Ok, so I’m still not much of a blogger, but it occurred to me that I’ve been posting videos on YouTube for some time now and it seems silly that I haven’t embedded them here. So I’m going to go through my videos and make entries for them here. There will be a lot of posts show up from that but I’ll try to keep it organized as best I can. Enjoy!

A series of pictures I have posted to twitter recently have caused me to be accused of twitter-stalking. Not an accusation that I ever thought would be leveled against me, and especially not about someone like Wil Wheaton. I mean, if I was going to stalk someone it would be someone a lot less… male.

It’s a bogus claim of course. I’m just trying to amuse myself on twitter, but I can see how someone could get the wrong idea. Allow me to walk you through my thoughts on this so it becomes more clear.

If you rewind to 1989 or so you would see a very young and very geeky Big-O watching Star Trek The Next Generation every chance he possibly got. If I had run into Wil Wheaton in a restaurant or something in 1989 I would have been crazy star struck. I don’t even think I would have had the stones to ask for an autograph, and if he had spoken to me I would have broken out into a cold sweat and not been able to speak.

Fast forward to today and I still probably wouldn’t interrupt his meal at the hypothetical restaurant, but it wouldn’t be because I was star struck but because I’d be thinking “You know, he’s relaxing and enjoying that $1 slice of pizza. How could I be a douchebag and interrupt him? I’m going to just let the poor man eat.”

There are two primary reasons for this change. First and foremost: I AM NO LONGER TWELVE YEARS OLD! I’m all growed-up with kids of my own, and I have the good sense to think of actors as *actual people* not objects for us to fawn over. Secondly I’ve had a little taste of celebrity myself. I have met and still correspond with some L.A. folks that others call “celebs” and there are also at least two distinct micro-niches on the interwebs in which I am kind of a big deal. Yes, the group is small and does not compare to what actual celebs have to deal with, but if I go to certain gatherings I get asked for autographs and people treat me like I’m way more important than I actually am.

Reflecting upon these facts has brought me to believe firmly in what I consider to be a universal truth: Fame is fake. False. Evaluates to zero. IT IS NOT REAL. “Celebrity” is as phony as the stock market. Any given celebrity is just a normal person who happens to have a much different kind of job than the average person does. And here’s a news flash: Most of them don’t even fly first class.

I submit as proof of this fact that a person can be named Vanilla Ice and be dancing  in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie one day and then then next be named Rob Van Winkle and have a home improvement show.

So do I know Wil Wheaton? No. We’ve never met. And although I’ve seen every episode of TNG, this does not make me feel any sort of closeness to him, or make me presumptuous enough to think that  I know what he’s like or if we’d be compatable as friends. Sorry, Twelve Year Old Big-O, that’s just how it is.

Here’s what I do know though. Wil uses twitter. He also reads the @ replys he gets. And he likes to make stupid videos (his words) with his cell phone and post them on youtube.  I happen to get a lot of enjoyment out of these videos. They are spontaneous and fun.

So one day last week he posted a new video.  In it he eats a slice of pizza and remarks about how awesome life is. In the last few seconds of the vid he gets this serious look on his face which really cracked me up.  I don’t know what inspired the serious look, but it made think about some of the messages that it might be sending and suddenly I had the idea to grab some screen shots and write captions.  I have made a total of three of them so far.

Pic 1 – my first

Pic 2 – in response to this video

Pic 3 – derived from a pic he retweeted from elsewhere

So does this constitute stalking? I suppose that’s a question for Wil, but that’s certainly not my intent. They are supposed to be in the same vein as the cell phone videos. Stupid. Fun. Mostly pointless.  And I’ll probably make some more of them so long as I continue to be amused by it.

So in closing I’d like to thank Wil and all the other Hollywood types who use social media services such as twitter to connect with fans. It really helps to make you look less like some entertainment object and more like an actual person. Everyone wins. And if I ever run into Wil at a con or a restaurant, instead of fawning over him like a pre-teen girl I’ll probably just offer to buy him a drink and make it a point to not mention Star Trek or Wesley Crusher.

Have I mentioned that I’m not much of a blogger? Twitter is just my pace. 140 characters and you’re done. And people don’t even care that much if you don’t use spell check. Blogging just takes so much more time. So unless I find an intern willing to work for insults, I’m just not going to blog much.

I haven’t been resting on my laurels though. I’ve been ramping up my freelance work again in addition to my day-job (we’re trying to buy a house), and have re-vamped Realisticweb.com to match. Let me know how you like it!

If you haven’t noticed already, there’s a links section over on the right that will point you to some of my other sites online. I’ve got a food blog that I write with a friend, a couple of podcasts, and I also post videos on YouTube from time to time. I’ll try to post here as well when I put something up, but if you really want to stay up to date, you should go to the other sites and subscribe there.

What started as an inside joke turned into a nearly all-night code run, and the birth of a new web site! Presenting http://www.AndYouSuck.com.

Need a snarky response for a stupid coworker? Dealing with idiots online with stupid questions? No worries! You can type anything you want in front of the first dot and will change the page accordingly. Right now you can only have one subdomain, text is all lower case, and it will replace underscores with spaces. Also, it must conform to normal URL standards which means that only numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores are allowed, and the total length of the whole url must be less than 255 characters.

I’m still adding features, but in the mean time check out this important swine flu update: http://tinyurl.com/dkat69

Enjoy

UPDATE: The rules for text replacement have changed since I wrote this post. Just visit the site to get the complete details of how to craft the insult that you’re looking for.

UPDATE 2: The site is down now thanks to some weirdness when I changed hosting providers. I’ll bring it back eventually. Maybe.

This is my first post written on my new iPod touch. Isn’t as hard to type on this thing as I thought it might be and the official WordPress app is great. Still, I think I’ll stick to my keyboard for now.

So I’m tired of getting crap from my friends making fun of me for not updating this site for over a year, so I’ve FINALLY gotten around to it. There’s a new template that *finally* has some color in it, and in addition to that, I’ve also hooked it up to ping.fm so all my micro-status updates that I post throught the day will be posted on here also.

Enjoy!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

I hope all your tech dreams have come true

I’m going to try my hand at blogging. We’ll see how this goes. And before you ask, no I don’t expect you to care. It isn’t always about YOU is it? Geez…