Castle Magus

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

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"Wil Wheaton on His Star Trek Family and His New Podcast Storytime with Wil Wheaton"

"Hi everyone, happy Tuesday! I am so excited for this week’s episode. I’m talking to the one and only Wil Wheaton! You know Wil from his roles as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation, Gordie in Stand By Me and his appearances on The Big Bang Theory. Wil is also a super-nerd and a prolific audiobook reader. He has a new podcast called Storytime with Wil Wheaton, where he reads a new short speculative fiction story each episode and I highly recommend it! We had such a lovely conversation— Wil is a deep thinker and one of the kindest people I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him a little bit better! Stick around after the interview for the hindsight, where my producer Jeph and I talk about the episode, as well as some upcoming live podcast recordings, our new Patreon and oh yeah, time travel!"

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Apparently the only thing you have to do to get me to watch an entire hour and a half episode of your podcast is simply to have Wil Wheaton on as the guest for that episode. Like so.

Also, it's kind of funny, because I'm sure most other geeknerds (or is the proper term "nerdgeeks"? *shrug*) like me would know Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. Here's the thing, though... I have never seen anything of Battlestar Galactica, either the 2004 version or the original show or anything else, outside of maybe an occasional clip on Youtube or something that I don't even remember now. (I always tend to get it confused with Babylon 5, as well, which is another geeknerd show that starts with the letter "B" and of which I have yet to see a single episode. How far in the toilet is my geeknerd cred now?) Nor have I seen any of that other nerdgeek stuff like all that Star Wars stuff mentioned on her Wikipedia page there. What I have seen a fair bit of her in, though, is Longmire, because there is an over-the-air TV channel which I don't recall the name of right now that my sister watches, and it airs a metric assload of Longmire episodes, back to back, on at least a weekly if not daily basis, and I see bits and pieces of it whenever I happen to exit my room to go the kitchen or something (also stuff like Stargate SG-1 and The Closer/Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles and NCIS and whatever else that channel [those channels?] tend to air, but that's beside the point). Beyond that, I have no other experience with pretty much anything Katee Sackhoff has done, unfortunately. At least as of right now. So far. Yet.

Okay, so...

There's a fair bit of overlap here with what Wil said in the Mayim Bialik podcast and what he has said on his own blog, but there's a lot of stuff that's new, too. That's one of the cool things about Wil is that even if he's telling largely the same story as one he's told before, elsewhere, he's still able to put a new spin on it. It's not just the same thing, over and over.

At one point, early on, Wil says that if he could give up all of his acting success if it meant that he would instead have a normal childhood where he had parents who weren't terrible, he would do it in a heartbeat. However, later on, about halfway into the episode, when asked about if he could time travel and change something, would he do it, he says that if he could go back and change the bad things about his childhood, he would not do it, if it meant that it led to him never meeting Anne, his wife. It was an interesting contrast. His acting career he would sacrifice in a moment, if it meant he could instead have had a good childhood with loving parents, but not his wife and her kids that he later adopted as his own. By the way, his stories about his wife's children, separately, asking him to formally, officially adopt them when they were each 18 was very touching.

Oh, and the short story they were talking about is Wikihistory. I'm glad Wil mentioned it because it gave me an excuse to read it again (this will be the fourth of fifth time now). In fact, I literally paused the video, then went and read it again, before returning to the video. It's definitely as good as he says it is (though he did get some of the details about it wrong, i.e. there was no "baby Schlimmel" or whatever).

And the fish story is this one or one of several like it told by Michio Kaku.

Finally... I haven't gotten around to it as of yet, but I think I'm going to start actually making the time to go through It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton now. Perhaps even getting started right now, in fact.

"There's always going to be shitty people in the world, that's just how it is, but we can choose whether we're going to be one of them."

I still despise April Fools' Day, but things like this make it less sucky.

Sucks that this isn't a real thing, though. I mean, an actual, serious version of this, rather than the blatant parody, at least.

(Via here.)

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET with an amusing, semi-embarrassing anecdote about an incident that occurred on the bridge of the USS Enterprise-D.

There was also a follow up comment to the Reddit version of the above linked post.

"Hi. Companies owned by Elon Musk are now essential to how nations explore space and get connected on satellite internet. Perhaps Musk and other billionaires shouldn't be able to do unfettered capitalism in the cosmos? Especially when they claim to be driven and inspired by stories of moneyless space communism?"

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Added the "middle-finger-worthy" tag right off the bat, just because it's all about Sissy SpaceX.

Yeah, calling Musk "the greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America" is most certainly not the wonderful thing all those chodes think it is. And you'd think that Donald Trump would look dimly on Phony Stark horning in on his turf like that. Both of those guys could fit the title of "greatest capitalist in the history of the United States of America." As long as we all agree that that is a grievous insult, mind you, and not, like, a positive thing to call someone.

"Hi. Today, we're taking a look at American men – are they in crisis? Why do they turn to misogynistic manosphere creeps like Andrew Tate? What else can we offer them besides anger and contempt?"

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(Beware: right off the bat, Warmbo is on the screen again. As such, this video will never be as good as it could have been. Fortunately, though, Warmbo has only a very small role in this video, at the beginning and at the end. "Stollie" on the other hand... *weary sigh*)

If you don't watch any other part of this video, at least watch this part. Not because it's good or funny. It's not. It's depressing and terrible. But I think it needs to be seen.

Barely teen boys saying horrific shit like "Fuck the women," and "All gays should die," and "We love women... but not, like, transgenders" (the latter said, questioningly, in response to that "Sneako" guy saying "No, no, we love women," which was itself in response to the initial "Fuck the women, fuck the women" dumbshit). It shows what effect all the assholes discussed in this video like that guy are having. (I'd never heard of this "Sneako" dipshit before this video, and I hope to never hear about him again after, either. Like Cody said, fuck that guy and everyone else like him, but not literally, because they're gross.)

Anyway, as one of the comments under the video said: "I'm tired of alpha males, I'll wait till the full release when they've patched out the instability."

"Teens are opening up to AI chatbots as a way to explore friendship. But sometimes, the AI’s advice can go too far."

This article is interesting as much for the comments as for the article itself. The comments are vacillating between (to paraphrase) "Yeah, I get it, talking to real humans is hard because real humans are shit," to "I don't see the harm in it, but yeah, I wouldn't take what an AI says at face value without outside verification," to "This is dangerous and will be the death of humanity as we know it."

(I'm kind of a mix between the first and second opinions, with only the slightest dash of the third one, myself. Mostly the second one.)

One comment is (direct quote):

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We really just gonna pedal-to-the-metal speedrun making every overtly horrifying scenario from Black Mirror into reality, while simultaneously criticizing Black Mirror for being corny as shit and lame now, because all it does is tell us stories we go out of our way to make true within 5 years.

This shouldn't be a thing at all. It's monstrous, full-stop.

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I haven't seen any of Black Mirror, so I don't know how "accurate" that statement is, at least in the context of this The Verge article, anyway. I have to assume they're talking about this? That's what came up when I searched Google for "Black Mirror artificial intelligence," anyway. If there's more than that that's actually relevant, I didn't come across it in the minute or two I devoted to searching. *shrug*

What I can say, though, is that Star Trek has dealt with this topic quite a lot, in its own way, and at least a couple decades before Black Mirror ever existed. And that's not even all of it (as of five years ago, at least, as there's been more since). Basically, all we need is for someone to invent hard light holograms now, and we'd practically be almost there already.

As for me, I've messed with Character.ai (as recently as a couple weeks ago), AI Dungeon (back when it was still cool, before it became total shit), and NovelAI (I havehad a long-ass on-going story thing I mess with fairly frequently and occasionally dabble in "one-shot" story things), and it's all interesting enough, sure. I don't mistake it for a friend or a psychologist, though, and all that I've tried have absolutely given horrible "advice" on occasion. I think it's mostly fine for this purpose, within reason, with moderation, but when people start confusing this stuff with reality, that's where the problems start.

"Sorry, Zack Snyder, the Dark Knight should remain a non-lethal crime fighter."

Whenever I read things like this, about Batman's "no kill" rule and all that shit, it reminds me of a particular Shortpacked page:



Here is the page from the original comic, for comparison.

Oh, and if you don't follow Batman comics at all, that first panel is a description of an actual story that happened a decade and a half ago, minus the "meeting his original self" bit shown up there.

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I can just imagine Zach Snyder making a Star Trek movie.

Snyder stated, "The Enterprise traveling faster than light is canon. And I'm like, 'Okay, the first thing I wanna do when you say that is I wanna see what happens,'" elaborating on his belief that, "You're making your starship irrelevant if it can't be in that situation."

Then we get a Star Trek: Sublight movie or some stupid bullshit like that, where it takes the Enterprise over 16 years (instead of about a day and a half at maximum warp) just to reach Proxima Centauri (the next closest star to Earth, after the Sun) from Earth at maximum impulse speed (which is supposedly something like 0.25 light speed), let alone Vulcan (64 years from Earth [instead of just 6 days]) or Qo'nos (448 years [instead of around a month]) or Ocampa (roughly 300,000 years [instead of "just" 70 years at maximum warp]).

So yeah, I think all of the above is about equally as silly as saying "I'ma make modern Batman kill chumps in my movies."

A rare article about Wil Wheaton that I post about which doesn't come directly from his own website.

I really need to get back into watching Star Trek: Lower Decks. (And Prodigy... and Strange New Worlds, of which I've actually seen nothing yet...)

It looks like this game will be finally coming to the personal computer. Good. I've been waiting for... *checks date on that last post* ...almost two years for it to get released (which it still hasn't, yet, as Q2 could be as late as June, and that's assuming it doesn't get pushed back at some point for whatever reason).

So, now, I can throw it on my wishlist and wait still more for a 60-75% off sale, because that's what I do for pretty much all games now, but especially for games that wasted my time with going the paid beta route via Epic Goofy Shit. At least all the bugs and glitches should be (hopefully) worked out, now that it's almost ready to be actually released.

Remember that "Star Trek: The Next Generation, but in the style of Star Trek: The Animated Series" thing I posted about last year? Well, the same people who made that also did a bit from Star Trek: Voyager.


The episode they chose to animate is one of the most reviled episodes out of all of Voyager.