Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 28

The captain dreams of flying but he’s oh so scared of heights

I’m having a bad mental health day.

Well, I’ve been having a string of bad mental health days.

Ten weeks or so, it seems, and every day is a battle just to get up and face it.

I’m paralyzed by a fear of failure, and that fear is stopping me from creating anything that matters.

Hell, it’s preventing me from creating anything at all.

So I gave myself an exercise today, to see if I can help move this ship that’s been trapped in ice.

I had a simple idea, and I gave myself permission to just spit it out without thinking too much. I decided to write in a style that I don’t normally use, just to crack the ice a little bit.

And because I’m so afraid of failure, I gave myself permission to share this unvarnished, unpolished, trapped-in-ice bunch of words that spilled out of my head.

The monster lives under the bed. It sleeps among the dust bunnies, wraps itself around the box of sweaters, stretches its legs between toys.

It keeps the lost socks. Lost things are desired to be found and that need sustains the monster when the children are not in their beds.

The children know the monster is there, as all children do, having felt its presence in the dark of night. Their parents don’t believe in monsters, as no parents do, having forgotten the truths they knew when they were children.

What the children and the parents don’t know is that the monster under the bed does not threaten on the children.

It protects them. From the other monsters.

The monster in the closet.

The monster who taps at the window when the wind blows.

The monster who lurks in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door.

The monster who stands in the room when the children hide beneath the covers.

The monster who lives under the bed waits for them to come calling. The monster who lives under the bed waits for them to tap on the window or scratch on the walls or creak the closet door open. The monster who lives under the bed waits and when the children are in danger, it reaches out with an impossibly long arm, covered with fur and scales and blisters and oozing pustules. It reaches out and opens a claw, snaps it closed on the neck of the monster who lives in the closet, crushes the life out of the monster who taps on the window, flays the skin off the monster who lurks in the hallway. When the children hide beneath the covers, it breaks the neck of the monster who stands in the dark bedroom.

It protects the children, as it protected their parents, as it will protect the children’s children long after they have grown into parents and forgotten it or any of the other monsters existed.

It protects them

and it waits.

It waits for all the other monsters to be driven out, so that it may uncoil itself, stretch itself out, creep into the bedroom

and feed.

Fifteen or so minutes, 352 words, a few images, an unexpected ending. Something where there wasn’t something before. Something unpolished and raw and imperfect. Something published for the sake a making a thing that isn’t perfect. Okay.

Maybe this will crack the ice, or at least sweep away a few snowdrifts.

Owlbear Pin Winners!

Okay first things first: I went to the Kings game last night, Dustin Brown scored a hat trick, and when I threw my Santa hat onto the ice, ADRIAN KEMPE PICKED IT UP WITH HIS STICK and it made it onto the TV broadcast!! AND they put me on the jumbotron twice during the game! I’ve been on TV like a thousand times, but that didn’t prepare me for how excited I was going to feel when I saw myself on the big screen in Staples Center. Yay! They really suck out loud this season, but GO KINGS GO!

Now to business. Here are the randomly-selected winners from . If you’re one of these lucky folks, email me and we’ll get you your pin:

pandorasdadca
Steve
Jason Thorpe
Todd
Chad Walter

And while I have your attention, allow me to remind you that there are just hours left to join in on the fun and get your own Owlbear Conservation Society stuff.

Just a few hours left to become a part of the Owlbear Conservation Society and get your official enamel pin! Happy Owlbear to all, and to all a good night! http://bit.ly/Owlbear_WWh

The Majestic Owlbear (briefly) Returns! And we made ENAMEL PINS!

You guys, I loved the Owlbear Conservation Society design I did with Stands earlier this year, so we decided to offer it again, for a super-limited time … AND OH MY GOD WE MADE ENAMEL PINS!

Check it out:

I embedded a link to buy your own shirt or pin in this image, because I go the extra mile for you.

I am so freaking psyched about these pins. I’ve been wanting to get into the pin game (is that a thing?) for a long time, being an avid pin collector, myself, so this makes me super happy.

In fact, I am so excited about these pins, I’m going to give away FIVE of them to random readers who leave a comment on this post, telling me why you support Owlbear conservation. Winners will be chosen at random in a few days.

(Did I just use gratuitous bolding? You know I did.)

Allow me to close with some ad copy:

The majestically grumpy Owlbear is back for one week only! Perfect time to get a tee or hoodie for the holidays. And this time around, we’ve added some sweet new pins, too. Check them out here: http://bit.ly/Owlbear_WWh

look for the helpers

I feel like words are cheap and sentiment is empty, but I can’t stop thinking about the people who have lost homes due to the fires that are raging all around my state.

I also can’t stop thinking about how much I respect, admire, and appreciate the firefighters who are risking their lives to stop the progression of the fires as well as protect the lives and property of their fellow humans.

I’m watching a man who has therapy dogs with him up near Thousand Oaks. He was asked to bring his dogs to Cal Lutheran after the mass murder a few days ago, and he stayed there so his dogs can offer comfort to people who have been displaced by the fire.

He said that he and his team gather every morning for devotion and prayer, and then they take themselves and the (this is my phrasing, now) ephemeral inspiration they take from their faith to help other people.

I am not a religious person, but I believe as strongly as I believe in anything that this man and his kind, loving, selfless help is what I believe religion should inspire people to be, not the hateful bigotry we so often see from people who claim religious faith as justification for their own absence of compassion and empathy.

I am not religious, but I want to say: God bless this man and his team.

It’s scary and upsetting to see so much destruction and know that it’s going to get even worse before it’s all over, but I am remembering Mister Rogers’s gentle reminder to look for the helpers.

the only way out is through

I wrote this yesterday on my tumblr thing. I’m sharing it here for anyone who struggles with the same things I do.

I’m having a bad day. It happens. So I take my own advice for people who are having a bad day, and I get out of my house. I go for a walk. I work hard to push negative and hurtful thoughts out of my head, and I replace them with positive things. It’s little observations at first, like the trees are starting to drop their leaves, a dog has a cute beard, this person’s Halloween graveyard has tons of great puns in it.

I take this positive voice that’s enjoying things in the neighborhood, and I use it to talk to myself. I remind myself that my experience is valid, even if random strangers who know nothing about my experience tell me that it doesn’t, on account of my privilege and success. I remind myself that this terrible way I feel isn’t forever. I remind myself that my wife and children love me. I remind myself to make an appointment with my therapist.

I’ve walked a couple of miles by the time I get back to my street, and when I’m a few houses away from mine, I feel better. I still don’t feel good, but I’ve moved my day from a 1 to a 2 on my 5 point scale. It isn’t the 4 I am hoping to achieve, but it’s better, and just moving from 1 to 2 is enough.

I am enough. I am enough for my wife and my kids and my dogs, and I’m learning to be enough for myself. I’m learning to let go – trying to let go – of the pain I feel whenever I’m reminded that I’m not enough for at least one person who was until very recently in my life, because it’s not my fault.

One of my neighbors comes out of her house and tells me that her daughter’s English teacher is a fan of my writing, and when he mentioned it to her class, she told him that we’re neighbors. He was excited by that, and asked her to ask me if I’d come into the class to talk to them about writing and being a writer.

I tell her that I’d love to do it. I don’t tell her how humbling and overwhelming it is to feel wanted by someone because I’ve done things that matter. I hope she doesn’t see me squeeze the tears back into the corners of my eyes.

Her daughter comes outside, and we talk about me coming to her class to talk about writing and being a writer. She tells me how much her teacher loves me (those are her exact words) and I feel so lucky and grateful to have done something that somebody cares about, something that a teacher feels makes me worthy of speaking to a class of 11th graders.

So I give them my email address, and we resolve to coordinate with her teacher next week. I’ll probably go speak to her class sometime in December.

By the time I’m done talking with them, I have moved from a 2 to a 3 on my 5 point scale, and that’s a HUGE improvement over the 1 I was feeling when I walked down my driveway.

So I’m sharing this good news that I hope inspires and comforts anyone else who is having a bad day. It’s possible, through loving ourselves and allowing the kindness of others to get past our defenses, to turn a day that’s awful into a day that’s okay, and it can happen really quickly.

I’m glad I took my own advice, and I’m grateful that I have an opportunity to share it with all of you who are reading this.

history has its eyes on you

In today’s Washington Post, Dana Millbank published an op-ed titled We have no excuses now. Our eyes are wide open. He closes by saying:

On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:

Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?

Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?

If we choose the latter, 2018 will in some ways be more difficult to take than 2016. This time, we don’t have the luxury of saying we didn’t really know what Trump would do.

Our eyes are wide open.

I keep saying this: history doesn’t just happen. The world isn’t a story that someone tells, and we all ride along inside the narrative, unable to affect it in any meaningful way.

I am 46. I was raised in an America that claimed to be The Land of Opportunity, a place where all people are equal under the law, and anyone who was willing to do the work could make something special for themselves and their families.

That is painfully not the America we are living in now, and that didn’t just happen. This America, this country that is so xenophobic, so profoundly unequal, which treats nonwhite lives like they are disposable, which is currently lead by the most despicable, dishonest, openly racist and misogynist man to ever hold the presidency … this America didn’t just happen. This America was slowly and deliberately built by people like Ronald Reagan, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, George Bush and his idiot son, Newt Gingrich, The Koch Brothers, The Mercers, Fox News, Stephen Miller, and their malignant voice of hate and fear, Donald Trump.

Taking a look at my 46 years in America, it starts to become clear that, at least at the national political level, presidents like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter are not our norm, as much as I wish they were. Looking at just the last 25 years, we see two presidents who were not elected by the majority of Americans, and we see a Senate that continually and gleefully abuses its anti-Democratic power to keep shaping America further and further away from the ideals of freedom and equality and opportunity that America at least claimed to stand for when I was a child.

What we are witnessing now is a fight for not just the future of America, but for her present, and for the rest of my life. Will America continue her march toward open civil war between the revanchist, paranoid, bigoted army of racists who make up the incredibly small but powerful Republican base, and the majority of Americans who are not bigots, anti-Semites, white nationalists, and misogynists? OR will we send a clear message that our voices, which are the overwhelming majority, will not be silenced, and we will not allow ourselves to be governed by Trump and people who support him?

Dana Milbank is correct in his column and in his assessment: our eyes are wide open now, and we know exactly what we get when Republicans are in power.

This election is powerfully and unambiguously clear: you are with us, or you are against us. You are with Trump and his hateful, violent, paranoid, racist values, or you are against him. This is the reality in which we are living, and you have to choose a side.

History doesn’t just happen. Every election matters and every election helps decide what our country is going to look like not just for us, but for our children and for the future. And though it isn’t just this election, (because we aren’t going to undo thirty years of right wing paranoia, voter suppression, and assaults on basic human and civil rights with just a single election any more than the Kochs and Adelsons and Mercers corrupted America’s free and fair elections in a single election) this is the first nationwide, congressional election of the Trump era. This is the first election since the Republicans stopped winking and dogwhistling and giving themselves plausible deniability, and openly embraced racism, bigotry, xenophobia, violence, and started proudly and stridently embracing the most deplorable ideas and beliefs in American politics since the Confederacy.

Put simply: if they can hold onto the House, if they can consolidate their power after they have made their intentions and beliefs crystal clear and without any doubts, they will be empowered to go even further toward taking civil and human rights away from people, because that’s what they’ve been promising to do since Trump’s election. History doesn’t just happen by accident, and what’s acceptable in America doesn’t just happen. In America, elections and the people they elect decide what history will be written, and by whom. In the past, a person could make the case with winks and nods and dogwhistles, and a voter could credibly claim that they were voting on the economy, for example. This election is different. This is the first election in my lifetime where openly racist, antisemitic, white nationalists are telling you exactly who they are and exactly what they will do if you vote for them.

It may seem like one vote doesn’t matter, or one election doesn’t matter. It may seem like “they’re all the same” or “there’s no difference between the parties” but I want you to consider that there is one main group of politicians in America (and their supporters) who don’t have a problem tearing a child away from its parents, who claim to be good, honorable, God fearing moral Christians, yet whose deeds consistently hurt the poor, the marginalized, people of color, and immigrants. There is one main group of politicians in America (and their supporters) who are appalled and revolted by the abuse of children and the destruction of any family, regardless of that family’s nation of origin. They believe that women’s rights are human rights. They believe that healthcare is a right. They believe that workers should have rights and protections, that the air we breathe and the water we drink should be clean and safe, that we can do more together than we can when we’re divided, and that all people, regardless of their gender, who they love, where they were born, who their parents are, how they pray (if they pray), and how much money they earn, deserve to live their lives in safety and prosperity.

Every election in America is a choice between these two parties. I know it shouldn’t be that way. I know that we should have more nuanced choices. But the reality is, we don’t. We can choose between a party that will tell nonwhites that they don’t matter and don’t have basic, fundamental, human rights (that are also their Constitutional rights, by the way), and a party that says their lives and their rights and their families matter. That’s the choice. In the past, they muddied things up with fear and economics, but this time is different. This time our eyes are open and we know exactly what this election is about, because they have told us what this election is about.

History doesn’t just happen. Elections have consequences. If Republicans hold on to power or — god forbid — expand it, they will make good on their antisemitic, misogynist, bigoted promises, because their voters will have told them that’s what they want.

On Tuesday, we all vote with our eyes wide open, and we have a chance to grab the pen that’s writing our history. Don’t let anyone tell you that your vote and your voice doesn’t matter, because history has its eyes on you.

i took a picture

This summer, when we had to get out of our house because of black mold, we used points to go stay at a friend’s house in Hawaii. I mean, if you have to be driven out of your home, there are worse ways to spend your time, right?

So they live in Hana, on Maui. We flew to Kahului, then took a little Buddy Holly killing plane up to their place. On the flight, I took this picture, which I love so much I made it my desktop wallpaper. I’m really happy with the accidental composition, and the colors bring me great joy. I thought about sharing this on Reddit or Imgur, and decided that, rather than put it someplace where nobody will see it, I’d put it here, in my own dumb blog, for anyone who wants to look at it, or use it for their own desktop or whatever.

click to embiggen and or download

casual cruelty

Someone looked at a post I wrote on my blog about taking some time and making an effort to go out and look at the stars, and decided to do this.

It’s just tiny words, and if I were in a different place, emotionally, I’d delete it and move on. But because of where I am emotionally, it stung. I’m sure this person doesn’t see me as a fellow human, who is struggling with profoundly painful grief and loss, who doesn’t deserve to be treated with such casual cruelty.

I’m sure this person is young, is likely suffering in his own way (because everybody is going through something), and is trying to make himself feel better by being hurtful and cruel to someone he views as a safe target.

Look, I’m happy to take this, if it means that a real person in this guy’s life doesn’t become the target of his cruelty, but I’d rather not take it at all. I’d rather that this person stopped before they decided to be so casually cruel.

This person won’t get the public attention they crave (hence the pixelizing), and I doubt that they’ll even see this post, because they probably don’t spend much time away from 4chan and the toxic subreddits, because that’s where this person finds others who are as miserable and cruel as he is.

But I do hope that he matures, develops empathy, and when he has a choice about how he’s going to treat someone in the future, he chooses kindness instead of this sort of thing.

Life is incredibly short, and there’s so much pain and cruelty out there. Do your best to not be part of that.

not in our stars, but in ourselves

Remember, when you were younger, all the times you would go outside at night, just to look up at the stars? Remember how happy it made you feel? Remember taking out a star chart, so you could find a constellation or a galaxy? Remember how cool it felt to know that, even if you couldn’t see the visible light from a Messier Object, you at least knew you were looking at it? Remember putting down a blanket and watching meteor showers all night long? Remember the first time you saw a satellite flare and convinced yourself you’d seen a flying saucer?

Remember how magical and humbling and inspiring it felt to just go outside specifically to look at the stars and planets, sometimes with a telescope, other times with binoculars, most times with just your eyes? Remember the first time you really thought about the reality of our existence? That we’re tiny little specks of life on an improbably perfect planet, speeding through space at incomprehensible speeds, protected by a thin layer of atmosphere from specks of dust and rock that are also speeding around in space, just like we are?

Does anyone else remember that? Or is it just me, getting older, rewatching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and desperately wanting to revisit a time when it didn’t seem like our improbably perfect planet was teetering on the brink of catastrophe?

When’s the last time you got away from your phone or tablet or TV or whatever, pulled your head out of the garbage fire we’re living in, and went outside, just to look at the stars, pick out some constellations, and feel the size and magnitude of our universe?

I can’t remember the last time I did. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been. That makes me feel profoundly sad.

So tonight, I’m going to do a some stargazing. If I’m lucky, I may even find what I’m looking for.

The WWdN store has some stuff in it again

I found some teen dream posters, and a box of the Happiest Days of Our Lives special edition, so I restocked the online store. There are very limited quantities of each, so if you want it, come and get it!