Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 133

in which a good person is kind

My son Ryan was home from college all week for Spring Break, and I kept expecting him to grab one of my logged-into-Twitter devices to tell the world how awesome I think he is. (I pretend to get all mad, but I secretly love it when he does this.)

Today, he went back to school, and I went out to meet a friend for lunch. We left the house at the same time, and when I got back and logged into Twitter, I saw this:

Who's the greatest? Ryan. He's the greatest. Someone should make a website named RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com. 

My first thought was, "I'm so glad he did that." My second thought was, "Oh fuck. Some dick is going to buy that domain and do something horrible with it."

Ryan is tremendously kind, and isn't the sort who would think "I better not do this, because someone may do something really terrible with it," but I've been around the block and through the wringer a few times, so I put the URL into Chrome, and steeled myself for the worst … but instead I saw that someone had indeed bought it, and made it go to the post he made on Twitter from my account.

I'm really lucky for a lot of reasons, but I'm especially grateful to interact with people on the Internet who are, for the most part, good people. I don't know who bought RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com (whois is all protected and anonymized and locked and stuff), but whoever did it is a good person.

If you're reading this, Person Who Bought RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com And Didn't Do Something Cruel With It, please get in touch with me; I'd like to give you something awesome as a thank you.

Sunken Treasure joins Hunter in the Kindle store.

Kindle readers! You can get your very own DRM-free copies of Sunken Treasure and Hunter directly from the Kindle store.

Sunken Treasure is $2.99, and Hunter is 99 cents.

You can get to Sunken Treasure and Hunter by clicking those links, or you can use these snazzy clicky-image-buying-the-book things (which you won't see if you're running AdBlock):

 

Neat!

From the Vault: see this place where stories all ring true

This morning, while driving around town, Anne and I heard Green Grass and High Tides on the radio. It was part of a set of songs with "green" in the title, on account of it being St. Patrick's Day. It's a stretch, but any excuse to play a great song on the radio -- especially a song that's nearly 10 minutes long -- is fine with me.

After a minute or two, I said, "it feels kind of weird to just listen to this song, and not feel worried about failing out of it before it's over."

"Is this that song from Rock Band?" She asked.

"Yeah."

"I totally remember you and Ryan playing it over and over a couple years ago."

"Well, it's --"

"and over and over"

"I know. It's a really great song," I said, "it's just so ... evil ... at the end."

We drove on and just listened to it, until there were about three minutes left in the song.

"This is where it gets brutal," I said. In my mind, I could see the bar on the left side of the screen turning yellow, then red. I kept my hands on the wheel and resisted the urge to reflexively activate Overdrive, which we will always call Star Power, no matter what music game we're playing (even DJ Hero, which doesn't make any sense at all.)

I realized that my heart was beating harder than it should have, and I felt flush.

"Oh my god," I said, "I'm getting stressed out! It's like I have Rock Band PTSD!"

"Nice," she said. "You want to slow down?"

"What?"

I looked at the speedometer and realized I was going ... a little too fast for the street we were on. I took my foot off the gas and gently applied the brake.

"Whoops."

Speaking of Rock Band and Green Grass and High Tides, here's a story I originally wrote about it in 2008, which is included in the Chapbook I did for GenCon last year, called Games Matter.

Ryan goes back to school in just under 2 weeks, and I've been bugging him to play the Endless Setlist with me on Rock Band before he leaves.

If you're unfamiliar with Rock Band's multiplayer thing, the Endless Setlist is the last thing you unlock in the game when you're playing as a band. It is exactly what it sounds like: a concert featuring all 58 songs that come with the game. It takes about six hours to play if you don't take any extended breaks.

Today, Ryan and I tackled it on expert. He played guitar, and I played bass. It was awesome. We got five stars on pretty much everything for the first 20 or so songs, including three gold stars. I got the authentic strummer thing and 99% on about half of them.

We were seriously having a good time, striking the rock pose, putting our backs together while we jammed through epic songs, bonding through the power of rock.

Then, with five songs left to go, we got to Green Grass and High Tides.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rock Band, this is a fantastic southern rock song by the Outlaws. It's also one of the hardest in the game, and the longest, weighing in at around 10 minutes. It's a song that you don't play as much as survive, and it does its best to really beat you down. If a song could kick you in the junk, this would be it. If this song were a poker game, it would be Razz.

So, after already playing for 5 hours, (and not exactly conserving our energy) we started to play this rock epic, knowing it would be the greatest challenge we'd faced yet.

Our first time through, we failed at 84%. It was entirely my fault for holding my guitar too high and deploying our emergency overdrive when we didn't need it.

"Sorry about that," I said as we lost 360,000 fans. "I blame my guitar."

Ryan looked at me.

"Okay, I blame myself."

Ryan laughed and said it was no big deal. He was confident we'd get it on the next try, and when we started the song, I could see why. He was in the zone, nailing 97% of the first solo. I wanted to holler about how awesome he was, but I felt like it would have been the same as talking to my pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter, so I stayed quiet and did my best not to screw things up.

I screwed things up, and we failed the song at 96%. We lost another 360,000 fans, almost wiping out the million we'd picked up when we did the Southern Rock Marathon last week. Compared to the nearly 5 and a half hours we'd spent playing, that 18 minutes wasn't that long, but it sure felt demoralizing, especially because it was, again, entirely my fault we'd failed. See, there's this bass phrase that's repeated over and over and over, and if you're just a tiny bit off (like I was) you're screwed, and . . . well, you get the point.

I dropped my hands to my side and let the guitar hand around my neck. My arms were tired, my legs hurt, and my vision was getting blurry.

"I think I've identified the weak link in our band, and it's me," I said. "I'm really sorry."

"It's okay," Ryan said, "but I think I want to take a break."

"Good idea," I said. "Let's pause this, go out for something to eat, and come back later."

Ryan walked into his room and turned on his shower. I unplugged my guitar so we didn't have to worry about our dogs knocking it down and starting the game again while we were gone.

In my memory, the next few moments happen in slow motion:

I pick up Ryan's guitar, the wireless PS2 guitar from GHIII.
I hold down the button to get the control screen.
The dashboard comes up, and it gives me the option to cancel, turn off the controller, or turn off the system.
I click the strum bar to select "turn off the controller."
I set the guitar on the ground -- carefully -- and reach up to click the green fret button.
I hear the Xbox beep.
I push the button.
I realize that the beep was the strum bar clicking one more time when I set the guitar down, selecting "Shutdown the System."
The system shuts down, taking all of our progress with it.
Time resumes to normal. For the next 120 seconds, I use every curse word I know, until my throat is raw. It takes everything I have not to grab the guitar and get all Pete Townshend on it.

Ryan came out of his room.

"What happened?" He said.

I told him.

What happened next was astonishing to me: Ryan didn't freak out. He didn't get upset. Instead, he told me, "Calm down, Wil. It's just a game. We can do it again."

I was still really upset. It was an accident, yes, but it was my fault. In my head, I kept replaying all the different ways I could have powered down his guitar that were more careful. I really felt like an asshole, because I screwed up twice and caused us to fail both times. I felt like an asshole, because I screwed up and lost all the progress we'd made. Mostly, though, I felt like an asshole because I really wanted to accomplish this feat with my son. I really wanted to have that memory.

What I got, though, was better than what I'd hoped for. I got to see Ryan exhibit one of the key values I'd raised him with: he kept everything in perspective, and found all the good things in the experience, like the gold stars we scored, the fun we had playing all the other songs, and the time we spent together. He reminded me that it's not about winning, it's about playing the game.

If you've read my blog for any amount of time, I'm sure you can appreciate how great it felt to hear my words and my values come out of my son's mouth.

I don't write about my boys very often these days. Their friends read my blog, and they sometimes read my blog. They're not little kids any more and I feel like it's not cool to talk about everything we do together with the Internet . . .

. . . but in this case, I'm making an exception.

You can hear me read this story on Radio Free Burrito Episode 20, if you're into that sort of thing.

Direct Relief for Japan

One of my favorite webcomics is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Zach Weiner cracks me up every day, and a lot of his jokes are just science-y and geeky enough to make me feel smart when I laugh at them.

In today's post, he writes:

Hey geeks. No doubt you've heard a lot about the Japanese tsunami. We're now hearing reports of coastal cities losing 15% or more of their population. Imagine 1 in 7 people in your town dying violently in a 24 hour period.

Direct Relief, which has a very good rating for spending most of their money on relief (as opposed to administration and promotion) have a setup where you can choose to give to Japan. Remember, this is the country that gave us Samurai, Ninjas, dirty cartoons, and Godzilla.

I think it's reasonable for a lot of people to have Disaster Fatigue right now, as we watch disaster after disaster strike all over the world. But like LeVar Burton said on Twitter, we have to fight Disaster Fatigue and do what we can to help.

Just think about what Zach wrote, and try to imagine what tens of thousands of people are suffering through right now. There are a lot of us, so I'm sure that, together, just a few bucks at a time, we can make a difference for them. Please do what you can.

#whiskyface is proof that the fsm loves us and wants us to be happy

Last night, my friends and I had a whisky tasting. As we neared the end, we were all feeling pretty happy … so I grabbed my silver sharpie and drew this, which I called #whiskyface.

It's not as funny now as it was after several wee drams of scotch, but I think it's still worth sharing.

Preemptive FAQs: We tasted Caol Ila 12, Macallan Select Oak, Lagavulin 16, Laphroaig 10 and Laphroaig Quarter-Cask. Oh, and we poured our whisky into my Reddit galsses from r/Scotch.

#whiskyface

happy pi day, my darling mathletes!

I wrote this in 2004:

This morning over breakfast, I said to my wife, "Happy π day!"

"Happy pie day? What the hell are you talking about?"

"No, not 'pie'," I said. "'π'."

"Not 'pie,' but 'pie.'" She was clearly not amused. "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"

"Anne, look at the date on the calendar."

"Yes it's march 14th, and you're going to watch WrestleMania dos equis* with your brother." She frowned. "Are you trying to tell me that you're taking a pie to Jeremy's house? Because if you expect me to make you a pie . . ."

"No, I don't expect you to make me a pie." I said, well into that area where you've explained the joke so much, it's never going to be funny.

"Today is March fourteenth. That makes it 3.14 on the calendar. 3.14 is also known as π."

She blinked a few times.

"Oh. It's π day."

"Yes!" I said. "And at 1:59 pm, it will be even more π day. Isn't that cool!?"

She took a long, thoughtful drink from her coffee mug, carefully set it down and said, "You are such a nerd."

And to commemorate pi day in 2009:

I present this incredibly awesome song by my friend Chris Hardwick:

 

This year ... well, I got nothin'. Except maybe ... maybe we could use today's date as an excuse to talk about math with kids!

Yeah! Check this out: When I think back on my years in school, I realize that math wasn't hard, math was just boring. Until I got into high school and started solving equations in algebra, which were framed as puzzles for me to solve, math was always framed as this collection of facts that we just had to know by rote, because ... well, nobody really knows why, we just do it and stop asking so many questions you damn troublemaking kid.

Maybe we could use today's date, 3.14, and its relation to π as an opportunity to show kids how numbers and mathematics are all around us all the time, like a secret language or something fun like that.

...or you could just watch the video Chris and Mike made and leave it at that. I'm not the boss of you.

Edited to add: Over at Geek Mom, they're doing a ton of fun math stuff for kids today that's all pi-centric. I highly recommend taking a look.

HUNTER is in the Kindle Store for 99 cents

Project Kindle Store Get Books In has begun:

I started with Hunter because it was already in .mobi format, and it's my most recent thing (it's still in pay-what-you-want-even-nothing format, incidentally.) Assuming the world doesn't implode around me, I'll get Sunken Treasure in the Kindle store next.

Also, while I did this, I made myself an Amazon Author's page. Neat!

this is for @thebloggess

here i dreamt i was an architect

My brain desperately wants to write some stories, so I've been digging through the pile of Ideas That Didn't Quite Make It to see if anything in there inspires me, or is at least worth dusting off and poking with a sharp stick. So far, two stories look promising, though one of them needs a fairly serious rewrite. I also have this Batman story that I really want to write, that I know is going to be extremely awesome, but I doubt would ever find life at DC. It refuses to let go of my creative forebrain, though, so I may end up writing ... fan fiction. Ahem.

During my travels though the pile, I found ePub versions of a few of my works, and I used Calibre to convert them into DRM-free .mobi format. Everything seems to be okay in the conversion, so I put Hunter and Sunken Treasure into the Kindle Store for 99 cents and 2.99, respectively. It looks like they'll get through the system there by the end of the week. If they do well enough, I'll make it a priority to get Memories of the Future Volume 1 and Happiest Days converted and published there before I go back to Eureka next month.

I would very much like to be one of those people who are making mountains of money self-publishing through the Kindle store, but I'm not all that keen on learning about sparkly vampires and bullshit, so it may be more like molehills for me. Still, the idea of being able to reach a zillion people as easily as "go to the Kindle store" in their Kindle menu is pretty awesome.

A question before I dive back into the pile of Ideas That Didn't Quite Make It: The Complete Works DVDs I took to ECCC were snapped up pretty quickly, and I probably could have sold twice as many as I took with me. I had a lot of fun putting them together, making the little sleeves and putting the seals on them and all that stuff, so I was considering making some more and selling them online, right here. Are you interested in that? Leave a comment for me so I can get a sense of what, if any, demand there is for that sort of thing, okay?

If you got one of the DVDs, I'd love to hear what you thought about it, and if you are happy with your purchase, too.