Yeah, I'd noticed that for a guy who's family crest reads "Don't be a dick", most of your recent character work has been heavily in the dick camp. So "the whole point of being an actor is to portray characters who are different from who you really are" is an important thing to be aware of, both for yourself, and your fans.

I've been thinking about having a Murch Madness film festival/movie night thing… showcasing movies with sound design or editing by Walter Murch. THX-1138, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, etc… Somehow, I don't think it would draw the same crowd as March Madness…

So do you go with a full Charley Douglass laugh track? Or the limited Hanna-Barbera track?

Last I heard he was an adjunct professor of Art History at Syracuse, of all things…

(I've seen some of Warren's scripts, like Fell, but haven't seen Ed's...)

So, for further geekery, we now need an example of what “Modified Brubaker” formatting entails. Even if you don't want to spoil any actual script, would you be willing to share the components that go into it?

It's like selling you a 16 oz drink for the same price you used to pay for a 20 oz drink, meanwhile they try to hype the "new bottle design." The current "half-seasons" are more like quarter-seasons. To me, a full season is 22 episodes, minimum. This "air 6 and see you in 6 months" thing really doesn't let a show get any traction with the audience, IMHO.

“OK. I want a goddamned concerted effort to come out of a blog post that isn't a fucking happy blog post every time I do a goddamned Negativland reference!” — Casey Kasem.

Now with the speed of the EVO 1-G, you can post more text about cats on USENET!

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Dr. Parrish, if for no other reason than to see you get to add more depth to him. Because, by your own admission, he's a bit of a dick. As is Evil Wil. As is Chaos. As is Fawkes. And you are so NOT a dick. I mean, it's even in your family crest. I'd love to see you play the nice guy again. I miss seeing him on screen. (Though truth be told, it will always probably be better to read your thoughts here than to see you on TV. I think in my mind you've officially made the transition to writer who it's cool to catch on TV from time to time rather than actor who happens to blog.)

Wil, next time I'm in LA I need to get you over to Bill Mumy's place and record the two of you talking about your lives & careers. I think it would make for an enlightening podcast or similar. You've mentioned a few times maybe wanting to get out of LA, and he's got some good bits about how his father stayed in LA to support him when he was on Lost in Space, and how while Bill wanted to move on more recently, he stayed in Laurel Canyon because his daughter got into the industry as a child actor too.

Wil, you ever read Ray Bradbury's "Graveyard for Lunatics?" It's set on what's essentially the Paramount lot, with the name changed to protect the guilty.

I'm not a hard-core gamer. (I'm a Mac guy, and firmly agreed with the old video that was going around 5+ years ago talking about games on the Mac... "We've got, uh, that number puzzle game.... and Photoshop!") I got Steam when it was released for the Mac, and have probably bought more video games since then than I had in the previous 10 years combined. (That said, while I enjoyed Portal when I got it for free, I'm not willing to spend $50 for Portal 2 on day one… I'll wait until they drop it to $20.) So I don't listen to critics or reviews at all. It's mostly word of mouth/peer stuff, or seeing something that looks cool to me (the two DeathSpank games would be right up your alley, if you haven't played them.) I don't even own a current console system, but your numerous fond memories of Rock Band make me want to pick that up eventually. Maybe when my 5 year old daughter is a little older and we can play it together.

I anticipate a whole GTY alternative to GTD. The "Getting Things Yogurt" method of lifehacking would either amuse or infuriate Merlin Mann (or both!)

My wife has had some pretty nifty illustration credits for children's books and stuff, but the few illustrations she did for Highlights should give her some clout. (They don't, actually, mind you... but they SHOULD...)

Got it. I like Stan Ridgeway well enough ("Goin' Southbound" and "I Wanna Be a Boss" in particular), but I need to explore the whole Wall of Voodoo catalog. I'm curious about the later Andy Prieboy stuff too, because I always liked Concrete Blonde's cover of "Tomorrow Wendy", and I've heard bootlegs of Andy & Johnette singing it together in various forms...

“Back in Flesh”… with your history of using Pink Floyd song titles for blog posts, I’m now trying to wrap my brain around a “Back in Black” / “In the Flesh?” mashup. It’s not going well… (I got some bad news for you, sunshine, I’m back…)

I was a slacker and dropped out of college when I was around 23, after 5 years of not getting very far. Ended up going back after the dot com bubble burst and got my Associates' degree in '05, my BFA at age 40 in 2009, and am halfway through my Masters of Fine Arts degree, planning on finishing in 2012 (just before the end of the world ;) There is no "losing," there's only giving up...

UIV was probably the last Ultima game I played through, perhaps because later ones weren't as available for the Mac, and Ultima 4 was one of the last games I played on the Apple ][+. Not only did my friends & I come up with a complete guide of our own, with copious notes on ingredients and moon phases and the like; and completed drawing out the entire map; but it was also the first game that I learned to seriously hack with a hex editor. I found all the character records and learned a fair bit about the structure of the data files, which bits were stats, inventory, etc. While it was a cheat to the game, it was probably very instrumental in my future interest in computer science.

Weren't you also going to do a second spot on Leverage? Or is that not until their spring-half of the season?

And, of course, the fucking moon, as performed by Evolution Control Committee... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhWZ4gNqPP0

See, I'm thinking the latin would be a Good Thing™ because “Don't Be a Dick” is such an ancient, universal & classical concept. I’m also stumped trying to recall what the latin joke was in Eric Idle's “Road to Mars”… was “He who smelt it, dealt it?” or “Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke?” (Of which, I prefer the corollary: “Joke’em if they can’t take a fuck”, but that’s just me…)

Good move. The idea of a "scarcity of ones and zeroes" is problematic. Limited edition downloads simply means limited income possibility for yourself. I know people gave Scott McCloud a lot of crap about his micropayment advocacy, but really he was making such noise before things like Lulu or the iTunes app store came along. People WILL give you money for something that they perceive has value if there's a system in place that makes it easy for them to do so. There's just a threshold beyond which it's not worth the effort for them.

I know I've commented here in the past on assorted "1000 Big Fans" and "Long Tail" discussions. It seems to me that if you want to do a "limited edition", its really best done (and only done) with the print version. If you halt sales on the eBook edition, then you're only sealing the fate that the only way for people to get it if they missed the boat is to pirate it. So my recommendation is you make the print version a big deal. Make it exclusive and rare and all those collectable bits that bibliophiles relish; and keep the digital edition available for a reasonable cost to allow people later the opportunity to still get it without being dicks. (That said, I need to mail you a book that I self-published in an ultra-rare edition last year. (10 copies...))

There's definitely movement happening, and I'm seeing it on all sides: Saturday I caught JoCo & Paul and Storm in Houston, their third Houston appearance. They've moved from "folky pub" seating about 100, to House of Blues seating probably 500, to a really nice classical recital hall that probably sat 200 or less and made them feel really out-classed by the acoustics. Though this one may have been smaller than the last, it was definitely a more intimate show, with stage responses to individual heckling. I even got a shout-out directed at me in response to a tweet I'd sent Jonathan that afternoon. Then last night Scott McCloud came and talked, and while he's still apologizing for pushing micro-payments so hard 10 years back, I almost see a correlation to the iTunes store's way of delivering both music and apps. And I'm going back and reading Warren Ellis's Come in Alone blog posts, as he pushes against the direct market (read "comic book shop only") sales of works as being too exclusionary to audiences who might appreciate the work but never be exposed to it because of how or where it's sold. I brought it up at SIGGRAPH last year, that with the democratization of media through the decreased cost of production (cheap digital cameras, recording software and interfaces, etc), the increased opportunities for distribution (CD Baby, YouTube, Lulu, etc) there's more opportunity than ever before for creative works to be unleashed on the world. The next step is, who becomes the arbitrator of taste? Naturally, your friends, the blogs you read, etc. These are the critics whose opinions you trust, and the word of mouth necessary to turn you onto new things. It's all coming together. And it's exciting. And I don't know that, with the speed that it's moving, anybody will have even the slightest clue where it's going next. But we'll be there.