WWdN: In Exile

Lakeside Shadow

I'm not sure how many people are listening to Radio Free Burrito, but a bunch of you wrote in asking for a stand-alone MP3 of my ambient tune Lakeside Shadow.

Look, you're totally not the boss of me, but I did sort of say that if enough people asked for it, I'd put it here on its own.  I'm proud of the composition, and I'm happy to put it out there for anyone to listen to, or use in a creative way.

If you like it, you'll probably like some of the artists who influenced me over the years: Woob (especially 1194, and especially the track strange air) Dedicated (especially Global Communication, also called 76 14), and Solitaire (especially Ritual Ground). Also, Instinct Records (still alive) and Silent Records (sadly, tragically, defunct since 1996) released an amazing number of genre-defining ambient discs in the 90s. And now, just to prove how hardcore I am, I'm going to throw out Pete Namlook, and the FAX Label, but their stuff is far more experimental than the rest of my list, and isn't what I'd use to introduce a new listener to Ambient music.

Finally, if you can find it, Silent Records put out an incredible record called Earth to Infinity (I think in 1994) which was pulled shortly after it was released, due to some sampling issues. I think it's one of the greatest ambient recordings of all time, and don't ask me for it because I'm not going to jail for you, Chachi.

Anyway, here it is. The file is 4.9MB, and is a 192kbps MP3, at 44.1kHz. It's 3:30:  Download lakeside_shadow.mp3

Lakeside Shadow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. If you decide to do something cool with it, let me know and I may just link it up. If you want to pretend we're really in the radio business, you can send me some money and a hooker to help influence my decision.

The photo in this entry, which is the photo I'd use if I'd made this into an actual record or whatever, was taken by jpmatth. I found it at flickr (using the tags winter and lake) and is used according to his Creative Commons license. Pretty cool, huh?

WPT could lose some top pros

I read in a couple of blogs last week that some poker pros are unhappy with the release the World Poker Tour requires them to sign before they can play in WPT events.

So I called up Chris Ferguson, who I'd heard is unable to play in WPT events due to the scope of the current release, got some comments from him and wrote an article about it for CardSquad.

These days, when you sign up for a poker tournament, in addition to plunking down your buy-in and flashing your ID, you often have to sign a release. In fact, for any televised tournament, including World Poker Tour events, if you refuse to sign the release, you won't be allowed to play. This has created some tension between the World Poker Tour and some of the top tournament players in the world, who who can't -- or won't -- agree to the WPT's terms.

[. . .]

[T]he player the WPT may miss the most is 2000 World Series of Poker Champion   Chris "Jesus" Ferguson. I caught Chris a few minutes before a tournament last Thursday, and he told me, "The release has gotten worse over time, and I simply can't sign it." He explained that the WPT release is so broad, it asks for rights Chris is not legally able to relenquish. "I have business deals that prevent me signing this release," He said.

Some Internet commentors have been critical of the pros, suggesting that they wouldn't be in this position if television hadn't made them famous, but Chris said, "I'm not asking for money, just the right to control my image outside the program." He reminded me that in tournament poker, the players put up all the money for the prize pool, in addition to paying for the rake. "In no other sport do participants put up [as much money as poker players do] for the events," he said, and that's a major point of contention for some players, who feel that they are taking all of the financial risk while the WPT profits from their tournament participation.

Commenting is currenty hosed at CardSquad (probably because they are associated with me, and we all know how technology breaks whenever I get too close to it -- NASA calls me before an important space probe launch, just so I won't do something crazy like think about it) so feel free to comment on it here.

The story has also made it to digg, even though it doesn't say anything about the Xbox, haxxoring [whatever] or contain a top ten list. So check me out! I'm totally doing journalism . . .ish . . . things.

I'm grows up and grows up and grows up! Yeeehhhaaahahahahaaa!

Radio Free Burrito Episode 3 (fixed. again.)

This episode of The Burrito is the longest, yet, weighing in at 37 minutes. It was so long, in fact, that I had to break it into two parts in garage band, and use audacity to join them together. However, it's relatively small; just 15.2MB. I listened to it in headphones and through my Powerbook's speakers, and it sounds fine to me, but let me know if you think it sucks. You can also let me know if you like it, of course.

I'm not very happy with this episode, as I fell into one of my chief complaints about podcasts in general: it rapidly devolves into just some guy talking about bullshit. I mostly did the show so I could stay on the weekly schedule, and I really just wanted to share this song that I made in garageband, because I think it's kind of cool.

I'm always interested in feedback which can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net. The feedback some listeners have chosen to send in has been extremely useful, whether it's praise or constructive criticism, so thank you all for that. Questions for next week's show, which will focus exclusively on family and holiday themes, can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net.

Anyway, If you have 37 minutes to spend listening to me blather on about bullshit, please enjoy: Download radio_free_burrito_episode_three.mp3 <-- the second fixed version. The first one had huge gaps where I addicentally erased a track, while the second one had an additional track layered over the beginning that I didn't delete when I replaced the first deleted track, for fuck's sake. But this should be the "good" version now, and if you have one of the earlier versions, hermetically seal it and start planning for your retirement.

Show Notes:

• Yes, this should be called Episode Two. I am an idiot.
• Continuing the "I'm an idiot" meme, I inadvertently deleted an entire track, which took some of the bumpers with it. This results in about 20 seconds of silence around the 5 minute mark. I will repair this, and replace the current file later tonight. Sorry about that. Okay, thanks to some audacity-fu and a bit of garageband voodoo, I fixed it. Nothing to hear here. Move along.
  
• The intro music comes from Squirrel Nut Zippers' 1996 gold album, Hot. The song is titled "Hell."
• My tune is called "Lakeside Shadow." I made it in Garageband.
• Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net, questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
• Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend!

Mirrors, provided by WWdN reader Brian M:

Low: 6.46 megs, vbr 24kb max, mono
http://badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_three-low.mp3

High torrent:
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_three.mp3.torrent

(Thank you, Brian!)

friday night at MGM

My WPBT Trip Report is currrently under construction [insert totally awesome 1996 .gif of a man with a shovel on a yellow diamond here. It's retro-ironicool!] but I came across a photo that so perfectly captures my Friday night at MGM, I had to post it right now.

This comes from Flickr, via CujoFan's blog. You will note that, even though I had position on Paul Phillips, he still managed to make me his bitch, which is probably easy when I'm playing near my gulp limit, and he's playing below his "guess what I found under a couch cushion" limit.

I guess it goes without saying that Paul is a remarkable poker player . . . but until you've sat with him, and watched him completely pwn a table, you have no idea how scary good he actually is. Paul has said that he's just about finished playing poker, which is a real shame. He could utterly destroy just about any WSOP field he enters, and I'd like to see him take at least one bracelet before he retires.

WWdN Poker Game Schedule Changes

After two awesome months, I'm moving the WWdN Friday game at PokerStars to Tuesday, where it will henceforth be known as "The WWdN Friday Game On Tuesday."

Just kidding. It will be "The WWdN: [Donkey who outdrew me because I am so awesome] Invitational."

I'm moving it to Tuesdays in anticipation of SciFridays coming back, and so people who don't want to give up their Friday nights to play poker with the most awesome group of future WSOP champions (and Poker Geek) ever assembled can still do so on Tuesdays.

The West Coast Warm-up will still happen at 7:30 PST on Thursdays, and is currently seeking a new name, since it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to warm up for something that happened on Tuesday, unless you're warming up several days in advance, which is a silly way to spend your entire weekend.

So cut-n-paste this as necessary, and spread the word around:

The WWdN Friday game at PokerStars is moving to Tuesday, beginning December 20th. The game will play each week, except in the event of major holidays, starting at 7:00 PM EST. The buy-in will remain at $10+1.

A major announcement related to the Friday-but-now-on-Tuesday tournaments will come out tomorrow. Feel free to speculate wildly, in the hopes that the Associated Press picks up the story and runs with it. Also feel free to tell me I smell good and have nice hair. But don't expect any funny business, because I'm not that kind of date.

artwork, TODO, and the devil

I wanted to do something creative and cool for the booklet that comes with Just A Geek The Audiobook, so I bought a Molskine notebook, and hand-wrote an introduction, the chapter and track listings, and a bunch of liner notes in it. There may also be a few things like the surfer "S", a Van Halen "VH", an actual game of Tic-Tac-Toe that I played with my wife, and some of the other stuff that you typically find on a Pee Chee folder in seventh grade. The idea is that Just A Geek is sort of a journal (all about Star Trek, if you believe the cover and marketing), and I think that this booklet ties in with that theme quite nicely. It's supermegatotallyawesome that I have the creative freedom to layer one creative mini-project over another creative mega-project.

I've finished the art work several times, but when I go to scan it and e-mail it off to the appropriate people, I end up with one of those "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I just added . . ." moments, and the project keeps growing and growing, so now I have to edit out some of the stuff that it would be "cool if I just added . . ." so I don't have to kick up the cost of the damn thing by twenty bucks to account for my unrestrained creativity. (Unless you really want to purchase the "holy shit I can't believe I paid this much for an audiobook, but Wil Wheaton thanks me for helping him buy a boat" edition.)

I also have to write my trip report from the WPBT Winter Classic in Las Vegas this past weekend, and turn in a Games of our Lives column today, and I hope to record a new episode of RFB before the kids get home from school . . . so I guess I should probably stop blogging and get back to work.

Oh, the whole reason I sat down to write this was to point at this week's Games of our Lives, Satan's Hollow, which I think is pretty funny:

Gameplay: It's 1982, so of course you have to enter Satan's Hollow in a spaceship. To pull this off, you build a bridge across a river of fire by picking up pieces from the left side of the screen and dropping them onto the right side of the screen. You have a shield that will protect you (for about .08 seconds) from the gargoyles and demons dropping World War II-style bombs. When the bridge is completed, you cross into the game's eponymous locale and face down Satan himself. If you avoid his magic pitchforks and destroy him, you won't save mankind from eternal damnation, but you will earn bonus points and an extra laser blaster for your space ship.

Before you complain that none of this makes sense, please remember that the number-one song of 1982 was "Centerfold" by J. Geils Band, and the number-one film was Tootsie.

One final thought before I really get back to work: You know who's cool? Enoch Light.

undone (the sweater post)

Several years ago, I participated in a fund and awareness raiser in San Francisco for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's chillingeffects.org, where I made a speech, and participated in a celebrity boxing grudge match with Barney the Dinosaur.

The whole thing was about fair use and parody rights, and it was the awesome. It was held at DNA Lounge, with an after party that I was criticized for leaving early (read: after three hours, rather than when the sun rose) by morally outraged and holier-than-wil participants who couldn't be bothered to find out: 1) how many totally spun people got up in my shit and completely freaked me out, (the answer is one, but that was enough) and 2) how many hours I'd already been awake by the time I left a few minutes short of complete exhaustion (the answer is close to twenty, including six hours of "I'm-Entertaining-People" time, which is like eight hours of regular time.)

Before I so rudely left the party, I got to hang out with lots of awesome NorCal folks (thanks for the water, you guys -- I'm running some out into the street right now, just for you), one of whom brought this rather . . . unique . . . sweater, which I was asked to wear.

I've been in the public eye long enough to know that doing things like wearing an incredibly ugly sweater and posing for a photograph while wearing said sweater is bound to result in something Not Good, but the sweater was hilarious, and in the spirit of the evening (not, I might add, in the spirit of lots of Guinness. I was too tired to avail myself of the DNA's fantastic bar that night), I went ahead and posed for the picture you are now trying so hard to get out of your brains.

About once a year, this photo (which was taken by my friend loren, who never gets credit for it, you bastards) surfaces, and makes a brief run around The Internets, where it is the subject of much speculation by random people are are just positive they know what they are talking about, like "Well no wonder his career bombed." Oh! Burn! I am so nailed by your clever insight! Someday, I hope to achieve whatever it is you've achieved, Anonymous Internet Genius! Allow me to retort, in a vernacular you may understand. "Your leik so right! I am a such a looser!"

If anyone is still reading, and is interested in knowing exactly what the ugliest sweater in the world (sorry, Mr. Cosby, but it's true, and you lost) is all about, take a look at the Clown Sweater Project's page at Internet Archive, where we learn that

"I found this sweater at the Salvation Army thrift store on Valencia Street in San Francisco a few years ago. It cost me $3.75. It has proved to be a good investment."

There is also a page featuring photos of all the hapless souls who have had their careers ruined by the Curse of the Clown Sweater in one place, which takes about a year to load on my cable modem, or fifteen years if you're on dial-up. If you'd like to find out what happened to that once-promising co-worker of yours, but you don't have one to fifteen years to invest, try this page which breaks up the collection into slightly more managable chunks. Unfortunately, archive.org stops at the first page, so if you're manic about looking at all the pictures, you'll have to go to the page with all the photos. See you in ten to fifteen years. (If I may offer a bit of advice: spending one to fifteen years waiting for photos to load on The Internets may cause your career to bomb almost as fast as posing for one picture while wearing an ugly sweater. But do whatever you want, man. I'm not the boss of you.)

Whenever something like this hits a new unique online community (in this case, people who like to knit), a bunch of new readers will show up to see what all the fuss is about, with their preconceptions of me locked-and-loaded. If you're one of those people, I'd like to welcome you to my bit of madness on the intarweb, and encourage you to read some archives before you send me e-mail about what a huge idiot I am for [your reason, which you've formulated in the span of fifteen seconds based on a quick skimming of one or two pages of my blog goes here]. Now, before you decide that I hate knitters, I should point out that my wife does Stitch-n-Bitch from time to time, making totally awesome hats for cancer patients, which totally rules. I do, however, really hate the Oakland Raiders, Toronto Maple Leafs, people who lie, dishonorable people, milk, neo-cons, paying too much for parking anywhere, and this pain in my right hip that just won't go away.

Welcome to WIL WHEATON dot NET: in Exile. Enjoy your stay, and look out for the snark. It runs wild around here.

poker bloggers are the nuts

Poker bloggers totally. Fucking. Rule.

I had more fun, got less sleep, and won more money in the last 48 hours in Las Vegas than in the previous three trips combined.

The WPBT 2005 Winter Classic trip report will come soon. But first, I need to collapse for about 18 hours.

apples for the kings and queens

I played for about six hours in a 1-2 No Limit Hold'Em game at the MGM Grand tonight. I planned to get into the HORSE game with the rest of the poker bloggers, but the list was so long, I ended up in the 1-2 game instead.

Just before midnight, a man with a puffy face, tired eyes, and the aura of defeat sat down into the 7 seat. He bought for 100, as his obviously exhausted wife sat behind him, her hand supportively on his shoulder.

He was the worst player I've ever seen in my life, and after two painfully quick rebuys, he left the table. When he got up, everything about him said he had played with -- and lost -- the rent money.

Though I hadn't taken any of his chips, I felt terribly sorry for him, as he walked, dejected, out of the poker room.

I played for another two hours, and finally cashed out four hundred and ninety-eight dollars better off than when I started.

live from hollywood, it's The Trade!

I just got back from Monogram Sweater, but thanks to the magic of Typepad's post-it-in-the-future thingy, this won't publish until I'm in Las Vegas on Friday. Cool.

I was very nervous on the way to the theater, more nervous than I've been before a performance in a long time. It didn't make sense to me that I felt that way, because I was performing material I'm very familiar with, which I've performed several times before. On the way there, I puzzled it out, and came to the conclusion that I had a perfect storm of pre-trip anxiety, separation anxiety, and poker tournament anxiety, magnified by holy-shit-it's-almost-the-holidays* anxiety. Once I realized what was actually going on, I calmed down a little bit, and I was grateful for the opportunity to take the stage and perform.

See, when I'm acting on stage, that's the only thing going on in my entire world at that moment. I honestly forget about everything else in the universe while I'm in a scene. Even though I enjoy writing, I don't get that same total escape when I'm doing it like I do with acting. I love that escape so much, I don't think I'll ever completely lose that thing which makes me an actor.

So the show was great. The other writers created hilarious stories (if you ever get a chance to see James Judd perform "James and the Momo Sisterhood," do it) and though the house was small, they were a very receptive and supportive group. I think they had a good time.

I took my iRiver with me to record my bit in the show. I stupidly put it on the music stand, next to my book, so the audio is pretty lousy . . . but I'm here it is anyway, for those of you who are forgiving and just want to sort of hear what it was like in the theatre. It blows out at the beginning, and again around the 5 minute mark for a bit. Right near the end you can hear my cell phone ring in my pocket, because Anne was calling me. Yeah, I thought I'd turned it to silent mode, but I guess it got nudged back into "ring while Wil is on the stage" mode. I don't think anyone in the audience heard it, but it's clearly there on the recording.

So, with the understanding that the audio is far from perfect, please pretend you are in a tiny little theatre in Hollywood, and you've just seen two brilliant performaces as I walk onto the stage . . . and enjoy The Trade: Download TheTradeLive (5.7 MB -14:14 Min).mp3

*(Normally, I'd just say Christmas, but I'm trying to make Bill O'Reilly's enemies list.)