Monday, March 15, 2010

Pumped for PAX Spotlight: Wil Wheaton

Well, my actual website is now fully operational. I assure you, it is quite deadly. A lot of the content from this blog has been copied over there already, not sure if I'll move the rest or not.


Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

Man, you can tell that Wil Wheaton is an internet/geek celebrity based on the fact that his Wikipedia page is 16 pages long. Makes my task of trying to find cool stuff about him that you haven’t read before a little more of a pain in the ass… but I’ll try, God help me.

Fanfiction. The word evokes powerful emotional responses from most people, both positive and negative. For those people who are into it, joy. For the rest of, likely a deep sense of loathing. I’m not entirely sure when publishing fanfics became en vogue, but I wrongly thought it came about from the internet, it didn’t. It’s been around for since at least the 70s. At the time, fanfics were found in fanzines, and fanzines were largely operated by the geeks of the time, so naturally, there were Star Trek fanzines. Star Trek fanzines = Star Trek fanfics (it somehow seems appropriate that there was Star Trek fanfic before many of us where even born). Apparently, a popular theme in Star Trek fanfics was the idea that some underage teenager (often a girl) would somehow end up being an officer on board a Starfleet ship. Paula Smith, in her fanzine Menagerie, lampooned this idea to extremes with her character Mary Sue in her story “A Trekkie’s Tale”. The character was 15/1/2 years old, a lieutenant, and possessed an outlandish skillset to get herself out of any situation. This was in fact, the birth of the ‘Mary Sue’ literary standard; a young character with no reason to be as important as they are, possessing skills they shouldn’t, unbelievably saving the day again and again, usually fawned over by the authour and often reviled by the fans.

Sound like anyone?

In 1987 Wil Wheaton made his debut as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His character possessed an uncanny resemblance to a fanfic character, only this was Gene Roddenberry’s fanfic, and it was on TV. And like it or not, he was right where a lot of us wanted to be: on the bridge of Starship Enterprise, saving the day. Even though he got (and probably still gets) a lot of flack for the role, it was undeniably iconic. I can imagine that everywhere he went in the 80s (and 90s, and you know… yesterday) someone recognized him as the ‘Star Trek kid’, which has to be frustrating. I think that people were probably just jealous. Personally, I like to think of him as the ‘Stand by Me kid’.


The part that we didn’t know at the time (and may have gone easier on him if we did) was that Wil was one of us. He wasn’t just an actor on Star Trek, he was a geeky actor on Star Trek. Not only was he living our dream, he was living his dream; if you follow him on twitter (and for shame if you’re not), you’ll see gems like this. That’s right, as a child, young Wil was imagining what it would be like to get sucked into a videogame, the age old dream of basically everyone I call a friend. Look at his twitter page, that pic tiled in the background? He’s wearing a fark shirt people. That’s badass. I’m willing to bet that if TMZ went around asking celebs what fark was, Wil Wheaton would be the only one with an even coherent answer (maybe Conan O’Brien?).

After Star Trek, people would only really get the chance to know him through sci-fi and comic conventions, his “geek cred” probably spread only by word of mouth. Throughout the 90s he would make some pretty terrible movies (he played in Python, a film regrettably not about Monty Python and Flubber, a film regrettably starring 90s Robin Williams), but would not become the beloved geek poster boy that he is now until July 2001, when he started blogging on wilwheaton.net. I remember hearing about the blog through word of mouth, and it quickly made its way into one of my “dailies” since his updates were pretty frequent and he quite quickly identified himself as a fan of many of the same things I was (and still am). The response was tremendous, and many of my geek friends were quickly singing his praises. Judging from his current fame, this response was unanimous. Only 2 years later he would release Dancing Barefoot, a book composed of excerpts and edited material from the site. A year after that (we’re in 2004 now) he’d release Just a Geek, an even further extended memoir. While I couldn’t find sales for these books, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they did well.

Here is just a short list of accomplishments and interests (that have nothing to do with being Wesley Crusher) that help cement Wil Wheaton as a stupendous choice as inaugural speaker of PAX East:

1) Hidden Character ‘Louis’ friend’ in The Last Starfighter (I say hidden because all his scenes were deleted and he’s only in the DVD deleted scenes, but seriously, it’s The Last Starfighter… seriously)
2) Was a fan of http://www.x-entertainment.com/ back in 2001, if you don’t know how cool that is then SHAME.
3) Was the voice actor for Ted Kord (the Blue Beetle) in Batman: The Brave and the Bold
4) His voice is secretly all over the new Star Trek.
5) Wrote a regular column in Dungeon magazine called ‘Wil Save
6) Has done some regular voice work for video games like Grand Theft Auto and Ghost Recon.
7) He already knocked a PAX inaugural address out of the park back in 2007.


Internet cred, video game cred, table top gaming cred, sci-fi movie and television cred, cartoon cred… Jesus. That’s a lot of cred.

With that being said, assuming I can get in… I will definitely be attending his key note address.

Monday March 15th. Me = pumped for PAX.

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