Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 57

Tiki Tilt

Anne likes Mai Tais, and I like making things — especially things that my wife likes — so I’ve been learning how to make tropical drinks from the golden age of the American Tiki restaurant. My guide to all of this has been Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, specifically his books Beachbum Berry Reloaded and Potions of the Caribbean.

Both books have dozens of tiki drink recipes in them, which is why they are practical and useful, but the thing I love about these books is their history of the American tiki craze of the 20th century. These books are filled with pictures of long-forgotten theme restaurants from all across the country, and photographs of the drinks, the menus, the bars, and recollections from the people who made them.

So last night, I made Anne a Mai Tai, I made a Samoan Fog Cutter for Ryan’s girlfriend, Claudette (which we renamed The Tahitian Fart, because I didn’t have any sherry for the float, so I used 151 that I set on fire instead), some kind of Grog for Ryan,  and a Planter’s Punch for myself.

It was fun and festive, and our drinks went well with the Les Baxter music I was playing on the Sonos, and the teriyaki-marinated chicken sandwiches we grilled for dinner. We watched a great movie, enjoyed each other’s company, and then when Ryan and Claudette left, it was time for bed.

Right. Well. It turns out that the sugar in the tropical drink plus the caffeine in the black tea in the drink had a stacking effect that gave me -10 to saves vs. Stay Awake, so I ended up just getting out of bed and shuffling into my office, where I fired up my new obsession, Pinball Arcade.

I desperately want to get a pinball machine for my game room, but there just isn’t room, so Pinball Arcade is a really good substitute for me. I’ve been playing it so much, I’m starting to get some pretty high scores (for me) on some of the machines I play frequently … and last night, this happened:

I got the highest score on this Attack From Mars table.

Then I got all the high scores on Elvira and the Party Monsters.

And then I got all the high scores on Medieval Madness.

I tried to run the table on Cyclone, but by this time my lungs were aching for air, and I was finally able to engage in some much-needed rock climbing.

Seven hours of sleep later, during which I had a dream that — I shit you not — featured me designing and then playing a pinball machine based on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, before I went to see The Wall with my son, Nolan, I woke up, feeling irrationally proud of what I’d accomplished.

Paraphrasing a certain smuggler: “Good against simulations is one thing, but good against the real thing?”

I guess I’ll have to head on down to a real arcade once I get the time, and see if I can count my experiences at the virtual tables as training, or if it’s just something I’m doing when I should probably be pretending to be productive.

this is not how this week was supposed to go down

Me: I’m going to get some words down on this story I’ve been developing for months!

My brain: Okay. Let’s do this.

My body: Not so fast. I have to cough so much all of our muscles are going to hurt.

Me: Okay. You done?

My body: Not just yet. I also have to sort of ache a little bit and also produce a whole bunch of snot and crap for you. Also, I need to cough some more.

Me: Got it. Now, let’s get to work!

My body: Can we just put a pin in that for a moment? Our throat needs some attention. It’s not nearly scratchy enough. Oh, and this cough isn’t really doing anything, but it’s a whole thing now, and I’m not really ready to give it up.

My brain: Um. Fellas?

Me: Yeah?

My body: What’s up, brain?

My brain: This is bullshit. When you’re ready to get your shit together, you let me know, and we’ll do some awesome creative work. Until then, I’m going to check out and focus on amusing cat pictures.

Me: NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS! I NEED YOU!

My brain: I know he isn’t going to actually buy a boat, but my god this is still as funny as it was the first time.

Me: YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!

My brain: Let’s play pinball arcade, buddy.

My body: Yeah, about that … I’ve slowed down your reactions and increased the coughing. I am really into this whole coughing thing.

Me: I think I’ll just go take a nap.

My body and my brain: Finally, something we can all agree on!

My body: … I’m just going to keep coughing. Sorry not sorry.

summer colds are the worst

Just in time for me to commit to spending my August working on my own projects and recovering from months and months of endless work, I seem to have come down with some sort of summer cold.

Because of course I did.

Anyway, I’ll complain about it for a day or two, and then I’ll just power through and stay focused on my writing projects, and maybe I’ll finally edit together some videos I’ve been meaning to edit forever.

I’m still making occasional episodes of Not Radio Free Burrito, if you’re into that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll make one where I just cough and sneeze and grumble about it. That’s what the people want, and I know how to give the people what they want.

Speaking of that, here’s the season finale of Titansgrave:

I can’t believe we’re done with this season. It feels like we just started.

Can I hibernate? I want to hibernate for a couple of months.

you must remember this

Earlier this year, I became completely hooked on the podcast Serial. I wasn’t alone, as it rocketed to the top of the charts in every podcast directory, and became A Thing for about three months.

Ever since it ended, I’ve been looking for something to pick up where it left off, in terms of pacing, compelling subject matter, production quality, and intellectual stimulation. I expected that podcast directories like Stitcher and iTunes would be the place to find what I was looking for, but other than recommending This American Life, they weren’t very helpful.

Enter my friend Ed. Ed is a writer who is currently doing a magnificent comic about the early years of Hollywood called The Fadeout. Ed turned me on to a podcast called ​You Must Remember This, which is about Hollywood’s first century.

For the last couple of months, You Must Remember This has been looking back at ​the Manson Murders, unpacking where Charles Manson came from (both physically and spiritually), and how the changing scene within Hollywood (as a geographic location and an industry) in the 1960s created an environment where he and his followers could find each other.

This season, You Must Remember This will explore the murders committed in the summer of 1969 by followers of Charles Manson, and the Hollywood music and movie scene surrounding the killings. Throughout the series, we’ll learn how a single sociopath’s thwarted dreams of fame and fortune led to the gruesome events which became the symbolic “end of the sixties.” Future episodes will explore the various celebrities, musicians, movie stars and filmmakers (including Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, The Beach Boys, Dennis Hopper, Doris Day and more) whose paths crossed with Manson’s in meaningful ways, both leading up to the murders and in their aftermath.

I love this podcast, and once I get caught up on the Manson episodes, I’m going to go back to the beginning and binge the whole series. I think some of you will like it, too.

this needs a title but i can’t think of a title so it’s just an aside without a title

I feel like years and years of hard work has allowed me the privilege to take this time for my own work, say no to projects or things I don’t really want to do, and focus on getting excited and making things.

So the plan has been to take August off (except for @Midnight on the 19th and two installments of Critical Role, both things I want to do because they’re fun) to just write and be creative.

I thought I’d have some progress toward finishing one of these writing projects by now (since it’s Thursday, after all), but  I’ve spent this week recovering emotionally and physically from GenCon (more on that later when I can properly organize all those thoughts).

For the longest time, I’ve felt guilty if I take time to do things like watch movies or read a stack of comics, and even though I remind myself that part of my job is to be familiar with and inspired by the things I want to create, the loudest and most insistent part of my brain does a lot of “umactually…” at me a lot of the time.

But here I am, watching almost two movies a night, reading on average a book a week, playing and learning lots of games, and generally just doing my best to feed my creative side, so it’s ready to go when I ask it to work with me to turn ideas into stories.

This feels strange, but also good.

Titansgrave Chapter 9: Nightmares

It’s Titansgrave Tuesday!

Chapter Nine isn’t in the book, it wasn’t in the schedule, and it wasn’t something any of us thought about until the day before.  If you want to know more details, keep reading. I recommend that you don’t continue this post until you’ve seen the episode, though I avoid any specific or direct spoilers.

This was originally part of Chapter Ten, and in the book it’s pretty much something like, “the PCs endure nightmarish visions and have to make a save roll”. I was ready to do that, but my son and co-creator, Ryan, realized that I had inadvertently paid off some important character moments and goals way back in Chapter 5 when they got the Staff. I didn’t see what he was talking about until we got to the end of Chapter 8 (we filmed 7, 8 and the original 9 on the same day) and that’s when I knew I had messed up some really important stuff that affected the narrative character arcs for most of the players.

“What am I going to do?” I asked him. “It’s too late to change anything, and now all this very important character stuff — the most important thing to me in the whole season — isn’t going to pay off.”

“I’m going to stay up all night and write you something that will accomplish what you wanted to accomplish,” he told me. He has a degree in writing, and is an accomplished storyteller, so I trusted him.

“You sure you want to stay up all night?” I said.

“Let me try. I’m young, and I have coffee and ideas.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

The following morning, I texted Ryan when I got out of bed. At the same time, he was e-mailing me the script he’d written. I won’t discuss specifics because spoilers, obviously, but it was exactly what I needed: a final test for the characters. A final test they needed to endure, to coalesce into the family they needed to be in order to have a chance at taking on The Prophet Dahwan.

The result is nearly 50 minutes of narrative, with some extremely emotional and intense decisions being made by the players about their characters. The players did an amazing job with this, and when we got to the end of this section, most of the crew and all of our observers were wiping their eyes.

If you’re not connected to the characters and want a lot of RPG action, this is going to leave you cold. But if I’ve accomplished what I always wanted to accomplish, you’re invested in the characters at this point. If I’ve done what I wanted to do, you may not even notice that this is a story-heavy episode without a single die roll. If I’ve gotten you to come along on this journey with us the way I wanted to, this will be an emotional episode for you like it was for us

So I expected that this would be a polarizing episode, but after four days at GenCon where I talked to hundreds of people who are watching this show, I’m hopeful that the vast majority of the audience will be glad they watched it.

We are home from GenCon

I have many things to write about, and many experiences to share.

But right now I am emotionally and physically exhausted, so here’s a picture of a Beholder:

Did you go to GenCon? What did you play/buy/playtest/demo that you loved? Any huge hits or misses you want to share with the rest of us?

The Titansgrave book goes on sale this Thursday. If you’re watching the show and plan to get the book, please read this first.

I wanted to have the whole series finished and released by today, so we could have the book come out after the story had wrapped up. Life happened, and now we won’t wrap up the whole thing for another two weeks.

This means that on Thursday, the script for Titansgrave — including the two unaired episodes — is going to be available. This means that anyone who wants to can find out how it ends.

I’m not the boss of you, but I beg you not to skip ahead, if you’ve been following the story week to week. I watched an edit of the finale yesterday, and it really is some of the best stuff we’ve done. If you know what happens before you watch it (at least, according to the module), you’re going to rob yourself of some cool stuff.

I want you to buy the book. I want you to love the book. I want you to run The Ashes of Valkana for people who haven’t watched the show. I  want you to have your own adventures that are inspired by the book.

But I don’t want you to spoil the end for yourself, or for anyone else. So please, read carefully.

Thanks for listening, and if you do get the book, I hope you have fun in our world.

Oh, speaking of Titansgrave … here’s today’s episode:

And here’s a delightful song a young woman wrote about Jeremy:

Finally, if you have found or created Titansgrave fanart of any kind, I really want to see it so I can share it with the cast and the team. I’d love it if you’d leave links in the comments.

the night is dark and full of terrors

My sleep tracker says that I slept for 8 hours last night, but it’s lying. I slept for about 3 minutes, because I spent the rest of the time I was in bed trapped in a stress dream that touched nightmare territory from time to time, but was so weird it’s worth sharing.

I was in a play, but I didn’t know my lines, or what I was supposed to do. This is a very common theme in my stress dreams.

The play was being performed in a pop-up banquet tent at my Aunt Val’s house in the valley. The geography of the house was distorted in that weird way that dreams distort things to make them fit together in ways that would never work in our waking world. In this case, her back yard was big enough to hold about two hundred audience members in the tent.

So far, this is just a standard stress dream, and this is where it gets weird and worth writing about.

The play was a version of Star Wars.
This version of Star Wars had been adapted to fit inside the Welcome to Night Vale universe.
The entire cast was playing characters from Welcome to Night Vale, but none of them were the actual Night Vale cast members.
I was playing R2-D2. My costume was a blue hoodie.

In the dream, we had one rehearsal, while the tents were being set up. I saw my lines in the script, but I couldn’t get them to stay in my head. I don’t know why R2-D2 spoke instead of beeping in this version of Star Wars, but I suspect that it had something to do with it being set in Night Vale.

Time shifted, like it does in dreams, and the tent was full. The play was happening, and I was waiting to go on stage with two other actors. I think one of them was playing a version of Yoda or a Luke/Yoda hybrid for some reason. Again: Night Vale. The plastic wall of the tent (I’ve just now realized that the tent may have been selected by my brain because I’ve been reading The Martian) parted, and the three of us entered the scene together.

Only I was supposed to be on my knees, so I was, and I couldn’t move. You know, the way you can’t move in dreams sometimes.

So I’m R2-D2, in a Star Wars play that’s set in the  Welcome to Night Vale universe, being performed at my dead great aunt’s house for an audience that’s far too big to fit in her back yard, and I’m stuck in the curtain, unable to move.

One of the other actors whispers to me that I need to follow her, and I’m doing my best to shuffle along on my knees, keeping my arms straight to look like R2’s legs, and I realize that the other actors are just standing there, waiting for me. I don’t know my lines, I don’t know when I’m supposed to say them, but I recognize the scene from the movie. We’re in the blockade runner, waiting for the Empire to board the ship. We’re in the end of a corridor … and that’s all I know. The other actors say their lines, look at me expectantly when I’m supposed to say mine, and I improvise whatever I think is supposed to go there. The scene lurches along for a few minutes, until I just decide that I’m done with it, and exit right through the back wall of the stage.

Once I get backstage, I take off my hoodie, and I make a decision: I’m going to just disappear. R2 isn’t that important to this version of the story, and it’s going to be better without me in it. So I stand up, and I walk down the side of my great aunt’s house toward the street, and I find myself on the side yard of the house I grew up in. According to the rules and physics of dreams, this makes complete sense, so I start walking around the house, pacing, as I try to talk myself into staying off the stage. Somehow, I end up inside my great aunt’s kitchen without actually walking into the house, and I realize that I can just find a script, put whatever my lines are into my short term memory, and muddle through the show. I can hear the other actors on the stage. The audience is silent. In fact, I realize now, that maybe the audience is entirely dead people (though that may be my awake version of making the story better, not like it needs help being weird).

But I can’t find a script, so I keep walking, and I’m starting to really freak out. I should be on the stage because I owe it to the other actors, but I really don’t want to go out there and embarrass myself and not know what I’m supposed to do. But I basically know the story, so maybe I can just go out there and say , “Beep beep boop” when I have lines. It will probably throw the other actors off a bit, but the audience won’t know and maybe it’ll even be funny.

I’m in the driveway of the house I grew up in. The car my mom drove in 1978 is parked in front of me. It’s hot and there’s a lot of dust everywhere. I can hear the actors on the stage improvising a scene because I’m not there. I’ve missed my cue. I panic and run toward the back yard. I go into the backstage area, which is in the side yard of my great aunt’s house. A stage manager is there, and she says, “you are supposed to be in this scene! You’re supposed to be on stage! They’re waiting for you! Go! Go! Go!”

I realize that I’m only wearing white underwear briefs, because that was the last element that was missing from my stress dream.

I don’t go onstage, because the actors move to the next scene without me. They come off stage, and I try not to make eye contact with them. I feel terrible. I know I messed up. I want to apologize, but I’m ashamed and embarrassed. They walk past me, and I see a big poster board, like the ones you use to make projects in elementary school. It has an invitation to the wrap party, and everyone’s name is on it, except mine.

The scene changes, and I’m in a park near my childhood home. It’s present day, and the whole thing has been developed. There are lots of condos and offices and other buildings along the perimeter of the park. This is a place my brain takes me in my dreams all the time, and it never looks the same, even though I know where I am.

Something is wrong. Something is sinister. Something is profoundly scary about this place, but I’m in a car or something, so I can at least drive past it in relative safety … but there is something or someone in almost every building, looking at me, and I’m terrified of whatever it is.

I wake up, because the alarm is going off. The weirdness and unsettled feeling of the dream is going to stay with me all day, like it always does.

wake me up i’m deep dreaming

I have to run out to work (I’m finishing an audiobook job today), but before I go, I wanted to share this gallery of super weird and interesting things I made yesterday using Google’s Deep Dream.

It’s surprisingly satisfying to make these things, and it’s a whole lot of fun to tweak the various settings to figure out what they do.