Quotes from Wil Wheaton

Mister "I am not a Trekkie" gives me the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" salute as I walk away. Of course

I will never understand why the Internet seems to take away the basic humanity of most people,* and allows—no, enables*—them to say things that they'd never say to another person face-to-face.

And if everything is geeky, maybe nothing is geeky, and that means that gate-keeping in geek and nerd culture is a pointless waste of time.

Look around you—everyone here has their own internal monologue.

Because my brain is broken. There's all sorts of interesting medical and neurochemical reasons for it, and I've learned everything I can about them,* but knowing all of that isn't enough to make my brain magically start processing serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine in a balanced way

YOU must ask for help when anxiety makes you feel out of control. Because we need you. We need you to be well and whole and taking care of yourselves. I know that the prevailing rise of anti-intellectualism that's plaguing our world right now can be unbelievably depressing.

Still, I accepted this invitation to speak tonight because if one of my fundamental rules for living a successful and happy life is: don't be the smartest person in the room, it's corollary is: if you look around and see that you are the smartest person in the room, find a new room. This is the only way you keep growing and challenging yourself to be the most interesting human you can be.

And this is why I believe that ART is an important part of a well-rounded education, not as an alternative to STEM education, but as a fundamental part of it. I want us to start putting ART into STEM, to make STEAM.*

Bob Ross: "You can't have light without a little darkness.

Don't be a dick

Wesley Crusher will only live on in reruns. I will never get to bring him to life again, and that makes me a little sad. I'd like to try on his spacesuit and his oversized brain one last time and see how they fit now. After I posted that entry, the

I live with depression and anxiety.* I take medication, I practice meditation and CBT, and I see a therapist regularly to help me handle it. It doesn't control my life, and it doesn't define my life . . . but when it's really bad, it sure feels like it does. When it's really bad, it feels like it is the only thing in my entire life, the Alpha and Omega of my existence.

your dream is, you deserve to realize it.

I change from present to past tense and back again, and use an annoying passive voice throughout the whole thing.

Listen, Q, don't know who you've been talking to, but in Starfleet, we save the universe and fuck the green alien chick twice before breakfast, every day. We've got this one, dude.

40 minutes in a city is nothing. But 40 minutes along a rural highway seems like an eternity. So we're driving along, and I ask my friend if we're there yet, and he says no, so I say, "Jesus. By the time we get there, the kid won't even be dead anymore." There is this pause in the car, and one of the other actors says, "Dude. Did you just quote your own movie?" I answered in the affirmative, and he says, "That was very cool.

I guess that the thing people say to me all the time is, "Were the leeches real?" They then turn to their frat guy friends and snicker, like they're the first person to ever say that to me. I wait for a second, so they think they've really cut me down, and I say, "Yeah. Ask your mom about my scar." Finding new and preferably disgusting ways to degrade a friend's mother is always held in high regard.

They all hop into the turbolift, and Picard says, "Hey, I think it's great that you guys know each other, because it's important for my key officers to be familiar with each other's abilities." Troi says, "We are, sir," and Riker and Picard subtly high-five each other as the doors close.

If imagination is not set to the task of building a creative life, it busies itself with weaving a web of inner fears and doubts, blame and excuse. —LAURENCE G. BOLDT

Back on the Enterprise, Riker heads into the holodeck to meet up with Data, who we learn can't whistle like a human, wants to be human, and is consequently called "Pinocchio" by Riker. The whole bit really wants to be sweet and a little funny, but it ends up being kind of lame.

As the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, I looked out onto America: once, the land of the free. Now, the land of the zombies.

It's fun to win, sure, but if you only have fun when you win, you completely lose the joy of just playing a game, and being part of a team that works together. You're not going to win every game you play, so if winning is the only way you have fun, you're going to have a bad time pretty often.

I also know that I've been letting depression make me feel like shit for the last month or so, and I know that depression lies, so I'm probably just fixated on all the worst case stuff, and not paying enough attention to the awesome stuff." And the second those words came out of my mouth, it was like someone cast Dispel Depression.* I felt the weight of it lift off me.

It's hard to accept that the genetic lottery gives us strengths, maybe even a superpower or two, but that it also gives us vulnerabilities.