WWdN: In Exile

Something something something awesome weekend

I had a rather ... interesting ... weekend. According to Paul and Storm on Sunday, I won the game of "What I did last night" that I didn't even know we were playing. It was so surreal, I'm mostly writing this down today so I never forget what an incredible time we had.

Saturday, Anne and I were invited to a party at Seth Macfarlane's house for the release of Family Guy Something Something Something Dark Side (their parody of Empire Strikes Back).

I almost didn't go, because I never know anyone at parties like that and end up feeling like a tourist, but I really like Seth and figured there was a non-zero chance I'd see at least one other person I knew while we were there. "Besides," I told Anne, "if we really feel like we don't fit in, we can always go out to dinner or something."

We parked in a garage on Sunset and took a shuttle bus up terrifyingly narrow and winding roads into the Hollywood hills, while the last edge of a nasty winter storm did its best to convince us we were all going to die. When we got to Seth's house, I understood why we needed to park so far away: he lives on the top of a mountain and you could probably only park ten cars there.

The whole thing is a blur, but I shared some highlights with Twitter, which I reprint here with added context and whatnot:

Not only did I not expect paparazzi at this party, I didn't expect them to give a shit about me. That was really weird.

We walked up his driveway, and I was totally unprepared to see an actual press line, with a red carpet and photographers and everything. Usually when there's a press line, there's also a normal walkway without press for normal people to use. I really don't like the whole press line thing, so I always try to go down the other walkway. It's never really been an issue, because for much of the last decade, nobody in the entertainment press has given a shit about me and I can sneak in under a radar that isn't exactly waiting for me to return a ping.

This time, though, it was different. I walked down the normal person entrance, and when I was about two steps from the door, I realized that people were calling my name. From the press line. "That's weird," I thought. "Well, I'm almost in the door, so I'll just keep walking and they'll forget about me in five seconds."

"Who's calling you?" Anne said.

"Photographers, I think," I said. "Let's just keep going and they'll lose interest."

That's when I saw that the people in front of us had stopped, and I was trapped.

I realize this may seem strange to a lot of people, but I really hate having my picture taken, especially when it's by a ton of photographers who all yell my name over and over again while they fire off dozens of flashes and pictures each in the span of about 60 seconds. I can't stress how uncomfortable and self conscious that whole thing makes me feel, but I felt like I was really being a dick by refusing to walk ten feet away and let them do it, so I went over, tried to put on my "I'm happy to be here and not completely freaked out by this whole thing" face, and two profoundly uncomfortable minutes later, got to walk into the party.

http://twitpic.com/tb62v - Ice sculpture of Stewie as Darth Vader. Cool!

When we saw that ice sculpture, the total mindfuck of being in someone's house for a big-budget party with hundreds of strangers totally settled in. It was like, "Oh, you're not just here for a nifty thing at Seth's house. If the fucking press line out front didn't clue you in, Wheaton, you're at a Very Big Deal Event." But I'm not going to lie to you, Marge, that ice sculpture was even cooler (ha! ha! cooler!) in person than it appears in any of the photographs I've seen from the party.

I'm in a room at Seth Macfarlane's house with a full orchestra, and a bar made entirely out of ice. This is so weird.

After we saw the ice sculpture, we wandered around a little bit (Seth's house is one of those giant places that could fit my entire home in the garage) until we walked down some stairs and discovered that the wonderful big band music we'd been hearing since we walked in was actually being created by a live big band. Like, a 22 65-piece live big band. With a conductor and a dance floor and everything.

We saw Seth (who looked every inch the Rat Packer in his white jacket and red carnation) and thanked him for inviting us. At first, he didn't recognize me (on account of my luxurious beard, a theme that would repeat itself again in a moment) but when he did, he got super excited to introduce me to his orchestra's conductor, Ron Jones. Ron scored Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Seth was such a huge TNG fan, he hired him to score Family Guy. When Seth introduced us, Ron smiled warmly and said, "It's so lovely to meet you. I scored your childhood."

It was such a wonderful sentiment, and said with such joy and nostalgia, I looked at Anne and had to blink my eyes several times. Seth got pulled away by one of the hundreds of people who wanted to talk to him, and Anne and I talked with Ron for a little bit before he had to go back to conducting his orchestra.

I just saw @levarburton. He didn't recognize me, on account of my luxurious beard. Ha!

I saw LeVar and his family, and would have run across the room if it hadn't been packed with people.

"Hi, I follow you on Twitter and you never reply to me," I said.

LeVar laughed and said, "That's because I'm an asshole. What's your Twitter name?"

I thought, "Ha! LB doesn't recognize me!" so I said, "It's WilW, but you can call me ... Whil Wheaton!"

LeVar engulfed me with a hug and told me he didn't recognize me, on account of my luxurious beard. We talked for as long as you can reasonably talk in a room packed with people, an orchestra, and a bar made entirely from ice, before deciding that we'd just hook up in a week or so in a more quiet and normal location to catch up.

I am about to have my picture taken with ... wait for it ... Chewbacca Claus.

The printer they were using to make these photos jammed, so we don't have a copy of ours. Apparently, though, we'll be getting a copy via the magic of the internet soon. When that happens, I will produce the photographic proof that so many people on Twitter require before accepting that this event actually happened.

So, uh, it turns out that Katie Sackhoff and I are in the mutual admiration society. (Squee!)

Yeah, so ... that was weird. The next day, upon realizing I'd misspelled her name, I told Twitter: "So in my nerdglee last night, I misspelled Katee Sackhoff's name. As someone whose first name is frequently misspelled, I'm mortified." Katee was friendly and excited and told me that she grew up watching TNG with her dad, who would probably have a heart attack upon learning that she'd met me. I didn't tell her that I was fairly sure a lot of people in the Twitterverse would have a similar reaction upon learning that I had met her. (And they did, too. I felt a disturbance in the Force, like a million billion million people cried out a Sheldonesque WHHHHHEEEEEAAATTTOOONNNN! and were suddenly silenced.)

We talked about working on Big Bang Theory and being nerds, and then I had to pee.

I didn't Twitter this because my phone battery died, but I ran into Simon Helberg (Wolowitz on the aforementioned BBT, and Moist on the not-until-now mentioned Doctor Horrible) on my way to the restrooms, which was a cluster of port-a-potties arranged beneath a tent on one of Seth Macfarlane's numerous and spacious patios.

Simon was on his way out, so I said, "Hey, how plush are those things?"

"Oh, they're magnificent," he said. "Each one has a restroom attendant inside."

Maybe this was only funny to us, but we riffed on the concept of not just a single restroom attendant inside an 8 square-foot port-a-pottie, but a different one inside each port-a-pottie, for a very long time. Simon is a tremendously funny and kind person. I loved everyone on Big Bang Theory, but I really hope I get to have scenes with him if they ever bring back Evil Wil Wheaton.

Now I'm about 20 feet from Seth, as he sings Dean Martin's "I've got my love to keep me warm" with the orchestra. This is FUCKING AWESOME!

This is unbelievable. We're getting a private Rat Pack-style show from Seth in his freakin' house.

You know that Seth sings all the songs on Family Guy, right? He has made no secret of his love of show tunes and crooners, and the man can fucking sing, people. It was infectious how much fun he was having. Whatever the party cost, I'm bet he'd say it was worth it, just to sing for his friends (and a lot of strangers) backed up by an orchestra ... in his freakin' house.

Draw a Venn Diagram of Weird, Awesome, Surreal, and How The Hell Did I Get Invited To This? And put me in the middle. That was my night.

Someone actually made that diagram, which rules.

As midnight approached, Anne and I felt old and tired, and we'd had an incredible time, so we rode a shuttle bus down the hill to the parking lot, and drove home to our delightfully normal lives, where we live in a small house with a lovely patio that can probably only accommodate a single port-a-pottie, if we move the table to one side.

I doubt Seth Macfarlane will ever see this, and I know that for a party of this magnitude, he probably had no personal involvement with our invitation, but just in case: Thanks, Seth. We had a wonderful time, your home is beautiful, and you sang like an angel. Something Something Something Christmas.

the turtle trick delivers ultimate victory

I once wrote a Geek in Review, called 8 Bits High and Rising (Content SFW; Site is NSFW), about my love of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I liked it so much, I adapted a great deal of it for my keynote address to PAX in 2007.

Here's part of it that's relevant to this post:

I was invited to a celebrity charity thing in Hollywood, which was sponsored by Nintendo. In addition to all the usual photographs and teen magazine interviews, shoulder pads and Aqua Net, there would be a Super Mario Bros. competition.

This wasn't some silly Starcade competition with modified versions or timed levels on certain games. It was a serious high score competition, and Jeremy and I were determined to take down the Grand Prize: a complete NES system, featuring a light gun, a robot, over twenty games, and possibly First Prize: a 20 inch color TV. While all the other young teen heartthrobs were busy being seen, signing autographs and getting their picture taken, my brother and I prepared to claim what was rightfully ours. You see, we'd been unintentionally preparing for this very moment all summer long.

Since that fateful day in Zody's, my brother and I had developed an affinity for Nintendo games. In fact, you could say we were protofanboys. We'd always liked Donkey Kong and Punch Out!!, but when a Super Mario Bros. machine was installed between Arkanoid and Pinbot at our local 7-11, we played with a cult-like dedication. Over that summer, we were those guys who nobody could beat, thanks largely to a trick we learned from one of Jeremy's friends at school. He called it "the turtle trick," and it was a way to earn almost limitless free men by freezing and jumping repeatedly on a turtle at the end of world 3-1. Though we never managed to actually beat the game during that time, using the turtle trick, we obtained and held the high score for months. (For you damn kids today, not just earning – but maintaining – the high score on an arcade machine was a very big deal back in those days.)

The competition rules were simple: every kid in attendance could play twice and keep their highest score. At the end of the afternoon, the four highest scores would win prizes.

Thanks to the turtle trick, a lot of patience, and a singular focus that the presence of several young starlets tested (Christina Applegate, Alyssa Milano, and Nicole Eggert among them,) my brother and I completely obliterated everyone else there, and took home the the grand and first prize. 

Earlier this morning, a bunch of people messaged me on Twitter about a column at 1UP, which not only describes that fateful competition, but includes a picture of me and my brother that filled me with such joyful nostalgia, my vision temporarily blurred. You'll have to hit 1UP to see the awesome picture, but please indulge me this quote:

...all we know is that Wil Wheaton is better at Super Mario than Jason Bateman. Please feel free to pull out this fact the next time you are at a party.

Bam, said the lady.

Hey, speaking of my brother, have I mentioned that he takes phenomenal pictures and made awesome things with them?

in which the secret identity of wesley crusher is revealed

Imagine if Television Without Pity recappers had been writing about TNG back in 1987, only with more swearing, more digressions and more geeky in-jokes, plus behind-the-scenes memories for every episode. That’s what Vol. 1 does for the first half of the first season of TNG, from “Encounter at Farpoint” to “Datalore” — it’s just the thing for people who love TNG and snark. - Tracy V. Wilson, How Stuff Works.

I mentioned on one of the Memories of the Futurecasts that writing Memories of the Future Volume One was unintentionally cathartic, as I was able to examine and gain further understanding of what I will call (without further definition) the Airlock Enthusiasts' Society. I didn't realize it while I was working on the book (I was just trying to write something funny and entertaining) but after fourteen weeks of Futurecasts, I can see evidence of that side quest spread out across the entire manuscript. In fact, several readers have commented on it, and now I kind of wish I'd seen it before the book went to press, so I could have smoothed it out a little bit more. Well, live and learn.

While I work on Volume Two, though, I've noticed a real change in Wesley in the second half of the season: it's almost like he takes that uniform seriously, and though he's still an annoying kid, he's not nearly as consistently obnoxious as he was in the first half. 

I mention all of this as prelude to a damn hilarious post on the How Stuff Works blog, which provides an entirely new view of Ensign Pumpkin Sweater:

The Secret Identity of Wesley Crusher

Wil talks about how working on Vol. 1 helped him come to terms with (and understand) the world’s hatred of Wesley Crusher. It’s a hatred I never had. I loved Wesley Crusher. When TNG premiered, I was just starting high school, and I was a serious know-it-all. Seeing a kid on TV who was essentially correcting his teachers, doing science projects and being a huge nerd all the time was kind of awesome. And enabling. I’m sure I was as annoying to the adults around me as Wesley was to adults trying to watch TNG.

But in listening to and reading “Memories of the Future,” I found a whole new reason to love Wesley. In episode 12 of “Memories of the Futurecast” (and the corresponding book chapter), Wil talks about how Wesley repairs the malfunctioning holodeck in “The Big Goodbye” with one zap of a magical holodeck fixing thing. In the middle of my morning train commute, I thought, “Ha ha ha, Wesley has a sonic screwdriver.” Then, accompanied by lots of mental capital letters and exclamation points, and possibly even a ZOMG, came the follow-up thought: “Wesley Crusher is a Time Lord!”

If you're experiencing the same amount of ZOMGLOL that I experienced when I read that yesterday, I think you'll want to check out the rest of the post, because it gets even better.

thirty-two hours in three hundred words

It was just above freezing when I got into the car Tuesday morning. The rising sun had just barely cleared my neighbor's roof, and did its best to melt the frost off of my roof and windshield.

Anne and I sat in the passenger compartment shivering, surprisingly thick clouds of fog blooming in front of us with every breath, while we waited for the engine to warm up.

"We should have started the car five minutes ago and waited in the house," I said, hugging myself to keep warm.

"When we build the time machine, we'll make sure we do that."

After a couple of minutes, the frost on the windshield began to soften, helped along by judicious use of the wipers. As we drove up the street, I noticed that every house, lawn, car -- hell, every surface -- that was still in shadow had at least some frost on it. I'm sure people who live in parts of the world that actually have seasons wouldn't be moved by it, but it made me happy to observe some tactile evidence of winter's impending, full-throated arrival.

About fifty traffic-filled minutes later, Anne dropped me off at the airport. Four flight-delayed hours after that, I walked into the Seattle airport, and five hours after that I walked into the Child's Play Charity Auction.

Seventeen hours after that, I walked out of my hotel into a crystal-clear thirteen degree Seattle morning that shocked me so much, I didn't actually feel how cold it was until I'd been sitting in my cab for almost a full minute.

Finally, about thirty-two hours after I'd walked out of my house I walked back inside. My pets greeted me at the door, and made me feel like I’d been missing for a week.

if you've been trying to reach me via e-mail

I took my Mac into the shop for some work last week, and for a variety of reasons that are as complex as they are boring, I haven't been able to get my wilwheaton.net e-mail since I dropped it off. If you've been trying to get in touch with me for business reasons, I'm not ignoring you; I just haven't seen your e-mail (though I should see it by the end of the week.)

...remembering the irrational immortality of youth

I didn't have to look at the weather forecast to know that a storm is on the way; I could feel it with the first step I took outside this morning with my dog.

As I stood on my patio and watched the steam rise off my coffee and swirl up through golden shafts of golden morning sunlight shot through a cloud-filled sky, I remembered a day like this one fifteen or sixteen years ago.

I'd just gotten home from Nice, where I'd lived and worked on a film called Mister Stitch for a few months. It wasn't the most pleasant movie in the world to work on (the other lead actor was an unprofessional nightmare) but the time I spent there working on it remains some of the best time in my life. I'd been acting since I was a child, but it wasn't until I lived in Nice and worked on Mister Stitch that I truly felt like an artist. I was fundamentally changed by the experience, seeing the world - especially entertainment - differently than I ever had before.

The day I got back from location, sometime in mid-January of that year, my friend Dave picked me up from LAX, and we went directly down the road to Manhattan Beach, to wait out the terrible rush hour traffic which stood between the airport and my house. After ten hours on an airplane, another 120 minutes to crawl 40 miles up the freeway wasn't exactly an appealing notion.

We parked in a mostly-empty lot and walked down toward the water. There was a winter storm on its way, driving powerful waves ahead of it that were so huge, they crashed up against the bottom of the pier and occasionally broke over the end of it. Wrapped up in the irrational immortality that's endemic to 22 year-olds, we walked dangerously close to the end of the shuddering pier, angry waves boiling beneath, and dared the Pacific Ocean to reach up and touch us.

I don't recall specifically what we talked about - I'm sure I regaled him with slightly-exaggerated tales of glamor and excess and artistic awakening along the French Riviera - but even now I can I clearly recall the terror and exhilaration I felt whenever foamy, freezing sea water splashed up through the spaces between the planks and soaked into the tops of our shoes.

Since I grew up and became a husband and a father, I've gone out of my way to avoid anything more dangerous than driving on the Los Angeles freeway system, so I can't imagine defying a Pacific winter storm like I did when I was in my early twenties ... but standing on my patio in my late thirties, not really defying as much as tolerating the morning chill, I was grateful for the memory.

obscured by clouds

I never quite managed to get started today, and haven't written a single word that wasn't part of an e-mail or something stupid on Twitter. Dammit.

So, in an effort to continue my daily-blog-o-phonic creative output, a very very short story:

The wind came down the canyon and blew ice and snow into Colin's face. He brushed it off his goggles, but had given up keeping it out of his beard days ago.

He looked up, but the summit was obscured by clouds. Still, he knew it was there, even if he could not see it, and so he continued to climb.

Well, it's more of a scene, (a very very short one, at that) but it's more than I've been able to muster all day, so ... that's something.

See you tomorrow, Internets.

You just keep on trying, until you run out of cake.

Yesterday, I wrote:

Well, the power just went out, so it's time for me to pack up my Mac and head out to a cafe with WiFi where I can work on my novel in front of people and get this posted. The weird thing is, while it's likely going to take an hour at least from the time I finish writing this paragraph until it actually posts on the internet, there is no perceived delay from whoever reads this, because as far as you're concerned, the post didn't exist until it was published, though it already existed for me.

Um. Yeah. I'm sure someone who's actually studied physics is going to knock me around for that, but since my knowledge of the field is limited to what I've picked up on my own, it's a fun thought exercise.

Okay, little post, go sit in an eigenstate for the nice people.

Reader Gevmage says:

Your analogy is reasonable. The post existed on your laptop while you drove to the coffee shop, in a state such that it was stable but not portable. Once you got to the coffee shop, by connecting to the internet, you promoted it to an energy state where it could slide easily through the intertubes to our screens.

Since quantum mechanics describes ONLY the behavior of the very small, it has problems when extended directly to the macroscopic (which the idea of Shroedinger's cat is an illustration). You extended the notion as well as it could be.

The eigenvalue then is just a scalar logical value indicating if the post is visible to the world. Every eigenvalue has to have a corresponding operator; the operator is a complicated set of tests of whether or not if you point our browser at wilwheaton.typepad.com, you get a certain character string that's in the post.

Why yes, I am procrastinating, why do you ask? :-D

Even though I don't understand the math behind quantum physics, I have a good enough grasp of the theory behind quantum physics to allow me to follow along when the math is discussed. Put another way: I know enough French and Spanish to put together what someone is telling me, but not enough to actually sit down and compose a letter in that language.

I'm sure I've just oversimplified the whole thing, and insulted a lot of actual scientists and mathematicians, so let me apologize for that before I continue, because I think I'm about to make it even worse.

I was easily bored as a kid. I wasn't athletic, strong or coordinated, but I was smart and I loved to read. I still enjoyed playing tag, hide and seek, and riding bikes, but none of that stuff satisfied me the same way that exploring imagined worlds in my mind did. Those imagined worlds were usually delivered in the form of Science Fiction and Fantasy books, within D&D modules, and occasionally created (or spun off from existing imagined worlds) using action figures. (I guess it's no surprise, then, that I make my living and found my place in life using my imagination.)

I always loved exploring strange new worlds in books and magazines (Dear Asimov's, I never thought it would happen to me, but ...) and there was even a time in my late teens when I actively sought out all the weird conspiracy, occult, UFO and supernatural stuff I could find (I truly despise that crap today) because even though I knew it was bullshit, it was yet another weird and fantastic imagined world to explore.

As I wrote in an old Things I Love post, it was the book Hyperspace that fundamentally changed my worldview:

[S]omeone (I think it was my brother) suggested that I read A Brief History of Time. I picked it up, read it in just a couple of days, and realized that my life could be divided into before I read it, and after I read it. On my next trip to the bookstore, I went straight to the science section, and looked for something – anything – to continue my education.

My eyes fell on a book with an interesting cover, and a provocative title: Hyperspace: A scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10th dimension. It was written by a guy called Michio Kaku. I pulled it off the shelf, and after just a few pages, I was hooked.

There's a story in Hyperspace, right at the beginning, that I'm going to paraphrase. It's the story that grabbed my attention, captured my imagination, and fundamentally altered the way I thought about the nature of existence. I already had "before and after" with A Brief History of Time, and when I got to the end of this story, I had "before and after I read about the fish scientists." The story goes something like this:

In San Francisco, there's this botanical garden, and near the entrance there is a pond that's filled with koi fish. Dr. Kaku describes standing there, looking at the fish one day, and wondering what it would be like if the fish had a society as complex and advanced as our own, but the whole thing was confined to the pond, and they had no idea that there was a whole other world just beyond the surface of the water. In the fish world, there were fish scientists, and if a human were to pluck one of them from the pond, show it our world, and return it to the pond, it would go back to the other fish scientists and say, "Guys! You're never going to believe this. I was just doing my thing, and suddenly, this mysterious force pulled me from our world and showed me another, where the creatures don't need gills to breathe, and walk on two legs!"

The other scientists would look at it, and ask it how it got to this new world, but it wouldn't be able to explain it. They'd want the scientist to recreate it, but it wouldn't be able to. The fish scientist would know, however, that the other world was there, and that there was something just as complex as life in the pond on the other side of some mysterious barrier that they couldn't seem to penetrate.

I'm sure I've mangled the story, but that's essentially what I remember from it. I thought, "Well, shit, if there could be a world like that in the pond, maybe we are in something else's pond!" I didn't know if it was possible, I didn't know if it was just science fiction, but I didn't care. It was this incredible possibility, and my world opened up again. I felt like I'd been granted membership in a secret society. I devoured the book, and I began to think about the nature of existence in ways that I'd never even considered before. When I finally read Flatland a few years later, I was blown away that Abbot had written essentially the same story a hundred years earlier, in 1884, and I was thrilled that I could actually understand it.

My elementary school teachers were real good at putting the fear of God into us kids, but they were just horrible at teaching us math. I tried and tried, but I never understood it, and "you have to learn this because you have to learn it" wasn't the type of inspiration that worked for me. Even today, I'm not very good at math, never having found that teacher who could translate it into something I could actually use and appreciate. 

Growing up, I was a creative kid, an imaginative kid, and while I loved reading and learning about scientists and mathematicians, I never had a teacher or tutor who could help teenage me understand their work the way I understood their lives. (NB: My tutor while I was on Star Trek, Marion, who took me through most of high school, did everything she could to help me get excited about math, but to borrow from a parable: that ground in my brain had never been cultivated, and it just wasn't fertile enough to bear fruit.)

My lack of mathematical ability held me back in science, and it prevented me from ever studying physics or astronomy at anything exceeding the "for dummies" level. Here's a sad and embarrassing truth: I still can't sit down and develop equations for things, I struggle to calculate simple problems that my kids can do in their heads (they were taught math in a fundamentally different way than I was) and few things make me feel as stupid and frustrated as a simple algebra problem.

But when I sit down to read books like Hyperspace, articles about the LHC, anything my friend Phil Plait writes, or comments like the one I quoted above, I understand what they're talking about. I get excited, and take a look at a world that seems fantastic and imagined, but is actually real and right here.

I seem to have wandered away from the reason I sat down to write this post, so let me try to bring it all back together: I love exploring fantastic worlds that only exist in books and my imagination. But I also I love exploring the real world, which is so amazing, it just seems imagined.

(I once read a story about this for an audiobook. I forget the title, but it was about a kid who wanted to leave Earth with a dimension-hopping guy to explore the universe, and the dimension-hopping guy tells him that he shouldn't leave Earth for parts unknown until he really explores all the wonderful and incredible things that Earth has to offer, because due to the laws of dimension-hopping, it's a one-way trip. I wonder if that's still in print? I'd love to listen to it.)

I still wish I had a better understanding of the science and math that makes understanding and exploring the most fantastic parts of our real world possible, but until I do, I'm happy I have a pocket phrase book and a tourist map to help me get around a little bit.