There is an awesome plugin called "It's all text" which will allow you to pass data seamlessly back and forth between a text box in your browser and a text editor on your system (notepad, wordpad, gedit, vim, emacs, you name it) Great for keeping content safe.

I guess I'm a fairly recent reader. A friend saw your dancing in the rain post and passed it on to me.. and then I forgot about you as 'just another celebrity' until your 2007 PAX talk and I suddenly realised you were genuinely one of us. RSS things were subscribed to, twitter account created and it's been an interesting, and enjoyable, time since. Thought I'd drop in: I'm an experienced Sysadmin with a several years experience in web services, both small and medium enterprise scale. If you need any help with returning to WWdN I'd be happy to volunteer my services.

I honestly couldn't tell you what I screwed up on my first homebrew. The result was extremely strong (I think it could fight with my usual Scotch and win). It had a really nasty initial taste, and an amazingly wonderful aftertaste. It wasn't something I was going to offer other people to drink, but I certainly enjoyed it, one bottle a night.

Ever come across the UK Indie band Laika? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnvvWp_emWU "Black Cat Bone" was used on an episode of Buffy, when Willow gets high on magic.

Your blog post about dancing in the rain with your wife was the first blog of yours that I ever read. A friend of mine sent a link to me and I remember reading it and getting caught up in the narrative. Skip forward a couple of years and I remembered the blog (again) went in hunt of it and subscribed to the RSS feed so I get to enjoy your continued gems.

His humour can be hit and miss with me (though mostly hit), but I loved Scott Kurtz's take on it: http://www.pvponline.com/2010/09/13/mushroom-for-error/

Christmas with the Brady Bunch? Oh dear Wil, serious 2d3 damage to your coolness points. /me hides his early albums. Haddaway, get-outta-way.

It had to be done: http://www.paulgraydon.co.uk/images/wil-hulk.jpg Apologies for my n00b GIMP/photoshopping skills :)

That sounds like a perfectly just form of punishment.

Apologies for the second post, but I fancy expanding on something that's been striking me for a while. Twitter is encouraging this strange behaviour from people, and when I say twitter here I mean the ecosystem, not the company. There is this weird habit of using the persons twitter handle in the tweet when talking about someone, rather than to them, even if the content of the tweet is stuff you'd expect to be "speaking behind their back." Then you see almost shock when the individual responds, either positively or negatively. It's almost like people tweeting forget that whilst using @ points followers directly towards whomever is being referenced, it also makes the tweet appear in their tweetstream. It's strange that as a ccommunity we also do virtually nothing to discourage such behaviour, and in fact merrily engage in it ourselves even in our most mundane of tweets. "At the supermarket, saw someone who looks vaguely like @wilw". I'm sure Wil's life is enriched by such tweets!

Wil Wheaton in "I'm a human being" shocker. Sure it was a slight over-reaction, but you realise that, however it was a supremely stupid question. I'm sorry but I read it exactly the same way you did last night and I've got no emotional ties to the situation in the same way you have.

I absolutely would be the same. The only reason I can say otherwise is that I'm a british child of 1980, and spent most of my childhood playing with them. I got my geek credentials really early on.

For clarity, it's neither a ZX81 or a Spectrum, it's the standard external tape deck. The ZX81 had a flat keyboard where you depressed the keys to type (horrible) (and a stunning 1K of RAM, though you could get a 16Kb expansion for it). The ZX Spectrum was a huge step up in that it had rubber keys that were at least partially practical (and 48K of RAM!) ZX81: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sinclair_ZX81.jpg Spectrum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ZXSpectrum48k.jpg

Oh wow. The site of that tape deck brings back many memories. I thought I was in for a serious upgrade when I bought a ZX Spectrum 128k to replace my aged ZX 48. The sight of that integrated tape deck was a source of great joy until I discovered it somehow managed the near impossible feat of being even more susceptible to tape head alignment issues that the twitpic'd. There are games from that era that I miss playing, like Chaos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(video_game) somehow using an emulator just isn't the same. Especially the lack of squeeeeeeeeee-bzzzz-brrrrr-cshhhhhhh from loading the tape.

I suffer from that problem too. Most games I can aim to be competitive in, and pull back a bit on my strategising, but stick me in front of a Monopoly board and that all goes out the window. Evil Twirrim comes into play and any mere mortal foolish enough to challenge me will live to regret it.. or something like that anyway. Yet to pull a Meemaa card or "break up the couple" but there is still ample time yet for that.

Every time I hear the phrase "Do you know who you look like?", my heart sinks. I know exactly what the next line will be. "Harry Potter!" Yes, yes I do look like an older version of Harry Potter (or rather, given the age difference between Daniel and I, I was here first so he looks like a younger me). Some day I'd like to escape from his shadow, something that hopefully will come with the final films nearly upon us. I know in the relative sense of things that it really doesn't matter all that much, but damn does it get annoying. That said, looking like Harry Potter was the main reason my now-wife came up to me in the first place, as she wanted to show folks back home that she'd met HP in England. Conversations flowed and now nearly 4 years later I'm married to her and have moved halfway around the world. It's a strange world we live in, for sure.

I'm facing some unbelievable aversion to even typing these words, the memory of the game being that horrible to me.. Tron won't be the first completely tied-in-with-the-movie game out there. I'm not sure if any others preceed it but the "The Matrix" cross-platform game was completely integrated in the films, acting as both a companion & bridge to the last two films. Covers a lot of the story around Niobe and Ghost, and some of the plot points that were never really explained in the film (bad idea IMO). The main actors were involved in the game production for motion capture, voice over stuff along with a few "filmed for the game" segments.

I was too young to remember that one, 5 at the time. I do remember where I was and what I was doing when Columbia blew up on re-entry. That was a shock to me. For me the take-offs are still the easy bit (though my heart is in my mouth at ignition willing that ship to rise, as if willpower alone is necessary), it's the landing that makes me twitchy now. It pisses me off no end that in both cases it was bad management that destroyed the hard work of the engineers at ground control.

Sure, just randomly trust your work content to "do no evil" Google? Given a geeks tendancy towards paranoia, particularly where corporations and government are concerned, NOT hosting your docs with Google is surely a +20 modifier for geekness rating. Each time you surrender control to third parties you lose just that tiny bit more direct control, and security.

I'm loving the sight of the Microsoft Surface version of D&D precisely because of the thought that it would enable disparate groups to play but maintain that touch element. I know some people use Neverwinter Nights to achieve online RP games over the internet but it isn't quite the same thing.

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Your 2007 keynote speech marked the point at which I started regularly following your blog and seeing what you were up to, and as such I guess also directly lead to me buying your books too :) I'd occasionally looked at your blog on and off over the years but never really grokked that you really were "just a geek". I've seen celebrities for years claiming to be geeks, but you were the first one I've come across who could walk the walk too. The opening few minutes of your '07 keynote where you quoted game references was probably the big eye opener, the point at which I said to myself "You know what, this guy is one of us, and you can tell that he used to be really cool once."

"...I have had a fucking weird life, man." Far better a weird life than a monotonous one!

It's a great video. Showed it to my other half yesterday who loved Felicia in Dr Horrible, but whilst she enjoyed it she didn't quite understand all the references and such like. Showed her S1 Ep1 of The Guild and she was hooked :D Now getting to work my way through the Guild again with her!

Happy Birthday Wil :) May you have many more to come (and blogs, and d'n'd podcasts, and books.. and... and..)