Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 55

ephemeral nightmare (proof of concept video)

This is a proof of concept I made to test out a project idea I’ve had for a little while, sort of similar to my Ephemera Mashup. The main inspiration for this came to me awhile ago, when I was in a bar downtown that was silently playing Mondo Hollywood on TVs. That film, without sound, is a collection of images that are strange but also good, and I thought it would be fun and cool to collect films from the Internet Archive, and cut together something of my own.

The idea with this particular proof was to create something that was a little creepy and slightly off, that could be projected onto the wall at a warehouse party, without sound, as background art. I ended up with something that works with or without sound, and (I think) rewards varying levels of attention. In fact, I rendered the audio only, and put it on my Soundcloud, because I think it’s cool and weird all on its own.

So, to make this, I grabbed a bunch of public domain footage from the Internet Archive, and cut it all up. Then I tossed it into iMovie and applied some filters. I modified the audio in Audacity, and mixed in some other audio that I also created in Audacity by modifying other public domain works. If I like it, and feel that it was worth the time, I’ll make some more like this that actually have more deliberate cuts and choices in the content. At the moment, this is primarily clips that I eyeballed, thought were interesting, and tossed into the edit timeline.

I got sort of fascinated by some old burlesque and stag footage that I found at the Archive, so that’s in here, and may offend those with sensitive dispositions.

Seven Things I Did To Reboot My Life

About twenty years ago, I had a portable spa in the back yard of my first house. One day, the heater stopped working, so I called a repairman to come out and look at it. He told me that there would be an $85 charge no matter what, and I told him that was okay. When he got to my house, he opened up the access panel where the heater, pump, and filter lived. He looked inside, then looked back at me.

“Did you try pushing the reset button?” He asked.

“Um. No,” I said.

He pushed the reset button, and the heater came back to life.

“That’ll be $85,” he said. I paid him.

This post is about realizing that I was sitting in cold water, and not doing anything to turn the heater back on. This post is about how I hit the reset button.

I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.

So I took a long, hard, serious look at myself, and concluded that some things needed to change.

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

All of these things are interconnected in ways that are probably obvious and non-obvious, and by making a commitment to do my best to accomplish these things, I’ve been able to do a soft reboot of my life.

The hardest part of this was not drink less beer, which surprised me. The hardest part has been writing more. The easiest part of this has been exercise more, which also surprised me. I thought watching more movies would be easy, but it turns out that time is not a renewable resource, nor can time be stretched out in any real way that lets me get, say, four hours of movie into an hour of linear time.

In fact, if I’m being honest with myself (and I have to be, because being honest with myself is the only way this is going to work; I’m making major life changes here, remember), all of these things are hard to a certain degree, and that’s okay, because everything worth doing is hard.

So let’s go down this list and talk about each thing a little bit:

Drink less beer.

I love beer. I mean, I really love it. I brew it, I write about it, I design recipes of my own, and I’ve structured entire meals around what food will pair with the beer I want to drink. The thing about beer, though, is that it’s really easy to just keep on drinking it until it’s all gone or your brain goes, “um, hey, man, ithinkthat … imean … I mean, sorry, hold on. I th- think that youvehadneough.” Excessive drinking isn’t just tough on my liver (which has been a fucking CHAMP for years), it’s also tough on my brain because of my Depression. It’s tough on my heart, too, it turns out, because alcohol is metabolized as sugar which drives up insulin which makes my cholesterol go up which is bad for my heart thanks a lot genetics.

So I just made a commitment to drink less, drink more responsibly, and keep the intoxicating effects of the beers I love to a minimum. The first two weeks of this were really tough because I was habitually drinking two or three beers a night, but once I got used to it and broke the habit, it became as easy as I think it’s going to get (and that varies from day to day).

Read more. Write more.

These go together more closely than any other things on this list. Stephen King says that writers who don’t make time to read aren’t going to make time to write and holy shit is that exactly, perfectly true. I need to read so that my imagination is inspired. I need to read so I get an artistic and creative hunger that can only be fed by writing. I need to read so that I feel challenged to scrape ideas out of my skull and turn them into words and images. I need to read because if I don’t, I’m not going to make time to write, and even though I’ve had a lot of success recently as an actor and host and Guy On The Internet, all of those things are ultimately in the hands of others. I became a writer ten years ago because I not only loved it, but because it was a way for me to express myself creatively in a way that ultimately gave me control over my own destiny and my own life.

I struggled as an actor for years (it’s all in my book, Just A Geek! You should buy it!) and I was doomed to a future as a Former Child Star with occasional, humiliating, soul-crushing reality TV gigs if I was lucky. But I made a choice about twelve years ago to stop chasing the big film career I always felt I deserved (and maybe would have had, if I’d made different choices and had better advisers when I was younger) and start telling stories. By writing those stories and embracing the love I’d always had for creative writing, I made a second act in my life (take that, F. Scott Fitzgerald!).

Now this could sound like I’m complaining, or ungrateful, but I promise that isn’t the case. I am totally aware that a combination of hard work, privilege, and luck have all come together for me and put me in a very good place. But I worry about things. A lot. When the night is darkest, and it seems like the sun may never rise, I worry about how long I can sustain this life. I worry about what will happen when the people who choose to hire actors decide that they don’t want to hire me any more. I worry about how I’ll support and provide for my family, and on and on and on.

I am profoundly and completely grateful for the success I had and continue to have, because of the hard work I did in those years. I’m so lucky and grateful for the things I’ve been able to do on TV, and I’m really proud of the things I’ve created for Geek & Sundry. But even Tabletop and Titansgrave aren’t mine the same way a story I wrote is. In fact, the show I did with my name in the title was probably the least “mine” of anything I’ve ever done, and that didn’t feel particularly good at the end of the day.

But writing and storytelling always feels good. It’s truly mine, whether it’s awesome or shit, and nobody can take it away from me. For all of this year and most of last year, I hardly wrote anything of consequence. A few blogs, a couple of columns, and some small creative things that were always well received by the audience, sure, but never consistently and never in a way that fed the creative hunger that constantly makes my stomach growl. Going all the way back to last August, I swore that I’d take more time away from other things to focus on writing and taking the pages and pages of story ideas I have in my little notebook and turning them into actual stories. The thing is, when I took that time off, my health and mana were so depleted, I couldn’t find it in myself to do the work. Every few months, I’d take a week or two off, and instead of writing like I wanted to, I’d play video games and do nothing else, because I was just so goddamn tired. Then I would look up, realize a couple of weeks had passed, I hadn’t done anything, and I needed to get back to “real” work. I would feel frustrated and empty, and the whole cycle would start all over again.

I’ve been reading this book called The War of Art. It gets a little churchy at points, but I can skip over that and focus on the stuff that helps me: identifying all the barriers we create to give us the excuses we crave to not create. It turns out that if I were as good at sitting down and writing as I am at coming up with all the reasons I just can’t do it today, I’d have written ten novels this year.

So a big part of this Life Reset I’m doing is being honest with myself about why I want to write, why I need to write, and why I keep making excuses for not doing it. I won’t go into it, because it’s either too personal or too boring, but if you’re reading this and starting to have the glimmer of an epiphany about your own creative process, maybe pick up this book and check it out. It’s been very helpful for me.

Yesterday, I wrote over 3000 words. I only stopped because it was time to leave for a hockey game (there’s that privilege again), and I felt so goddamn good about myself when I walked out my door. I couldn’t wait to get back to work today, and I’m having so much fun writing this story, it may not even be fair to call it work.

Reading is an important component of this entire process for me, and making time to nourish my creative side has made a big and positive difference. Whether it’s comic books, magazine articles, fiction or non-fiction, I’m reading every day, and finding inspiration in everything I read.

Watch more movies.

Thanks to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and a billion movie channels, we have access to more movies than we can ever watch, and that is amazing. Watching movies is, for me, similar to reading books. It’s part homework (as an actor and writer) and part inspiration. I have the opportunity to make short films with Nerdist and Geek & Sundry, so watching movies — good movies, not disposable trash — just makes sense. It also engages my brain in creative and intellectual ways that are important. I need to watch things and feel like I can do that, too, or feel like if that thing got made, there’s no reason I couldn’t make one of my own things. Hell, in this room where I am right now, I have everything I need to take some sort of simple creative idea and turn it into a movie. So why not? Why not watch movies as varied as the true classics (Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown) to the weird 70s experimental (The Trip, Scorpio Rising) to the epic blockbusters (Star Wars, Jaws) and get inspired by them? This is something that I need to do, because sitting in my office all day and looking at the Internet isn’t making me happier, more creative, more productive, or more inspired.

Related: listen to more podcasts like Lore, You Must Remember This, The Memory Palace, Welcome to Night Vale, The Black Tapes, and Unfictional. Those all inspire me to learn more, focus on pacing and storytelling and narrative, and make me want to be a more interesting person.

Get better sleep.

Maybe this is a strange one, but hear me out: for months — most of this year, in fact, now that I think of it — I haven’t slept well. I’ve had the hardest time, ever, falling asleep and staying asleep. I’ve had nightmares that terrify me from the moment I finally fall asleep, well into the following day as they haunt my memories. I’ve lived with the constant dread of waking up in a panic attack, and then waking up in a panic attack. It’s been terrible, and has contributed tremendously to my inability to get motivated, my reliance on alcohol to relax and go to sleep at night, and a general feeling of exhaustion, laziness, pessimism, and futility. I talked with my psychiatrist about it, and we tried sleep medication, which only made my body feel tired, while my brain was still racing along at the speed of terror. After several different attempts and failures, we tried changing up my brain meds, and about six weeks ago, I finally started feeling like a human again. I won’t go into the deep science of it, but we think I just had too much of some chemicals in my brain, and not enough of others. And it turns out that drinking alcohol to help you go to sleep does not result in good sleep, but does result in feeling like shit when you wake up.

So by committing to getting better sleep, I have changed up my evening and nighttime routines. I eat earlier, I drink less, I read more, and I’ve been able to slowly adjust my circadian rhythm from wanting to sleep at 2am to wanting to sleep around 11pm. I’ve used some great apps on my Droid to help me monitor things and determine what patterns work best for me, and while it’s still a work in progress — this entire thing is a work in progress, actually — it’s definitely getting better. When I don’t have nightmares all goddamn night, I’m more rested when I wake up. When I’m rested, I feel better in every aspect of my being. When I feel better, I am more creative and more willing to allow myself to take the risk of feeling good about myself.

Isn’t that strange? It’s a thing that I do, that I’ve done for my whole life: I don’t want to take the risk of feeling good about myself, because I’m afraid that I’ll get complacent, or arrogant, or someone will discover the Truth that my Depression tells me: I’m not that great and I don’t deserve to feel good about myself. I’m reading another book, called Trapped in the Mirror, that’s really helping me get through that, though.

So I take the risk of feeling good about myself, and more often than not, I actually do feel good about myself.

Eat better.

We all say we’re going to do this, and we always make excuses for why we don’t. Now I’ve been very lucky. My whole life, I’ve been able to stay at a healthy weight and body type without much effort … then I turned 40. In the last couple of years, I gained almost 30 pounds, my cholesterol went through the roof, and my whole body began to hurt, all the time.

There’s no excuse or rationalizing, here. I just wasn’t taking care of myself. I wasn’t eating right. I wasn’t getting good nutrition. I wasn’t thinking of food as fuel and nutrients. I wasn’t making an effort to be smart about this, because I didn’t particularly care about myself. I didn’t really like myself, I didn’t feel like I could do anything about getting tubby and slow and out of shape, because I was just getting older and that’s the way it was.

That’s all bullshit. Here’s the thing, and this is pretty much the whole reason I made a choice almost three months ago to hit this reset button and really get my life together: I didn’t like myself. I didn’t care about myself. There’s a bit more to it, but that’s the two things that exist the most clearly and form the root of the last few years of my life. In fact, it took my wife, who is the most important person in my whole universe, telling me, “I feel like you don’t care about having a long life together with me, because you don’t care about taking care of yourself.”

Well, that was ridiculous. Of course I cared about having a long life with her! Of course I cared … didn’t I?

I cared about her, and I cared about our kids, but I didn’t really care about myself. And my Depression was doing a really good job of making sure that I didn’t really think about my choices and my actions affected the people I love and care about the most in this world. That was what made me look up, take my head out of the darkness, and commit to doing all of these things.

It turns out that eating well, consistently, isn’t as easy as just eating what I want, when I want. It turns out that it’s really hard to break out of bad habits, but it also turns out that, once I made the commitment to do that, I started feeling better almost immediately. I got an app that makes it easy to track my nutrition, calories, and exercise, and in a very short amount of time, I lost almost all the weight I’d gained. I’d still like to lose five more pounds, and that five pounds is really keen on sticking around, but it’s slowly coming off, it’s staying off, and it feels great. Also, having a digital scale that lets me track precisely how much I just pooped is probably the pinnacle of technology in the 21st century.

And a super bonus that comes with this? My body doesn’t hurt like it did, because I’m not schlepping around extra weight. My joints are healthy, my muscles are stronger, and my skeleton is just in better shape, and that leads me into the last part of this.

Exercise regulary.

My son, Nolan, is a personal trainer. He’s in phenomenal shape, looks like Thor (for reals), and trains both me and his mom. So I should be in great shape, right?

Well, if I’d stuck to a good diet, taken better care of myself, and felt like I actually deserved to feel good about myself, then yes. But as we’ve seen, that just wasn’t happening. I worked out a couple of times a week, I did good, hard workouts, but then I’d feel sore and tired and wasn’t getting the results I wanted (mostly due to poor diet) and I’d come up with reasons not to do it. Then I’d make the mistake of seeing myself in the mirror when I got out of the shower, and I’d really hate myself.

I think that lifting weights and doing inside stuff just isn’t for me. I get bored easily, and I don’t fully participate in the workouts. But I love running. I used to run marathons and 5Ks all the time, and my entire self felt amazing when I did. So why not give running a try again? The excuses wrote themselves.

I was working on Con Man with Sean Astin. Sean told me about the Ironman Triathlon he was training for, and I complained that I couldn’t run anymore, because my body always hurt. Sean talked to me about the diet aspect of it, and then suggested that I use a method of mixing running with walking to work myself back into shape.

So I bought an app called Zombies, Run 5K for my phone. It uses recording and all the various sensors in my phone to let me imagine that I’m a runner in the zombie apocalypse. While I am being trained by a doctor, I listen to my music (Taylor Swift and Tove Lo accompany me on most of my runs) and a story unfolds in my ears. I’m three weeks into the training, and while it’s starting to ramp up from challenging to difficult, it feels great. I look forward to every run, I challenge myself to go as hard and as long as I can (that’s what she said) and the benefits to my self-esteem, my physical and mental health, and overall quality of life are incredible. If I was looking to quantify the value of this, it would probably be like spending five bucks to get ten thousand dollars of awesome. (Does that make sense? I’ve been writing this for a long time and the words are starting to get blurry on the screen).

I deserve to be happy. I deserve to feel good about myself. I can do the work that I need to do to accomplish these things.

If I tried to do just one of these things, and I stayed committed to it, I’d probably feel better about myself. Doing all of them together isn’t necessarily easier, but it isn’t necessarily harder, either. Every one of these things supports the other in a sparkling geometric structure of awesome that is making my life significantly and consistently better.

I just did a word count on this, and I’m at nearly 3500 words. I didn’t intend to write this much, and I suspect that most people will tl;dr it, but I’m glad that I spent the time thinking about these things and writing them down like this. I’m sure I’ll revisit this, rewrite it, and revise it, but I’m going to publish it now without a lot of editing. This is raw, and I feel like it’s supposed to be.

thanksgiving vs. christmas

A bunch of my friends got together and created a face-meltingly funny holiday musical, called Thanksgiving vs. Christmas. If you like the things I like, boy howdy are you going to like this.

So, here’s an embed for ya:

Thanksgiving vs. Christmas by Molly Lewis

You can listen to the whole show online for the low low price of free, but you can listen to it whenever you want and support the brilliant creative people who made it when you buy it at Bandcamp.

Enjoy!!

Halloweeney Tabletoppey Gamey Stuffey

So I was thinking about putting together a list of horror-themed games that you can play, and while I was doing that, I realized that we have played two of my favorites on Tabletop: Betrayal at House on the Hill and Dread.

I also realized that I’d made an episode of Not The Flog that was about Halloween-themed games. So instead of sitting down and writing up something long and exhaustive and interesting that would seriously cut into my Blizzcon preparation time which is really actually preparing and not just playing lots of Diablo III and Warcraft and Hearthstone I swear.

So, presented here for your amusement and education are a series of videos with a gaming and Halloween theme.

Hey, since I have your attention: what’s a horror-themed game that you like to play around Halloween? Maybe we’ll end up with a neat list, after all.

Videos after the jump!

 

I 3D Printed A Kitten

Eliot keeps sleeping in my Makerbot, because cats.

I’m doing actual writing today, so here’s a picture of Marlowe.

While I was out for a run day before yesterday, I finally broke the story I’ve been wanting to write for ages. So now that the hard part is finished, all I have to do is write it all down.

that kinda lux just ain’t for us

Anne and I went to Las Vegas on Sunday for our friends Matt and Doree’s wedding. We got dressed up like fancy adults, spent an evening with people we love, and got the hell out of there before Vegas could take any of our money away from us.

I had a stupidly good time playing a silly Star Trek penny slot machine for a quarter a pull, and somehow managed to turn my twenty dollars into one hundred while I was at it. My friend Matt and I found a stupid penny poker machine that let you play one hundred hands at a time, and spent about three dollars to have hundreds of dollars worth of fun for close to an hour.

We almost didn’t go, because I just don’t enjoy being in Las Vegas, but we had a great time, and I’m really glad that we went.

On the plane home, I was reflecting on how much fun we had, and I remembered this story, from a very different time.

For a lot of us who grew up in Los Angeles, a big part of being in your early twenties involves something like this:

The phone rings.
It’s one of your friends.
Your friend says, “Vegas?”
Before you can pull another breath of life out of the air around you, you reply, “VEGAS!”
One drive across the desert a few hours later, you’re in some casino on the strip, losing whatever money you budgeted for the trip, while trying and occasionally succeeding to find the energy that began your journey there, three or four hours ago.
The drive back home lasts for three or four hours, but feels much longer.
You swear you’ll never do this again.
Months go by.
You pick up the phone and dial your friend.
When the call connects, you say, “Vegas?”

When Anne and I were dating, we did one of these trips. We stayed at the Imperial Palace, which is just an appallingly outdated and rundown pile of regret in the middle of the Strip. Over the course of a few hours, we walked around it and its adjacent casinos, wagering twenty or so dollars at a time in various places, and never winning a single thing. At the time, we didn’t have a lot of money and had to stay on a tight budget, so the $200 I lost really hurt, to say nothing of the unshakable feeling of just being A Total Loser that clung to me like that cloud of dust around Pig Pen.

I remember, as our night was winding down, we walked into the Flamingo Hilton. We found a $5 blackjack table, and I bought in for my last $40. As the first hand came out, a pit boss came over to us, and asked to see my ID. I showed it to him, and he said, “I thought that was you. I love your work.”

At this time in my life, I hadn’t done any acting work that was worth a goddamn in what felt like an eternity, but was probably close to five years on the calendar(which is an eternity in the entertainment industry). “Thanks,” I said, trying to put on my best happy face, and hoping that the stinky cloud of Loser wasn’t as clear to him as it was to me.

“How’s your night going?” He asked.

“Not good,” I said. “I have literally lost every dollar I’ve bet.”

Because the universe has a good sense of humor, and because the person who is writing my life is lazy, I lost the hand in front of me. I don’t recall what it was, specifically, but if I were writing this, it would have been something like standing on a 13 with the dealer showing a 6, only to draw to 18. It had been that kind of night.

“Well,” he said, “I’m rating you right now, so we can get you some drinks or some breakfast.”  He paused, then added, meaningfully, “at the very least.”

I looked at the last $35 dollars I had in front of me, and hoped against hope that somehow my luck would turn around. I knew we wouldn’t get a comped room, or show tickets, or anything like that, but there was something in his voice that told me that if I could just sit there and play for a little while, we’d get something that would make me feel like less of a total loser than I did. Hey, people got lucky in Vegas all the time, right? People sat down with two bucks, and became millionaires with one pull of the handle. Guys turned five bucks into a thousand in mere minutes, getting lucky at a craps table or hitting a longshot in roulette. Hell, people even won on Keno from time to time. Maybe it was time for my luck to turn around.

So I got ready to defy the odds and become a winner.

Five bucks at a time, I proceeded to lose seven hands in a row, and was broke. I stood up from the table, gathered what I could of my pride, told the dealer to have a good night. The pit boss came over to us (Anne had been standing supportively next to me the whole time, as I could not win a single thing, which was a perfect metaphor for our lives back then). “You sure you have to go?” He said.

“Yeah,” I said, unable to mask the totality of the defeat I was feeling, “I’m all out of money. My luck is just …” I didn’t need to finish that thought. At this time in my life, when I was probably around 24 or 25, My luck is just … was how I felt about pretty much everything.

“Well, here,” he said, not unkindly, “let me at least get you some food and a couple of drinks.” He gave me some vouchers, and Anne and I each had a martini, plus steak and eggs, on the house. We made our way back to our hotel room, fell asleep on a really uncomfortable bed, and slept for a few hours until someone woke us up, screaming in our hallway because she’d hit a jackpot on a slot machine.

stay awhile and listen

I’m hosting Blizzcon next month, so a big part of my preparation — my job, which is still kind of hard to believe — is to play as much Blizzard games as I can. There’s no way I’m going to be as knowledgeable as the people who live and breathe these games, but I need to know my way around them, because it would be irresponsible not to.

For some games, this is really easy. I’ve been playing Diablo since day one, and I used to play StarCraft back in its first release, so playing those games is like visiting with an old friend, if that old friend hasn’t gotten all saggy and old and weak and unable to hold his liquor after midnight like, um, someone who is most certainly not me. That’s for damn sure. Not me. I’m doing great thanks.

If you follow me on Twitter, which I’ve explicitly told you not to do, you know that I’ve recently restarted Diablo III, and I’m going all the way through the story again. I’m playing a wizard (a class I’ve never played before. I sort of fell in love with the monk and never played any others) and I’ve been saying up way too late every night, while I try different spell combos and figure out what gear I like the best. Can I just mention how happy I am that I can transmogrify items now? Because I am the kind of player who would really fall in love with the way a hat looks, and never want to put on something better because it didn’t fit my style.

I can feel some of you rolling your eyes at how I’m a filthy “casual”, but you’ll get over it. The idea of loot runs and rushing bosses to level a character as fast as possible has never appealed to me, but playing through the story, experiencing areas and NPCs that I’d forgotten about or never came across before, and remembering the countless all-nighters I pulled in my twenties has been really fun and rewarding.

Anyway, I’ve put something like 50 hours into D3 in the recent past, and it would be very easy to hook myself up to some sort of iron lung-style device that keeps me alive, fed, and moderately hygienic for the next couple of weeks. It really is that much fun for me, and I’m only level 36 right now. I got a ring last night that spawns these little chubby troll things that blow up for no reason, and don’t seem to be useful in combat at all, but hold crap are they hilarious.

I’m doing my best to have a good work/life balance, though. I’m making time to walk my dogs every day, writing a little bit every day, eating right, and even seeing my wife once or even twice a day. Today, I even went outside while the sun was still up, so there’s that.

I’m also learning games that are new to me, like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. I love Heroes of the Storm, and I made it through the training missions pretty easily, but when I try to play with actual humans, I am hilariously bad at it. I mean, I’m better at rolling d20s than I am at not dying in Heroes of the Storm. Ted Cruz is better at not being an asshole than I am at being useful to my team in Heroes of the Storm. True Detective Season 2 was more satisfying than — okay, you get the point.

But here’s the thing: every time I’ve played, I’ve told my team that I’m learning, and I stink, and I’m sorry but I’ll do my best. And every time I’ve played, my team has been friendly and patient and encouraging. Even when I’m stinking it up like the San Jose Sharks in the playoffs, the people I’ve played with haven’t been shitty to me. I asked my son, Ryan, who knows his way around these games much better than I do if that was normal, and he told me that, in his experience, people who play Blizzard games tend to be pretty decent to each other.

“They’ve built in all these controls to weed out the assholes,” he told me. “So the people who are playing are people who want to be playing, and it isn’t like League of Legends, where someone feeds the other team specifically to be a dick and ruin it for everyone.”

So if you’ve recently played Heroes of the Storm with a player who was so incompetent you thought that maybe a kitten had hopped onto a keyboard and was rolling around on it, and you were kind and patient with that person, there was a good chance it was me. And even if it wasn’t, give yourself a gold star for being awesome to someone who is struggling in a game. The only way we get more people to play games, and the only way we keep nice people in games, is when we help new players get comfortable.

Today, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Hearthstone, which is sort of like if you put Magic: The Gathering and Ascension into a blender, poured in five gallons of World of Warcraft, and put it on high speed for an hour. It’s silly as hell (in a good way) and easy to figure out, but difficult to master. My experience with deck builders and dueling games gives me an advantage to not sucking that isn’t present in Heroes of the Storm, and I’m probably going to be ready to attempt an actual, human opponent by the end of the weekend.

I have installed WoW, but I’m intimidated by and terrified of it. That’ll probably get played next week, sometime.

 

Hello, world.

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 400. I spent hours sitting in front of that thing, copying programs from magazines and running the games I’d made from them. When I wasn’t writing my own (even though I was copying things from Atari Age or whatever, I was slowly learning how BASIC worked and felt like they were “my” programs), I played the hell out of Star Raiders and Pac-Man, and States & Capitals (which was loaded from a cassette, because that’s how we did things back then).

After the Atari 400, I got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I loved that computer so much, and it was in that machine’s TI-BASIC environment that I truly grokked BASIC programming. I wrote text adventures, a rudimentary database to store news events I made up for a UFO research project that I also made up, and when I wasn’t doing that, I played the hell out of the weird and wonderful video games that machine offered.

Around 1984, I got my first Macintosh, and the first thing I bought for it was whatever BASIC ran on the 128K OG Macintosh back then. I was so excited to get into that language, and start doing things that took advantage of the GUI and this thing called a mouse, but 12 year-old me just couldn’t wrap his head around the language. I don’t know if it actually, objectively sucked, but in my memory, it really sucked. Nothing made sense, nothing followed the conventions I had grown used to, and just getting programs to respond to the mouse was beyond me.

So it was, in 1984, that I gave up trying to open BASIC to write computer programs, and instead opened MacWrite, where I began to write stories. I also played the everlivinghell out of every Mindscape game I could get my hands on.

Fast forward to a a few weeks ago. I was looking through my Humble Bundle library, and noticed that I had a book in there that teaches Python. I flipped through it, and the curiosity that I had as a kid bubbled up to the surface of my mind. I went back to the beginning of the book, and began reading. I downloaded Python for my Mac, and I started copying down the examples, starting to figure my way around the most basic aspects of the language. I’m a few chapters into it, now, and bits of it are beginning to stick. I’m having a lot of fun breaking things and then putting them back together, and just remembering the joy of turning a set of instructions into something useful and fun, like I did when I was a kid.

I have no idea if I’ll see this through to the end, and I have no idea what I’d actually use the skills (if I can even master them) for, but I really need a hobby that isn’t also part of my job, and this seems as good as anything.

Who knows? Maybe I can finally finish that dungeon adventure I started when I was 10.

got a photograph, picture of

I have a Canon 70D, and I love it. I’ve invested in some great lenses, including a 16-35 and 17-55 at 2.8, an 8mm fisheye, and a 60mm macro. It shoots beautiful video and stills, and I can get into the settings of this magnificent beast to take lots of beautiful pictures.

The thing is, I don’t carry it around with me as much as I would if it were smaller. It’s perfect for days when I get it into my head that I’m going to go and take lots of pictures of things, and pretend that I’m a Real Photographer™, but carrying it around is a commitment.

Enter this little, waterproof, Olympus point-and-shoot thing that I picked up recently. It shoots video, has a decent lens for its size, and fits entirely in my pocket.

I’ve been carrying it around with me this weekend, and here are some pictures I took using its black and white “art photo” setting.

 

Not bad for a little point-and-shoot thing, right? I could do the post-processing in gimp or whatever, but there’s something fun about seeing these shots like this on the camera’s little screen.