Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 6

Christmas with Grubbs – an animated holiday special I worked on that you and your kids will love.

Christmas with Grubbs is a heartwarming, animated, holiday special that takes a lot of inspiration from the classic cartoons I grew up watching this time of year, especially the Peanuts specials.

Oh, Gen X! Here, this is for us:

Did you feel it? Even now, I feel it.

Okay, so on to Grubbs! It’s adapted from Max Weaver’s comic about a little boy and his imaginary friend who keeps getting him into trouble. I get to voice the imaginary friend, Tyler, and it was even more fun than you think.

This is such a lovely, classic, heartwarming holiday special, that is perfect to watch with your kids. I’ve embedded the YouTube link below, where it’s freely available for everyone to watch and *cough* *cough* share with your friends and family so we have a better chance to be picked up for a full season.

having exhausted my ability to solve a simple problem, i turn to the internet for assistance. help me, mysterious internet; you’re my only hope.

I’ve been treating my blog as if it is some kind of publication that can only push updates that have been heavily edited and carefully crafted. I’ve been doing this for a few years.

That’s been more stifling than I realized. I start to write something here, decide it’s not interesting or “worth writing a whole blog about”, and walk away. I don’t know when I let this get so precious, but I did, and it’s is YEARS overdue for a return to the early days, the Old Internet, before the Bad Place was so big and influential on how we spent time online. I also noticed that that so much of what I put into the world online is on platforms I don’t own, subject to the whims of an unaccountable, byzantine algorithm. Who am I writing for, anyway? Me? Readers? A stupid algorithm that actively works to fuck me (and not in the good way)?

So I posted this on Facebook already, since that’s where the people are, but I’m also posting it here to break this cycle of But That Isn’t Important or whatever else gets in between me and using my blog that I’ve worked so hard on for twenty years.

So with that, this post is an ask for technical support. Just a basic, straightforward, “Hey, Internet, can someone help me out here?” And before you ask, yes, I have turned it off and back on again.

Internet, I need some assistance, and I hope one of you can help me out.

I use ProtonVPN for everything (and so should you). It Just Works(tm) as far as anonymizing my connection goes, but I keep running into problems on my LAN.

The machine I’m tying on is named Bela. Bela has no trouble connecting to the Internet using the VPN. But when I try to use the printer, it can’t find it unless I turn the VPN off. Same thing if I attempt to access my NAS (though the NAS issue is greater: even with the VPN off, my Desktop (Nemo, on Linux Mint) can’t connect to the NAS.

I thought it would be simple to tell my machine “Hey, use the VPN when you talk to the Internet, but when you talk to the LAN, just ignore it.” I figured there was some way to edit a hosts file to accomplish this?

Well, this is where I have been stuck, and where I feel a little dumb. Everything I look up online solves a similar problem but not mine.

I’m sure there is some simple, three lines in a .conf file solution to this, but I can’t find it. Can anyone help me?

Here, as a thank you, I offer this trip (in every sense of the word) down memory lane:

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I have over 1000 hours in NHL 22. I’ve been playing Create A Pro for three years, guiding Blaine Gretzky to the top of every record possible in the Mirror Universe NHL. He will retire with the Kraken as the greatest player of all time.

But to get there, I have to play another three or four hundred games, and Blaine Gretzky is so OP now, the games aren’t all that challenging. I’ve also become VERY aware of the bugs they never squashed. While it is tremendously satisfying competence porn, it’s become a bit rote.

So I got myself NHL 25, which gets reasonably good reviews (correcting for typical EA Sports fuckery).

Holy shit it’s so much harder to play a rookie who is constantly getting knocked down and running out of gas after 30 seconds than it is playing a veteran who scores essentially whenever he shoots the puck. And since it’s been like 930 hours since I played this game as a rookie, I have had to learn all over again how to actually play the game, rather than just running over it because I’m so OP.

Which brings me to my current pro’s rookie season. His name is Johnny Marlowe. He wears number 13. He is named after my beloved dog, and is a tribute to Johnny Hockey (may his memory be a blessing).

After a disastrous 1-7 start to the season (can we talk about the goals the computer scores against itself when I’m on the bench? And how it tends to give itself 4 goal leads that way?), things finally started to turn around and we got the team’s record up to 3-9-2 and the coach challenged Marlowe to win 2 of the next 3 games.

No problem. I’m getting the hang of the flow and demands of the game, Marlowe is getting better, and 2 of 3 seems really doable, especially since I just unlocked his first zone ability.

Game 1 is against the division rival Washington Capitals (Marlowe plays for Carolina). Marlowe scored TWO goals in the first period, before getting boarded in the second, injured, and removed from the game … which Carolina goes on to lose, after Johnny Marlowe gave them a 2 goal lead in the first.

But not to worry! He’s not on the IR, and is ready to play in the second game, against Pittsburgh. We gotta win two in a row, boys! We can do it!

Johnny Marlowe is injured and removed form the game after an open ice hit on his first shift.

And I’m like … what the fuck, NHL 25? Give me a challenge, and then ensure I can’t complete it? Are you serious?

So I reached deep into my MEMEory to mark the occasion the only way I know how:

I posted this on Facebook, where about 500,000 accounts follow me, many of them actual human beings! After several hours, there were under 200 interactions, which honestly exceeded my expectations.

And it reminded me of this philosophy I have embraced since I heard Joel Hodgson say it in the 90s: “We don’t ask ourselves ‘who is going to get this?’; we remind ourselves “the right people are going to get this.”

And real quick, before I start my Sunday: if you recognize this old meme, and especially if you’re fondly remembering the rageface comics you made in college … it’s time to schedule your colonoscopy.

it’s an older meme sir, but it checks out

I have over 1000 hours in NHL 22. I’ve been playing Create A Pro for three years, guiding Blaine Gretzky to the top of every record possible in the Mirror Universe NHL. He will retire with the Kraken as the greatest player of all time.

But to get there, I have to play another three or four hundred games, and Blaine Gretzky is so OP now, the games aren’t all that challenging. I’ve also become VERY aware of the bugs they never squashed. While it is tremendously satisfying competence porn, it’s become a bit rote.

So I got myself NHL 25, which gets reasonably good reviews (correcting for typical EA Sports fuckery).

Holy shit it’s so much harder to play a rookie who is constantly getting knocked down and running out of gas after 30 seconds than it is playing a veteran who scores essentially whenever he shoots the puck. And since it’s been like 930 hours since I played this game as a rookie, I have had to learn all over again how to actually play the game, rather than just running over it because I’m so OP.

Which brings me to my current pro’s rookie season. His name is Johnny Marlowe. He wears number 13. He is named after my beloved dog, and is a tribute to Johnny Hockey (may his memory be a blessing).

After a disastrous 1-7 start to the season (can we talk about the goals the computer scores against itself when I’m on the bench? And how it tends to give itself 4 goal leads that way?), things finally started to turn around and we got the team’s record up to 3-9-2 and the coach challenged Marlowe to win 2 of the next 3 games.

No problem. I’m getting the hang of the flow and demands of the game, Marlowe is getting better, and 2 of 3 seems really doable, especially since I just unlocked his first zone ability.

Game 1 is against the division rival Washington Capitals (Marlowe plays for Carolina). Marlowe scored TWO goals in the first period, before getting boarded in the second, injured, and removed from the game … which Carolina goes on to lose, after Johnny Marlowe gave them a 2 goal lead in the first.

But not to worry! He’s not on the IR, and is ready to play in the second game, against Pittsburgh. We gotta win two in a row, boys! We can do it!

Johnny Marlowe is injured and removed form the game after an open ice hit on his first shift.

And I’m like … what the fuck, NHL 25? Give me a challenge, and then ensure I can’t complete it? Are you serious?

So I reached deep into my MEMEory to mark the occasion the only way I know how:

I posted this on Facebook, where about 500,000 accounts follow me, many of them actual human beings! After several hours, there were under 200 interactions, which honestly exceeded my expectations.

And it reminded me of this philosophy I have embraced since I heard Joel Hodgson say it in the 90s: “We don’t ask ourselves ‘who is going to get this?’; we remind ourselves “the right people are going to get this.”

And real quick, before I start my Sunday: if you recognize this old meme, and especially if you’re fondly remembering the rageface comics you made in college … it’s time to schedule your colonoscopy.

nothing but bluesky is such a predictable title for this post

When it was still invite-only, I grabbed @wilw and @itswilwheaton on Bluesky, just to ensure a scumbag didn’t yoink them before I could. I’ve never used them, because after I quit Twitter — long before it was fashionable (or a fascist propaganda platform) — I realized how much better my emotional quality of life was without the endless yelling and outrage from Extremely Online People, and the systemic, deliberate refusal by the “safety” team to do anything about it. We humans are not built to have that much information poured into our souls in a nonstop stream of trauma that never ends. I do not miss it.

But I’ve lurked around on Bluesky a little bit this last week, and I keep seeing things that remind me of Twitter’s first year, before the Nazis showed up and Twitter was like “it’s just an opinion [thumbs up emoji]”. What I see on Bluesky is a deliberate, coordinated, serious effort to slam the door in the faces of those dipshits the moment they arrive. It seems that Bluesky, at least for now, takes the responsibility of shutting down hateful rightwing trolls seriously. It seems that, maybe, it could be what Twitter was and should have always been, at least until some shitbag techbro fucks it all up.

I don’t think it’s a good idea for me and my mental health to be as involved now as I was a decade ago, but as an alternative to the toxicity, chaos, and destructiveness of Twitter, it has a lot going for it.

ANYWAY. The whole point of this little post is: I’m working on the verification system, which involves editing some files at my host, which I haven’t done since the very early blogging days. So I have some calls out to My Guy (I can not oversell how great it is to have A Guy for things) to help me not break the Internet (again).

I just mention this because though I am still on a break from public life, I understand some number of people were concerned that someone was building a foundation to impersonate me, and I wanted to verify that those accounts are, indeed, mine. There is no need to report them. But thank you for looking out for me.

Okay, that’s all. Have a nice weekend. Choose to be kind (except to Nazis. Punch Nazis. Always.)

What have you done, America?

I am anguished, I am heartbroken, I am afraid of what’s coming for people I love. I am shocked that my country just gave 247 years of Democracy away over one night. We live in a different country now, than we did when we woke up, yesterday. Exactly how violent and cruel and hateful this new country is has yet to be revealed, but it’s going to be pretty terrible.

I fought hard to prevent this. We all did. But I guess there was a fundamental hurdle we just could not overcome, and we have to be real about that hurdle: this country is full of people who are just drowning in hate and fear who want nothing more than to hurt as many people as they can.

I knew they were always here, but I always believed that there were more good, kind, compassionate people who chose light over darkness. I always believed that we were the good guys, the place people come to when they are fleeing what we became this morning.

it’s just … it’s a lot.

It’s going to take me a long time to process this, and find a way to not feel despair every moment of every day until he is dead and (maybe) America comes back from this open embrace of Fascist authoritarianism.

I mentioned to some folks earlier that I believe it’s important that we allow ourselves to feel all the feelings, to honor them without judgement. For a lot of us — millions upon millions — this is the greatest betrayal by our fellow Americans we have ever experienced, and that’s going to be a LOT. At the same time, we can’t really _do_ anything about that, other than support and love and show up for the people we love.

To that end, I’m going to retreat from public life for a bit, and be with my family.

Stay safe, everyone.

The Wedding Crusher

Okay, so. I’m developing this Star Trek Lower Decks fan fiction I call The Wedding Crusher.

There’s a wedding on the Cerritos. Traveler Wesley shows up because he loves to crash Starfleet weddings. It’s kind of his thing.

When he gets there, he runs into Mariner. For the rest of the time he is on the ship, all he wants is for her to think he’s cool, because they went to academy together when he was decidedly NOT cool.

There’s a quick scene where Ransom runs into him, and is absolutely POSITIVE they know each other. Wesley says they’ve never met. Ransom says that they definitely know each other. Maybe from when they were kids?

Meanwhile, Boimler is just BESIDE himself that Wesley Freakin’ Crusher, who piloted the Enterprise, who knows and works with a lot of Boimler’s heroes, is on Boimler’s ship. So Boimler wants Wesley to think HE is cool, and we enjoy Wesley being both Boimler AND Mariner in these various interactions. But Boimler is being that delightfully exuberant dude we love, but he’s just trying too hard.

Right around the time Wesley is about to just lose it at him, Boimler nerds out REAL HARD at Wesley about some technobabble science thing, and it speaks so loudly to Wesley’s inner nerd, they end up on a major science project together that brings in Rutherford. When it’s done, they all sign it, and OF COURSE it ends up saving the Cerritos in the third act.

In the denouement, they are all in the ship’s bar, celebrating. Mariner is setting Wesley up for the thing he’s wanted so badly. She’s about to tell him how cool he is … and instead she pulls a switcheroo and just ROASTS him in the most hilarious way possible. I haven’t figured out what it is, yet.

Wesley is so severely burned, he sort of chokes on his drink, tries to do a comeback, fails, tries again, fails again, and then does this Traveler thing where he basically Men In Black’s them with an “I was never here” snap of his fingers. They have a beat together where they play most of the scene again, only this time it’s Boimler who did it with Rutherford’s help. Fade out.

CUT TO: Wesley sitting with the OG Traveler, who asks him how it went, and Wesley is like I DO NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. The Traveler gives him a slice of wedding cake to ease his pain, and Wesley gratefully devours it. “You really gotta come with me to one of these things,” he tells him while he eats.

The final shot is the Cerritos cruising away while we hear a voice over from Boimler and Rutherford wondering how Wesley Crusher’s signature got on this thing.

THE END.

Write you fool: Congo Bongo

The same kid who talked me into trading him my Death Star for a landspeeder and five bucks also had ColecoVision. And not just ColecoVision, but ColecoVision with every game, and all the accessories. He had his own little TV, set up on a coffee table, just for his ColecoVision. It was on top of two phone books, so he could see it over the steering wheel for Turbo.

Weird sidebar real quick: holy shit this kid’s parents must have been fucking LOADED for him to have had all that stuff in 1980. I’ve told the trade story a million times, but I never remembered or realized that this kid was spoiled to death. His parents’ wealth also explains why my parents wanted to be friends with them, and probably why they disappeared from our lives around 1984.

But I do remember how envious I was of his personal ColecoVision setup. I could tell a great story about him being a dick about it, making me sing Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight or My Dingaling before he let me play, but I remember that he was actually really chill about it. He shared way better than Henry up the block who would make you watch him play all 20 minutes of Pitfall before you got one turn in Cosmic Ark.

Fucking Henry I swear to god. This is why we never want to come play games at your house, dude.

ANYWAY.

I can close my eyes and see my little hands at the end of my skinny arms, holding that steering wheel while I played Turbo. I can feel the little plastic accelerator beneath my bare foot, because we’ve just gotten out of the pool and are playing video games while his mom makes us grilled cheese for lunch. I remember this kid being legitimately impressed by how good I was at that game.

I was really good at Turbo, because I had been in a movie we shot in 1982 called The Buddy System, part of which was filmed in an arcade (Castle Fun Park on Sepulveda, shoutout to all my fellow 818ers!), the art department had two actual arcade machines on the stage: Kangaroo, and Turbo. I loved Turbo. It was Varsity to Monaco GP’s JV squad, a marathon to Pole Position’s 100 meter dash.. I got to play it for free, until I was bored, because that was the summer Dreyfuss flipped his car while blasted out of his mind on cocaine, right before he got sober; there were entire days I went to 20th Century Fox, got into makeup and wardrobe, and never worked, because he didn’t show up. I remember this scary tension everywhere that nobody would talk to me about (it was very familiar to what I experienced at home), and trying to get out of it by playing these two games as much as they’d let me (childhood by disassociation for the sad win). Kangaroo was inscrutable to me, but Turbo was familiar, so I basically mastered it as well as a little kid can.

But I am not here to write about Turbo or Kangaroo (though ColecoVision will come back later).

No, today I am here to write about Congo Bongo, a game I don’t remember playing, but remember watching the Landspeeder Hustler play an awful lot.

Congo Bongo answers a question that not a lot of people were asking in 1983: what happens when Doctor Moreau splices Donkey Kong with Zaxxon?

No, literally, that’s what it is. Ikegami is the company that released Zaxxon, it was a huge hit, and as a follow-up, they made Congo Bongo as a fuck you to Nintendo, for reasons you can discover in this video.

I played it once or twice in the arcade, and I hated it. I couldn’t wrap my head around the isometric playing field the way I could with Q*Bert, and as a kid who was a hardcore Donkey Kong STAN, I was deeply and personally offended by its blatantly derivative, gimmicky efforts to steal Donkey Kong’s spotlight.

But I remember watching Landspeeder Hustler – you know what? I can’t keep calling him that. It’s hilarious to me, but we’re all going to get tired of it. Let’s call him … Kyle. I watched Kyle play it on that little TV, and he was a goddamn virtuoso. Like I did with Turbo, he basically played it until he was bored. He had solved the game and achieved nirvana, all before the age of 12.

Real quick: I need to put ColecoVision into context. I need you to see it the way I saw it, as an 11 year-old, in 1983, and why it changed everything for me and so many of my peers.

This is Donkey Kong in an arcade:

This is Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600:

This is Donkey Kong on ColecoVision: 

I, uh … I have to admit something to you all now that kind of undercuts my premise a little bit and makes me wish I’d done more homework before I started writing this.

The 2600 screen looks a lot better – and a lot more like the ColecoVision screen – than I remember. I mean, on the 2600, Donkey Kong looks like a rejected gingerbread man who prays daily for the merciful release of death, and the barrels are obviously the cookies from Megamania, but looking at the two screens side by side, they are not nearly as different as I remembered … except in the key ways they were, which I’ll get to. The way I remember it, Donkey Kong on the 2600 was terrible. The sound was terrible, it had two screens only, and the animation was flat and boring, compared to other 2600 titles.

52 year-old Wil respects the fuck out of the programmers on both, for the record. I understand what they did and how challenging it was. But for 11 year-old Wil, and his Landspeeder hustling friend, Kyle, the ColecoVision was basically the arcade version, at home. It had more screens than the Atari version, looked so much better, had fantastic sound, included both hammers (even the one you never used) and was vastly superior in every way. It was an arcade on a card table hooked up to a 13” TV in his house. Versailles had nothing on this. I bet that lame “palace” didn’t even have an arcade.

More context: When my family finally got Atari in 1980, all of the original titles were a miracle. Air Sea Battle! Circus! Combat! I was a kid who played Adventure and saw a goddamn WARRIOR where a lesser imagination saw a stupid block. Every single Activision title was a revelation of sound, graphics,, and gameplay. With rare exception — Space Invaders and Breakout were simple enough to work at home — there was an understood and expected difference between arcade games and home console games. None of us ever thought we’d get something like, to pick a random example, Donkey Kong.

That all changed for me and my friends when ColecoVision came out, and basically put real arcade games into your house. Almost overnight, Atari … kinda sucked. I held the line as long as I could. Atari still had Yar’s Revenge, Pitfall, and Kaboom. Combat with maximum walls, invisible tanks, and bouncing shots was still as much fun as it had ever been … but the knowledge that ColecoVision was out there doing what it was doing was always just sitting there in my peripheral vision. I hoped so hard that the 2600 Donkey Kong would be as good, but when I bought it at Kmart after an eternity of saving and extra chores, I excitedly settled into the couch to play it, and was greeted by a disappointment that can only be expressed in Tamarian: Ralphie, the message decoded.

Oh, I tried my best to pretend it wasn’t as terrible as it was. I tried to enjoy the … sounds? Or maybe … the … um. Oh there’s not even an animation when you clear the second level. Oh. There’s no third level. It’s just the first level again. And there’s no music. Oh. Um. Yeah. Shit.

Yeah. It sucked. Not quite Pac-Man levels of suck, but the distance between them was only measurable by a laser.

So I started saving for a ColecoVision of my own. It feels like it took about a year to even get close. My allowance was still two dollars a week, and even though I was doing commercials and TV movies then, my parents didn’t let me spend that money on toys. They were keeping it safe for me, they said (by spending it before I could, which they did not say). 

So by the time I could actually afford a ColecoVision, I had kind of grown out of wanting one. I was now 12, and I wanted OmniBot almost as much as  I desperately wanted one of these home computers I was starting to see on TV. (I did get OmniBot, which was fantastic, but this post isn’t about OmniBot; I’ll do that another time.)

The closest I ever came to having a ColecoVision console of my own – and it’s just fine by me, I prefer the memory to what I’m positive is a flimsy plastic reality – is one of those Flashback emulators from a few years ago. It looks like the console, with reproduced controllers and everything. It doesn’t have Turbo, but I think it has Congo Bongo, which I promise is what this post is really about.

I’ve had Congo Bongo on the mind lately, because one of my arcade machines includes it, and I have always skipped right over the same way I skip right past Donkey Kong 3. (Seriously, Donkey Kong 3. What the fuck are you even doing? How dare you call yourself a Donkey Kong game. Good DAY sir.)  But I have been playing Fallout 4, and there’s a song in it called Civilization – as catchy as it is problematic –  and when you hear “Bongo Bongo Bongo” as much as I have lately, it really makes you want to go to Krusty’s Clown College. 

So I relented about a month ago, if only to sate my curiosity and get the damn song out of my head, and I played Congo Bongo on purpose. The first game was surprisingly fun, way more fun than I remembered. But I just could not get past the third screen, no matter how many times I played it. I kept trying for a few days, 90 frustrating seconds at a time, before I went back to Dig Dug, where I am currently leveling up my game. But I kept going back, “just to try one more time, because I’m sure there’s something I’m missing” and goddammit I was going to solve this fucker and have fun playing it if it killed me. 

I am a mature adult. I mention this because you may currently be thinking otherwise.

Okay, now that all of that is settled, I am finally going to talk about Congo Bongo.

In Congo Bongo, the story begins with your Explorer guy sleeping in a tent.The game’s titular villain creeps in with a torch and sets Explorer guy’s foot on fire. Hilarity ensues, and the game is afoot. A-hot-foot, if you will. (Check out my white New Balance sneakers. I can wear them all day when I’m hard at work, and I feel like I’m hardly workin’!)

Your revenge saga begins at the bottom of an exotic jungle scene with waterfalls and bridges and monkeys. At the top of the screen is Congo Bongo, who hurls coconuts down at the player, in a manner that is suspiciously similar to throwing barrels that roll down girders. You aren’t fooling me, Congo Bongo! Explorer guy has to avoid them, and the monkeys, to climb all the way to the top of the screen. When you get there, Congo Bongo slinks away like the coward he is. Come on, you didn’t think you were going to win on the first screen, did you? What is this? Atari 2600?

The second screen offers a whiff of the Frogger that is to come. Explorer guy (whose name is Guy, which is pronounced Guy, but looks just like Guy in print and serves only to confuse the reader while I am mildly amused at leading you through that whole dumb thing) has to jump over snakes and avoid scorpions before he finally times a leap off a swimming hippo that once again lands him within striking distance of Congo Bongo, who once again slinks away like a little piss baby.

An animation moves us up to the next level. We see Chekov’s vulture for the first and last time. Don’t tease me with a vulture and not deliver, Congo Bongo. You’re on thin ice as it is, pal.

On this screen, Congo Bongo is letting these blue rhinos do all the work for him, and the only way to avoid them is to hide in holes, leap over them, and evade them when they charge.

I have no personal experience getting through this level, because I … just can’t. I haven’t been able to find the timing, or the pattern. I got really close, once; close enough that if I’d been a kid, my entire neighborhood would have heard for days about how the fucking game cheated. 

That’s a thing we all believed was possible, even those of us who had been to enough computer classes to know better. 

Like, you totally know what I’m talking about: that time you absolutely definitely jumped and the fucking game said you didn’t? Or the time you totally shot that ship? You know that time. It happened to all of us. It’s fucking bullshit, man.

The day I learned about collision detection and sprite animation, I did take a moment to send apologies to arcade cabinets all over the greater Los Angeles area that had, in retrospect, been subjected to some language and accusations they did not deserve. My bad.

This is where, if I were writing a typical review, I would say that it is trying to be too many games at once, and where Gorf successfully set a standard, Congo Bongo catapults you into the bottom of an inverted pyramid of an uncanny valley formed by Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Zaxxon. Ten year-old me didn’t know what “derivative” was, but this is Stranger Things Season Two levels of derivative.

That said, lots of people love it, so clearly there’s something there I just don’t get. I can clear the first two screens, but then I get stuck, and Congo Bongo never delivers any of the fun necessary to slog through the lever the way a game like Bubbles, or Mr. Do!, or Dig-Dug does.

But, hold on a second, Wil. You’re not writing a review. You’re telling a story about this game and what it means to you. Maybe you’re being too harsh. Maybe you’re not letting it be its own game. Maybe you need to choose to experience it differently.

Maybe… huh. Okay, maybe the way I should play it is on ColecoVision. That’s the way I see this game in my memories. So. Huh … well, the only way to find out is to pull the Flashback out of storage.

Approximately all of the spiders in the universe and a substantial donation to the swear jar later, I plugged the little white and yellow cables into their ports on my TV, and turned it on. The nostalgia of the welcome screen! There’s Venture! There’s Miner 2049er! There’s Zaxxon! And Jungle Hunt! Oh fuck the nostalgia is so hard I’m turning into the Riley Reid meme. There’s … something I’ve never heard of. But there’s Space Panic, and where is … where is … where …

Oh my god it isn’t included. Neither is Donkey Kong or Mr. Do! But … Alphabet Zoo … is? Look, I know it’s because of licensing, but …

Bumpus Hounds, the turkey devoured.

Okay, look. I can’t play it on that emulator, but I can easily find a way to load it up in an emulator online, and play it in my browser. I know how simple that would be. So why am I not doing that? How can I go all this way and not play the game?

Wrong question. The right question is why would I do that? The network executives are sending me clear notes about how this story needs to end, and it ends with me not playing the game, sending the console back to Lolth, and probably not going out of my way to play it ever again. It ends with me taking something unexpected away from the experience.

Okay, here are the Goldenrod revisions. I hope they get to the office early enough for run through today: 

As I carefully put the console back into the box, I noticed that if I moved a couple books, a space opens up under my TV that is the perfect size to hold not only the ColecoVision Flashback, but the Intellivision and Sega Flashbacks. I can move some RPG box sets, and fit in the Lego Atari 2600 on a different shelf next to them. I’ll have a little nostalgia nook for me to enjoy when I sit here and write about what old games mean to me. That’s not the destination I was going for, but it’s where the journey took me. And when I pay attention to the journey, I see that it’s the memories that matter, the fun I had revisiting them, the freedom I gave myself to write this in a style I never use without fear or judgement. All of this was fun. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point. It’s not about the high score. It’s about playing – or, in this case, not playing – the game.

A meaningful part of my personal journey to recover and heal from my childhood involves time spent with these old games and their associated memories. It is in these moments that I find metaphors and wisdom that inspire growth and lead to healing. When I play games in my arcade, the veil between myself today, and the little boy I was Before, is at its thinnest. I can almost see through it, I can almost put my arms around him and hold him until he feels safe. I can feel echoes of memories that live deep, deep, inside me, where they are protected from the people who would try to steal them from me, the way they stole so much else.

Ah, now I know how this ends. This ends with me returning to that journey, seeking the next place where that veil will be thin again.

I have a pocket full of quarters, and I’ve got next.

frances farmer will have her revenge

Remember going to the record store, browsing for hours, listening to tons of recordings on headphones, soaking up the culture and that vibe we can all feel in our memories, but can’t describe with words?

Remember getting the tape, even though you really wanted the record (that you could make into a tape), because you could listen to the tape in the car, right away?

Remember getting home and listening to the whole album, both sides of it, for the very first time?

Remember buying a CD because the single was great, only to discover that you spent 18 dollars on a piece of shit, and you were stuck with it?

Remember discovering a record that did not have a single bad track on it, and how rare that was?

I don’t know how many of you share similar experiences, but I suspect it’s not zero.

This is where we all expect me to dump on streaming or something, right? That’s not what this is about.

I love the convenience of streaming. I love the access to basically the entire history of human recordings, so when I feel compelled to listen to The Andrews Sisters and Tones On Tail in the same day, it doesn’t involve a trip to the mall. I love massive playlists of music they don’t play on the radio, that I can shuffle into my own sonic time machine. I can do all of those things I remember (except for going to record stores; I’ll still do that whenever I can), with the added bonus of never being stuck with a shitty record, ever again.

But I’ve noticed that the playlists have taken over, and I haven’t actually listened to a full album in a really, really long time. Like, other than Pink Floyd records, which must be listened to in their entirety, always (I will not be taking questions at this time), it just hasn’t occurred to me to listen to, say, all of In Utero.

I reset the counter on DAYS SINCE I LISTENED TO AN ENTIRE ALBUM to 0 last night. I really wanted to hear Drain You (yes, I know it’s off Nevermind, and I was just talking about In Utero; settle down), I saw the cover for In Utero, just sitting right there like, “Remember me? Let’s have a cuddle.” And I was like, “this is the best idea anyone has ever had.” I pushed play, then sat there and listened to the whole thing for the first time in … I’m going to describe the amount of time as “an embarrassment”.

Wow, I forgot how much I loved this album when it came out, how I played it on repeat in the car, on the boombox CD player when we played street hockey, how it was such a revelation to young me. I’d forgotten a couple of the songs, too, so it was like discovering them for the first time all over again.

When it ended, I immediately listened to all of Bleach, followed by Nevermind.

I remembered those days, before Smells Like Teen Spirit was everywhere almost over night. I briefly thought about an entire generation that grew up hearing it as just another track on Now That’s What I Call Arena Rock While Missing The Point Of The Lyrics, Volume 5, and how the context for them and Gen X is so profoundly fucking different. Mostly, I remembered how much I loved all three of these records, how much I loved Unplugged, how I played them all as loud as I could stand, and how devastated I was when Kurt Cobain died. I remembered how angry I was at him, back when I didn’t know how to feel any other emotion if I was hurt or felt a loss.

ANYWAY. When the last note of Endless, Nameless faded, and I had fully experienced all of those memories, it occurred to me that I had listened to the entire Nirvana studio catalog — the band that will likely go down as my generation’s Beatles — and it was just over two hours long. Holy shit. They changed an entire generation in, like, 120 minutes (that sounds cooler if you imagine it in Kurt Loder’s voice) and I can’t even imagine what they would have done if Kurt hadn’t died, and they’d stayed together long enough to do their American Idiot. …right?

I then took a moment to be grateful, and to admire Dave Grohl, for having the strength and courage to carry on and form Foo Fighters, which is another band that means a lot to me. He’s talked about feeling intimidated around Kurt, not believing in himself as a writer, and doing whatever it took to power through it all because he had to. In my own way, I can relate to that. I think a lot of us can. And to carry on after Taylor Hawkins died, too? Jesus Christ, man. Dave Grohl doesn’t know I exist but I am so sorry for the loss he has experienced. May their memories be a blessing.

I still love grunge, even if it hurts my heart when a kid calls it Classic Rock. But I’m old and out of touch. Who is this generation’s Nirvana? I mean, it’s probably Nirvana, but who is speaking to kids the same way, now, as they did, then?

rest in peace, bob newhart

When I worked on Big Bang Theory, each episode involved a few days of rehearsal before we did camera blocking and the actual taping in front of the audience. Most actors go to our dressing rooms during breaks to relax, learn lines, grab a nap, and so on. But when I worked there, if I wasn’t in a scene, I’d stay on the stage and watch the other actors work. It was like getting to sit in on an advanced acting class, without ever having to stand up in front of the other students. I learned so much from that, I am a more fully-equipped performer than I would otherwise be, certainly when it comes to comedy.

When I had the extraordinary privilege of working in the same episodes as Bob Newhart, I stayed on the stage the whole time, just to watch him work. I mean, how could I not? He made it all look so easy, and holy shit he was so funny, even more than you think.

One day, he and I ended up sitting next to each other during a break in production. In the industry, we call it “taking a five” or “a quick ten” or something like that. Just a little break for everyone to catch their breaths. A couple of the writers were there, I think, and maybe one or two other actors. And we all sat there, while Bob Newhart told stories about his life and career. It was amazing. This legend, just talking to us like it was no big deal, sharing these incredible experiences with us. I knew then that I would never forget it, that I would cherish that experience for the rest of my life.

I just read the news that Bob Newhart passed away at 94, and this memory has come back to me, like it was yesterday.

He didn’t need to be kind. He didn’t need to tell us these stories. He didn’t owe us any of his time. And yet he did, and he loved it. Because he chose to do all those things, I have a gift that Bob Newhart gave me. I haven’t opened it in a while, but I took it out today, and I was grateful.

Rest well, Bob.

May his memory be a blessing.