Anne and I got to go see The Pee Wee Herman show last night. It was phenomenal, and I realized about 20 minutes into the show that I was sitting on the edge of my seat, grinning and jumping around like a little kid ... because that's pretty much how I used to watch Pee Wee's Playhouse.

After the show, we were fortunate enough to listen to Paul Reubens do a Q&A with about 100 people. As much as I loved the show, I would go back every night just to listen to him talk about acting, writing, comedy, and performing.

I asked a question about the scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure that I talked about on RFB #19. I wanted to know if he improvised that, or if it was all in the script, and hoped that he would just talk about it a little bit, because I think that it's one of the most hilarious, perfect, subtle comedic acting performances I've ever seen.

He said that it was all in the script, confirmed that it was tremendously fun to do, and then told us how he did a show at the Groundlings a few years ago where he used that scene as inspiration. The show was a fake actor's showcase, where all the performers did actual scenes, but they did them the way really bad actors would do them. (The thing about showcases is that actors hope casting people to come see and hire them, but they never do. The audience ends up being friends and family - the same ones who have suffered through all the other showcases you've done - and it's all a little bit depressing.) The only catch was that, to be in the show, you couldn't do the same bad acting bit that someone else was doing. This was a tall order, because the were some extraordinarily talented comedic actors in the show. Paul said that he and Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne) did an actual scene from an actual play, and he made the bad acting choice to mouth every single word of dialog she said, just like he did in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. He said that it was the only time in his career that he had to focus and concentrate really hard, so he wouldn't break and end up laughing.

Anne and I also got to meet him very briefly, and I talked with him for about 90 seconds, before I realized we were holding up the other people who wanted to meet him. He was incredibly gracious, humble, and kind. When I thanked him for providing me with a lifetime of joy, he thanked me back, and I could tell that he meant it, and I kind of wanted to hug him.

But all of that isn't the reason I wrote this post. The reason I wrote this post is to share with you a video he mentioned after the show. In a discussion about Jim Nabors and Charo, he told us to go to YouTube when we got home, and search for Charo doing Love Will Keep Us Together. He said it would change our lives.

Well, he was right, and now it is my great honor to change your lives. (You know, paying it forward and all).

Thank you, Pee Wee Herman, for a great show, a lifetime of joy, and changing my life through the magic of Charo.

If you're of a certain age, do you remember the first time you saw AKIRA, or any of the Dirty Pair or original Macross cartoons? Coming from a steady diet of Hannah Barbera cartoons, it was like trading a transistor radio for a high-end stereo or seeing the grand canyon with my own eyes. The cinematic scope of the entire thing just blew me away, and my world was fundamentally changed.

The first time I saw AKIRA, I was 13 or 14, and it was on a fifth generation VHS bootleg, purchased for some ungodly sum at a con. My friends and I watched it over and over again, without the benefit of subtitles or dubbing, developing our own storyline that we would eventually learn had nothing at all in common with what was really going on.

It was a very different world back then if you were into anime or just about anything outside of mainstream culture. The Internet didn't exist at all like it does today (the closest we had were large closed networks like GEnie and Compuserve - this even pre-dates AOL) so we just didn't have tons of cartoons and communities at our fingertips like we do now. We relied on whatever we could find at cons - often at great expense - or what we heard though a grapevine that was nearly as reliable as the one in Johnny Dangerously.

So when I saw a post on Reddit titled "I saw AKIRA for the first time last night. Would someone explain WTF happened at the ending?" this morning, it was with great amusement that I left the following comment:

You damn kids today. When I saw AKIRIA for the first time, it was a fifth generation VHS bootleg, without dubbing or subtitles. We had to make up our own story to go along with the animation, and when we finally saw the movie with dialog we could understand, we discovered that everything we thought was wrong. And we liked it!

I'll tell you what happens at the end of the movie: Tetsuo gets off my goddamned lawn, and then I call Kaneda's parents.

For those of you looking for a serious and more insightful answer, Redditor themanwhowas has got you covered. I highly recommend checking it out.

Seriously. How cool is this? In my little geekmind, the lamp on the left is related to Luxo Junior, and is wishing it had the necessary hardware to enjoy a nice mug of tea.

See more Wheaton's Mug in the Wild (including my friend Mer looking beautiful, and the best binary birthday celebration you'll see all day), or get your own mug from the Memories of the Futureshop.

Edited to add this comment from Tony Buser, who made this awesome thing that is awesome: 

Hey that's my picture! When I saw that mug and realized it would fit perfectly on my MakerBot build platform, I bought it specifically so that I could take a picture of it sitting inside. :)

In case people don't know, a MakerBot is a 3D printer, like a prototype replicator. It creates objects using molten plastic. I've named this makerbot "Tea". Right now I'm printing the parts for a new improved replicating 3D printer called a RepRap that can recreate most of it's own parts. The new printer will be named "Earl". By the 4th generation upgrade, "Hot", I hope to be able to scan and replicate this mug like a prototype transporter. It will probably take quite a few more versions before I can fabricate actual edible Earl Gray, though.

The Future! We live in it.

We totally do, Tony, we totally do.

I went to Seattle at the end of last week, where I not only got to spend three days with my friends from Penny Arcade, I finally got to take a tour of the Wizards of the Coast offices after years of being invited to check them out.

While the offices weren't quite as Wonka-like as my inner 12 year-old (and outer 37 year-old) hoped they would be, it was still pretty awesome to see lots of dragons, several suits of armor, more dice than even I own (which is a lot of dice, guys), and three framed uncut sheets of original black bordered Magic cards.

I also got to visit and talk with the people who make D&D and Magic (they have all the same xkcd, PvP, and Penny Arcade comics hanging on their office walls that we all have, which was kind of neat), but I have an NDA with WotC so that's all I can say about that.

During my trip, I got to drop into my friend Mike's D&D game. His DM is this incredibly creative guy Rob, and Rob came up with a brilliant way to let me play a character who was more than just a hireling. He actually let me play a NPC who they'd interacted with the previous session, gave me a rich backstory, let me add some details of my own, and set up the evening's session so that it was mostly a massive (and incredibly fun) battle. He also let me make some choices and reveal some information that could have an impact on the rest of their campaign.

The session was incredibly fun, and I thought I'd refer to it in a column I'm working on about how you can keep the R in RPG, even when you're playing a session (or sessions) that are mostly combat, so I e-mailed Mike and asked him what Rob's last name was, so I could spell it correctly and everything.

"It's Rob Heinsoo," he wrote back.

Now, I'm guessing that a nonzero number of you are now picking yourselves up off the floor like I was when I got that e-mail this morning. For those of you who are wondering why the other kids in class are dazed for one round, allow me to explain why: Rob Heinsoo was the lead designer of D&D 4e, and wrote the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

In other words, it was kind of like getting to play Dragon Age RPG with Chris Pramas, or Magic with Richard Garfield, only you have no idea who you're playing with. In hindsight, I understand how Rob was able to effortlessly weave me into and out of the campaign, and how he was able to come up with some truly awesome combat effects and deal with unexpected situations entirely on the fly. All those times while playing that I thought to myself, Man, this guy really knows how to use this system suddenly make sense.

Okay, real quick, before I sign off and get back to work: y=2m+x.

I love Lord of the Rings, and even though I've been trying to get Anne to sit down and watch it with me again for months, when I had my chance to watch it undisturbed last night, I wasn't nearly as interested in going back to Middle Earth as I was in going back to Ferelden.

I've been playing Dragon Age for about 64 hours, and I'm finally starting the climactic battle portion of the story. (Yeah, I take my time and get every last second of RP out of the RPGs when I play them.) Last night, I had to make some very difficult decisions, one of which resulted in a character I deeply care about leaving my party. It wasn't as upsetting as losing my dog in Fable II, but I still felt a real, emotional sense of loss. I don't know if I'll ever talk to this NPC again (at least as this character, with this origin), and that made me feel sad. 

It also made me want to keep playing so I could find out what happened next ... and so I did.

Knowing that my dog would wake me up at 6am and demand to be let outside, I still played until 1am, not because I wanted to kill the damn Darkspawn, not because I was trying to level my character and not because I just wanted to complete a quest. I intentionally allowed myself just 5 short hours of sleep because I hoped against hope that I could somehow find a way get [REDACTED] to come back and rejoin me. Alas, I failed. There were a lot of Darkspawn, and I just couldn't get past them all before it was really time to go to sleep. (Guess where I'm going as soon as I finish work today?)

Some of you are probably wondering why I didn't just save scum and try out different things until I got the desired result. I should probably mention that when I play any computer RPG, I use one savefile, plus a backup in case it gets corrupted. Yeah, let that roll around in your heads for a second, kids: daddy is hardcore. I should also point out that the choices I made last night - indeed all the choices that lead up to this particularly momentous one - were all made from a roleplaying point of view, based on the background and story I created for my character. I know that I could have just told different party members whatever I thought would make them happy and keep them around, but even though that's the kind of metagaming that keeps you from dying in the acid pit, it just isn't how I roll.

But here's the fundamental difference between playing this fantasy RPG and watching a fantasy movie: when I finish this character and play a different origin, I'll be able to make different choices that will (hopefully) lead to a different result when I get to the same place, 70 or 80 hours hence. Of course, there's still the chance that I'll end up in exactly the same place and discover that this event happens no matter what I do, in which case I'll say a swear really loud ... but even if that happens, the journey that I'll take to get there that time will be different from the journey I took to get there this time. Sure, the major landmarks won't change, but the little details will, and that's an experience we simply can't get from movies (The Watch George Lucas Shit On Your Childhood editions of the original Star Wars trilogy DELIBERATELY IGNORED.)

I think this says something significant about video games as narrative storytelling, and I wanted to paraphrase something I said when I was interviewed for the Sci vs. Fi Mass Effect 2 special that is apparently airing every ten minutes on SyFy this week:

Narrative video games aren't going to replace television and movies any more than television and movies replaced books, but as technology continues to advance, and games become even more cinematic and interactive, the battle won't be only for the consumer; it will also be for the creator. People who went to school 20 years ago to learn how to make movies are now going to school to learn how to use the same narrative storytelling techniques to make video games.

It's going to be a fierce battle, and even though I think it will likely be fought to a draw, we're going to get some incredible entertainment out of it. As creators and consumers, we're going to experience things that we can only imagine right now, and I can't wait.

(Thanks to my friend C., who made this when I needed a bit of cheering up.)

Even though I'm a much stronger and more confident writer now than I was then, I've resisted the urge to rewrite this, because something would definitely be lost in the translation... 

In the summer of 1988, I turned 16 years old, and, just like the Corey's, I got a License to Drive!

It's well documented within the Star Trek community that Patrick Stewart and I bought almost the same car, a 1989 Honda Prelude...the, uh, only problem is, I bought a model that was just slightly cooler than his. (He got the si, and I got the si4WS, baby.) Patrick has really had fun over the years, teasing me about how, since then, he's always had cooler cars than I do, to which I reply something about his driver.

What's not well documented, however, is this thing that happened, in the summer of 1988, in the parking garage at Paramount, where we all parked our cars.

We were all working late one night, probably shooting blue screen on the bridge, so we were all wrapped at the same time (a rarity). I excitedly walked to the parking garage with Jonathan Frakes, who I was already looking up to.

So we're walking back to our cars, and we're talking about something, I can't quite remember what, and I really feel like Jonathan is treating me like an equal. He's not treating me like I'm a kid. It really makes me feel good, and I say to him, "You know, Jonathan, I can tell, just from talking to you, that when you were younger? You used to be cool."

He laughs, and I think to myself that I've cemented my position with him as cool contemporary, rather than lame ass kid.

Then he says, "What do you mean, used to be?!"

I realized what I'd said, and how it didn't match up with what was in my head, which was, "Gee, man. You are so cool now, as an adult, I bet that you were a really cool guy, who I'd like to hang out with, when you were my age."

He knew what I meant, I could tell, and he really tortured me about that, for years. Every time I see him nowadays, he turns to a person nearby, and he says, "You know, Wheaton here told me that I used to be cool." We laugh about it, and I make the appropriate apologies, and explanations, while Jonathan makes faces and gestures indicating that I am full of shit.

You can probably see why I wanted to rewrite that when I looked at it this morning. I almost did, but I just couldn't bring myself to apply my own Red Pen of Doom to it. It's very rough, but the 2002 version of me used his words and developing storytelling skills the very best he could. If he thought that the 2010 version of me would look look back at this story, cringe, and rewrite it, he wouldn't have had the nerve to tell the story in the first place.

So, 2002 version of me, if you build a time machine and read this: Someday we're going to look back on this and want to rewrite it, but then we'll remember how we felt when we sat down at our Linux box on the desk in the living room and told this story for the first time on our lame blog. So you just go ahead and enjoy telling it, and know that I'm going to leave it alone when I get hold of it IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!

I'm up to my neck in Memories of the Future Volume 2 work, but I wanted to take a minute to share something cool that happened yesterday...

The familiar chirp of an Original Series communicator came out of my Blackberry, announcing the arrival of a text message.

I thumbed it a couple times and read a message from Brent. "Jonathan is trying to get in touch with you. Give him a call when you can." A smile spread across my face as I selected the phone number and clicked the appropriate buttons to call it.

I put the phone to my ear (funny how moving this little device from palm to ear turns it from computer to phone, isn't it?) and listened to it ring. Just as I thought I'd have to leave a message, a familiar voice came through: "This is Jonathan," he said.

"You know, I can tell by the way you answer the phone that you used to be cool," I said.

He paused. I could feel him smiling on the other end of the line. "That's such a great story, W," he said, softly.

"My kids have heard it so much, they now tell me that I used to be cool," I said.

He laughed and said, "You know what, though? I bet they're right. I can tell that you used to be cool."

Even though he couldn't see, I dramatically clutched at my heart. "Gah! Now I know how it feels to be on the other side of that!"

We laughed together for a long time, and then we talked about a lot of things that I wish I could share, but probably shouldn't. We're getting together next week to have lunch and catch up. I can't wait.

We've had a drought in Southern California for so long now, even a little rain is cause for our local news to go apeshit with STORMWATCH!!11!!1 coverage. This week, though, we've had serious storms that have produced tornadoes, mudslides, flooding, and all sorts of things that every other part of the country that actually has weather can just shrug off.

I've spent even more time than usual inside writing this week as a result of the cold and wet weather, and I've made some good progress on a few projects including a short work of fiction and Memories of the Future, Volume Two.

Working on Memories Volume 2 has been a lot of fun, even though there aren't as many atrocious episodes in the back half of the first season. The stronger episodes are more enjoyable to watch, of course, but it's the really lousy ones that are the most fun to recap and make fun of. (Too Short A Season was a fucking goldmine, but Coming Of Age was a real challenge because - even though it's all Wesley, all the time - it's really good.)

Anyway, while working on Arsenal of Freedom this week (which starts out strong and has some great character moments for Geordi, but doesn't quite fulfill its promise), I wrote some Picard/Beverly slashfic* as part of a joke. I suppose I could have taken some anti-nausea meds and gone searching for some existing work to copy and paste, but I thought it would be funnier if I actually wrote it myself. You'll have to wait for the release (or maybe even the relevant Futurecast) to experience it, but I thought some of you may want to know that I got all of 41 words before I made myself throw up in my mouth and had to stop.

I hope the sacrifices I make for comedy are appreciated, he said, in his best passive/aggressive grandmother tone.

Well, it's raining like crazy again and there's a clown in the storm drain, so I'd better get back to work. Skin of Evil isn't going to snark all over itself, you know.

* It has been brought to my attention that "slashfic" is the term used to describe fanfiction where two dudes get all teabaggy and swordfighty whatnot. I have always been under the impression that any fanfic involving sexytime was called "slash" or some derivative thereof, regardless of the genders or alien races involved. Upon discovering that I have been incorrect about the finer points of this particular world for my entire life ... I'm really okay with that.

Last night, I stood in front of the open refrigerator and thought to myself, "You know what would go good with this vegetarian chili? That Oaked Arrogant Bastard!"

I reached for it, applying my -3 DEX modifier, like you do. A minute later sent the following text message to Anne:

"Hey, we're out of beer. Could you pick up some Oaked AB on the way home? Also, totally unrelated to this, where's the mop?"

While I waited for her reply, I was reminded of this post I wrote three years ago:

We have a new refrigerator. It's energy efficient, can hold an entire horse and a stick of butter, and is generally one of the more awesome "grown up" purchases Anne and I have made since we got married seven years ago.

In addition to the awesome Futurama magnets that adorn its doors, it comes with a nifty little basket thingy which slides in and out underneath one of the shelves, perfect for holding bottles and cans.

We here in Chez Wheaton don't drink much of anything that comes out of a can (the notable exception being Guinness) but I drink plenty of things that come out of a bottle, like Stone Pale Ale and Izze soda, for example.

A few months ago, I uncovered a design flaw in the otherwise perfect basket: the wires spread out a little (okay, a lot) more easily than you'd expect from something intended to hold bottles in their least entropic state. If you have a heavy bottle (like a wine bottle, for example) on the same rack as a lighter bottle (like a Newcastle, for instance) and you look at them funny, the heavy bottle will create enough pressure to spread the wires and launch the lighter bottle onto the floor, where it will explode.

This afternoon, while I was trying to pull out a bottle of Tejava (99 cents at Trader Joe's) to enjoy a cool glass of tea, a bottle of clementine Izzie soda looked up at me, shouted, "Hooray! I'm free!" It then launched itself onto the floor, where it landed in a sticky explosion of horrible, entropic freedom.

I was, of course, standing barefoot in the kitchen at the time, so I got to tip toe through a spreading slick of soda and shards of broken glass that were as pointy and deadly as they were invisible on the floor while I made my way to the paper towels.

By some miracle, I didn't cut the everlivingshit out of my feet, and only got stuck a couple of times, and by the time Anne and Nolan got home, I was nearly done cleaning it up.

"What happened?" Anne said.

"There were . . . errors," I said.

She gave me a blank look. Before I could explain the inside joke to her, Nolan said, "What did you do?"

"I was trying to get some iced tea, and the Izze decided to make a break for it."

I held up a handful of dripping paper towels.

"It succeeded."

Nolan dropped to his knees and looked skyward. "Noooooooo!" He said, while shaking his fists at an imaginary Statue of Liberty.

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry. But there's more, so you can put them in there when I'm done."

Anne walked over to the pantry to get some replacement bottles.

"Would you like me to leave some of this here, as a warning to the new bottles?" I asked.

I got The Look.

I finished cleaning up.