About a year-and-a-half ago, the guys over at Penny Arcade made available the speech from their keynote speaker at PAX ’07. While I’ve never been fortunate enough to go to PAX, I’ve often wanted to do so. Normally, however, I’m not that interested in the keynote speakers, and I felt that my opinion would not change when I saw who the speaker was: Wil Wheaton.
But, needing something to listen to while working, I gave it a shot. And believe me, it was a great decision. While I still remembered Wil as that scrawny actor that played Wesley Crusher, one of the more controversial characters in the entire Star Trek franchise, Wil had grown into one of the more prominent bloggers on the Interwebs.
I remembered hearing something about his blog either when I was in college or shortly after graduating and blogging was still a new concept. At the time, I dismissed it because I thought blogs were lame (look at me now, ma!) and because I didn’t expect him to have anything interesting to say.
But, now I am willing to admit that I was wrong. After listening to his PAX keynote, I started reading his blog—much of which has been co-opted for the books he has written—and listening to his podcast. When several of my friends convinced me to try out this whole “Twitter thing“, @wilw was one of my first feeds to follow. I even replied a few times and got a response back when I asked him to spread the word about the free copies of CodeWeavers software back in October.
Shortly after, I began to notice that Mr. Wheaton’s feed was no longer showing up in my Twitter feed. At first, I thought he hadn’t been updating, but then I went to check out the feed and saw that I’d missed a lot of Tweets. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a big deal. The man tweets a lot and I don’t have time to check Twitter so often that I catch everything from everyone anyway. But I figured there must be an issue with my Twitter account.
Now, you may be wondering to yourself, “What kind of stalker needs to know what’s going in someone’s life all the time?” To which I would respond, “This kind, dammit! Err… I mean, I’m not a stalker.”
In all seriousness, I’m a big fan of Mr. Wheaton’s writing and subscribe to his blog via RSS. However, I tend to check Twitter more often than RSS and can find new posts faster via Twitter. Plus, he’s pretty funny sometimes and that comedy plays out in Twitter quite a bit.
So, after some investigation I discovered that I was no longer following Mr. Wheaton anymore. This confused me, but I didn’t fret because it was easy to remedy.
I clicked the Follow button.
Safari did its thing and just before the following began, I received a message from the Twitter site saying that an error occurred and I could not follow at that time. WTF?
So I shrugged it off. I waited a couple of hours for Twitter to fix itself and I tried again. And later again. And each time I got the same error. I waited a couple of days this time. Again, no dice. Finally, I tried it on my iPhone, which loaded up the mobile version of the site. This is when the unthinkable happened.
The error message I was given from Twitter mobile said that I had been blocked at the request of the user. I. HAD. BEEN. BLOCKED.
BY WIL MOTHERFRAKKING WHEATON.
I thought it had to still be a glitch. I contacted Twitter support whom confirmed the error message. I had been blocked. I verified the issue further by logging in with my cat’s Twitter account @omgcat.
At this point, I didn’t know what else to do. I slept on it for a couple of days, but when the withdrawal proved to be too great, I tried the unthinkable. I e-mailed Mr. Wheaton directly. Unfortunately, I received no response and decided to just let it go. And I did. For two months. Until today.
Because today, I formally declare war on Wil Wheaton.
But, y’know, satirically.
