Exactly! How much LESS cool would that whole thing have been if you DIDN'T have that d12 with you just then? :)

Your reaction is very genuine and very cool, Wil. That was a pleasure to watch. Thanks for sharing with us. :)

Lead figures were supposed to scream if you threw them in the fire?? Damn, I missed out! I wonder if it works with the plastic ones. heh. My mother (a devout Catholic) was really paranoid about D&D back in the 80s. I think she mellowed out about it, slightly, when she sat me down to watch one of the televangelists ranting about it, and made the mistake of quoting from one of the books... but the quote he was quoting didn't exist. It was something about the goal of the game being to get all the treasure by killing off all your friends. I grabbed my PHB and showed my mom the page and paragraph that the guy was supposedly quoting from and asked her to show me what he was saying. I even looked in the DMG, just in case he got the book wrong, but nope. It was a total smart-ass response, but she got the point and I didn't need to sit down and watch any more rants about the game. My father was of the opinion that I should get a job writing the games. My dad definitely had his great ideas. :)

My thought when I finished reading it: "Dinner? Getting cold? But she already ate... ooohhhh..." hehehe. That was really good. :)

Hey Wil, Thanks for making this Dragon*Con great! My wife and I had a bit of a sucky Saturday. We were coordinating with our friend with the Wheatley puppet (you met her in your autograph line) to dress up as Cave Johnson and Carolyn, but hardly anyone recognized us!! We even went mostly unrecognized at the Portal/Valve meetup! So disappointing! Going to the Sunday morning Eureka panel was great though, and your panel this morning was just as good, if not better. I'd heard you telling the WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER story in Just a Geek, but the musical accompaniment by Paul and Storm really stepped that up a notch. You should get them to work with you on your next audio book. :) Anyway, I'm glad you made it to Dragon*Con this year, even if you may not be able to make it in future years. I know your con schedule is kinda busy, with several cons overlapping. I'd met you at GenCon last year (I gave you the 32 year old d20), but I didn't make it there this year (my wife came down with pneumonia RIGHT BEFORE the con). I felt bad about that until I realized you weren't going to be there. After that, I thought "Pft.. well, if Wil's not going to be there, it's going to suck anyway." heh. ;) Question: I witnessed you sign 3 boobs this year (Colin's at the Eureka panel, and the two this morning). Which was the best? I'm now picturing Colin giving you the "big eyes" now, though. hehe :)

Froggy strikes again. They've been earning a bit of a notorious reputation for screw-ups these past few years.

The part about the shared moment of geeky excitement at the Higgs signature got me laughing, 'cause I had a similar experience a few years ago. I was working as a volunteer at the Yale Peabody Museum, in the Historical Scientific Instruments collection, while my wife was a grad student and I was waiting for my work authorization. Most of it was just generic old brass instruments, but I opened up this one box and inside was this rather unremarkable cardboard tube sealed at both ends with black wax, with a slit cut into the cap at one end. I turned it over, looking for some kind of identifying mark, to tell why this cardboard tube was in some Yale professor's collection (beyond it likely being for diffraction), when I come across some pencil scrawled along it... "Made by Lord Rayleigh who gave it to me July 28 1918, H.A.B." I was holding in my hand something that Lord Effin' Rayleigh himself had made! I was geeking out quite a bit at that, which my supervisor thought was pretty amusing. If you'd like to see it, look up "Rayleigh Scattering Tube" at this site: http://peabody.yale.edu/collections/search-collections?hsi

Ugh, people can be so selfish and self-centered sometimes. When I've attended Dragon*Con in the past, I spotted celebrities walking around like normal people (!), but I went out of my way not to bother them. The most I've done is say "Hey! Jerry Doyle!" as I walked past him while going into one of the hotels, and he High-Five'd me. I'll admit that if I'd seen you gaming at GenCon, I would have felt tempted to come up and talk to you, Wil, but I would ultimately resist that temptation... 'cause honestly, you're gaming! I don't think that I'd want anyone to come up and interrupt me when I was trying to have fun playing a game. I'm glad that Felicia was looking out for you this time, and that you were looking out for her last time. That's what Con-Buddies are for!

Last night was the first time, in a LONG time, that I was able to watch Eureka on the actual night that it was showing. I had to catch up on Netflix or On-Demand before this. It was great! I did notice a slight stiffness to your lines in the Café Diem scene with Niel and Felicia, which was a little jarring to me, since I've seen you do better (your enragenation in your previous episode was quite good, btw). However, with what you said in your post above, that makes sense to me now. It didn't dawn on me that it was your first opportunity to really perform Parrish. So, I noticed that "lack of feel" you mentioned, but after that, I could really tell that you settled into the character and were having a lot of fun with it. Oh, and yes, I did notice Parrish drop the arrogance when things got serious. Very nice. Oh, oh, and... YES! "ZOMG STAN LEE" IS RIGHT! That was so unexpected! My wife and I laughed so much. The Gamma Radiation stuff was great. :D

Hey Wil, Can you give some seminars at GenCon and Dragon*Con (if you're going to GenCon... you ARE going to GenCon, right??) about how one can get a life like yours? 'Cause I think you'd have a lot of people showing up for something like that. Just sayin'. :)

It's always very cool to read about your experiences, Wil. The content is always relevant to my interests, but you're just such an excellent storyteller that it's easy to get sucked in to your narrative. :)

Your experiences somewhat echo mine, Wil. I was big into DC when I was a kid. The comics I collected at the time were Legion of Superheroes and Adam Strange, in the late '70s and early '80s. The X-men were my only big foray into the Marvel universe at the time, and I've been loyal to them since. Excalibur was my favorite Marvel title for the longest time... but only while Alan Davis was in charge of it... when he left the title, the quality dropped and I lost interest (it migrated to Davis' other title ClanDestine). Currently, I collect Astonishing X-men (originally collected because of Joss Wheadon writing), Fables, Invincible, The Walking Dead, and Runaways. I also grabbed up Y:The Last Man (although I ended up not liking the reason for him being The Last Man. Still need to read vol 10, though).

I don't remember having Highlights in my doctor's office, but your post reminded me of my first trip to Toronto Comic Expo. My wife and I met some friends there, who were running one of the comic dealer booths, and when we were all riding down the escalator, my wife and I threw up our hands and went "Weeee". :)

"Yeah, if you don't know what a Muggle is, you're a Muggle. That's just science, Anne." In the silence that followed, I could feel The Look coming through the phone at me. I got a really good laugh out of this part. Thanks. :)

Awww... you should have chosen the box! Now you'll never know what was in it! It could have even been a boat!!

I heartily recommend Wil's audiobook of Just a Geek. My friend put it on when we were driving home from GenCon, and it was great to hear Wil tell all those stories himself. We didn't get to finish it, so I'll need to pick that up soon.

Besides, if you added in the d10, you'd upset the symmetry of the atom, matter would fly apart, and all reality would collapse in on itself. And that would just be lame.

Oh! Yes. Ehem. Right. Of course. I forgot about that. Well, that was embarrassing. Heh. Thanks Wil. :) PS: BTW, "Critical Mass" is a great name for that shirt. :)

Argh! Noooo!! This proves that you ARE evil, Wil Wheaton! I checked around and today is the one day where I don't have any money to spend on something like this!! Yesterday? fine! Tomorrow? perfect! But today... Aaaahhh!! ;_;

Oh, very nice! And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! Sorry. Sorry. As soon as I said "Very nice" I started channeling Dennis. This is awesome news! The two I bought on the shirt's first run are too big now, so I can pick up a couple more in a smaller size! :)

That was great. I got such a good laugh from that one.

Indeed. As a witness (to the dropping, not the blasting), he was very careful. Personally, I used a little bit of Purell on the die I gave him. It'd been sitting in my dicebag since 1985, so who knows what could have happened had I not... remember that X-Files episode about those loggers and the insects they released when they cut down that really old tree? :)

"I just catalogued all our 1st edition books at work." Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but exactly where do you work and how can I get a job there? :)

Hey cool! I can see the die I gave you! It's a little weird how my eyes went right to it when I saw each photo. :) I think part of it is because it's so old, pitted and rounded that it actually looks blurry even while the dice around it are in focus. heh.

Oh! 2nd Edition Math? Awesome! :) Granted, my DMs for 2nd edition never used the double 20 rule. Anyway, 3rd Edition makes things so complicated, probability-wise. First, you have to account for the threat range of the weapon, like with the longsword example. Then you have to account for the fact that the confirmation roll only needs to HIT the opponent, so if you only need to roll a 13 on the die (plus your bonuses), then your confirmation roll only needs to be a 13... so you end up with 2/20 * 8/20 = 16/20^2. 2nd edition was so much more elegant. If the shirt goes on sale, I'm grabbing one!