Some of my friends raised money for Child's Play Charity by doing a Minecraft Marathon. I meant to link to it when it was happening, but mumblemumblesomething.

Anyway, here are two of the many amazeballs things they got excited and made:

(Click images to embiggen at Flickr)

I wish I hadn't mumblemumblesomethingcough, because it would have been awesome to see this happen in real time, but if you like what you see here (and here and here and here), then please consider making a donation to Child's Play Charity.

“Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?”

        --Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian on CNBC.

I put this on my Tumblr thing earlier today, but I'm reposting it here, because it's important to me. If you don't know what SOPA and ProtectIP are, read this technical examination of SOPA and ProtectIP from the Reddit blog and come back when you're done.

SOPA Lives -- and MPAA calls protests an "abuse of power."

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has looked at tomorrow’s “Internet blackout” in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—and it sees only a “gimmick,” a “stunt,” “hyperbole,” “a dangerous and troubling development,” an “irresponsible response,” and an “abuse of power.”

“Wikipedia, reddit, and others are going dark to protest the legislation, while sites like Scribd and Google will also protest. In response, MPAA chief Chris Dodd wheeled out the big guns and started firing the rhetoric machine-gun style. 

“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.”

Can I interrupt for a moment? Thanks. When you complain that opponents didn’t “come to the table to find solutions”, do you mean that we didn’t give NINETY-FOUR MILLION DOLLARS to congress like the MPAA? Or do you mean that we didn’t come to the one hearing that Lamar Smith held, where opponents of SOPA were refused an opportunity to comment? Help me out, here, Chris Dodd, because I’m really trying hard to understand you.

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

Oh ha ha. Ho. Ho. The MPAA talking about “skewing the facts to incite” anyone is just too much. 

“A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.”

Except for the part where this is completely false, it’s a valid point.

“It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”

Riiiiiiight. Protesting to raise awareness of terrible legislation that will destroy the free and open Internet is an abuse of power, but buying NINETY-FOUR MILLION DOLLARS worth of congressional votes is just fine.

I’m so disappointed in Chris Dodd. He was a pretty good senator, wrote some bills (like Dodd/Frank) that are genuinely helping people, and is going to be on the wrong side of every argument as the head of the MPAA. What a wasted legacy.

===

I am 100% opposed to SOPA and PIPA, even though I'm one of the artists they were allegedly written to protect. I've probably lost a few hundred dollars in my life to what the MPAA and RIAA define as piracy, and that sucks, but that doesn't come close to how much money I've lost from a certain studio's creative accounting.

The RIAA and MPAA are, again, on the wrong side of history. Attempting to tear apart one of the single greatest communications achievements in human history in a misguided attempt to cling to an outdated business model instead of adapting to the changing world is a fucking crime.

A free and open Internet is as important to me as the bill of rights. I don't want the government of one country -- especially the corporate-controlled United States government -- to exert unilateral control over the Internet for any reason, especially not because media corporations want to buy legislation that won't do anything to actually stop online piracy, but will expand the American police state, and destroy the Internet as we know it.

Please contact your Senators and US Representatives, and tell them to vote NO on SOPA and ProtectIP. The future of the Internet -- and the present we take for granted -- depend on it.

The directions to my audition were simple: two freeways, one off-ramp, two left turns.

In practice, finding a parking spot and making my way into the actual waiting room were slightly less complicated than getting The Babelfish (kids, ask your parents), so I actually walked into the room for my 1415 audition at 1425, having arrived at the actual location close to 1400.*

Luckily, everyone else was having a similarly difficult time figuring out how to thwart the top of the room cleaning robot, so we were all more or less equally late, essentially time shifting the entire session, as if our future selves had planned the entire thing.

I sat in a long, featureless hallway on the same kind of office furniture I've been sitting on for 30 years, and ran my lines to make sure they were properly in my head. Another actor, older and better looking than me, came in while I was waiting and signed in.

Before too long, the door to the office opened, and another actor, also older and better looking than me, came out. I looked up at him and smiled. It took him a few seconds to figure out who this weirdo with the beard was, and why he was staring at him, but when he did, he opened his arms and walked toward me.

"Holy shit, dude," I said. "It is so good to see you!"

It was Michael Cudlitz, an absolutely sensational actor who I worked with in the early 90s on a movie that, while it didn't completely suck, wasn't some of my best work.

"How are you?" He asked.

"I'm good," I told him. Then, I wrapped up almost 20 years in about a minute while the casting director stood in the doorway, looking amused. 

"Started a blog ... got married ... raised two kids ... Ryan just graduated from college and moved out of state for his job ... wrote a bunch of books ... comics ... columns ... [Super Secret Project] ... Leverage ... Eureka ... The Guild ...

"So life is really good," I concluded, "and every day I'm afraid I'm going to wake up from this wonderful dream."

Realizing that I was wasting her time, and the time of the actor who was also waiting to go in after me, I give Michael my email address. "I'd love to catch up over a beer or a coffee or something, if you want to do that." He took my address down and said he'd get in touch.

I went into the room, apologized for making her wait, and got to work. 

"Do you have any questions?" She asked.

"No," I said. "I think the scenes are quite clear, and I've made some choices. If they're not what you're looking for, just let me know and I'll adjust."

"That sounds great," she said. "Go ahead whenever you're ready."

I read the first scene. It felt okay, but when I was reading with another person and actually performing, instead of just running the lines on my own in my house, the scene came alive, and something wasn't quite right. She gave me some notes and direction and asked me to do it again. I did it again, and it it felt considerably better. "Great," she said.

I read the second scene. She gave me notes and direction, and asked me to do it again. I did it again, and she told me it was wonderful.

I was intensely grateful that she was invested in the process, and was giving me notes and direction. That just doesn't happen very often, and when someone is as rusty at auditioning as I am, it would be easy for a casting director to just write me off for making a character choice that wasn't what they were looking for. It bolstered my confidence and let me relax away some of the tension I didn't realize I had.

I started to read the third scene. A few lines in, I stopped myself. "I'm sorry, I went to Mars there for a second. Can I start over?"

"What you were doing was actually perfect for what's going on in the scene," she said, "but go ahead and start over."

I started again, and just felt a little more focused and connected to the material. I can't say anything about the scene (or the project), but there's a lot going on between the two characters, and finding the moments while I was sitting on a folding chair in an office wasn't the easiest thing in the world.** 

"Really, really nice," she said.

"Thanks," I said. I began to pick up my phone and sunglasses (which I'd put on the floor when I came in) and before I realized the words were coming out of my mouth, I added, "I have to thank you for giving me notes and direction. I'm 40 this year, and I've been doing this since I was 7. Something's changed in the last five or ten years... it's just like hardly anybody cares if the actors are comfortable, or if we're doing our best work. I've had auditions where casting makes me feel like I'm imposing on their time simply by being there, and whatever performance I give doesn't matter.

"It really means a lot to me that you gave me an opportunity to adjust, and I felt like you wanted me to do my best work. So thank you."

She looked at the other casting associate in the room and back to me. "It's depressing how easy it is to make actors happy these days," she said, "We want to have fun in here, and we want you to do your best work. There are a lot of different choices an actor can make, and I know what the producers are looking for, so if you've made a different choice, I can point you in a different direction. So thank you, and you're welcome." She smiled at me.

I'm probably not going to get this job. I think I'm too young, and the other actors there were all handsome manly men. But I don't feel like the time was wasted, because I got to do my best work for someone who cared to see it. It's rare that I feel respected as an artist when I audition, and if every audition felt as good as this one, I'm positive that I -- and other actors -- would book many more jobs, simply because we've been given a chance to do our best, instead of feeling like a widget on an assembly line. 

I walked out of the office, dropped my sides in the first recycling bin I found***, and made my way to my car, babelfish jammed securely into my ear. A bowl of petunias appeared in the sky above me, and I knew exactly where my towel was.

*24 hour time is used in this case for the purposes of confounding Americans while slyly winking at the rest of the world. How you doin'?

**Believe me when I tell you that auditioning is a skill, and the some of the best actors on the set have an incredibly difficult time finding that level of performance in a casting office.

*** I always do this, because it allows me to let go of the audition. I've done what I can do, and since the entire process is out of my hands, there's no good reason to hold onto the sides. If I get called back, I'll get a new set.

I composed a post in Firefox all about how I have this awesome audition this afternoon. Then, when I tried to publish it, Firefox hung for ten minutes before it crashed.

I've been spoiled by stability, so I didn't do the ctl-c that was so pretty much automatic a few years ago... so here's the tl;dr: I have an audition today for a movie. The script is fantastic, the people involved are Top Men, and they have a sensational track record in the genre. This movie will be a massive hit with its audience, and I hope I get to be part of it.

Posted from Chrome, which is now my default browser goddammit.

I put this on Tumblr earlier today. It deserves to be here, too, I think:

Two things jump out at me in this picture:

1. Holy shit those shoes are huge.

2. I don’t look nervous or uncomfortable; I look genuinely happy. That, combined with my haircut, makes me think that this must have been taken when I was 14, perhaps in the Spring just before I turned 15. This is probably right when Star Trek was starting.

When I look at these cheesy teen magazine pictures of myself— wait. That sounds creepy and weird and awful. Let me try again: When I gaze lovingly at these old pictures, I remember how sad and unhappy and uncomfortable I was for most of my teens, and how much I hated all the posing for pictures and attention from magazines. I was shy, I was uncomfortable in my own skin, I was nerdy and anxious and weak and weird, and being put under the Teen Media spotlight just made me want to crawl into a hole and die.

But this picture reminds me that it wasn’t always overwhelming and weird, and I’m glad to be reminded of that, because it’s way too easy to focus on the awkward and uncomfortable times I really wanted to be alone playing Blades of Steel on my NES, but I was at some teen cheese thing, trying to fit in.

In a lot of the teen magazine pictures, my smile never reaches my eyes, so I'm grateful for those rare occasions when it did.

(Thanks to Chambers1986 on Tumblr, who originally posted this picture.)

There's a moment every day when I think, "I should have written about that in my blog," but then I realize that instead of planting the seeds that would grow into a story, I put them in boxes on a shelf called Twitter, or Tumblr, or Google Plus.

They're nice seeds and all, and they look great in their individual boxes, preserved for years to come, but they never get a chance to grow into something more than just seeds. That's sort of sad, I think, and I always promise myself that I'm going to come back here and write something every single day, and give myself one assignment and deadline a week... but I'm just not disciplined enough to do that right now, and I haven't been for close to a year.

It's not that I don't love telling stories, but I sort of feel like a band that's been on tour so long -- and having so much fun doing it -- they haven't gone into the studio to cut an album in so long, they've forgotten how to do it.

Last year (also known as two weeks ago) I participated in the Reddit Gifts Secret Santa exchange. My giftee is a Batman fan, so I gave him a copy of Gotham Central, autographed by my friend Ed brubaker, who wrote it. I also gave him a copy of DC Universe Online, because it's really fun to pretend you're a superhero (or villain) and when you go to Gotham City in the game, you can play with me (I'm the voice of Robin in the game.)

My Secret Santa hit it out of the park, and shipped me a box of awesome. Yesterday, I finally put pictures of my gifts into the gallery.

My Secret Santa looked deep into my soul, and gave me four + Q gifts that nailed the four points of my inner compass. There was also a Snickers bar in there, in case I needed a nougat boost during the opening of gifts. They were all awesome, but it was the one non-gift in the box that was the best gift of all. 

My gifts were all individually wrapped and labeled so that I would open them in the proper order. Go ahead and flip through the gallery to enjoy them the way I did. 

Head on over to RedditGifts to see what I got, and Happy New Year!

Here are three Star Trek-themed things that have come up recently. All of them made me laugh so hard I pooped a little, so they need to be preserved here for the ages.

First, from Jimmy James, Inc:

For the record, Wesley's dance crew was called Jiffy and da Popz.

Next: Last night, Paul of Paul and Storm made WesLOL Crusher:

It's a little uncanny how much it fits with the original image, isn't it?

Finally, this place is real and exists:

For those of you who are scratching your heads right now, that's the intersection of Crusher Avenue and Picard Lane, around the corner from WARP DRIVE. WARP-FUCKING-DRIVE! 

BAM!

Ryan's home for the holidays, before he moves far, far away for his new job (hey, check out my son! He graduated college last week, and he starts a great job in two weeks! Go Ryan!!)

The first night he was home, I told him that the warm covers for the bed he's sleeping on were in the dryer, so he could get them out when he was ready to go to sleep.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, it gets cold in my office overnight, so don't forget to put the comforter that's in the dryer on it before you go to sleep.

Him: Okay. Thanks. G'night.

Me: I love you, kiddo. G'night.

I went to bed, and the next morning at breakfast he told us how cold he was overnight, because we didn't give him any warm bedding.

See, even at 22, the damn kids still have brain damage.

I reminded him of our conversation. He recalled it (having apparently forgotten it, immediately after I told him goodnight, likely because that part of his brain is the part that also processes requests to put his goddamn dishes in the dishwasher), and that was the end of that.

Flash forward to later yesterday afternoon. Ryan and Nolan were out with some of Nolan's friends, and Ryan texted me, "Will you put the covers on the bed, so I don't forget them again?" I told him that I would do just that.

...then I got this idea to be a Trolldad. Instead of making the bed, I put the covers in a neatly-folded pile at the foot of the bed, and made this picture, which I printed out and put on top of them:

(Click all images to embiggen at Imgur)

I thought that was so stupidly funny, I made this picture, and put it in the middle of the blankets:

I was having way too much fun, so I put this on his pillow:

And finally, this was folded up and put under the sheets where it would crinkle and make him get out of bed after he thought he was getting into it to go to sleep:

When he woke up this morning, I asked him if he got my notes.

"Oh my god, that was hilarious," he said.

"It was pretty amusing to me," I said.

"The best one was the last one, because I thought I was done with your notes and I could just go to bed, and then I was all, 'OH GODDAMMIT!'"

"That was the idea," I said.

"Well done, sir," he said.

"I spent more time making those stupid pictures than I would have spent making the bed," I said. "I'm very proud of that."

"Oh, I'm sure you are. Good job," he said.

As we parted ways and I walked out of the living room toward my bedroom, I heard him say, softly, "...and it is on."

So I have that to look forward to for the next two weeks.

If you can't watch the embedded clip, you can see it here.

You can see the whole thing on the Nerdist Holiday special, Christmas Eve on BBC America.