this piece of shit would spend hours sitting on a beach, taking I don’t even know how many pictures of us, and then have the audacity to tell me that I should just go home if I didn’t like it. Like I was in the wrong for expecting to enjoy some time on the beach without some fucking creep using a telephoto lens to take pictures of me.

While I ate my sandwich (SO GOOD OMG) and finished my Bikini Blonde Lager, I hatched a scheme: Anne and I would render this subhuman pile of shit’s photos worthless (more worthless than they already are, because who gives a fuck about me in a bathing suit) by taking pictures of ourselves and posting them on Twitter.

So that’s what we did. And now I’m posting them here.

Thanks for giving me an anxiety attack in the middle of my vacation, brah. Good luck selling your fucking pictures, you piece of shit. Maybe go find something worthwhile to do with your life, like use that camera to take pictures of the beauty in Maui, instead of playing at being a paparazzo and making someone feel really uncomfortable when they’re just trying to enjoy some quiet time with their wife.

And now: my flabby, nerdy, 40 year-old self… and my amazingly beautiful wife:

And me, in all of my flabby, 40 year-old nerd glory:

Die in a fire, paparazzo guy. Die in a fire, brah.

in which a crappy dented ping pong ball finds a new home and a DVD auction is relisted for charity

A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning out y garage to make space for my tabletop games and homebrewing supplies. I came across a bunch of cool things and posted pictures of them on Twitter.

Two of the things I found ended up as eBay auctions to raise money for the Pasadena Humane Society: a Stand By Me DVD, and a crappy dented ping pong ball that I made Internet famous for two days.

The DVD sold for $1000, and the ping pong ball sold for $1135 (I KNOW RIGHT). The buyer for the ping pong ball was awesome, paid immediately, and posted a fantastic unboxing video that you have to watch right now:

The other buyer was … not quite as awesome. I won’t go into it, but I had to cancel the sale after a number of attempts to resolve a number of increasingly unreasonable demands. The good news is that the DVD has been relisted! Yes, you can now bid on this DVD that was living in my garage!

Anne and I are very close to our fundraising goal for the Wiggle Waggle Walk, and it would be awesome if we made it. We need your help, and there are so many of you reading this, just ten bucks from you will quickly add up to get us there.

I mean, how can you say no to this face?

I mean, seriously:

 Here’s that link to our team one more time.

And, of course, the DVD auction (which I should add will ship to the winner with a bonus copy of Different Seasons that I also found after the auction was created)