Being a nerd is not about what you love; it's about the way you love it.
— Wil Wheaton
I really try my best to be the person I want other people to be.
I want people to understand and embrace that the art that inspires our technological dreams is just as important as the tech it helps us create.
I'm very lucky in that I was inspired by science fiction while I was a little kid, and I was interested in science and technology and was encouraged to pursue those interests.
To the best of my knowledge, a lot of people who play video games also play tabletop games and vice versa.
I was lucky to have been a seven-year-old kid when I saw 'Star Wars.'
To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.
I'm basically a professional nerd, and I'm still not cool. I'm around people who are cool sometimes, and I know I'm not them. But that's OK; I don't care.
Someone who I would describe as a 'geek' or 'nerd' is a person who loves something to its greatest extent and then looks for other people who love it the same way so they can celebrate loving it together.
When you say a 'former child star,' you may as well say 'failed child star.'
I've done a lot of geeky things in my life, but I think the geekiest of all was my first effort to build props and cosplay, when I was about twelve years-old.
Even when I was little, people would always ask me if I wanted to be a movie star, and I would always say, 'No, I just want to be an actor.'
I'm guess I'm up to about 70% of normal, which is a real relief. My doctor gave me clearance to go out in public again, so I've been able to go to the store and help out a little bit around the house.
One of the things that I'm very proud to stand up and yell about is that we need to end gatekeeping in our society. We need to stop people from saying, 'You need to pass the test if you're going to come in here and do this.'
When I was a boy, I was called a nerd all the time - because I didn't like sports, I loved to read, I liked math and science, I thought school was really cool - and it hurt a lot. Because it's never OK when a person makes fun of you for something you didn't choose. You know, we don't choose to be nerds.
I obviously pursued a career in the arts but always wondered if I had just been supported a little more in math, as opposed to it being 'a thing I had to learn,' how that would have changed things for me.
I go around the country, and I speak to colleges, conferences and thousands of people at a time, and I'm like, 'Great. Fine. Whatever.' Coming to speak to about 60 kids, I am scared to death.
I fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons, and the storytelling of it, and the weird dice, and the fact that it didn't use a traditional board. It felt like I was a part of something special and almost kind of like a secret club because a lot of people didn't know what it was and didn't understand it.
Paranormal reality shows are some of the best unintentional comedy in the history of recorded entertainment.
It's nearly impossible to enforce actual consequences in video games at the moment, but at a table, sitting face-to-face across a tabletop game, or even playing at a LAN party, sportsmanship matters.
It probably wasn't until I was a freshman in high school and I met the people who became my gaming group that I finally found people who were weird like I was: that loved reading and playing games and not just watching a science fiction or fantasy movie but talking all about it.
Some ISPs are blocking all BitTorrent traffic, because BitTorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws which would force ISPs to block or degrade BitTorrent traffic, too. Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away.
People who don't want to give a creator money are never going to give a creator money.
I spent a lot of my childhood not fitting in, in a lot of different ways.
Even when I was little and going on auditions, it was clear who was there because they wanted to be there, and who was there because their stage parents were making them be there. There was a major difference.
If the world were a bar, America would currently be the angry drunk waving around a loaded gun. Yeah, the other people in the bar may be afraid of him, but they sure as hell don't respect him.
I'm privileged to occasionally stand on a table, and people listen to what I say, and in those moments, it's important to me that I have something to say and that I honor it.
When a person makes fun of you, when a person is cruel to you, it has nothing to do with you. It's not about what you said. It's not about what you did. It's not about what you love. It's about them feeling bad about themselves.
To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.
One of the things that I've never seen in tabletop gaming is this juvenile notion that the existence of a game that I don't like, or the existence of a gamer who's different than me, threatens my very existence and the very existence of my hobby.
'Ghost Adventures,' 'Mountain Monsters,' weird alien UFO shows like 'Ancient Aliens.' The people who are self-appointed experts in these fields are really a series of national treasures.
I love tabletop and video games, which should be open and inclusive to everyone.
Anonymity, in some cases a key civil liberty, also enables society's worst actors.
I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.
One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things.
I was obsessed with 'Ghostbusters.'
When you get a group of kids together, especially boys, the psychology of those kids requires that they find a weak kid or a sensitive kid or a soft kid.
I would love to find myself in a position where I have to decide, 'Gosh, do I want to be on a series?'
