No worries. :-) I make more egregious errors than that all the time. Especially understandable since you were, I imagine, excited while writing this, and the sort of typos where you use a homonym are the hardest to catch.

The four of us who are in the core of the show have busy schedules that don't always compliment each other... I am taken with the vision of a round table of day planners (though, doubtless, you all use new-fangled things like iCal and Google Calendar instead) saying things like, "Oh, good show, old boy, you have an absolutely fine binding!" and "Goodness, but your pages are well-ordered, aren't they?" And then one drunken malcontent stumbles into the room and mumbles something deeply offensive like, "You're all six months out of date!" before wheeling in a sloppy pirouette and staggering out again. ;-) Or, perhaps, you meant "complement?" Sorry, I couldn't resist sharing the image. It made me giggle.

So do you have any idea when the D&D Live session will be made available for viewing/listening? I'm eager to learn whether/how Aeofel returns!

You got name-dropped in Full Frontal Nerdity! http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ffn/index.php?date=2010-08-12

Cool! I don't watch that particular show, but I think it's great that you've been doing all this guest starring work lately. Especially so considering how you felt about acting a few years back (I just finished listening to Just a Geek yesterday). I think the writer/actor hybrid class is a good fit for you. ;-)

So I just bought the Just a Geek audio. Upon downloading, I found it was a series of MP3s, essentially ripped unchanged from the CD version. So, as per my usual in such cases, I opened up Audiobook Builder and made the disparate files into a single audiobook file, with chapters and the ability to remember its position, and all that nifty jazz. And while I am waiting for it to compile the file and import it into iTunes, it occurrs to me that you might want to be able to sell it in this format. So I thought I'd write to you and ask if you wanted a copy of it put together this way. I'd be happy to send it along if so, by whatever means you prefer, now that I've got it anyhow. Or, I suppose, you could get the software and do it yourself--it's dead easy to do and the program is pretty cheap (less than $10--I've used it on something like 25 different books by now that I got in CD or MP3 formats and it was totally worth the minimal cost). By the way, it was great to meet you at PAX-E on Saturday. I don't expect you'd remember me--I probably didn't stand out, and you must have seen a LOT of people, but I was the guy with the fire & water dragons shirt in the signing line. Mostly I'm just pleased I didn't get all stuttery or say anything too idiotic, though I managed it by saying relatively little. :-) I did get to watch your Keynote on the YouTubes when I got home again, and it was excellent. Not being able to see it live remains my one regret of the weekend. Curse those damnable fire codes!

Yay! I'll try to remember to bring my copy of Memories of the Future, Volume 1 for signing, then. I'm looking forward to the speech. This shall be my first PAX (being a Mass native and not endowed with vast sums of shiny gold rocks, I have not been able to afford the Prime shows), and I thought it was awesome when I heard you'd be giving the keynote. Awesome.

I don't want to ruin anything for you if you intend to play it again, but suffice to say that it is possible for you to play through the game again and not say a swear really loudly for that particular reason. In fact, there are several possible outcomes to that particular scene, depending on your origin, how you handle events with the characters involved leading up to it, and how you handle the scene itself. At the most basic level the choice is binary, but in truth there are at least 4 possible outcomes of that event itself, along with a couple of corollary events that follow it which also have branches. Some of the choices in Dragon Age are illusory, or trivial, but most of them aren't--they can have significant and meaningful impact on later events, up to and including the final chapter of the game, to a degree I've not seen in any other video game to date. Some of them make me wonder how they plan to do a sequel and still allow the player to carry a character forward from this one, as they intend to allow with the expansion pack due out later this year. The sheer range of different outcomes to various options would make writing for such a sequel a massive undertaking, I imagine. The mechanics of the game are not groundbreaking, though it is fun to play, but the writing is genuinely impressive, I agree.

Eh, don't sweat it. I expect large sections of your reading audience hadn't seen this yet (such as me), and were amused. Youtube memes take time to propagate through the internet, after all. Though I have to say, the amusement of the video had worn off by the time I was about a third of the way through it, and yet I kept watching until the end. It has a strange power. It frightens me a little, I think.

You probably couldn't do this every week, but I think it'd be really cool if you did more MotFc as you finished chapters of volume 2. I mean, as they function now, you aren't reading the whole chapter, just excerpts, so they'd serve as nifty previews much as they were before volume 1 came out (although, admittedly, all of those were also available online at TV Squad). Maybe mix those in with more regular Radio Free Burrito episodes--I wasn't reading your blog yet when you were doing the show regularly, so I think I only ever heard one of them, when it had become extremely sporadic--but I'd listen to it now if you were to do that.

Sadly, I am forced to point out that your adjustments to the episode 7 post have not solved the iTunes issue. Perhaps because the iTunes thingamabobber is not refreshing now that it has it on its server or whatever (can you tell I am highly technically savvy in the ways of podcasts? Heh). In any case, the version of Episode 7 up on iTunes remains 6:50 seconds of MC Frontalot.

Is it a fixable thing? I was able to get the direct download into the podcast directory of my iTunes with some adjustments to the file's info, but I can't get it to become a part of the list with the other Memories of the Futurecast episodes I got previously. I'm saving them all (this is not something I do lightly with podcasts--only the PA/PVP/WW gaming podcasts also get saved forever), and would like them to be all together in a neat stack if I can.

It is currently almost 3pm Eastern, and iTunes is still showing the wrong thing. I was just going to listen to the podcast on my way home from work (yay for early days!), and instead of getting Wil Wheatoney goodness, I got MC Frontalot for 3:50 minutes. There are, of course, worse things to suffer, but it wasn't what I'd had in mind. I figured, surely, the download had cut off prematurely, or iTunes had a momentary glitch yesterday when I got it, so I went and downloaded it again, to no avail. I shall have to get it from here instead, now that I am home.

Oh, I did not realize you were playing YOURSELF in this show. I figured what was meant by, "a darker version of you" that it was metaphorical, rather than literal. I don't currently watch this show, but your presence on it has made me very curious about it. I may have to Netflix it now.

Wow, you seriously got screwed over on that last episode, didn't you Wil? I felt so mad just as it opened, and you rolled that 18 and it didn't work, I went over to my coworker and ranted about how that trap was too dangerous to be placing in a location of this level. Either the escape DC ought to have been lower (you guys were what, level 6?) or the damage the acid dealt shouldn't have been so high. It killed you in 2 rounds, for crying out loud! And it is such that it isn't even very feasible for your companions to get any of your remains to cast Raise Dead afterwards. Scott rubbing it in so badly didn't help, either. I totally empathize with your rage at that time. Though hopefully it hasn't ended your friendship with him (I've seen such things happen around the gaming table before). Now I'm wondering what's going to be up for the next podcast series (I presume there will be another)--will you be turning Aeofel into a Revenant? Will the DM bend the rules a bit and let them raise you from the bit of equipment they recovered (some cells might not have melted off it yet)? Or are you going to start entirely from scratch with a new character?

This sounds like an awesome time, and if I were not at the other end of the country, I'd be sorely tempted to come. But a total of $500 for Child's Play doesn't seem like that much for the level of awesomeness that will doubtless be present at this thing. I think next time you do this (because it will surely be a huge success and a regular thing you do at least once a year from now on), you should also charge a significantly smaller, of course) donation for front-row seats in the audience. People should still be able to come see it free, of course (well free excepting whatever it costs to attend the convention, anyway), but ringside ought to come at a premium. Say $10/person, if its $50 for a seat at the table itself.

I find it fascinating that practically everything I've seen you in lately (Numb3rs, Leverage, The Guild, Criminal Minds, even Loading Ready Run) you're either playing the villain, or playing an asshole. It's quite interesting to see when contrasted with Wesley (we just finished working our way through TNG again a few days ago, so your presence on Star Trek has been much on the mind even if it weren't for Memories of the Future). I realize that part of this is simply a function of the guest star role--when the show is a crime drama of some sort (as almost all of your recent appearances in the last couple of years are, in one form or another), the most common significant role that isn't a recurring character is going to be the bad guy. But irrespective of that, are you deliberately seeking out these kinds of roles at all, or is it just happenstance that its what you've been landing?

Happy Birthday! Mine's in just a couple of days, personally. It's a milestone, too--the big 3-0. I'm honestly not freaking out about it, but it is sort of surreal to contemplate that I am about to hit 3 decades. When I was a teenager and through the first part of my twenties, I always thought of 30 as "when a person really becomes an adult"--I was never impressed with the maturity of 20-somethings, I guess. But now that I'm about to cross that threshold, I'm realizing that there is no magic line, beyond which is a sign that says, "here be adulthood."

It is now possible to get a color laser printer for about $200. Toner goes MUCH farther than ink does... A toner cartridge is still expensive (actually more so than an ink cartridge), but you get about 10 times as many pages from one, so it's still a better deal.

So forgive me if this has been asked somewhere before, but I haven't seen it if it was. This is going to be volume one, which implies further volumes of episode-by-episode commentaries on TNG. How far is this intended to go? Just through the seasons in which you appeared regularly? Or all 7? I realize that most of the stuff on the last 3 seasons would have a lot less of the personal anecdotes, but I, for one, would buy 7 books by you commenting on Star Trek: The Next Generation. After reading a few of yout TV Squad reviews to her and then telling her of this upcoming book, this was my wife's first question as well. Admittedly, we're not going to each buy the books, but surely that indicates the potential for a larger market, right? As an aside, we watched "The Game" a couple days ago, and my wife could not stop saying, about you and Ashley Judd, "they look so cute together!" And I found myself wondering how often you bring up the fact that you totally got to kiss Ashley Judd back in the day, to prove your superiority to the masses. But seriously, we agreed after it was over that it was one of the best Wesley episodes of the series: the writers managed to write a "Wesley saves the day" episode that does not make us annoyed at how "smart" the kid is--he's genuinely intelligent and forward-thinking and even heroic. Plus, he gets the girl (even if he does go back to the Academy at the end, never to see her again), and you totally feel like he deserves it.

Yours is definitely scarier than mine from two days ago. But driving home from work, traffic was crawling through a particular bottleneck intersection not very far from my house (by bottleneck I mean I pretty much can't go around it--it's one of two or three points in my daily commute that I have no choice about) because of a nasty accident. Bad enough that an ambulance was on the scene and there was a guy on a stretcher with a neck brace. The ambulance was partially blocking the road I would normally go up, so now that I'd reached the intersection, I detoured around to finish going home, rather than crawl past the accident itself. Very next light, perhaps 100 yards away from that last intersection, had I gone straight instead of around, and I'm waiting on red, front car. In the cross-street, pointed back towards the previous accident, a dickhead decides to try to sneak a quick left turn in through a break in the traffic going the other way. Except he doesn't actually have enough room, and the car he tried to jump in front of smacks into his trailing corner. Fortunately neither driver was hurt--this wasn't a highway and while neither car had only minor damage, both drivers were climbing out unharmed as my light turned green. Needless to say, I, too, was very careful with the remainder of my drive home. Then later that evening my XBox 360 suffered the 3-blinking-red-lights demise. Not the best evening ever. Not complaining, though--I wasn't in an accident, and the broken XBox is covered under the extended warranty for that problem. Just have to do without it for a couple weeks while it's repaired.

"Isn't Nero a substandard CD burning software?" Yep. Also the name of a crazy-ass Roman emperor. The one who reportedly "fiddled while Rome burned." There is a long-standing tradition of naming Romulan stuff after Roman stuff (Romulus and Remis were brothers who were said to have been raised together by a she-wolf. The former went on to found the city named after him, and they later served as namesakes for the homeworld of the Romulans and the planet's primary moon, which features in the last TNG film, Nemesis). I believe Roman culture served as a baseline inspiration for the Romulan race, too, even if they only bear a cursory resemblance after many years of storytelling in the Trek universe.

Seconded! That was my first thought on finishing the movie: I want this to be the introduction to a new TV series. Trek has always been better on the small screen rather than the big. Sometimes a good story overcame that tendency, such as with Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, and First Contact, but mostly the movies were only okay, or downright bad (I'm looking at you, Final Frontier and Insurrection). A TV series is going to have some strike-outs as well (most of the first season of TNG, for example), but it has a lot more time to explore characters and plot ideas that don't really need 2 hours to develop. And for those that do, you've got 2-part episodes, with the bonus that you can build up to them gradually in preceding shows. I heard something about CBS being able to negotiate a new contract soon for renewed rights to a Star Trek TV show. Maybe they will. I hope so.

That's great to hear, about how good it turned out to be. And I would love to see a well-made film version of Sandman, but...I can't imagine how it could be done in a single movie. To do the story justice, it would have to be multiple films--a minimum of three, I'd think, and possibly more, depending on how much time is given to some of the side stories and flashbacks (several of which are vitally important, like those dealing with Orpheus). It's a sprawling story, and would be better suited to something more like an OVA than a feature film. And since I can't imagine a film studio trying to get a thing like that made, I'm very afraid of a movie form of Sandman, even one done well--it would cut far too much to do the story justice.

We've been working our way through Season 1 of TNG, my wife and I (and interspersing it with season 2 of Criminal Minds), via Netflix. At the end of each episode, I bring up your review of that episode and read it aloud to her. Its fun to see you making note of many of the same things (both good and bad) that we comment on to each other during the show. Sadly, we just finished Angel One. That means we really need you to hurry up with this! ;-) My wife also wants you to know that she thinks she must be the only Star Trek fan who didn't hate Wesley when she was watching the show on TV (this is not true--I didn't hate him, either, even if he was a little annoying at times--but I never held you personally responsible for that). Anyway, the important thing is we eagerly await your next review!