mandak26

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.

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?

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.

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.