Continuing the Geek Pride theme of the day, here’s something from NYMag‘s Vulture blog:
… Within the past decade, [Wil Wheaton]’s become a touchstone of the amorphous entity known as geek culture. His biggest canvas is Twitter, where he currently has 2.6 million followers and where he tweets about everything from net neutrality to board games. Speaking of board games, he also hosts a video web-series about them called TableTop, and this month, Wheaton raised a record-setting $1.4 million from fans to keep the show going. He’s a regular on The Big Bang Theory, does a ton of voice-acting for geeky animated shows, has written a half-dozen books, blogs prodigiously … the list goes on and on.
And now, as he approaches his 42nd birthday, Wheaton has a TV show of his own for the first time: The Wil Wheaton Project, debuting tonight on SyFy. It’s sort of a nerdy take on The Soup: In front of a studio audience, he riffs on everything from paranormal reality shows to Reddit memes. We caught up with Wheaton to talk about the intersection of geekdom and politics, Long Island Medium, and some surprising news he got from Neil Gaiman…
What do you mean by “our community”? Who’s “we”?
The nerd community, creative people. 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.How has that community, however one wants to define it, changed, and how has its role changed since you started on Star Trek?
It’s certainly a broader demographic than it was when I was younger, and I think a lot of that has to do with my generation growing up at a time where we were treated like we were weird and there was something wrong with that. And it’s like, I don’t think we should be taking any victory laps or anything, but I think we should be really proud of ourselves that we have created this world where we are now the creators of things, right? And we’re lucky that Joss Whedon is our leader and he makes amazing things.In some ways, I think that we’re speaking to our parents and saying, “See, I wasn’t wrong about all of this stuff,” and we’re saying to the younger version of ourselves, “Look, it’s going to be okay.” And 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.”…
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