Still Just a Geek
eBook - ePub

Still Just a Geek

An Annotated Memoir

  1. 368 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Still Just a Geek

An Annotated Memoir

About this book

A New York Times bestseller!

Celebrated actor, personality, and all-around nerd, Wil Wheaton updates his memoir of collected blog posts with all new material and annotations as he reexamines one of the most interesting lives in Hollywood and fandom--and now for the first time in audio, narrated by Wil himself!

From starring in Stand by Me to playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation to playing himself, in his second (third?) iconic role of Evil Wil Wheaton in The Big Bang Theory, to becoming a social media supernova, Wil Wheaton has charted a career course unlike anyone else, and has emerged as one of the most popular and well respected names in science fiction, fantasy and pop culture.

Back in 2001, Wil began blogging on wilwheaton.net. Believing himself to have fallen victim to the curse of the child actor, Wil felt relegated to the convention circuit, and didn’t expect many would want to read about his random experiences and personal philosophies.

Yet, much to his surprise, people were reading. He still blogs, and now has an enormous following on social media with well over 3 million followers.

In Still Just a Geek, Wil revisits his 2004 collection of blog posts, Just a Geek, filled with insightful and often laugh-out-loud annotated comments, additional later writings, and all new material written for this publication. The result is an incredibly raw and honest memoir, in which Wil opens up about his life, about falling in love, about coming to grips with his past work, choices, and family, and finding fulfillment in the new phases of his career. From his times on the Enterprise to his struggles with depression to his starting a family and finding his passion--writing--Wil Wheaton is someone whose life is both a cautionary tale and a story of finding one’s true purpose that should resonate with fans and aspiring artists alike.

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Information

Year
2022
eBook ISBN
9780063080492
Print ISBN
9780063080478

About the Publisher

Australia
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United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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* I still cannot believe that Neil agreed to read my manuscript and wrote this intro for me.
* I’m going to discuss this more later. Right now, I’m too angry about it to annotate coherently.
Let me just put it this way: I’m not sending copyright lawyers chocolates anytime soon.
* I know that it’s hilarious to define ā€œblogā€ in 2021, mostly because I don’t think they really exist now the way they did when I wrote this. But in 2004, writing a blog—a mixture of opinion column, letters to and from the editor, and public diary—changed my life.
* Hey, check me out! I’m having fun again! Look out for the annotated annotated version in sixteen years.
* I don’t write in it daily like I once did. In 2021, I’m more private than I was in 2004, and I don’t have the need to write in my blog every day. But a decade of archives are still there, and I post something new about once a month.
* This is the first, and far from the last, Unix reference in this manuscript. Never let it be said that I don’t know my audience.
* It’s April 11, 2021. I will turn this in on April 17, 2021, nearly sixteen years to the day I wrote this. I’d like to say we did this on purpose, but it was just a happy coincidence.
* This is new to this edition and very important to me. I’m not sure I can say this enough during the book, so I will continue to do so until I run out of pages or the printer runs out of ink.
* Originally, every chapter had a quote from a song that established the tone. It’s an old trick from books and movies I loved. But I can’t show you any of those lyrics, because of the dumbest fucking law in the world that requires me to get permission from every fucking publisher just to share a few lines from a song. I’m not protected by fair use for some reason that I do not agree with, and the whole thing is infuriating to me. So instead of lyrics, you get a black bar that indicates my displeasure at being censored by stupid fucking lawyers who can all get fucked.
* But if you wanted to know what this quote originally was, allow me to tell you that the words, ā€œIf man is five, then the devil is six. If the devil is six, then god is seven. This monkey’s gone to heavenā€ are extremely important to me, and so is this extra commentary to legally define why I’m talking about it. *eyeroll emoji*
* Titles of songs are entirely acceptable, though, because copyright law is not just broken, it’s madden-ingly inconsistent.
* This book is also called ā€œThe Alpaca,ā€ which is the animal on its cover. Randal also co-wrote ā€œThe Llamaā€ (Learning Perl).1 I guess this book will be called ā€œThe Geek.ā€ Or not.2
1 Does anyone use Perl anymore? I think Python has replaced almost everything Perl did.
2 Or not.
* Do they even run this PSA anymore? Kids, look up ā€œyour brain on drugsā€ on YouTube, if you want to see some of the 1980s Nancy Reagan hysteria I grew up with.
* I know my demo, so I presume you know who Trogdor is, and are singing the song right now. But for those of you who didn’t live on the Internet in the early 2000s, Trogdor is a comical dragon character from the legendary webcomic HomestarRunner.com, which captured our imaginations with his big, beefy arms and consummate Vs.
* The dog, not Anne. Stupid dangling modifiers . . .
* My editor says this is called an ā€œinterrobangā€ and is the lowest form of writing. I told my editor he could interrobang himself, and so we’re leaving it in.
* Seventeen years later, I am still on this journey. (But that’s because it is a journey and I’m constantly learning and evolving. This is a good thing!)
* The cartoon, not the movie, where you can’t actually discern any of the transformations. Thanks, Michael Bay.
* A couple years ago, I was cast to voice Perceptor, a scientist Autobot, for a super fancy Transformers movie. If you’d told the Wil who wrote this paragraph he’d be doing that someday, he never would have believed you.
* This is all extremely narrowcast nerd junk that you can safely ignore.
* Tim is the president and founder of the publishing company that bears his name, O’Reilly Media. Before Substack, before Quora, if you had a computer issue, if you needed to look up a command or wanted to do some complex network engineering, O’Reilly was the publisher you looked for, and we all had bookshelves full of O’Reilly books that we constantly referenced. For a nerd like me, being published by O’Reilly was a very big deal, and so was meeting Tim.
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Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction to Still Just a Geek
  6. Just an Introduction
  7. Note to Reader
  8. Author’s Note
  9. Introduction
  10. Act I
  11. Act II
  12. Act III
  13. Act IV
  14. Epilogue: Hooters 2: Electric Boogaloo
  15. Afterword
  16. Acknowledgments
  17. Appendix A: The WWdN FAQ
  18. Appendix B: An Interview
  19. Further Reading
  20. Acknowledgments for Still Just a Geek
  21. About the Author
  22. Copyright
  23. About the Publisher

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