Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
It’s been a long time since I made a mixtape, but I remember making them all the time when I was a kid. I rarely had the opportunity to make them for another person, but that didn’t stop me from making endless awesome mixes to block out the world on my Walkman.
I’ve made a ton of public playlists over the years, but every last one of them is meant to be shuffled. They don’t have a cohesive theme, tell a story, or do anything that particular flavor of mixtape did for us back in the 80s. They are more like radio stations, I suppose. I’ve received lots of compliments for my Generic New Wave, and my KROQ Flashback playlists from people who experience them that way.
But I haven’t made a playlist with intention, to be listened to in a particular order, in well over a decade, probably two, until I got it into my head recently that it was time.
So I made two sides of a 60 minute cassette. The first side is Boys Drool, featuring a lot of the women in rock who I can’t stop listening to right now, with a focus on punk and hardcore. Due to the time limit, it’s far from complete, and it kind of insists on a second volume with a different focus.
The second side is Wax and Wane. This is classic goth, dark and moody, meant to listen to while you come down from dancing your face off with the ladies on side one. Did you know that Bela Lugosi’s Dead was recorded and mixed live, done in a single take? So when we listen to the album version, we are hearing exactly what someone sitting in the session heard, as if our headphones have been plugged into the past. I fucking love that.
While I assembled both sides of this tape, I was reminded how fun it is when I impose limits on myself and commit to working within them. Having just thirty minutes to work with forced me to get really clear with myself on what I wanted to do. Ever since I started writing, I have embraced the concept of choosing arbitrary limitations to work within, so that when actual limitations arrive, I already have some experience finding the stuff that needs to be cut or changed. Also, it’s fun and creates space for me to appreciate when I don’t have limitations.
The war is long over and as the memory of it fades, it has taken with it the sacrifices and horrors endured by those who fought and won the conflict.
One of those warriors, perhaps the most consequential warrior, you’ll have to decide if that’s accurate for yourself, has quietly made a home for herself, far away from the blood-soaked front lines, where she has safely grown old, in quiet solitude.
Our story begins when she receives a visitor, a young warrior who brings with her a familiar something halfway between an echo and a reflection that stirs something deep within the veteran who welcomes her. The war is over, but there are still battles to be fought, tyrants to be defeated, a young warrior to be mentored.
She is tired, but it has been a very long time since she received a visitor, let alone a young warrior who may remind her of herself, so long ago, so she will embrace her visitor, embrace the responsibility of caring for her, and, perhaps, she will find a way to soften her embrace of The Loneliness of Former Constellations.
I interviewed Phoebe yesterday. We had a lovely conversation about her process, how this story came together, and combining sci-fi with fantasy. I think we are dropping it next week.
I have two live shows happening in Los Angeles, both with limited tickets, so if you’re local and want to come out, I suggest you grab them today.
Anne and I have known J.Keith vanStratten forever. Over 25 years, at least. I was his sidekick on his eponymous talk show in a theater at ACME for a long time, and loved every second of it. Keith hosts Go Fact Yourself on public radio (YAY PUBLIC RADIO!), and he invited Anne and me to be guests on this year’s holiday show. Tickets are on sale now.
On October 25, I’m going to be at Geeky Teas in Burbank for It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, Live. Last year, I did a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for our Patreon subscribers, from my office. (Where I’m sitting right now, actually.) It wasn’t directed, or mastered, or anything like that. It was just me, the story, and a mic (Love you, LeVar). I had a great time doing it, and I got good feedback, so I’m doing another live reading this year, with an eye toward establishing a yearly tradition. This year’s classic tale of terror is The Body Snatcher, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Here’s a little bit I grabbed from a summary, to entice you:
Every night, four men regularly meet in the small parlour of the George Inn at Debenham: the landlord, an undertaker, the narrator, and an old Scotsman named Fettes. Once educated and comfortably off, Fettes is now a “crapulous, disreputable” drunkard. The townspeople call him “the Doctor” because he occasionally sets a bone or treats an injury, though little is known about his past.
One winter evening, news arrives that a wealthy local landowner has been struck with apoplexy and that his famous London physician has been telegraphed to come. When the landlord mentions the doctor’s name—“Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane”—Fettes, half drunk moments before, becomes instantly sober. He repeats the name “Macfarlane” in shock, then insists, “I must see him face to face.” The other men watch as the once-listless drunk becomes alert and deadly serious.
The rest of the story is uncovering why Fettes is now a drunk, and what (or maybe who) he is running from. It’s creepy and even scary at times, and the prose is delicious.
Because this is Stevenson’s most famous horror work after Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, there is a ton of scholarly writing and analysis of it online. Because I am that kind of nerd, of course I dove in and drank deeply from the wells of knowledge I found within. This is a story that, like Sleepy Hollow, was written in response to contemporary events that have been mostly lost to history. When we know the context in which it was written, and the events that inspired it, it gives us (or gave me, at least) an elevated experience and additional appreciation of the material, in addition to a great story. Without turning it into a college lecture, I am thinking about including some of that in the show, the way I record codas after each story for Patreon.
It won’t be fancy, it won’t be staged. It’s literally just me, in a chair, telling you a story for about an hour. There are a couple lighting cues, and that’s it. I’m keeping this as simple as possible, because I don’t have time to rehearse and prepare any staging. I’d rather keep it simple, and feel prepared, than make it complicated and risk feeling like I got in over my head.
Also, I’m giving serious consideration to taking myself on the road, and playing some smaller theaters with live readings that we’ll record for the podcast. This will help me find out if there is any audience for that, if I even feel good reading in front of a live audience, and give me a safe place to stumble a bit, if I need to.
The last time I did anything like this, it was so long ago, we made our own flyers to promote it. So I reached out to my friend, Sean, who hooked me up with a couple of classic punk-style flyers:
You are extremely invited to download and print these out for yourself.
Aren’t they great? Honestly, if the show is half as fun as the flyers, I’m good!
The performance will be streamed live, and archived, for Patreon subscribers, so if you want to watch it but aren’t local, you can join us there for five bucks, which will also give you access to the entire show’s archive, and all our BTS materials, for a month.
Operation Read All The Books continues. I just finished Joseph Fink’s The Nudge, a fun and creepy novella that I tore through in about an hour. I’m deeply in love with The Republic of Memory, which plays with language in a deeply saitsfying way. I just picked up Ode To The Half-Broken, though, and my quick glance at the beginning of it to see where in the queue I wanted to put it came to an end when I noticed I was coming up on page 100, and I may as well go ahead and just put at at the top. This is the first story I have ever read where a robot protagonist felt like a robot, rather than a robot-as-imagined-by-a-human. And it’s just delightful, too.
Speaking of Read All The Books, my collection at Black Stone awaits! I’m such a fan of Black Stone; they don’t use any DRM, ever, in their audio and ebooks, they support indie artists, and they publish some truly outstanding genre work. This month, I wanted to spotlight Hard Reset, by Jonathan Yanez. This is a Lit RPG novel that does all the fun tropes we expect, but is so much more than that. Like Acts of God, which is also in the collection, it goes into the virtual world, and spends most of its time there, but that world is given context and higher stakes when we go outside, into the “real” (as far as any of us know) reality that contains it. It’s a lot of fun, and I connected to the characters very early in the narrative.
Last thing before I go: A study concluded that people who start their day with at least 30 minutes of literally anything that is not online reported significantly improved everything in their day. I’ve been trying this for about two weeks, and my non-scientific contribution is: fuck yeah, it does.
Just something to think about, maybe try out for yourself.
Hi, I’m Wil, this is my blog. I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to get my posts delivered directly to your inbox, here’s the thingy:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 21 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
It's only been... okay, I don't want to think how long.
We are preparing to take the beta update page and the beta inbox out of beta with the next code release. We don't have an exact date yet, but this is your last chance to tell us about problems!
To enable the beta versions: go to Beta Features and enable the "new Create Entries" beta test for the new update page and the "New Inbox Page" for the, well, new inbox page.
If this is your first time using the beta update page: nearly everything on it can be adjusted, moved, or removed to some degree. The upper right side of the update form has a " ⚙️ Rearrange Panels" link.
Not every panel is enabled by default! If you don't see something you're used to finding, look in the disabled panels. While in Rearrange mode, you can enable or disable panels, drag them to whatever position you want, and generally customize it to your heart's content.
Once we push the button and switch to the new update and inbox pages for everyone, we cannot keep the old ones available. We are so close to finishing the decade-long "get rid of the undocumented custom templating language from 1996 that no one else uses" modernization project that's been sapping our collective will to live that we can taste it, and we can't convert the old update page and the updated inbox page is the converted version. This is your last chance to alert us of problems. If you let us know after the switch goes live, we'll still fix it, but we can't guarantee how fast. Prevent future problems and test drive them now!
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
October 5th, 2026: This comic was inspired by realizing I don't know all the shapes, much less how many of them there are! The shapes we all learned in kindergarten was just the EASY stuff!! Although, thinking on it now, I imagine that's by design.
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1030. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Optional: If you would like your secret's fandom to be noted in the main post along with the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. If your secret makes the fandom obvious, there's no need to do this. If your fandom is obscure, you should probably tell me what it is.
Optional #2: If you would like WARNINGS (such as spoilers or common triggers -- list of some common ones here) to be noted in the main post before the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret.
Optional #3: If you would like a transcript to be posted along with your secret, put it along with the link in the comment!
I had to push some code live today to fix something, and that brought with it a couple of new things like if you have two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) enabled, you got automatically logged out and it is now required to log in. If you don't, you can set it up if you want (you don't have to.)
This also means that if you have 2FA enabled, you will not be able to use 3P clients using your username and password anymore. You should be able to use API keys in most cases, but there's some nuance to that (and tbh, I just am not precisely sure what clients anybody even uses.)
Please do comment if you're seeing anything weird, as per usual, and we'll work on it. Thank you!
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1029. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
What's in the Bowl? Fic, recipes, podcast/music recs
Let Me Know: Prompt me! More on each thing below...
For fic — I will write you either something original, or for one of the following: "Blue Prince", D&D:HAT, Knives Out (any of the movies/larger canon), the Scholomance series...honestly, okay, if I've mentioned it in my journal as something I've read or watched (and enjoyed), I'm here to write you fic for it. :)
You can find out what my writing is like on AO3. :D I'm open to writing sequels, missing scenes etc from any of my own work (so if you're a House Ilizana person, for instance, you are free to prompt me about that, and I'll write you something).
I reserve the right to go, "nah, I'm not comfortable writing that" about any given prompt — if I do, I'll ask you gently to give me a different one. If you want to avoid requesting stuff I'm unlikely to write (because it hits my DNWs), you can check out my FIAB letter from earlier this year.
For recipes — I cook a lot. If I don't have my own recipe for something, I will point you somewhere that has a tried-and-true recipe I love! :) I'm used to allergy-friendly cooking (no wheat/no eggs/no dairy/no meat), so if you have specific needs, let me know. ♥
For music — I listen really widely. Music is one of my special interests. You're free to prompt me with a specific mood or thing you want, and I'll do my best to throw something at you. It would be helpful for me if you included what genres you like. Note that most of what I listen to is in English or Spanish (as those are the languages I speak, and I'm a lyrics person), so most of what I send you will probably be in that vein ♥
For podcasts — I listen to audiodramas primarily, but I have listened to Many Podcasts and if I can, I will try to rec you something in line with your prompt!
Other info: I make no promises as to how long (or short...) any fic I write for you is. ♥ I think the shortest thing I have on AO3 right now is around 500 words, so if you do not want something lengthier, you may want to skip my door.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1029. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1029. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Have you ever known someone who went away for some reason, and came back so fundamentally changed, it’s like they picked up an alien parasite along the way that took control of their personality?
And they still look and sound like the person you knew, only … different. And they know it, and you know they know, and they know you know they know, and you both care about each other, so you muddle through the weirdness, seeking to reestablish the connection you had before.
It’s awkward, and uncomfortable, tentative and uncertain. Maybe it’s a little dangerous, for one or both of you, but you do it because you care deeply for each other.
And, hey, maybe the way they they’ve changed isn’t so much them becoming a different person, as much as it is becoming the person they were all along, who is a person both of you love to be with.
This is a story about all of that, and when it’s over, I think you’ll know exactly what it means to have Toothpaste Feelings.
It’s Storytime is available wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a Patreon, where I can tell you the whole story without any advertising interruptions, as well as a whole lot of fun stuff from behind the scenes. If you join for October, you’ll get access to a special, live performance of a classic, spooky story, that’s going to be something special. I’m really excited to do it.
If you listen to this episode, or if you have already heard it, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments. If you get a note that your comment is being held for moderation, please be patient while I approve it. I’m sort of a one-man show over here.
Hi, I’m glad you’re here. I’m Wil Wheaton. I tell stories; mostly written by others, sometimes written by myself. I also write this blog. I am @itswilwheaton on Threads and Instagram, where you have a chance to be one of the lucky 1500 the algorithm deems worthy of seeing my posts. If you’d like to get my posts delivered to your inbox, here’s the thingy:
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