#WilWheaton.net

[bargainsleuthbooks]

#StillJustAGeek by #WilWheaton #NYTimesBestseller #Memoir #BookReview #AudiobookReview #StarTrekNG

Have you read the New York Times Best Seller by Wil Wheaton yet? You should. Better yet--get the audio version. #StillJustAGeek by #WilWheaton #NYTimesBestseller #Memoir #BookReview #AudiobookReview #StarTrekNG #STNG #Startrek #Trekkie #Picard #books

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…

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#Paramount Studios #Paramount+ #Picard #Rob Reiner #Round Table #Stand By Me #Star Trek #Star Trek: The Next Generation #The Big Band Theory #Wil Wheaton #WilWheaton.net

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (read by Wil Wheaton!)

Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it’s a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it’s swept the trade press with starred reviews all ‘round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won’t sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench

Audible is Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and every single one of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon’s DRM on it. That means that you can’t break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I can’t give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format. Doing so is a felony carrying a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for an act that in no way infringes anyone’s copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is much less illegal than removing Amazon’s mandatory DRM from my own books!

I’ve got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they’re not charities. If they can’t sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they’re not going to make audio editions at all. Instead, I make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman​, and I sell them everywhere except Audible.

Doing this isn’t cheap: I’m paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores. Most audiobook listeners don’t even know that these stores exist: if a title isn’t available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.

That’s where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I’ve crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were astoundingly successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks. These campaigns didn’t just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon’s monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren’t sticky-traps for Audible’s walled garden/prison:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html

And today, I’m launching the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one’s gonna be incredible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

For starters, there’s the narrator: @wilwheaton​, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don’t tell my other narrators! They’re great too!):

https://wilwheaton.net/

Beyond Wil’s narration, there’s the subject matter. The hero of Red Team Blues is a hard-charging forensic accountant who’s untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west. Now, at the age of 67, Marty Hench is ready to retire, but a dear old friend — a legendary cryptographer — drags him back for one last job — locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that’s worth more than a billion dollars.

That’s the starting gun for a “grabby next-Tuesday thriller” that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation. Marty’s final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers’ libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.

It’s a pretty contemporary story, in other words.

I wrote this one before SVB, before Sam Bankman0Fried and FTX — just like I wrote Little Brother before Snowden’s revelations. It’s not that I’m prescient — fortune-telling is a fatalist’s delusion — it’s that these phenomena are just the most spectacular, most recent examples in a long string of ghastly and increasingly dire scandals.

Red Team Blues blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as bossware turned our “work from home” into “live at work.”

The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, and, as with Little Brother, Red Team Blues is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story.

These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I had to find out how it ended,” she answered.

The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:

That. Was. A! Fucking! Ride! Whoa!

Within a week, he’d bought Red Team Blues…and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.

First, there’s naming rights for characters in the sequels — I’m selling three of these; they’re a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a lot of fun — they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is The Bezzle, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff’s Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros.

The third book is Picks and Shovels (Jan 2025), and it’s Marty’s first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called “Three Wise Men” that’s run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.

Next, there’s three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories. Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I’ll then shop to fiction websites (every story I’ve written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn’t, I’ll put it up under a CC license).

Finally, there’s a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition — and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have Will Staehle’s fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there’s space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues. The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy’s endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I’ve put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I’ve written for Pluralistic for the past three years. There is no better way to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch — incomparable, really. Invaluable.

What’s more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon’s DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers: we have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us — creators, publishers and listeners — more fairly.

I’ll be heading out on tour to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany once the book is out. I’m really looking forward to as many backers in person as I can! Thank you for your support over these many long years — and for your support on this Kickstarter.

Today (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.

[Image ID: A graphic showing a phone playing the Red Team Blues audiobok, along with a quote from Booklist, 'Jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto. Another winner from an sf wizard.']

#pluralistic #wil wheaton #drm #chokepoint capitalism #Monopoly #audible #amazon #audiobooks #sf #science fiction #post cyberpunk #cyberpunk #technothrillers #thrillers #heists #cryptocurrency #red team blues #marty hench #kickstarter

[wilwheaton]

Hello! Not sure if this question has been asked, but I recently got into star trek tng, and I'm watching it with my family, and I'd like to know:

What was your opinion on the sweaters? You know the ones. Was it your choice to wear them? Were you forced into them? My family just finds them so stupidly hilarious and I want to know what you thought of them.

At the time, I hated them. I thought they were ugly, they didn't fit well, the colors were terrible.

I was also 14 and convinced that Genera Hypercolor T-shirts were a good idea, so maybe I wasn't the best judge of fashion at the time.

Since then, I've come to love them. In fact, if you look on my blog at wilwheaton.net, you can find a picture I took in ... 2013? I think? Of me, wearing one of the original sweaters at a convention. A guy bought it in an auction, and he asked me to autograph it. I said I would, but only if he let me put it on.

It was pretty great. Not two knives, but really close.

[threespacemonkeys]

Washington State’s bill called “Quit Clicking Kids” or HB1627 which defines the parameters of monetizing kids and their images on social media linked a blog post by Wil Wheaton which talks about some of his experiences with this as a child actor.

The idea that social media is exploiting our children whether through family vlogs, blog posts or just simply cloth diaper photos on instagram being fodder for paedophiles, and us the parents are letting this happen or even feeding the beast ourselves is cause for concern. I am so glad that I didn’t grow up with a social media account and that I get to consent to what images are posted of me and I want the same for my (future) children.

Heres the blog post: https://wilwheaton.net/2023/03/children-are-not-property-they-are-people/

And here’s the site: https://quitclickingkids.com/

#Star Trek #actors #children are people #monetizing #washington state #government #HB1627 #PSA #exploitation #privacy #concerns

[dubukat]

cleaning out a drawer

Before I recycle this address book I used to log passwords, I wanted to list the AIM (AOL Instant messenger) names I had.

KatyAction (My punk scene alias)

NuWavePunk

CarolTheBowler (Mystery Men related)

RockNRollGirl27

KatyontheGo (I think I specifically used this to send msgs remotely somehow)

ShepardsPie419 (I don't remember having this)

AurraSing27

FionnualaShea (I have no idea the basis for this name)

I also had a login to wilwheaton.net (@wilwheaton) message board where I used "CrushisCool" as a password

My icq was 50853807, which I still had memorized.

[infinitemonkeytheory]

tl;dr: algorithms are inherently racist, classist, and not at all neutral because the data used to train them is largely drawn from a system that has elevated the opportunities and privileges of CIS white men. It’s appalling.

https://wilwheaton.net/2023/01/buy-the-ticket-take-your-turn/

#ai #algorithms #bias #wil wheaton

[andythecorsair]

Wil Wheaton is on Tumblr!

If nothing else, my move back to Tumblr has allowed me to see a lot more of @wilwheaton, which I've missed from podcasts, YouTube, and wilwheaton.net. If you're on the fence about abandoning the bird app, but you're a Geek & Sundry, Scalzi, Don't Be A Dick -ite like I am, then maybe this'll help?

#wil wheaton #tabletop #geek and sundry #john scalzi #don't be a dick #wilw

[c-ptsdrecovery]

Somebody sent me this link a few weeks ago (I’m sorry, I can’t remember who!). Wil Wheaton appeared on Mayim Bialek’s (of Big Bang Theory Fame) podcast on mental health, and talked about CPTSD, emotionally abusive parents, and living with depression. I’ve listened to a large part of it, and it’s so great to hear descriptions from somebody who has been through it and come out the other side. He talks about what recovery looks like for him and how much better things are for him now. I’m so delighted to see such big names as Mayim Bialek and @wilwheaton talking about these issues.

#cptsd #emotional abuse #mental health #toxic parents

[kirkpussyindulgence]

if u wanna know abt what billy sharts said to wil wheaton the whole story is published here: http://wilwheaton.net/2021/03/the-william-fucking-shatner-story/

but more or less wil went over to a movie set in costume and someone offered to introduce him but when he said hi william shatner was like "oh so you're the kid on tng? what do you even do lol? i'd never let a kid on MY bridge" and was just overall super rude

thank you!!

fuck billy shits

#all my homies hate william shatner #i just saw this #thank u #asks #syn-odics

[rgbcn]

‪Wil Wheaton (June 2016!!) ‬ ‪I really recommend you to read an article @itswilwheaton shared the other day, especially if you are a TBBT fan. I loved it. To know better how he got to be in the show, how he felt about it. Emotional now that it’s coming to an end.‬ ‪👉 http://wilwheaton.net/2019/02/it-all-started-with-a-big-bang/‬ Since I started drawing a lot of tbbt fanart, I didn't only draw the the “main” cast, but also Wil Wheaton, Kevin Sussman, John Ross Bowie, Laura Spencer… Without them (and much more), the show wouldn’t be the same, right? ‪I thought on reposting the portrait I did for his birthday on 2016 (wow, almost 3 years ago!) so I could share the article with you. Read it and enjoy!‬ ‪.‬ ‪.‬ ‪Support my art —> patreon.com/rgbcn‬ ‪.‬ ‪.‬ ‪#rgbcn #wilwheaton #actor #bigbangtheory #‬WesleyCrusher #startrek #thenextgeneration ‪#fanart #tbbt #portrait #pencil #art #artist #fun #funny #comedy #traditionalart #hair #pencildrawing #drawing #blackandwhite #blackandwhitephotography #tvshow #artistsoninstagram‬ ‬ https://www.instagram.com/p/BtoKMClgSNa/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=kykwjdziy8zj

#rgbcn #wilwheaton #actor #bigbangtheory #startrek #thenextgeneration #fanart #tbbt #portrait #pencil #art #artist #fun #funny #comedy #traditionalart #hair #pencildrawing #drawing #blackandwhite #blackandwhitephotography #tvshow #artistsoninstagram

[vagalibido]

[hackernewsrobot]

Yes, I was forced to be a child star. it was never my dream or my idea

https://wilwheaton.net/2022/05/yes-i-was-forced-to-be-a-child-star-it-was-never-my-dream-or-my-idea/ Comments

[wilwheaton]

why don't you write on your blog - wilwheaton.net anymore?

I've been writing something about that, as it turns out. Stay tuned.

[cnrothtrek]

“I think it was then, at about 34 years-old, that I realized that Mental Illness is not weakness. It’s just an illness. I mean, it’s right there in the name “Mental ILLNESS” so it shouldn’t have been the revelation that it was, but when the part of our bodies that is responsible for how we perceive the world and ourselves is the same part of our body that is sick, it can be difficult to find objectivity or perspective.”

#wil wheaton #mental illness #mental health stigma #depression #anxiety

[archived-to]

Bonjour, 

Foot binding: https://www.buzzfeed.com/agh/china-foot-binding-tradition-history-backstitch?utm_term=.rg4odaDqE#.lfA8BGNEJ

Wil Wheaton on his chronic depression and anxiety and why he is no longer ashamed: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/05/my-name-is-wil-wheaton-i-live-with-chronic-depression-and-i-am-not-ashamed/

Regretful mothers: http://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers/

Scary - be careful with flying and lithium batteries: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-delta-flight-scare-is-a-reminder-why-you-should-never-put-electronics-with-lithium-batteries-in-checked-baggage-2018-03-13

“I’m exhausted from trying to be the ‘right’ kind of black girl at work”: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/codeswitching-while-black-at-work_us_5aa2b7dce4b07047bec60c5c?utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&utm_source=bv_fb&utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000047

Why Stephen Hawking’s disability activism was just as important as his science: https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/stephen-hawkings-disability-activism-was-as-invaluable-as-his-science.html

Enjoy! xo

#allo #we have a baby now #crazy #javier #foot binding #foot #bind #china #history #wil wheaton #depression #actor #writer #big bang theory #anxiety #ashamed #shame #mental health #health #mental #ill #illness #change #hope #scary #fly #plan #lithium #battery #explode

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

#15yrsago Congress proposes anti-DRM law for cars https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

#15yrsago Bush cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created https://web.archive.org/web/20090523162034/https://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-05-19-newjobs_N.htm?csp=34

#15yrsago Search Engine podcast is back on TVO https://web.archive.org/web/20090522054021/http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=3&action=blog&subaction=viewPost&post_id=10253&blog_id=81

#10yrsago NSA records every cell phone call in the Bahamas https://web.archive.org/web/20140519224819/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas/

#10yrsago U of Saskatchewan fires tenured dean for speaking out against cuts https://artssquared.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/canadas-academics-invited-to-sign-on-to-open-letter-to-university-of-saskatchewan-board-chair-ms-susan-milburn/

#10yrsago Nutritionists’ professional events catered by McD’s, sponsored by High Fructose Corn Syrup https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/my-trip-mcdonalds-sponsored-nutritionist-convention/

#5yrsago Bernie Sanders’ “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education” will desegregate schools, defund charters, pay teachers, end the school-to-prison pipeline https://berniesanders.com/issues/reinvest-in-public-education/

#5yrsago Judge recuses himself from health insurance cancer-denial case because he considers the company “immoral” and “barbaric” https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/16/health/judge-proton-beam-therapy-recusal-unitedhealthcare/index.html

#5yrsago Wil Wheaton’s “Dead Trees Give No Shelter”: terrifying tale, beautifully told https://wilwheaton.net/2017/04/dead-trees-give-no-shelter-audiobook/

#1yrago Venture predation https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

#pluralistic