Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 42

these violent delights have violent ends

Seven days of a post a day, and it’s starting to feel like it’s okay to do stuff that isn’t super intense or deep, though I’ve discovered that instead of just posting whatever, I’m racking my brains for something heavy or at least in depth to write about. I guess I’m learning how to think with different parts of my creative self or whatever.

I got this thing called the triby from woot because it was on sale (I know, just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you have to buy it) and though it has a terrible name (m’lady)*, it’s been a lot of fun to talk to Alexa on it throughout the day. It’s kind of cool that I can ask it to play me a news update, and it’ll cycle through about 10 minutes of news stuff from local to national to world news, then give me the weather. I keep wanting to thank it, the same way I want to thank my phone when Ok, Google, does something for me.

I kept hoping, all season long, that there would be some visual easter egg that gave a nod to the 1973 movie.

Hey speaking of self-aware robots: how about Westworld? I kept feeling like there was a good show inside whatever I’ve been watching for ten weeks, so I stuck with it, enduring awful exposition, two characters that are either badly written, badly performed, or both, and a criminal underuse of Anthony Hopkins … but after watching the season finale, I’m so glad I stuck it out. I’m looking forward to going back and watching it again, knowing what I know now. I still think the entire Mayve storyline is crap and stresses my suspension of disbelief more than the existence of Westworld, itself, but the other primary storyline was wonderful, and really paid off. Memo to LOST: this is how you do it without an audience-insulting shit ending.

Have you seen Ex-Machina? If you haven’t, and you liked Westworld, I highly recommend it. There’s also a fantastic episode of Black Mirror from series two called Be Right Back that provokes a lot of the same questions. Anne and I have been wanting to start series three of Black Mirror, but we’ve been investing our limited television time watching Channel Zero and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

You know, there’s so much good television right now, I feel like I could do nothing but watch incredible shows everywhere from broadcast networks to cable to online-only, and there wouldn’t be enough time in the day to see it all.

 

*I know, it isn’t Trilby, but it’s close enough.

raspberry pi plus arduino equals something something

 Forgive this dumb Amazon thing. It’s part of an experiment … but STEM toys are pretty cool.

When I was a kid, I loved to put together electronic project kits. I’d get these things from Radio Shack (RIP Radio Shack) and build radios, super basic games, synthesizers, and other fun things. I liked that stuff so much, when I was curating my Quarterly boxes last year (does anyone want me to do that again?), I put a Little Bits starter kit into one of them.

I have spent so much time in the creative part of my brain, I wanted to get out of that part of my brain for a little bit (it’s full of bees) and do some other kind of making/creating, so I got myself a Raspberry Pi, and an Arduino starter kit. I’ve read a bit in Make and I have a bunch of cool books and junk from Humble Bundles that I can’t put onto my Kindle because they’re over 50mb and for some reason the current software on my Kindle won’t let it mount on my desktop as a device.

Um. Anyway.

using ssh to get into another computer on the LAN. Ah, memories!

I spent some time last weekend reacquainting myself with the Linux command line, learning nano (my heart will always belong to vim, but I’m trying new things), and building a super basic home server, samba server, and trying (and failing) to get a media server that I don’t need (Plex FTW) up and running.

I have just realized that there are a lot of parentheticals in this post. I’m acknowledging that right now, just so it isn’t weird if you’re like “wow that’s a lot of parentheticals and it’s kind of strange that you aren’t acknowledging it.”

Playing with the Pi has been a lot of fun. It’s quite powerful, especially for its size, and there’s something super satisfying about investing less than $90 to have a full on computer with a ton of storage (thank you, inexpensive 64GB USB drive) that is portable.

I haven’t gotten into the Arduino, yet, because whenever I open the box and see all the wires and electronics, I panic and close it.

Which brings me to the point of this dumb post: for all you nerds out there who have built stuff or made neat projects with one or both of these things: what do you recommend? I’m pretty competent and I can follow directions pretty well. I’d really dig it if you guys filled up my comments with links to tutorials, examples of your own projects, and other recommendations for cool things that I can make with this stuff. I also have a magnificent 3D printer that I can use to make cases, gears, and that sort of thing too, if a murderkillbot is a thing to be built.

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

I worked on an audiobook all day yesterday. I don’t think I can talk about the specifics of it, but I’m proud of the word I did.

But I can point out this cool news that Cory Doctorow posted on boingboing yesterday, about an audtiobook that I read for him a couple of years ago:

I released an audio edition of the book in 2014, read by the incomparable Wil Wheaton, who also read the audiobook of my novel Homeland). At the time, I tried to get Neil and Amanda into a studio to record their intros, but we couldn’t get the stars to align.

But good things come to those who wait! Neil Gaiman’s 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats includes his introduction to my book, and the audiobook edition — which Neil himself read — therefore includes Neil’s reading of this essay.

Thanks to Neil, his agents, and the kind people at Harper Audio, I was able to get permission to include Neil’s reading of his essay for a remastered audio version of the audiobook.

I really like Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. I learned a lot from it, and it helped me grow as an independent artist and creator. You can get your own DRM-free copy for $15.

the cookie told me so

Okay so the whole point of this Daily December thing is to just put something new here every day, and not worry about exactly what it is. We’re four — five? Wait. Did I miss a day?

Okay, I just checked and I didn’t miss a day. That’s weird. Time is a flat circle, man, I read about it in The Bearenstein Bears And The King In Yellow.

Anyway, this is a good exercise for me. Just post a thing that I care about, or think is cool for some reason, and don’t worry too much about it being something deep and whatever.

So.

I don’t remember why I started doing “Goodnight, nerds” on Twitter, with a picture from Frinkiac, but now it’s a silly thing I look forward to every night before bed. I actually say to Anne, “I have to go tell the nerds goodnight” before I get into bed.

I usually hit the random button until I come across something from the first eight seasons or so. Occasionally something from the recent seasons shows up that’s really funny on its own, and I’ll grab it just in case, but I like to focus on the classics.

You know, for something dumb that I do to amuse myself, a put a lot of thought into it — well, more thought than you’d expect, I guess.

I don’t watch The Simpsons every week like I used to. We’ve both changed since the 90s, and I think it’s okay to move on and do other things. Shows like Bob’s Burgers and Bojack Horseman are more my speed these days.

I’m performing an audiobook all day today, so I have to get going, but I’m putting this here so I won’t forget: Bojack Horseman is a thing I want to write about in a little more depth when I have some time.

The 404 page at The Outline is pretty great.

 

you just start and you keep going until you’re finished

I’ve had this idea for a short supernatural horror story for years, but never actually committed to writing it. I guess the idea of the thing was so pleasing to me, I didn’t want to risk ruining it by writing it badly.

But a few months ago, I wrote an entirely different story, and showed it to a friend of mine who is a fucking amazing author who had offered to take a look at anything I wrote, if I ever wanted his feedback.

So on this other thing (which is called The Magician’s Path), I just wasn’t sure if it worked. I wasn’t sure if it all held together, or if it even told the story I wanted to tell. I sent it to my friend, and told him that if he thought it sucked, it would be really useful and helpful if he could tell me why it sucked, so I knew where to focus on developing my skills as a storyteller. He didn’t reply for a few days, and I thought, “Jeeze, I guess it sucks even harder than I thought it did.”

Then he texted me and told me that he really liked it, and didn’t think it needed much work. He hadn’t replied to be because he had gotten busy. Let that be a lesson to all of us about the things we presume based upon incomplete information.

As it turned out, he was coming to LA, and he offered to come to Castle Wheaton and go over it with me, so I could understand what I’d written from a structure standpoint, a story standpoint, a prose standpoint, etc.

We sat in my kitchen and went through it (it’s not long at all, like 4000 words) and while he showed me things, I began to feel like I was more capable than I thought I was. My instincts were good, my ideas made sense, and while the draft didn’t exactly need anything, if I did a couple of things to it, it would help it be better.

I want to say that it was like learning to walk, but it was more like suddenly having the confidence to stand up and stop crawling. My friend unlocked this thing inside of me that I’d been holding back because I was so afraid of failure, and all these ideas that I’d had for years started clamoring around inside my imagination to get out and become proper stories.

I started and abandoned a couple of things, because they weren’t the right thing for me to be writing at the time, and finally settled on the thing that was a short story that became a novella that wants to be a novel and still really needs a good title. Neil Gaiman says that each thing you write teaches you how to write it, that you have to learn while you’re doing it, and that every story is different. While that thing was teaching me how to write it, it was also teaching me how to just write the idea I have, without fear or judgement, and keep going until it’s finished.

Around the second week of October, I had to write a really difficult scene in that story. Without getting too precious about it, I just had to walk away from it for a little bit, and my brain was all “Why don’t you write the swamp story, and release it around Halloween?”

There isn’t a swamp in the story anymore, but I was like, “Good idea, brain,” and I got to work. It ended up being more than I expected, and I didn’t come close to making that Halloween deadline. But I finished it on Friday, and I’ve been deliberately taking this weekend off from it, even though I really want to get back to work on it and do the rewrites.

I’ll probably finish the rewrites sometime next week, and then I’ll go back to the novel, which feels like it’s about 90% finished, because I want to finish the first draft of it by the end of the year.

When it’s finished, I’ll go back to my whiteboard and pick the next thing that’s going to go into the collection of short stories that all of these things have come out of, and if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have at least one book (and hopefully two) published early next year.

if coffee then coffee do coffee more coffee else coffee

Since I’m not drinking this year, I haven’t been making beer. But I still like to make food things, so I’ve been teaching myself how to bake bread and roast coffee beans.

So the thing about making beer is that it really isn’t that difficult. Brooklyn Brew Shop says If you can make oatmeal, you can make beer, and it is entirely true. If you can just follow a recipe, you can turn malted barley, water, hops, and yeast into beer.

The thing about baking bread is that there’s a little more intuition to it than making beer, but not much. It’s incredibly satisfying to mix up flour, water, salt, and yeast by hand, fold the dough, let it rise, shape it into loaves, and bake it. There are all sorts of different types of bread to make, but that basic combination is pretty easy to understand. Like brewing, if you can follow directions, you can turn those things into bread.

Roasting coffee, though, is much more difficult to perfect. I’m using a smart roaster (the Behmor 1600+) that controls the delicate parts of the process, including the heat curve, the speed of the turning drum that holds the beans, and the cooling process. But roasting coffee isn’t something where you put the beans in, push some buttons, and wait until PRESTO you have roasted coffee beans. There’s a steep and complex learning curve (at least there was for me) and a very small margin of error. In my experience, when I’m roasting 1/4 pound to 1/2 pound of beans, there’s anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds of intense terror that I have to watch very closely, because in that tiny window of time, I’ll either end up with something decent or a complete a pile of fail. Unlike beer, which can sometimes end up not as hoppy or malty as I wanted, but still be drinkable, or bread, which may not rise as much as I wanted but still makes a nice tartine, if the coffee beans are off, they pretty much have to go into the trash. I mean, unless you’re really into wet cardboard.

So it was kind of a big deal for me recently when I had acquired enough data to feel like I knew what I was doing, and could reasonably expect the raw beans I put into the roaster to come out tasting like something I wanted to drink and share with others. (I didn’t mention that roasting coffee beans provides an opportunity for lots of notes, just like brewing and baking does, and it’s essential to do that if you want to get anywhere close to mastering it).

Anyway, I decided to offer some beans in the secret store, and the first batch came out yesterday. It’s pretty much exactly how I wanted it to come out, and I’m proud of myself, so I put some pictures from the roast on the other side of the jump, along with some notes on the process.

Getting started.

Not sure why the display photographed that way, but I’m just about four minutes in. You can see in my notes where I record the wall and exhaust temperatures at each minute.

All done, and it’s cooling. I ended up adding 1:30 to the total time. That happened during the 45 second window of terror.

Weighing out the beans. I wanted them to be about this dark (the lighter patches you see are from chaff that didn’t blow off completely), so the bean’s unique flavors could come through without too much acidity. I feel like this batch went up to about 15 to 30 seconds short of second crack.

I’m roasting some more today, and my house smells great. There’s also some pure levain sourdough bulk fermenting, that I’ll shape and proof in about an hour or so. The kitchen at Castle Wheaton is getting all kinds of action today.

a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

this is fine.

Okay day two of putting whatever the hell I want on my blog! This is great. Everything is great. Nothing is terrible. Facts and truth really do matter and bad people are held accountable for being bad. Really! They are! I swear. Ignore all evidence to the contrary because the world is definitely not on fire.

…well, that got dark in a hurry.

I’m probably going to finish the first draft of Ravenswood today. I wanted to finish it last night, but I just ran out of gas, sort of like when I go out for a run, really want to keep going, but my body is just at its limit and can’t be pushed any further. I’m really excited about this story, though, and I’m looking forward to releasing it in the Mysterious Future.

Speaking of running, I don’t feel like doing an in-depth review of my reboot for October and November, but I will give myself an overall grade for both months: C-. I can do better, and I will.

Have a good weekend. Here’s Robert Picardo reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.

“Haunted Bunk Bed Terrifies Family”

I post a lot of stuff on my Tumblr, share a lot of pictures on my Instagram, put videos on my YouTube channel, and do dumb things every day with Twitter. I’m also starting a regular thing on my Twitch channel (more on that later), so I can honestly say that I produce a lot of content or at least share a lot of content online. But it feels like my blog, which is where the whole thing started, is largely neglected, because I feel like I can only post bigger things or deeper things or heavier things here.

So I’m giving myself permission to post whatever the hell I want, so I can just get past the internal gatekeeper slash critic who prevents me from using the one space on the Internet that is entirely mine.

Therefore: I hereby challenge myself to post one thing a day during the month of December, no matter what it is. It can be a picture, a few lines from a work in progress, a video, a collection of links to things, or even just one link to one thing.

So. It is December first, and I am beginning with something dumb that is still interesting to me.

Even though I am writing a short, supernatural story right now, I do not believe in the paranormal. At all. Still, I freaking love it. It isn’t real, even a little bit, but it’s fun to pretend that it is. I love the idea that aliens are real, that ghosts haunt our world, that people make dark pacts with demons, and that Cryptozoological beasts are all real, just incredibly hard to find and photograph. I love the idea of the Denver Airport being some crazy Illuminati thing and the aliens use it as a landing facility. The Face On Mars is horseshit, but it’s fun to pretend that it isn’t. All of this stuff is delightful fan fiction that is set in our own world, and we’re all characters in it, whether we know it or not.

So I’m starting The Daily December with something from a paranormal blog I love.

The Tallmann House

(from Stranger Dimensions)

In the case of the haunted Tallmann House, residents of an ordinary home in Horicon, Wisconsin found themselves the victims of a very strange thing indeed: a haunted bunk bed. According to Cult of Weird, in 1988, this family suffered through nine months of intense paranormal activity after purchasing a used bunk bed, including spectral apparitions. They ultimately fled their home, but not before rumors of even stranger things – including bleeding walls – spread throughout their neighborhood.

I mean, you’re not going to do much better than “Haunted Bunk Bed Terrifies Family”, right?

 

all the world’s indeed a stage

I’ve been working on this book (a short story that turned into a novella that decided it wants to be a novel) for a few months, now. What I thought would finish up around 5000 words is on pace to end up a ten times that. I still don’t know if it all holds together, and I don’t know how much of it will survive the rewrite, but it’s been the primary creative focus of my life for a long time.

I recently hit a serious emotional beat in the story that affected me as much as it affected the characters, and I needed to get a little bit of distance from it, so I can come back to it and finish it by the end of the year. That was about a month ago, I guess. Maybe more like five or six weeks. Anyway, I had this other idea for a short, supernatural horror story on the board, so I started writing that, with the hope that I would finish it in time to be published before Halloween. That also took off and got a little longer than I had intended, but if I can focus and stay committed, I should finish the first draft by the end of this week.

I’m writing both of these things (and the other book of short stories they came out of) essentially on spec, because I don’t know if I’ll try to sell them to a publisher or self-publish them. Because of that, it feels like I don’t have a real job right now (and I know there are a lot of folks out there who will say that any kind of artist isn’t doing a real job anyway, and I’d like to invite them to fuck off).

There’s a fundamental rule for first drafts that I think I got from Stephen King: write it with the door closed. Don’t let anyone see it until it’s done, because it needs to be raw and broken and rough and even bad in places so that it can just get finished. Go ahead and open the door after the first rewrite. That’s solid and good advice that is one of my unbreakable rules, and it serves me well for staying motivated and giving myself the freedom to just get to work and write without judgement. But it’s also kind of lonely. It’s like performing to an empty theater.

Even though I’ve been productive and I’m making lots of stuff, I haven’t had the opportunity to interact with an audience for a long time, and I’ve missed that. So last night, I had this dumb idea to get onto my Twitch channel, read a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and ask the people who were watching to make the choices. We did Inside UFO 54-40 and The Race Forever. I think about 200 people showed up (not bad, considering the short notice), and holy hell did we have fun. It was this great community experience, and I liked it so much, I’m going to try to make it a regular thing.

So if you showed up last night, thank you. I needed the break from the fucking nightmare we’re all living in right now, and I got it. I hope you got it, too.

America the plum blossoms are falling

It is five in the morning. After a little over four hours of restless sleep, I got out of bed before my tossing and turning woke up Anne. I’m not sleeping much recently, and what sleep I do get is plagued by nightmares.

It’s been raining all night, which I realize isn’t something worth mentioning for most people, but it hasn’t rained here in Los Angeles since 1856, so it’s kind of a big deal. Back in the old days, when it rained a few times a year, before the myth of climate change tricked us all into believing that we’re having a terrible drought that apparently doesn’t really exist, we would sleep with the window open on rainy nights, so we could hear and smell the rain.

My dogs looked at me with confusion when I got out of bed, then did the dog equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and burying themselves back into the covers. My cat wants me to let him out, stop the rain, dry off the patio, and then let him back in. And then back out. And then back in again because he’s a cat.

So. Let’s get to it: we’re fucked. Nothing matters, everything is terrible, and we’re living in a nightmare that hasn’t even begun to hint at how bad it’s going to get. I’ve been spending a lot of time going through the stages of grief, and though it’s mostly a lot of anger, I’m bargaining: maybe the Electoral College will step in and prevent this fucking catastrophe from happening. Maybe the vote will be audited in some of these states where the devil won by just barely over one percent, which is honestly kind of suspicious. Maybe the Democrats in Congress will be joined by a few principled Republicans (they exist, right? They have to exist, don’t they?) and the white nationalist cabinet this president elect wants to install won’t be confirmed.

Bargaining. I know it isn’t going to happen. I know we’re fucked.

Twenty-five percent of eligible voters elected a racist demagogue who has never held a single elected office in his life, a seventy year-old man who has the temperament of a child. I still can’t believe it. When I hear the news say “President Elect Trump” it turns my stomach. It’s such an affront to the country, to the office of the presidency, it feels like it isn’t real.

Hate crimes are happening all over the country. White supremacists, anti-semites, and the absolute worst of humanity feels validated by this election, and they are boldly and fearlessly attacking people, declaring that this election — votes cast by one in four eligible voters — endorses their hateful, bigoted, regressive world view.

Anger. This never should have happened.

How can so many people, even if they are a statistical minority, have no problem supporting a racist for president? What are these fucking idiots going to do when all the things he promised them don’t happen? They say they were voting against corruption and lobbyists and Establishment Washington, but one look at the men this narcissistic sociopath wants in the highest positions of government reveals that none of those things will be reflected in his administration. They won’t get their jobs, they won’t get their draining of the swamp, but we’re all going to get the racism, bigotry, ignorance, and white supremacy they had no problem voting for.

Denial. Somehow, someone is going to do something to stop this from happening. He’s breaking all sorts of ethical rules. He’s breaking diplomatic norms. He doesn’t even want to live in the fucking White House! He doesn’t want the job, he just wants the attention. This can’t be happening.

And back to Anger. And then more Bargaining.

And Depression. So much Depression.

Paul Ryan is going to destroy Medicare, just because he can. Because he is a selfish, evil, despicable man. For the first time in the history of the nation, the Senate refused to confirm a Supreme Court justice (and apparently even the fucking Democrats who we’re supposed to count on to fight back are fine with it) and now our nation will deal with a regressive, right-wing majority on the court for the rest of my life. The Republicans are going to roll back and undo and destroy as much of the social progress of the last 40 years as they can, and in the richest country in the world, our citizens will suffer needlessly, because people like Paul Ryan subscribe to a selfish, hateful, myopic philosophy created by an asshole who never had to experience the consequences of her bullshit.

All of this, and more, because of twenty-five percent of voters.

Oh, there’s Anger again.

And so it goes, this cycle of grief, for my country, for the freedom and hope and opportunity I’ve always believed is fundamental to the American identity, for my fellow humans who are going to suffer now and in the future.

All because twenty-five percent of voters looked at this despicable, hateful, ignorant liar, and voted for him and everything he represents.