Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 49

Flash Friday

Flash Fiction, that is, you filthy animals.

This is another one from my dumb Tumblr thing, based on another neat work of sci-fi art I reblogged.

Peter Elson, Pirates of The Asteroids

Jace looked up from the scanner. “Two colonials, Hep! On the other side of the rock.”

“Perfect,” Hep said, almost to himself.

“Perfect?! How are we gonna handle two?!”

Hep took a short breath. The rookie was jumpy and a little panicky, but what rookie wasn’t? Flying through space is fun and all, right up until someone’s trying to blast you into it.

“Colonials are good, but they’re also cocky, Jace,” Hep said, powering up the Needle’s thrusters.

The scanner flipped from green to red and Jace instinctively interrupted him. “Two colonial Zona fighters now moving to intercept, sir.”

Hep continued. “One of them, alone, could be a problem, but a pair? These idiots will be so busy trying to impress each other, we’ll be able to fly circles around them.”

The scanner sounded and began to flash. “A third colonial Zona fighter has activated its ions and is now moving into attack formation Delta,” Jace said.

A moment of tense silence filled the Needle’s cockpit. “Hang on.” Hep pulled his controls toward him and the Needle arced sharply upward, spun 180 degrees, and flattened out again. Hep powered the ship’s thrusters to maximum, pushing both pirates heavily into their seats.

“What are you doing?”

“Two is a patrol group. We can handle two.” The Zonas came around the asteroid in a tight formation.

“Three is a combat defense squad. They only put a combat defense squad around this rock if there’s something more than metal in it.

“The good news is, we just found something very valuable.”

The Zonas opened fire.

“The bad news is, we may not get to tell anyone about it.”

I’m proud of these things, because I do them off the top of my head, taking the first bit of inspiration I find in the image, and writing without judgment. In this particular one, I decided to sort of flip it and make the pirates the two people in the foreground, who are probably not meant to be the bad guys in the image. Then, while I was writing it, I realized that I thought there were two ships that I called the colonials, but there were actually three. So I decided that our heroes had also made the same mistake, which is why they are fleeing from them

Life is too short to be Voldemort

My talk to Miami University went very well, and there were way more adults (like, old people like me adults, not college-aged adults) than I expected. Turns out I was terrified for no good reason.

I recorded the entire thing, and once I have a chance to clean up and edit the audio, I’ll post it on Radio Free Burrito. Until then, here’s an excerpt from my prepared remarks.

(NB: I write these things to be spoken, to be performed. I don’t know if it translates perfectly to written text, because if I were writing this to be read, I would change a bunch of things.)

There are a very few absolute truths in human existence, but I will discuss a couple of them today, starting with the fundamental truth from which everything else springs: everyone here, and every single human with whom we share this planet, wants to be happy. Pretty much everything we do in our lives is motivated by that desire in one way or another, and that actually works out very well for me, professionally, because I make my living as an entertainer. It’s my job to do my best to make people happy!

Today, it works out for me personally, too, because you are the future of our society, and you will shape the world that I’m going to grow old and have my diapers changed in. I would like that world to be kinder than it is right now, if I do this right, I’ll plant some seeds today that will provide some shade for me to relax in while I yell at clouds. So I hope that you’ll view me as a kind of dungeon master – someone who has logged a lot of hours in this game, can see what’s on the road ahead and offer some idea as to what your choices might be and how you can protect yourself and make friends along the journey. I can’t promise you that I’ll give you the key to happiness (because there isn’t one), but I will give you some conditional bonus modifiers on all of your future happiness rolls.

(That’s a D&D reference. If you don’t know what that means, I’m sure a nearby nerd will be happy to over-explain it to you long after you’ve lost interest. It’s what we do.)

So when I’m not being an actor, I am a writer. These two disciplines compliment each other in interesting ways when I’m discovering and defining a character’s narrative. I need to think about what a character wants in a story, identify who or what is helping or hindering his efforts, how he feels about it, and what he does as a result of those feelings.

If you’re paying extremely close attention, you may have noticed that I just described, in very broad strokes, what life is. Our life is a story, and we are the heroes of our own narrative. We are all starring in the story of our lives. And when we meet and interact with other people,  they become characters in our stories, while we become characters in theirs.

I’m technically here today to talk about bullying, but as I worked on this talk, I kept drifting away from that topic, and coming back to these thoughts I have about being happy. When I was your age, I didn’t need someone to stand up in front of me and tell me that bullying is crappy, because I already knew that — I was and am a nerd, for fucks sake, and in the 80s the suggestion that we’d one day hear people accusing people of pretending to be nerds because it was cool was about as likely as carrying a computer in your pocket or people thinking vaccines weren’t a good idea.

So I’m still going to talk about bullying, but I’m going to spend the rest of my time here sharing with you some things I’ve picked up over the years that have helped me find happiness. These things actually go together, because of this other fundamental truth: bullies and harassers are afraid, insecure, and REMARKABLY unhappy. In their stories, as they look for happiness, they haven’t had a lot of time finding it. They feel frustrated, they feel bad about themselves, and the only way they can give themselves a sense of worth and empowerment is to do everything they can to hurt other people.

And I worry a lot because at this moment in time, it is easier than ever to be a bully.

So if we just treat our bullies and harassers with sympathy and empathy, if we could just get them to talk about their feelings while they’re hurting us or harassing us or making our lives miserable because we happened to get seated next to them on the bus the same morning their dad called them a loser for the hundredth time, then bullies would magically transform into fully-functioning people, everything will be great and the cycle will be broken! Yay! I just saved humanity. One Nobel Prize, please!

…yeah. It doesn’t work that way. But understanding what motivates someone to be cruel and hurtful can help us to identify that potential in ourselves, and stop us from becoming the villain in someone else’s story.

And before we can understand someone else, we have to understand ourselves. Before we can even think about caring for another person, we have to take care of ourselves.

I’m going to repeat that, because I think it’s really important: you have to take care of yourself, emotionally as well as physically. Nobody is entitled to your time and attention. And, dudes, I wish I didn’t have to single you out, but I kinda do: if she’s not interested in your time or attention, walk. Away.

If there’s a person in your life who consistently makes you feel bad, that person does not deserve to be in your life. Sure, meaningful relationships take work, but there’s a real difference between working to maintain a healthy relationship and being a minor character in someone else’s story that’s a poorly-written melodrama.

And here’s an important point that I want you to keep in mind: Even though I can now experience full empathy for my childhood bully – I need you to understand that you are NOT RESPONSIBLE for your bully’s feelings. But! Being empathetic gives you a deeper understanding of the situation, and a deeper feeling of hope for the future, as well as a way to live your life at its happiest.

I think that’s one of the reasons that people like me and my friend Chris Hardwick, who are adult nerds now, work so hard to make the entire world a safe place for the young nerds of today. You have all grown up in a world where it is harder to find someone who doesn’t want to talk about Doctor Who than it is to find someone who will make fun of you for loving it. You damn kids today have no idea how good you’ve got it.

But it’s awesome to be a nerd today. It’s awesome to be a person who is massively passionate about something, whether it’s science fiction or basketball or that iPhone game Felicia Day won’t stop playing where you adopt cats for some reason.

Being a nerd isn’t about what you love, it’s about how you love it, and the way a nerd loves something can be really weird to the muggles of the world … but you’ve got to know this, from my voice of experience into whatever it is you kids today have where we old people have ears: if you’re weird, you gotta own that. If someone you know is weird but feels weird about it, you gotta help them own that.

If you’re weird, don’t try and hide it – find people who love your weirdness. And if you can’t find anyone who shares the things you like, don’t worry. They’re out there, I promise you. Right now you probably feel like you’re immortal – and that’s wonderful, so did I. But the curse of immortality is that time stretches out forever, and the moment you’re in right now seems eternal. It’s not. This will all end sooner than you know it, and be a distant memory.

And if someone else is doing something that seems weird to you, and it isn’t hurting anyone – let them be. It seems like these days, it’s easier than ever to be a bully and just get away with it – or not even realize how hurtful you’re being. it’s easy to forget that there’s a person on the other side of the screen. We’re surrounded by online communities and networks where a shitty person can hide behind a fake username and make life miserable for those of us who don’t. And if someone is being shitty to you – remember that being yourself is the best protection spell you can cast, because YOU are always with yourself, YOU have to live with yourself, long after the people you were trying to impress by being someone you were not have moved on, leaving you all alone in the parking lot at the – whatever it is you young people are doing these days that you really didn’t want to go to in the first place.

Look at my old roommate Chris Hardwick – this is a guy who was dumped headfirst into a trashcan full of old lunch spaghetti because he was enthusiastic about comic books and Latin and chess. So he did everything he could to distance himself from the things he loved, out of fear of being ridiculed for it. When I met him, when we were both 18, I could see that there was a nerd screaming to be let out of the cage he was keeping it in. I could see it, because I was doing the same thing at the time. And we’ll both tell you that we were pretty darn unhappy for many years, until we decided to embrace all of those things that people used to make fun of us for, and come out as nerds. And we have no shortage of friends and people who love us for it.

OK, one last fundamental truth of life: you attract to yourself what you put into the world. When you are kind and gentle, you’ll find yourself surrounded by kind and gentle people, and you’ll all be like a tribe of awesome. When you’re cruel and selfish, you’ll be surrounded by jerks, dragged down into an abandoned well of stagnant misery where nobody wants to help you out, because that means they’d be stuck down there alone.

So this is the part where I try really hard to impart some useful advice that you can hopefully apply to your own life, to help you find happiness more often than not, to help you be a more joyful person, and thus put a significant dent in the population of unhapppy bullies of the future.

Be kind. Not just to others, but to yourself.
Be honest.
Be honorable.
Work hard. Everything worth doing is hard.
Try not to be the smartest person in the room. Keep learning.
Always do your best. Your best will vary from day to day and that’s okay.
It isn’t enough to stand up for yourself. You have to stand up for others.
Don’t be a dick.

I used to think that the planet was huge and I would live forever. The thing is, the world is getting smaller every year, and we have to share this diminishing space with each other. No one has ever called their parents and said, “My new apartment is awesome! The guy next door is such a jerk I can’t wait to deal with his bullshit every day!” Our lives are really short, and nobody ever used their dying breath to say, “I … I wish I’d spent more time being a dick to people.”

We’re all in this together, you guys, and I want you all to be the most awesome hero you can be in your own story … and I don’t want you to be the villain in someone else’s.

Life’s too short to be Voldemort.

Thanks for listening to me.

Even though I genuinely enjoyed this experience, it was so far out of my comfort zone, I never really felt … well, comfortable. I don’t think I’ll make a habit of traveling around the country to give speeches (even though I’ve already agreed to do it two more times on different topics this year), but I’m glad I did this. I met a lot of students while I was there, and I had a wonderful and inspiring time talking with them. I have a lot more hope for the future today than I did before I met them, which is nice.

I’m not terrified to speak to a bunch of college students. You’re terrified to speak to a bunch of college students.

This picture does not do the sunset I saw when I landed last night justice.

I’m in Ohio for 24ish hours, because I’m giving a talk at Miami University later today. I’ve given talks at conventions over the years, and some of them have even been successful. I’ve keynoted two PAXes performed at lots of w00tstocks, so speaking to large groups of people is nothing new for me … but this is the first time I’ve actually prepared a talk on a subject, and traveled across the country to give it to a bunch of college students.

While I was working on my talk, which is titled Stop Hitting Yourself: We Need To Talk About Bullying*, I realized that I have been out of college longer that my audience has been alive. So … that’s neat. I was reminded of a moment last year, when I was having a drink with my friend. He asked me where Anne was, and I told him that she was out with her friends, because one of them was celebrating her 50th birthday. I said it like I would have said, “She walked to the corner and came back,” because that’s about how much of a big deal it was. My friend, who I’ve known since we were teenagers, was quiet and thoughtful for a moment, then looked at me and said, “we have become our parents’ weird friends.”

So on the one hand, I embrace and love that I’m 43 and feel like I have at least that many years left in my life. On one hand, I feel like I’ve got a lot of this Adulting thing figured out, and I don’t totally suck at it. On the other hand, if I was 20, would I listen to 43 year-old me? I sure hope so, because I’m about to go speak to a few thousand of 20 year-old mes.

 

 

*As I worked on my talk, I kept drifting away from that main topic, and toward addressing the root causes of bullying, which I believe are rooted in unhappiness, so the majority of my talk is what I would have wanted to hear when I was 20. Instead of some old guy coming up and going “Hey don’t do this you damn kids,” it’s more like an old guy saying “I’ve lived a lot, and while there isn’t a cheat guide to being happy, here are some things I’ve figured out that work more often than they don’t. Maybe they’ll work for you, too. Also, don’t be a dick.”

 

 

Remake Culture is the Worst (except when it isn’t)

I posted a thing on my dumb Tumblr thing about how awful the Stallone Judge Dredd movie was, and a lot of people asked me if I’d seen the 2012 Dredd with Karl Urban. I hadn’t, and didn’t intend to, for reasons that will become clear shortly. So many people recommended it to me, though, and it had such a great group of creative people behind it, I gave it a chance … and I loved it. Here’s what I wrote about it this morning:

I hate reboot culture. I hate that studios remake movies that were perfectly fine the first time around, simply because they’re too afraid to take a chance on something new, different and unproven.

That said, in an instance like Dredd, where the original film adaptation was a catastrophic failure of flaming shit, I should be willing to make exceptions.

I should be, but I’m usually not, because I’m stubborn. So when I posted about how I didn’t want to watch the 2012 version of the film, about two dozen people urged me to reconsider. I decided to take a chance (you know, like studios won’t), and watched it last night. I am so glad that I did, because I loved everything about it. A lot of fans fixate on Dredd never taking off the helmet, which I understand, but I don’t think that’s its strongest selling point. What I loved about it was how it felt like a proper motion picture adaptation of the 2000 A.D comics I read in the 80s, and the Games Workshop games I played from that universe. The city blocks felt massive. The Judges felt powerful. The relationship between Dredd and Anderson felt real. She didn’t need him to save her, even when he was trying to. The design of the entire picture, from the costumes to the sets to the little details like graffiti was pitch-perfect. And the photography was sensational.

I felt like it started to wobble a little bit in the third act, but like I originally wrote yesterday, I was on board by that point so I was willing to go along with it and let it be. I’m guessing that there won’t be any sequels, or we would have heard about it by now. If that’s the case, it’s a bummer, because I’d like to see these characters and this universe again … but maybe it’s for the best that this film can simply exist as its own thing, without being tainted by a sequel that lets us down (OH HAI THE MATRIX). Or maybe it’s a tragedy that Dredd won’t get its Aliens or T2. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

So now I’m thinking about other movies that missed the point of their source material (Running Man and The Shining come to mind, though they stand on their own in their own glorious ways), and trying to figure out what other pictures I’d remake, if I could pass a universal law that requires two new movies be made for every remake, because I am a powerful, tyrannical king.

Following these rules, what would you remake, and why? Show your work.

fun with writing prompts

I’ve started doing this thing on my dumb Tumblr thing where I take a picture from one of the blogs I follow, and use it to inspire a little bit of prose fiction.

I really liked this one, so I’m sharing it here.

Illustration for article ‘The Scientist, The Humanist, and Us’ (1981) by Ron Walotsky in Future magazine.

“Everything in our world, from the food we eat to the bombs we use to kill each other, is just reflected light.”

Poe floated in the isolation tank, the lecture playing into the darkness from an unseen speaker.

“Reality is real because we all agree upon it,” the lecturer continued.

Was there anything beyond the darkness of his solitude? Did the world exist if he wasn’t there to experience it?

If it wasn’t there, what was holding the isolation tank?

“Or maybe reality exists because we are, all of us, inside the mind of an even greater being, the way our thoughts and ideas – our reality – is within our own.”

Poe exhaled all the air from his lungs, and floated in the darkness.

 

I do not have time to be sick, so of course I am.

It was Thursday night, and I was at a gathering of nerds that I host with Bill Prady and Felicia Day. A lot of my favorite people were there (that’s the whole point) including Hank and John Green, who were in town on unrelated business.

When he came into the room, I hugged John Green tightly. “It is so good to see you!”

He hugged me back. “You too!”

I stepped back and looked at him. John’s taller than me, and I always forget that because he’s usually sitting down in his videos.

“So, what’s new with you?” I said.

“I have strep throat,” he said. It was very casual, like “I am wearing Vans.” What I heard was, “Chopper, sic balls.”

Oh. That’s not right. What I heard was, “I have infected you with murder death muwahahahaha you never saw my nefarious plan coming, puny mortal!”

“Wait. Like. Now? You have it right now? And you just hugged me?” A cold panic began in my abdomen.

“I’ve been on antibiotics for four days,” he said, “I’m not contagious.”

“I sure hope you aren’t,” I said.

Fast forward six days. My throat hurts so much I can barely swallow. I have a headache that won’t respond to any pain meds. I have chills in my body, and aches in my joints. Last night, I kept waking up every few minutes, because I felt like I was suffocating.

I really hope it’s just allergies, or exhaustion because I flew to Toronto to work on Saturday and came home last night. Maybe it’s a combination of both … but there’s this doctor in my head who is even more terrifying than WebMD, and she’s telling me that I have strep and probably a mono flare up and did I mention that I’m going to Ohio on Sunday to speak at Miami University?

Yeah. So I’m trying not to panic. If I don’t feel significantly better tomorrow morning, I’m going to the doctor and demanding some sort of Bruce Banner treatment to kill this thing, because I don’t have time for this.

Silver lining: if I do have strep, I got it from John Green, which means that I probably got infected with his writing skill, too. So look out, world. Here I come.

demons worry when the wizard is near

Still tired, and the pollen plus wind minus humidity has given me a headache that refuses to go away … but I’m better than I was.

If you’re one of the hundreds of people who reached out and offered a bit of kindness, thank you.

I wrote a story. It isn’t done, and it may never be published, but for the first time in ages, I felt like I needed to write it and get it out, so I could get my mind around what I have to write, so I can finally get back to what I want to write.

And actually doing that, instead of sitting around and actively not doing that … well, it was kind of a big and important thing for me to accomplish.

Saturday, I didn’t feel like doing anything, but I had plans to play Pandemic Legacy with my friends, so I made myself go over to my friend’s house, and we played two games. We were looking good and then got WRECKED in two turns in the first half of March, and then we completed our objectives in the second half of March.

It was looking bad for us.

I mean, really bad.

But we rallied.

My friend’s son, who is 14 (which isn’t possible because he was just born like, not that long ago), joined us for Pandemic. It was the first time he’d ever played, and we didn’t want to run the game for him, so we let him watch the first game, asking as many questions as he wanted, explaining everything that we did and why. By the time he was playing in his first game (our second), he had a surprisingly deep understanding of the game, and was making really clever and insightful decisions.

When people ask me why I do Tabletop, and when power gamers are shitty to be about Tabletop, I remind anyone who cares to listen that the whole point of the show is to make more Gamers. A world with more Tabletop Gamers in it is a better world, and it was pretty awesome that I got to be a very small part of helping my friend’s mission to share the joy of gaming with his son.

After Pandemic, we played Terra Mystica.

It’s a damn fun game that’s really complex, and I had this surprisingly joyful moment when I saw, a few turns too late, how the game worked and how I’d made bad strategic choices. The part of my brain that has Depression in the driver’s seat right now wanted to make sure I knew how stupid I was, but the rational part of my brain was too busy enjoying my time with my friends, and reminding me that figuring out how to play a game is part of the fun of playing a new game.

And then when I got home, I did that writing I mentioned at the beginning. Here’s a tiny piece of it:

The Magician sat alone in his study, and practiced his magic. He conjured small creatures who existed briefly before vanishing in a burst of fragrant smoke. He extinguished the torches with the wave of one hand, then drove the darkness away with the other. His magic was passable, and he was quite good at it, but the Magician wanted to be a true Wizard, and to become a true Wizard, he needed an apprentice to train.

It’s not that long, only about 2000 words, but it’s been far too long since I finished something that I started, even if it was only the puke draft. Now I’m sitting on it for a few days before I decide if I’ll rewrite and edit, or if I’m going to move on to the next thing on the white board.

I have an idea for a short film that, unlike every other short film idea I’ve had recently, doesn’t take place on a spaceship or another planet, and can easily be filmed with my DSLR and a crew of three people. So I’m going to writing it, and maybe even shoot it.

Never talking

Just keeps walking

Spreading his magic

so distorted and thin

I have a really great life. I don’t struggle to pay my bills, I get to do what I love for my job, I have an amazing wife who is my best friend and my partner in many crimes. I have a wonderful house, I am surrounded by people I love who love me. I’m successful in much of my work, and some days it feels like the best stuff in my professional life is yet to come.

And yet.

The thing about Depression, for me, is that it can take something that was already unlikely, like not getting an audition for the Ready Player One movie, and using that to negate and erase all the other good and awesome things in my life. The thing about my Depression is that it can take something that I love that I’m doing really well, like rebooting my life and taking extremely good care of myself — the best I have in years — and make me feel like I don’t deserve to feel this good. The thing about my Depression is that it can make me feel like whatever it is I want to do, whatever it is that I want to start, whatever it is that I want to finish, just isn’t worth it, because it’s going to suck and nobody will like it, or it’ll be great but nobody will care.

Depression is a dick, and Depression lies, and even though I know all of that with the rational and reasonable part of my brain, the Depression part of my brain has been really loud and persistent and just relentless for a couple of weeks, now. It’s Friday, and when I look back on this week, I can see all the important and good stuff that I’ve done, I can see the small but meaningful steps I’ve taken toward completing things that are important to me … but those things are all in the shadows that are cast by the giant spotlight Depression is shining on the things I didn’t do.

And the thing is, I could probably come up with good reasons that I didn’t do the things that I wanted to do, and they are probably reasonable reasons, too. But I also know that all week long, Depression was right there on my shoulder like the leprechaun that tells Ralph to burn it all down, and quietly telling me that there’s no point, there’s no reason to do it, it’s not worth my time.

And now it’s Friday, and Depression is telling me that I’m a failure because I didn’t finish the things that Depression helped ensure I didn’t start.

That’s the insidious part of Depression, at least for me, and I know that to a person who doesn’t struggle with mental illness like I do it just sounds like a pity party where all the gifts are excuses.

But here I am. On Friday. No closer to finishing the things I wanted to finish than I was on Monday.

And I’m tired. I’m having a hell of a time falling asleep and staying asleep, and when I do sleep, I have vivid dreams that make me feel like I haven’t slept at all.

These places I visit in my dreams, and the experiences I have when I’m there, are so real, I feel like I’m forced to live this other life when I fall asleep that I have no control over, and it’s not awesome.

I’ve had a splitting headache since I got out of bed two hours later than I wanted to, and I’m tired.

i’m so tired.

Fuck Daylight Saving Time

I fucking hate Daylight Saving Time. I know that it’s just an hour, but it really fucks up my brain. I already have a tough time sleeping, and something about screwing up the time by just a single hour makes my brain get confused and agitated and oh look it’s 1am and I’m wide awake for no good reason.

So I’ve gone from getting to bed between 9 and 10, and waking up between 6 and 8 — which I never thought I would have liked but ended up loving while it lasted — to struggling to fall asleep before 11pm, and sleeping much later than I want to.

First world problems, I know, and I’m lucky to have a flexible (read: no) schedule at the moment, which is allowing me to make it through my days feeling rested, if annoyed, and that’s a luxury most people don’t get.

But, seriously, fuck Daylight Saving Time. What a pointless and stupid thing it is.

Did you know I have a podcast?

There must be, like, fives of people out there who would want to listen to this podcast that I occasionally do, and I they don’t even know it exists!

Well, let me fix that, and introduce you to Radio Free Burrito.

The current episode contains no secret messages.

This show features a whole lot of talking about stuff, including the JoCo Cruise, art, auditions, and why it’s great to do things that are hard.

So maybe give it a listen, why not, share it with your friends, and review it on the places you do that sort of thing.