I shouldn’t focus on the bad parts, but I’m gonna.This is Roxy London, from Boss Fight Studios’ 6” Epic HACKS line, a line that has also given me a couple of skeletons and a Red Sonja. Roxy is, as you can see, a Purple Space Lady In A Jetpack, with a look and a style I desperately want to see more of. That 60’s/70’s retrofuture vibe is ver much my thing and in most ways, Roxy nails that.
But oh, those hips. The hips are inexplicably bad. Sonja’s hips are fine, but these are stiff and don’t kick straight out and don’t have much in the way of outward motion, and they created an immediate disappointment that’s colored my opinion of the figure since.
Which is a shame, because everything else is fine to great. Well, not everything. She has two weapons - the pistol shown, which is raygunny but small and also doesn’t fit in her hand right, and a knife. This isn’t someone using a knife as their backup weapon. So it’s a bit skimpy on the accessories, although the jetpack is very nice and the hand/head options are good.
She also has a holster belt that doesn’t stay put but I expected that from my Red Sonja experience. It’s just a thing Boss Fight…prefers?
I like the pic - I started with a NASA Artemis II shot and moved the Earth so that it wasn’t hidden by the toys. Adjusted the lighting on Roxy, added the shadow, then added the thematic laser blast and jetpack exhaust.
This one didn’t go quite how I hoped.To start, my plan was to have them fighting behind the bridge and visible through the arch, and there just wasn’t room for that. But those layers really help sell the realism in these.
Second, I shot on a red backgorund knowing the red would light up the figs and thinking I could then knoc it back so that the red was coming from the “blast” and that ended up looking worse than if I added the red in post, frankly.
Shredder as Mechagodzilla is fine - great for the price, as with all the Godzilla X TMNTs, but the price is very low.
Special guest appearance from the McDonalds Badz-Maru as Rodan I got for a buck plus shipping on eBay!
Deep in rural Sweden, the tantric kinksters are getting FREAKY. At the “Sexsibility Festival” a 5-day erotic gathering where you can explore tantra, contact improv, and eye gazing along with impact play workshops, there’s a lot to do and see. But everybody’s still gotta eat, right? Enter Pearse, who cooked breakfast for over 500 participants. … Read More »
Now, THIS one I’m inordinately happy with.The fig is good. They used, I believe, the stock Jazwares suit body, but it has a nice crosshatch pattern on it. He comes with an extra head, a microphone, a one finger pointing hand, a two finger pointing hand, a neck brace, and a diploma. Nice, solid effort to get a deep cut in before the line goes dark.
Since he’s a wrestling lawyer, I knew this was gonna be how I was gonna go but honestly, I wasn’t sure I could properly pull it off. It’s an odd pose and angle to match up and often action figure proportions simply don’t match either people or drawings well enough to create the same outline. But I figured it out, found the font (not a font really, an image file with the letters, so it was a lot of cut and pasting) and got it properly layered up.
Odd choices were made. Corners were cut. But Im good with it.We finally get the Forever Champ as an action figure at the tail end of Jazwares’ run. Four and a half years after her debut. Almost four years since she became the ROH World Champion. In what is essentially her debut look but with a belt. By the time she became ROH champ in like December 2022, she was just using the metal skeleton of the wings.
And let’s talk about those wings. They’re clearly a cost-cutting copout - printed foam with a stud through them for articulation. They’re not really like any version of her wings I remember and she was done using the wings by 2023 anyway and I should be mad at this and yet I’m not. Would I like proper ones more? Sure. But as compromises go, there’s’ something to be said about what is essentially stiff soft goods that won’t break or get weird in storage.
Her hand assortment is just fists and claw hands, which is good for posing her delivering an O Face but means I needed a lot of Blu Tac to get her to hold a sword (Storm Arena Ax Battler’s, my go-to for fancy shiny swords).
Anyway, I felt the fig deserved more epicness than a wrestling pose and I had a daytime shot of Wembley From The Air left over from when I decided on a nighttime shot instead, and Vultak is always lying around out of the bins because he’s useful, so….
For years I have slept like absolute garbage. I struggle to fall asleep every night, and it’s not uncommon for me to wake up five or more times, for no obvious reason. I’ve done all the things, and nothing seems to really help that much. The most effective thing, surprisingly, is listening to a sleep story from Calm, so I’ve been doing that. Every night, LeVar reads me to sleep, which is pretty great.
I’ve been sleeping in the guest room for a week or so, so Anne doesn’t have to deal with me tossing and turning and all the rest, so instead of rolling over and saying good morning, I stagger into the living room and say good morning.
Over the weekend, I walked out, saw Anne, and before I could say anything she said, “Did you see it?”
Friends, there is only one “it” I want to see when I wake up, and it’s the same thing we all want.
“What? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“No, no, not that,” she said. “Sorry. It’s not that.”
“Dude, you can’t do that to me. My heart can’t take it.” I weighed out my coffee beans. While I poured them into the grinder, she said, “Stephen King posted on Threads that he and Simon and Schuster are putting your narration of The Body up for Grammy consideration!”
That just about knocked me off my feet. “What?”
She repeated herself. “Open up Threads and look.”
“I can’t! I’m not looking at the Internet for 30 minutes after I wake up.” I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a coffee mug.
She tapped on her phone a few times and hurried over to me while I dumped the ground coffee into my Aeropress, and poured some water over it to start a bloom.
“Look!”
For your GRAMMY® consideration: @itswilwheaton’s narration of The Body. Submitted in the Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording category. recordingacademy simonaudio #GRAMMYs #FYC #WilWheaton #TheBody #RecordingAcademy SimonAudio AudiobooksOfInstagram
“Okay, that is pretty awesome,” I said. I stirred the damp grounds, then saturated them and let bloom finish. I filled the tube the rest of the way and put the plunger in with a satisfying hiss.
“I’m so proud of you!” Anne said. I pushed the plunger down, silently cursed that I always get some out of the sides and onto the counter, and was quiet until I was done. I set it aside and sipped my coffee.
I thought for a moment. I never cared about awards, and the few times I won, I always felt like a fraud, like someone felt sorry for me, or it was just about publicity, or a dumb popularity contest. It wasn’t about acknowledging and honoring art that I made1. “I want the work to speak for itself,” I always said, and I meant it. But I never let anyone know that there was a very small part of me, tucked safely away from everyone (including me, sometimes) who held out some hope that, maybe, if it were an Oscar … but that voice was always drowned out by another that said since that is never going to happen, just fucking forget it, man.
So I did. What initially started out as caring so much I had to insist I didn’t care, actually became sincerely not caring. Just do the work and don’t expect any external validation for it. It’s the work, itself, that matters2.
“Is everything okay?”
I realized that I had been quiet, staring at my reflection in the black liquid.
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. I was just thinking … all those times I was nominated for stuff when I was younger, none of that work was mine, right? I wasn’t being recognized for art I created because that art was important to me; I was desperately trying to earn a place in my family by doing what I was told I had to do. I guess I felt like any attention or accolade was negative reinforcement for my mom, you know?
“All that time, whenever I worked really hard and earned literally anything, my mother jumped in to claim as much of it as she could for herself. When something cool happened because I worked really hard to make it happen, my dad never cared. I always felt stupid for caring, so I stopped caring. You can’t be disappointed that you didn’t win, or that your parents are still dogshit when you did win, if you don’t care.” I did that tapping the head meme thing.
“Yeah, I get that. I’m still really proud of you, though.”
I sipped more coffee.
“Thank you.” I closed my eyes, furrowed my brow, and rubbed my free hand across my forehead, into my bedhead. I noticed something unexpected.
“I think … I think that I am proud of me, too,” I ventured.
“Good! You should be!”
I rubbed sleep out of the corner of my left eye. “I think that this feels different because –” I held up a hand, “wait. First of all, I’m not going to win this. And I’m probably not even going to be nominated,”
“Dude, why ar–” she looked disappointed.
“Hang on. I hear you. I’m getting there, but that’s just part of why I think I feel this way.
“This time is different, and I feel genuinely happy and proud of myself, because I know that I did good work when I narrated The Body. Gabrielle and I both knew it when we were recording. It’s like the way I knew Stand By Me was going to be special when we were making it.” I blew across the top of my mug.
“The narration feels like that work, that art, is mine in a way that most of my other work is not. I feel like my performance in this narration is special, that it’s something only I could do, and I absolutely own that. That’s really enough.”
Anne smiled and I took a deep breath.
“It’s so unlikely I receive a nomination, just because of math and all the tremendously talented narrators who have probably been nominated before, who will also be considered. But I’m not minimizing this very cool thing that Stephen King posted, at all. That post means that the publisher, and Stephen King himself, feel the same way about my narration as I do. They at least feel like nobody is going to laugh at us because I’m clearly not qualified to be White House Press Secretary, like and such as.”
We giggled together.
“Five days!” She sad.
“It’s the funniest thing, ever,” I agreed. “These fucking dorks, I swear.”
More giggles.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I’ve known about this for all of five minutes, so I’m going to take the day to process it. No matter what, I’m going to allow myself to feel good about this, because it is a genuinely cool thing on its own. I am sincerely proud of myself.”
She hugged me. “You totally deserve this. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thank you. I am proud of me too. I just need some time to get used to that, and not feel weird about it.”
A few hours later, I was out for a walk, thinking about all of this, and I had a moment that was similar to the first time I heard the birds singing. I noticed that I felt genuinely and safely proud of myself, excited to do more work like this, confident and secure in myself as an artist.
There is this thing happening in me that has been slowly going on for a few months. I feel like I’m getting to really know myself, especially my artistic self, in a way I never tried to before. All my therapy and CPTSD recovery work has helped me set aside and walk away from all these ways I made myself small so my parents and brother could feel big, all the choices I made to deny who I truly was, not only as an artist but as a person, in a futile effort to earn the kind of affection, support, stability, and love that all kids should get from our parents because we exist3.
As I’ve gotten to know myself, as I have recovered from so much pain and complex trauma, just working so hard to get from always feeling angry to just feeling sad, I have embraced the weird theater kid, who loves to tell stories, I have always been. I found the courage to retire from on-camera acting, which I never wanted to do in the first place, without throwing out the skills I developed when I was doing it. I’m a good narrator because I understand story, I understand character arcs, I know how to break down a whole story, how to break down a scene, how to create and maintain unique and interesting characters for 24 hours of narration. I did that. I put in the hours and the energy and worked as hard as I could to do the best performances possible, to get to this place where I can actually feel proud of myself. It’s a new thing to feel confident, to feel like I can hold my own with the people who earn nominations and get awards, because this is what I want to do with my creative life, this is my art, this is something I made for myself that makes my heart sing4.
When I got home, I found Anne and wrapped my arms around her. We hugged tightly and I told her what I’d thought about during my walk.
“I get all of that,” she said, “and I’m really happy for you.”
“Thanks, I’m happy for me, too!”
It was so weird to say that, and know that it was the truth.
Hi, I’m Wil. I narrate audiobooks (you probably figured that out) and I write this blog. I’m on Threads and Instagram as @itswilwheaton. I host a podcast, It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, where I narrate short, speculative fiction. New episodes drop Wednesdays. If you’d like to get my posts to your inbox, here is the thingy:
I think, after decades of space between then and now, that I can allow myself to accept that, maybe, I did deserve whatever accolades I got, because it was given to me for my work. I wish I’d been able to feel that, back then. ︎
Some of that work was good, none of it was great. I spend twenty years trying to figure out why, and recently came to understand, like, almost everything. That’s its own post in the future. ︎
It is so fucked up that both of my parents, and my father’s entire family, made us feel like we had to earn love and support, like we were constantly being graded. I was in my 30s before I found out how incredibly not normal that is. My sister and I talk all the time about how we unconditionally love our children, and how aware we both are of the ways our parents withheld their very conditional affection. God, it’s so gross. ︎
Man, it’s taking everything I have to not go back and delete that, conditioned as I have always been to downplay my accomplishments and abilities, lest I be accused of being “too big for your britches” by my dad. Well, fuck you, dude. I feel really good about myself, and super proud of the work I did. And I guess Stephen King agrees with me, and he knows a hell of a lot more about art and storytelling than you do. ︎
GUNS UP!Sequence break! The “21 Projects” were defined by the toys I came home from vacation to. After that, I got a Juice Robinson off eBay because frankly nobody’s announced they’re picking up the AEW action figure license after Jazewares wraps it up and after getting Jay White, I needed to complete the faction.
Or, at least, the available members of the faction. There’s no Ace Austin, so in Bang Bang Gang traidtion, I’ve included him as a cardboard standee.
Juice isn’t my favorite guy, but he has grown on me in the past six months or so. And his figure’s pretty good, with lots of pattern and color and specificity, even if it’s for his pre-injury look from a while back. Got him off eBay for Nigh-Retail, which was, as is traditional, my only acceptable price point.
A 25 year-old queer, plus-size woman has never been in a relationship or had sex. Both her size and virginity make it hard to connect with people through the apps. How can she break through these barriers and get some lovin’ already? A married woman for 18 years with kids is sick to death of … Read More »
I think I’ve developed a crush on my wife’s ex. I’m in my forties and my wife is older than me. We’ve been together for fifteen years. We are both women. Before we dated each other, we dated men exclusively. She had told me a lot about her ex before me. They were together for … Read More »
Kind of a tribute to theline.With the line complete, I wanted to do a little something to celebrate, and while this doesn’t include Akuma for complicated reasons involving the need to unlock him in the PS4 version of Street Fighter Anniversary, this is the “official” roster. I want to do something else too but it’ll be a lot more work so we’ll see how that plan goes.
This was more work than I expected and a lot of it you can’t see. Because I needed a hi res blank version of the character select screen, which meant completing the globe ends and extra background logos that are covered up in every screenshot, and blanking all the character portraits as cleanly as possible before shooting the two big guys and also all 16 of the “portraits” using the figs.
I finished a thing!With the addition of Zangief and T. Hawk, the 17-figure roster of Jada Toys’ Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers line ix complete, at least for me. At least mostly for me.
There aren’t any figures left to make in this line other than color variants or the weird unlockable Violent versions of Ken and Ryu. I was never able to get the You Lose pack of bloodied heads, and there are some accessories they made for only the Player 2 color variants that I’d snap up in a second if I could but I have, in essence, The Roster.
The funny thing about Zangief and T. Hawk is that, by living up to the incredibly high standards Jada Toys set with this line, and including many of the improvements they’ve made over the course of the line, they’ve come out… I don’t want to say “average” but “not exciting” comes to mind.
Partly because I’m not really a Zangief or T. Hawk guy and partly because there’s no surprises here and partly because as big guys at a reasonable price point they’re a little light on accessories.
T. Hawk has a bird and an extra head and extra hands and a gauntlet you can swap out to peg the bird into that works the worst of anyaccessory in the entire line. Zangief has a clear hand and an effects piece for it and then the usual angry head and grappling hands.
But they both move nad balance beautifully and look great and I’m very happy with them. But its like getting a really good croissant at the same bakery for two years. You start to take it a little for granted and fondly remember that one time you got a chocolate one by surprise and the chocolate croissant was Vega.
Spooky Season is October. Dumbshit Season is FOREVER.The second and final wave of Playmates TMNT X Godzilla figs has hit, and I was able to find the two most important ones. I may still stumble across Splinter as King Ceasar and get it for completeness and also because he’s an absolute freak of a toy, but if I don’t, I’m fine.
As before, these are basic, cheap figures with basic, cheap figures with minimal articulation but oddly appealing designs, at least to me.
Jet Jaguar is a normal sized dude who gets big. So are Apache Chief and Ultraman. Hence.
I do love a good chair.A while back, Hasbro announced a Destro with the “Despoiler”, a black and gold plane type thing and the Destro came with a gold head and tons of gold accessories and it was very cool and it was also $110 and therefore it could also fuck off.
This is also Very Fancy but it was much cheaper, especially ‘cause I snagged it in an Oops Wrong Price For Half An Hour preorder window.So I got it for a very reasonable Figure Plus Large Accessory price.
The Cobra Commander is pretty standard Classified fare, possibly with a bit more paint apps or possibly just more noticeable to me paint apps. Cloth cape, although it’s that plain flat fabric stuff most mass market toys end up with. The throne is tacky in the best way, ornate, full of snakes, red and gold. Very 2026 White House.
Unfortunately, I don’t have three thrones. Mattel Creations put out a Stone Cold Steve Austin with a King of the Ring throne, and I though “hell, that’ll be on clearance by November” and instead it not only sold out, it almost never pops up on eBay, and when it does, it’s too expensive. Oops.
But when I think two chairs, I think WINNER’S CIRCLE.
What’s it like to be a bearded, 6’4″, 250 pound fella getting his nails done in preparation for the first crossdressing session with his wife? Dust off your gender studies 101 textbook and find out. Tell us about your…transgressions. Q@Savage.Love
Model kits and I are complicated. The last year and a half has seena huge explosion in model kits from Blokees - assemble-it-yourself action figures with suprpsingly solid, well-articulated results. Most of them are a little small for scale (although that’s changing) but most importantly, as model kits full of dozens of tiny pieces. I can’t put them together. Which means, if I get one, Cathy has to do the assembly.
So I only get the ones that are absolutely awesome and vital for the collection, like the Robot Waiter, and now, Jeff The Land Shark, recent breakout Marvel character.
Sure, I could have bought the Hasbro Gamerverse Marvel Rivals Venom and Jeff 2-pack… and ended up with a small, unarticulated Jeff sliug and a giant Venom I don’t want and spent sixty bucks. Or I could spend less than 20, get an all timer action figure of just Jeff, and actually pose the little fucker.
So much articulation for his size and shape! And you can have him spray water out of his mouth, or have one of two different tongues, or no tongue and a closed mouth, and you can take off his top fin and plug it into an effects piece so it looks like he’s swimming through the land, and he has two different sets of eyes and the tail’s very articulated and goddamn he’s good.
Cathy also tricked out King Shark for comedy after she put him together, and I had to include it in the pic because it’s a hoot.
In case you missed it, I want you to know about a show I’m doing in a couple weeks, right here in the valley.
So last Spooky Season, I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for the Storytime Patreon subscribers. It was very simple, just me and a microphone, a few Halloween decorations I got at the drugstore to dress up my office. It was deliberately simple, and as far as I can tell, everyone who tuned in enjoyed it. I know that I had a really good time doing it.
When I was thinking about bringing it back this year, I thought it would be fun to try it out on stage, with an audience, this year. My friend owns Geeky Teas in Burbank, and she has a great performance space that I’ve been wanting to use for something, so I did the math and here we are.
The space holds about 70 people, and as of yesterday morning, about half the tickets are sold. That’s more people than I thought would show up, so I’m pretty happy about that. The thing about doing shows in LA is that there are so many shows in LA on any given night, we are all spread out rather thin, and unless you are a massive draw, it always feels like nobody shows up. I’m so delightfully surprised that this room will have more people in it than not who I didn’t bring myself, from my own house, to watch.
The story I picked for this year is The Body Snatcher, by Robert Louis Stevenson. For more information, I’m going to quote myself from a few days ago, to save time:
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 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.
When I booked the room, I was fully prepared to play to about a dozen friends, only. That it appears to be on its way to maybe selling out is pretty awesome.
HI, I’m Wil. This is my blog. If you’d like to receive my posts in your inbox, here’s the thingy:
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