In which I spill the tea on the creative activity I work on (when I'm not writing) for the November 2024 IWSG.

This is my last post for the year. I hope that those of you who are working hard on your novels this month are proceeding nicely. As for the rest of you, may you have a holiday in which Mariah Carey doesn't scream too much "All I Want for Christmas" in your ears. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Today is post-election day aftermath. It is also the first Wednesday of November 2024, and this means it is time for our Insecure Writer's Support Group posts. If this is the first that you have heard of this blogging phenomenon, you can read and sign-up for it at this LINK.

What is the Purpose of the IWSG?: It is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds.

When do y'all post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. So, on that day you should post your thoughts on your own blog. Some ideas for what those posts could entail are 1) you could talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered, 2) you could discuss your struggles and triumphs, and 3) you could offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Being a part of this blogfest means being involved. So, you should visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writers. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a dozen new people each time and return comments. This group is all about connecting. Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

The X (formerly Twitter) handle the Insecure Writer's Support Group uses is @TheIWSG and the hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the November 6 posting of the IWSG are Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard , Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose!

Now, every month, the IWSG announces a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. If this is what you want to write about, you should include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

But remember, the question is optional :)

November 6 question - What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing?

When I'm not writing I write things for my homebrew setting in Dungeons & Dragons. Over the years, I've built a secondary ruleset that overlays the primary rules of 5e+, and these books contain all the flavor of my homebrew world. I've also digitized maps to make them available to display on 32-inch monitors, and I've come up with all sorts of spells, abilities, classes, and you name it. It's fun to just sit and watch tv and think over a new ability and write it down, revise it, and then think about what it might look like with someone playing it. I think that's where I get the most enjoyment: in the theorycrafting. It is my jam.

Thanks for visiting my blog this year. I will be back for the January 2025 edition of the IWSG. Hopefully (by then) things have settled down a bit politically in this country. But I'm honestly not counting on that.

Let us all take a moment to appreciate the art of Greg Hildebrandt.

I learned that last week, the artist Greg Hildebrandt passed away. When I first heard of the "Brothers Hildebrandt" I felt that their surnames were certainly meant for great artists. It's the kind of name that you'd expect to see on an oils and acrylics line of paint in your local art store. Certainly Star Wars fans are familiar with their work from a painting of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. It's notable that they did this project without even having seen the movie. I read somewhere that Lucas had promised them that they'd only have their art on a few promo materials, but then it just got slapped on everything until they finally had to sue to get paid (and I think it was only for like $2,000). Hildebrandt was also the guy that gave Luke Skywalker abs that Luke never had.

Every fantasy reader, even those not familiar with them, has probably seen elements and themes of their work popularized in other materials and art. Here (for example) is the Balrog from Fellowship of the Ring. 

And then there's the depiction that Hildebrandt did of the Argonath (Lord of the Rings), which was a monument of two enormous statues carved in the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion standing on either side of the River Anduin at the northern entrance to Nen Hithoel. It marked the northern border of Gondor, and nearby to the south were previous outposts, Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw.

For me, I think the one thing that always drew my eye (about their work) was their use of light and shadow. Many of their paintings have this high contrast to them to really sharpen features while adding a kind of magic to the whole mix. Oftentimes, the shadows in their landscapes feel cool to me (low temperature as opposed to "awesome"). Maybe it's because they would oftentimes drench their shadowy landscapes with a kind of blue tone. The Hildebrandt's dabbled in just about anything that would take their art. Here's a picture from a Superman comic book that was illustrated by Greg Hildebrandt:

And they also lovingly illustrated the Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, basically turning his first outing as an author into an illustrated edition. I don't know any authors who get this kind of treatment so early in their careers. From what I've read, Random House was just really trying to mine the market of people who wanted "something else" after consuming The Lord of the Rings.

No matter what their assignment was to illustrate, I feel like the Hildebrandt brothers showed up to paint something as realistic as it could be portrayed, given the many fantastic elements of their overall portfolio. With Greg's passing, there aren't too many artists of this era that are left. I can think of a handful: Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Michael Whelan (I'll be really sad when Whelan passes on). Michael Whelan actually retired until Brandon Sanderson showed up with a truckload of money and dumped it on him to illustrate his books. I can't blame Sanderson. Whelan (in my opinion) was the best in the business, and it was probably every artist's dream to get a Whelan cover. Since people were/are just throwing millions of dollars at Sanderson, I think the money came so easy that he could just feel free to splurge on whatever his heart desired. Sanderson could have diamond studded window wipers if he wanted. Anyway, I'll leave you with this movie poster for Clash of the Titans that I really liked (illustrated by Greg Hildebrandt). It's weird to think that this era of art is gone, but as I've often said, "Everything in life is temporary. Even us."

Did George Lucas invent the Prequel?

Did George Lucas invent the prequel? I remember when he announced that there would be prequels to his iconic Star Wars trilogy way back in the mid-90's. It was one of those rumors that grew and grew until you started seeing chatter of it on the primitive thing we called "the internet." I remember seeing the first trailer for the Phantom Menace and how Apple's website was the best place to go to view them in a thing called "Quicktime." But I honestly don't remember if there were such things as "prequels" before The Phantom Menace. Now, of course, they are everywhere.

The latest thing that I saw that is getting a prequel is the movie/story of It by Stephen King. I kind of wonder why they are doing a prequel. The latest adaptation of It was successful. I've seen the first one but avoided part 2 simply because I don't much care for scary movies. However, I kind of wonder what could possibly be told in a prequel to It other than "more of the same." From what I understand of the monster, it reappears every 27 years or so (I can't remember the exact timeline), kills a bunch of kids, and then goes dormant again. So, in an It prequel, I'm guessing we shall see more kids being killed and an attempt to fight back at some point that doesn't go well because It survived (obviously). I may not be seeing this prequel though from the correct vantage point. Maybe the fact that it is a retread of the story is the point. Folks want "more of the same" but maybe just slightly different enough that there can be some surprises.

My blogging friend Alex over on his IWSG post for the month of October said that prequels are kind of an odd thing because you always know how they will end (he was specifically talking about Rings of Power). And you know what? He's right. They are kind of an odd thing. I mean...we knew that the little kid named Anakin had to turn into Darth Vader at some point. But seeing it happen on screen was kind of fulfilling. I really liked Christensen's performance (to be honest), and I liked how pouty Anakin was. I think it actually made Darth Vader a bit more menacing, because you just know he's not altogether a sane person who is just choosing to be evil. He's kind of crazy, and was pushed into that by trauma that he couldn't deal with properly, nor did he have access to any kind of mental health care that might have helped him to deal with it.

Obviously, nostalgia is an important reason for why prequels exist in the first place. But it may also be due to the structure of storytelling. Oftentimes in traditional storytelling, you have the bulk of the tale that leads to a climax, and then once that is over, the story quickly ends. With a prequel, you can still have that very satisfying ending way off in the future, but now you've got more ground to develop different characters, and to set up what may have led to that really satisfying conclusion in the distant future.

Anyway, I guess when I started writing this post, I wanted to know if George Lucas invented the prequel. I don't know for sure, but I do know that if you "Google" the term prequel, you come up with nothing but links to articles discussing the Star Wars prequels. That might be reason enough to say that he invented it. If so, I think that's pretty neat. George had a lot of great ideas (obviously), but inventing "the prequel" has affected movies in such a way that it honestly is comparable to someone inventing "color for film." Like...I'd compare it to being on that big of a scale. It's like someone taking the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and inventing "the Uncrustable."  You just don't know how good the idea is until its suddenly there and you realize that you can't live without it.

2025 may be the most interesting year of our lifetimes and not in a good way.

 As I watch yet another car drive down the street with a huge flag duct taped to the side of it, all black, with huge white letters that say "F*CK BIDEN" but without the asterisk...it's almost hard to believe that any of this is real. People being nasty has always been a thing, but I have a co-worker who is scared to drive on the street now because of a road rage incident where a guy wouldn't let her into a lane and when she forced the issue, he revved his engine and laid on the horn for ten seconds.

I myself have survived several road rage incidents, each one leaving me shaken with an adrenaline rush. People passing me, then slamming on the brakes to stop in the middle of a road, forcing me to skid to a stop, then rolling down the window to give me the finger. Another guy nearly sideswiped my car with his trailer by passing super aggressively (I ended up on the side of the road). A third person actually did hit my car with theirs in a sideswipe, scraping all the paint off my mirror, and they just kept rolling down the street with their finger out the window. I guess I should count myself lucky. There are many in my area who have just been flat out shot and killed on the highways in Salt Lake.

And then there is the weird and almost surreal income inequality that I now see everywhere. I hear of pig-butchering scams that have robbed people who are into crypto of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I see these people who are on the news and saying, "I first started noticing things when I couldn't get an address or a return call for the $700,000 that I wired to XXX." Then the report continues with other testimonies of various sums, all in the hundreds of thousands.

No one ever stops to say...whoah whoah whoah...you had hundreds of thousands of dollars that was just lying around and you only noticed it when something happened with say...$700,000...that seemed iffy? What kind of money are you talking about here? How much money is actually out there? It turns out...a ton (read this as millions and millions) of Americans are really wealthy. Yet, all I hear is bitching about the economy. Why are so many people bitching about the economy when they literally have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lose to scammers? It doesn't seem real...but it somehow is.

I guess the most shocking thing to me is how different these people are from me. I remember decades ago someone asked Bill Clinton a question about the liberal mindset and he offhandedly said that when you write everything down that liberals believe in it all sounds good, and that he actually didn't understand why anyone didn't think the same thing. But I think it's safe to say that he was ignorant in the same way that I was ignorant. There are millions of brains out there that actually like the idea of unmarried teenage pregnancy, that actually like the idea of slavery, that actually like the idea of having only one religion and no other beliefs to challenge them in any way, and that actually like the idea of forced birth, women being paid less than men for doing the same job, and yes probably concentration camps too. Yes, they like all of that. It's been a very successful trick to gaslight ourselves that these people are outliers. Now, with election day next week, I wonder where it all ends. I think 2025 is going to be a very interesting year, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Can you tell a Star Wars story with Force users at its core and ignore the Skywalkers and somehow avoid cancellation?

Emperor Palpatine (not pictured) using his "Force Lightning" to destroy an armada of
ships floating above his world in a nebula cloud thing that is in outer space.

I had an interesting discussion at Sunday brunch involving Star Wars. My friend Jessica asked, "Why did Rey have to be a Palpatine or a Skywalker in that last movie?" The movie that she was talking about was The Rise of Skywalker just for reference. Jessica's point was that, "it could have been perfectly fine for Rey to be a nobody...like, she didn't have to be a Skywalker or a Palpatine. I would have liked it even better in fact if they didn't make it so that she had to come from those bloodlines at all."

Here's what I said (more or less) to try to answer this question. I think that Star Wars has a "Skywalker" problem. Anytime they try to tell a story with a Force-user in it...if it is not linked to the Skywalkers, the fan base will reject it. And then I went on to explain to Jessica that they actually tried to do this. They tried to sever the ties with the Skywalker's in The Last Jedi, even going so far as to kill off Luke and to leave the ending of the story with some no name kid sweeping up and doing his chores and demonstrating some measure of "force ability." They could have gone in any direction after The Last Jedi. But the backlash this movie created was so huge, that Disney got scared. They fired that director, went back to JJ Abrams, and that's how we got horses riding on the outside of a star destroyer in a nebula/cloud in space, and how we got the emperor shooting lightning out of his fingers that was so powerful that it could hit every spaceship in the entire armada spread out through this nebula. Think about that for a moment. Why would the Emperor have ever needed a "Death Star" if he could just destroy everything with his own lightning bolts?

So, I said, "It was utterly ridiculous but JJ quieted down the fan base and gave us this ridiculous story that barely even made sense, and he paid fan service yet again to people who just weren't done with the Skywalkers." Then I said, "They also tried to do this a second time, and it also failed. The Acolyte was a show that Disney + put out that didn't have any Skywalkers in it at all. It dared to tell a story of "The Force" that was different and kind of refreshing. Well...that sure as shit got canceled. I think the only reason that the other series having a "force user" (called Ahsoka) is even remotely successful is that her character ties directly into the Skywalkers, and one of the reasons The Mandalorian is successful is that they reincarnated a young Luke Skywalker to teach Grogu some basics of the Force before he went on his way."

Now, I did point out that stories that don't have Force users in them can totally abandon the Skywalkers and be good. You see this in Andor. There are no Force users so there's no mention of the Skywalkers and suddenly the magic works again. You can have a good story that no one is angry about and that people will watch. But here was my point to Jessica: no one knows if it is possible to write a Star Wars story that people will like if you have force users that have no connection to the Skywalkers in any way. All that we do know is that people get upset and they review bomb the crap out of the projects that do try to break away from the Skywalkers and then everyone involved with the project gets blacklisted and/or loses their jobs.

Anyway, I'd like to know what y'all think about this theory of mine: is it possible to even tell a story in the Star Wars universe that has force-using people at its core and ignore the Skywalkers and still make money/not get canceled?

I want to tell you about my retinal tear experience.

Sometimes I feel like I'm falling apart in my fifties. Last week (keep in mind that this was after I had the kidney stone fairy visit which occurred after I had the covid fairy visit), something weird happened with my vision. I was downstairs in my house, and I thought that the cat was hiding behind an ottoman because I saw its orange-ish tail flicking back and forth. But when I checked, there was no cat there. A moment later I saw it again behind another thing, and that's when I realized...the cat isn't in the room. However, there is something in my eye. It was a strange floater, but it was darker than any floater I had ever seen. Almost like a reddish and black spot just off center in my vision, shaped like a mouse, with a tail that flicked around. I joked with my friend that I had "Muad'dib" in my eye, because of a line from the 1980's Dune movie where Paul Atreides asks, "What do you call the mouse shadow in the second moon?" And Stilgar replies, "We call that one Muad'dib."

The next morning, it wasn't any better. There wasn't any physical pain, but I started to worry that this "floater" might be something more sinister. So, I went to the eye doctor, they ran me through some tests, dilated my eyes, and took photographs of it. My doctor said, "That floater is blood. I can't see where it is coming from but I'm concerned. I need to send you to a retina specialist." Well I went and saw the retina specialist, and they also dilated my eyes, injected a special ink into my arm that would highlight any bleeding areas in the eye, and then put me in front of another machine to take photographs. The doctor came in, took a look at them, and said that I had a tear in my retina, which is the photosensitive layer of cells that gives you vision. He said that he wanted to operate on it within ten minutes.

I asked him how these things happen, and he said, "A lot of the time it is just age. But there are other factors like diabetes and other such conditions that can create retinal tears. It might be that the fluid in my eyes is a bit stickier than normal, so when it pulls away from the retina, it might try to suck some of the retina with it like a suction cup." He also said, "Retinal tears in people your age is fairly common." So yeah, I guess that happened. Anyway, I did go through with the procedure, and I didn't like it. But it's not like you have much choice when the other option is to just eventually lose your vision. The procedure is to basically staple the tear back into place using a pulsating laser that makes a hammering sound and creates a hammering pressure on the back of your eye (and maybe a faint smell of burning flesh but I might have imagined that). I thought it was quite painful, not to mention the fact that you just completely lose vision in that eye. My left eye was black.  I could see nothing, which was scary.

After the procedure my vision slowly came back in that eye over the course of the day. I took some Ibuprofen and by the next morning, I could see normally. I still have that mouse-shaped swirly thing of blood floating around in the vitreous, but I've learned to ignore it for the most part. The doctor said it will go away over the next few months as it gets reabsorbed. So anyway, that was health issue number three in so many months. I'm hoping that this is the end of them for a while. But if it isn't, at least I've met my deductible on my health insurance until next July. So any procedure I need, I'm just going to have done. If I have to go to the emergency room for any reason, I'll just go. Might as well, since it will be free. I guess I should be grateful that we have the technology to fix things like retinal tears. It actually is pretty amazing if you think about it.

How do you feel about another person playing in the sandbox of a creator who may be dead?

Next month, those of us who like the Dune story of Arrakis and the Great Houses all backstabbing each other for thousands of years get a treat. It's called Dune: Prophecy and it is inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune which is co-written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I actually didn't know this, and I only found out yesterday because there is so much hate for Brian Herbert online. I haven't read any of his books, but now I'm intrigued. Maybe I should finish up my Dune readings (as I only got to the end of God Emperor) and then moved on. But the kinds of vitriol that's targeting Herbert's son, Brian, basically goes along the lines of "I consider all of these works fan-fiction" or "I hate the way they are retconning characters. Some of the choices don't even make sense." For nerds who are deeply and emotionally invested in these science fiction works, these are real "clutch the pearls" statements. 

All of this makes me question what right anyone has to play in someone else's sandbox. Let's step back for a moment and think of other sandboxes that people are presently playing in or have played in within the last few decades. We've got Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, we've got Disney happily playing in the Star Wars sandbox and the Alien sandbox, and we also have Max which played in the Watchmen sandbox with a mini-series. Some people get upset when a character becomes black (when they were previously white). Others get upset when a character gets recast with a female (think way back to the Battlestar Galactica reboot and the SyFy channel's decision to make the character of "Starbuck" a woman when it was previously played by Dirk Benedict in the 1970's show).

In some cases (certainly) there are people who object to seeing something filmed that previously was just a mythical thing. The Clone Wars was like this. So, you had it name dropped by Luke Skywalker in A New Hope when he spoke to Ben and asked "You were in the Clone Wars?" And every single one of us wondered what the heck the "Clone Wars" even were, and so we made up things in the dearth of information that was available. So we imagined far off battles and struggles, and it was natural for every one of us to make it bigger than life in our imaginations. But when they showed up in film...even though there were lots of epic scenes...it could never live up to your dreams. And to some extent, we even get upset with original authors of material revisiting their sandboxes. The Matrix strikes me as one of these, calling any further attempts to explore the stories and themes of The Matrix a cash grab, as if audiences will just watch these things as brain-dead drones because they don't actually know what is good. "Oh it has Matrix in its name so I'll give it money." I don't think that's how any of this actually works.

Look, people will always try to recapture lightning in a bottle because it just feels so good. Jurassic Park was an amazing idea. I don't blame people for making that "cash grab" and trying to recreate the same wonder that we saw in that first film/book. It won't ever happen. Still...there's room to play in that sandbox. I for one think it would be cool to stop focusing on dinosaurs and cloning and set a world that is "post Jurassic Park" and do a spy thriller where it's a kind of Mission: Impossible scenario of world governments with the added part that dinosaurs are real and have been unleashed upon the world. I think that would be really cool...kinda like what happened when people thought of Alien and Predator and someone said...why don't we mash these together?

In the Star Wars universe, I've often felt that a series centered around a bounty hunter would be magnificent. Well, we got that in The Mandalorian and I was right. For what it's worth, I think the best Star Wars stories keep the Jedi and the Sith way in the background or not even mentioned at all, and they focus on the politics and danger present with a civil war that spans a galaxy. There's just so much you can do with that, and they haven't scratched the surface. For example, what about a series that has a crackpot team of rebels whose entire mission is to break into a skyscraper on some important core world where the tie fighter was developed to say...find the plans for something else...like a fuel depot or something like that? That would be a ton of fun.

Furthermore, I will never be so stuck in the mud that I won't think that a descendant of a famous author (like Brian Herbert is to Frank Herbert) doesn't have a right to play in the sandbox that the famous author created. I say, go for it. It seems silly that great ideas should just be done and finished when there might be more to tell in these enormous universes that were so meticulously created by a person who may have been bordering on obsession to get things completed before they kicked the bucket. I'm sure that long after George R.R. Martin is dead, we will have people playing in the Game of Thrones sandbox with stories about Arya and the other continents she discovers and on and on and on. Anyway, that's my opinion on this particular topic. So in finishing, I ask you all this question: do you like it when someone else plays in a famous property's sandbox? Or do you find this "fan fiction" offensive to your sensibilities and disrespectful to the creator?

My roommates have taught me a lot about the behaviors of all people.

If we were to pretend that people were plants, then I'd say that economic conditions in 2024 leave a lot of people "root bound." They cannot grow, and they enter a period of sameness that can last years or even decades wherein no change happens. However, this also makes it easier for other people to find and befriend them.

 I have now lived with other people (roommates) for a year and a half. When I first started this "experiment," I didn't know if I could actually live with people. And it turns out...I absolutely can! But I now understand better than I ever did why there is a loneliness epidemic in this country, and I think I can understand why we are as divided as ever on issues. At the end of the day, I believe (despite my small sample size), that a large amount (huge amount) of the population is actually unfit for human cohabitation. But this isn't an essay that backs up that hypothesis. Rather, it is one of those wherein I muse about the different behaviors of my roommates that I shall call "Alpha" and "Beta."

Both Alpha and Beta are men from the millennial generation. Alpha (the younger one) has literally no observation ability. This was an incredible thing to realize. If a rattlesnake was shaking its tail and wasn't hidden by bushes and was clearly seen in bright light on a trail...I think Alpha would step on it. He doesn't notice anything. If a burner is going on the stove, he doesn't see it. If there's a bee in the room, he has no idea that it is buzzing around his head. If there's a pile of shit in the middle of the floor, he doesn't smell it, and will step in it because he doesn't see it. That's how bad his observation is. It also impacts his ability to budget and save.

For example, Alpha buys these premixed honey butter things that come in a plastic container. My process is to watch him buy one, then watch him put it in the pantry for whatever "sweet thing" that he wants to use it on. When he finally gets around to using it, he puts it on the shelf in the fridge. He doesn't use it again, and then it slowly drifts to the back of the fridge where he forgets about it. I continue to observe it for a few months until it gets frosted over (this sometimes happens with the cold spots in the fridge). By then, Alpha has bought another honey butter that he intends to use on another sweet that he places in the pantry. And then I throw away the old honey butter that he no longer even remembers. Now...you may think that this is "normal behavior." But it happens with clothes too. He had a hoodie that he started leaving on the coat tree by the door. I noticed that month after month it lingered, until a year had passed, and I saw him wearing a new hoodie. So, I quietly discarded the old one that he must have forgotten was his. There's no permanence of memory.

My other roommate, Beta, has extremist conservative views that he gets from watching a lot of Andrew Tate videos. But aside from being an incel (he's not all that bad after you get to know him), he harbors some very strange ideas of what is smart and what is stupid. For example, when I use the term "genius" thinking of musical talent, or art talent, or athletic talent, or creative talent...Alpha doesn't recognize any of these terms. To him, "genius" only applies to someone who can do math. If you can't do complicated math, you aren't a genius. Also (as a caveat) he's very good at math. So, I think he views himself as a genius and just thinks everyone else is stupid (this may be a kind of personal empowerment in the absence of any other kind of evidence that proves that he is not a failure). But at the same time, he's unemployed and is struggling to find a job with his credentials. So he's kind of this "disgruntled man" who thinks he's a "genius" and he comes up with all kinds of reasons as to why he isn't getting hired, including "woke" hiring practices and whatnot. It's all just a conspiracy holding him down. He's also declared that he doesn't believe in the concept of wisdom. In other words, you are either smart or you're not. But in demonstration of this, he has so little wisdom it can fit into a thimble. Some of this manifests in buying a new car right before getting fired and then realizing he has an $800 a month car payment to make and rent to make as well. Not a very "genius" move if you ask me, but I digress.

One of the things I find so fascinating about both Alpha and Beta is that they are not "static" people. And by virtue of this small study group, I think all people share this same trait. When I met them, they just primarily ate one kind of food and did one kind of activity (play Dungeons & Dragons). Their lives were pretty much "work" and "play," in other words they lived binary existences. They moved in with me, I charged them reasonable rent, and here they are staying for now (I do hope that they move on sooner rather than later as my observations from month to month are only so entertaining). However, because I charge them reasonable rent, they are exploding at the seams in attempts to flourish. In America, we call this act the "pursuit of happiness." It's like watching a plant grow in a garden. Given room, it tries to spread. That's what's happening here at my house, and yes it surprises me. I thought they'd be static...fixed in time...people who just did their thing and paid rent. Was I naive? Probably. So it was a good thing to get roommates. I wonder if there are any other naive people out there? If so, it would be better for society if they did what I did and educated themselves.

But no, people are not static, if you give them room to grow. Beta in particular is trying to become a bodybuilder. I never would have seen this coming. Gym membership, ski passes to the mountains, working out, swimming, trying to lose weight to climb Mount Fuji in Japan, and you name it. There's so much protein in my house that it's honestly kind of gross to think about all the protein drinks, shakes, etc. that get mixed in the sink everyday, with protein splatter that ends up all over everything. I've read online before that scientists believe there is way too much protein being consumed by American men. Well...if you take a look at my house...there definitely is, and it's honestly not transforming Beta's body in any way that I can notice. Suddenly...all of the pizza boxes I'd noted in his previous apartment disappeared. Now Beta uses the stove daily, trying to meal prep, eating salmon and rice and oatmeal and doing all of these other things while watching Andrew Tate videos (yuck) but whatever. Sometimes, Beta takes time out of his day to rant about how stupid women are. And then he goes and does the very thing he rants about, not realizing that he just comes across as misogynistic. Self-awareness is not common with many young men I've decided.

Alpha, with access to top-end appliances and soft water and other things, now does his laundry twice a week to stay on top of his hygiene (I don't think this was a thing before he lived with me). So I hear the rumble of the wash on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. Combined with Beta's wash habits, sometimes it feels like the laundry machine never stops working, despite this only being a household of three. He eats at home a lot, and as cheaply as possible in order to save money for little vacations he takes with his non-binary friend to their cabin in Idaho and other places (like a game convention in Arizona). So there's always stacks of tin cans that need washed and recycled from all the cheap canned food he buys, and there's an entire freezer filled with chicken fingers just waiting for the air fryer. It's that plant just trying to grow and take up the extra space that's available in the garden. Nothing...no one...is a static thing. Every single person when you meet them is not actually who they are. They are only that person in that one slice of time, and tomorrow their desires and their goals will change. This is an important concept to master whenever you meet (and decide that you like) a person. They are different tomorrow!

It's actually amazing to me that relationships of any kind can actually happen in this world. With everyone constantly striving to change who they are, then the person that you get to know isn't the person you will end up with at the end of a year if they aren't "hedged" or "boxed in" to prevent growth of any kind. I think (unfortunately) this happens with a lot of people because the economics of rent and food and daily living rise to such a pricey extent that it saps all of their money. Then they just refer to themselves as "surviving." Their world becomes static and small. There is no bodybuilding. There is no traveling or expanding hobbies to things like woodworking. It is these people who don't change. Day in, day out, what they do remains the same because they have no other choices. Maybe this is the reason as to why it is easier to make friends when you are young: you don't have a lot of other choices of things that you can do to improve your life. You are kind of stuck and dependent on your family to live and you just don't get to do anything that your family doesn't allow. So you're like a "root bound" plant. However, the silver lining is that because you are root bound, you don't grow, and your "sameness" makes it easy for others to know you and befriend you. Once you escape the "root bound" condition and turn into a kudzu vine that goes every which way it wants and crushes everything in its vine-like tendrils...then that is a plant that is much harder to get along with and so...fewer friends if any. I mean...who wants to be in a relationship with a kudzu vine? People like stability, sameness, and you just don't get that from young people. Maybe...just maybe...you can get it from people over fifty, because by then, we can assume that they are many years into their kudzu growth and are now approaching a vine that won't grow all that much in the remaining years it has left. That stability seems to be why so many people can find a much more fulfilling "second act" later in their lives.

Anyway, these are just my observations based on living with people for the first time in decades (a choice I made a year and a half ago to answer burning questions and to make some money while I was at it). Remember, my roommate "Beta" doesn't believe that "Wisdom" actually exists. So don't take this essay as "wisdom" if you happen to agree with him. Maybe it's just the observations of a person who likes to "people watch" while trying to ascribe meaning to whatever it is that he sees.

Silo season 2 arrives in mid November.

How was everyone's long weekend? In my own world, I was dealing with a kidney stone again. I had one in 2013, and my urologist (at the time) told me that there was a 50% chance that I'd have another debilitating one within ten years. Well...I made it eleven years. Anyway, this particular one is one I had to pass naturally (it was much smaller than the 2013 one). However, it was still painful. I'm pretty sure as of the writing of this post that it has descended low enough that it is in my bladder, so the tough part is over with.

Feeling otherwise uninspired really to write anything, I did see that Silo season two is coming back in November (on Apple TV +). I finished season one about a year ago if memory serves. I remember being a blogger when the writer behind Silo, a Hugh Howey, made it pretty big and caught the imagination of other people who were trying to self-publish. He had some pretty great ideas, although I haven't gotten around yet to reading any of his lengthier works. I hear that he's retired now and just living on his millions. I think that's a good way to go about doing things: make a big splash if you can and then just ride on the coattails of your success. I've also heard that he wholeheartedly embraces ai, which can rub a lot of artists the wrong way. So, maybe it's good that he has enough power to be able to ignore the people who are upset about ai and its intersection with the arts.

Season one of Silo showed a lot of promise. The story itself is not ultra-complex, nor does it have a deep premise. In the end, the reasons why you tune into this show are for the characters and their underground dystopian world. The labor of their daily lives never does give you answers to the burning questions of "how did all of these humans end up in this Silo?" It also triggers that "conspiracy theorist" that resides in all of us by giving us little bits of information that elude to the fact that not everything may be as it seems. The idea that "those in charge" might have malevolent control issues resonates with just about everyone who worries about a "deep state" hiding information and making our suffering an intentional act, rather than making us victims of circumstance. 

Because I never read the extended novels (I only read the short story "Wool" that kind of started it all), the first season of Silo never really had an opportunity to fall flat with me. A lot of the time, readers and fans of a book or story won't like the show because they have imagined what the scenes should be like and what they end up seeing doesn't match up properly to that vision. That being said, Hugh (apparently) worked really closely with the showrunners and explained to his fans that the show is what he wants, and that the slight changes in the show are things that he desired. Sure, you do have to get used to Rebecca Ferguson trying to do an American accent (she's terrible at it) but it's honestly just a minor distraction.

I'm embedding the trailer for season 2 of Silo below (also I can't believe that it is almost November and it is still 85 degrees outside here in Salt Lake--ugh). Anyone else excited for this show's return?

I kind of miss gatekeeping.

With Rings of Power finishing its second season in a spectacular fashion (I really enjoy this beautiful show), I started to think about all the review bombs and the multiple ways in which internet trolls tear down these kinds of programs. Oh how far we have come since the early 90's and late 80's.

We live in a time where the worst people have internet access and dwindling, bordering on non-existent, levels of shame. Back in the day, if some sad sack loser wanted to vent about Spider-Man getting married, that dude had to write or type a letter. Then they had to address and stamp an envelope, and then mail said letter to an editor, and then wait months to see whether anyone read their deranged ramblings (or whether it was even printed). This is how things were done.

Now? Not only can the same type of loser set up multiple alts to review bomb a show they haven't seen 50 times before breakfast, but said loser has successfully lost the ability to understand how incredibly weird and damaged that behavior actually is.

I didn't realize at the time (as I was living through it), but there was a ton of gatekeeping in just about every aspect of life (and maybe that was a good thing). A lot of it was unintentional gate keeping. Things were difficult to get done (and expensive) because we simply didn't have a better way. If you wanted to publish a manuscript, it needed to be typed on paper. Once you did that, you needed to find an agent, because an agent was the only way you were ever going to get a thing published. Once you had an agent, then you could get in front of a publishing house. They wouldn't publish your work if it wasn't "good" and it was up to the agent to figure out if something was good enough to warrant a look at. There are tons of other examples of this kind of gatekeeping.

If you wanted the news, there wasn't 24-hour news. You just had to tune in to channels 3, 6, or 8 (out of a maximum of 12-13 channels) on an old tv, and you just had to consume what was told to you by Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow. Once the news hour was over, that was it. You could get some news out of a printed paper, but that required a delivery person and a subscription. My dad would go to the library once a week to read The Wall Street Journal to get the news from New York and see what was happening in the world of stocks and bonds. The writing in the journal was always fantastic, and they always had pictures of people they were talking about made in curious black and white pixelation. Knowledge came from textbooks and encyclopedias, and not from iPhones. If you didn't have an encyclopedia, you had to hit the sidewalks to go to the library and look up things there and take notes. You might be asking: Mike, why was this better?

Well...it wasn't better in the sense that knowledge was hard to obtain. But forcing people to jump through hoops to get a thing also ended up making it much more difficult for everyone to start hating each other for "reasons." Having a filter that only allowed some things through would also set up those who made it to the other side with reasonable incomes. If you were a writer and actually got published by a big publishing company, you could make a career out of that pretty easy. If you were a person that actually managed to get some music published, you would probably be setup for life doing music as your career. If you studied art in high school and college and somehow got hired to do a book cover, you could actually make a career of being an illustrator and gain some notoriety and fame. In a time when people couldn't just blather whatever madness is going through their minds, things like debate and debate performance actually mattered. If you did poorly in a debate, then you probably wouldn't get elected. Nowadays? I don't think that debates actually mean anything. It's like a parade or a show...it's pure entertainment and that's it. Nobody cares. People have already decided long before a debate who gets their vote. Back in the day...being an expert in something actually mattered. But in our land of "everyone has the same platform and can say whatever they want," the experts get labeled as "well that's your opinion," and then some jackass can say whatever they want to say and "this is my opinion and it carries the same weight as yours because I too can publish and make a video."

Now, I totally realize what I'm saying here, and it actually goes against what I would ideally want. As a person who typically gets the short end of the stick, I love that I can actually publish whatever I want and not have to be gate kept by someone (and prevented from having my expressions read). But because I can do this, everyone can. And maybe this is kind of bad for society. Gone are the "water cooler" type discussions I had with people in the past about books I've read thinking that someone else has read the same book. I very rarely come across anyone that has read the same books I've read because there is no central authority telling you what books are good and forcing people to read those books. People no longer know how to structure a sentence. I see grammatical errors and spelling errors all the time, and no one cares because the gatekeeping is gone. There are no consequences for being a bad speller or using improper punctuation. The consequences used to be that maybe you'd get a terrible grade or maybe you wouldn't get published. Well, there are so many people with degrees these days that its hard for any of them to find a job. And if a publisher doesn't publish a book, who cares? You can just go on Amazon and publish away with ai artwork for a cover. It used to be that you could have a certain kind of respect for "knowing things." These days, you can be a complete ignoramus and just use google and know things the same as someone who spent four years studying a subject.

Before this "rant" gets too long in the tooth, I want to end by saying that none of what I might miss from the days of yore actually matters (as we live in 2024). Access to all information whether it is truth or lies is there for anyone to consume. So it doesn't matter what I think. However, I kind of see modern society as a huge pond now, whereas before it was separate rivers and canals that you had to try and get access to. Because it's a pond, there aren't any preferential areas where the water is clean and pure. If a person on one end of the pond pisses and poops in it (or pollutes it with gasoline), then you eventually get to deal with it on your end. There's no "jumping to another water source," and its actually impossible to keep your side of the pond clean. No matter what, the filth gets in, and whether you like it or not this is the water you drink now. It doesn't feel like this is a better way.

Agatha All Along seems like a nice October distraction before the horrors of November.

Being the month of October, witches, ghouls, and goblins seem to be on everyone's mind. I don't much care for actual scary movies...you know...things like The Conjuring and Salem's Lot. I spoke in a previous blog post about how the new iteration of Salem's Lot is supposed to bring back the frightening version of vampires that has been kind of "out of style" for a decade or two since Buffy and Twilight and perhaps things like Interview with the Vampire made the monster into a sex symbol. But I kinda like the non-scary monsters. Agatha All Along from Disney+ seems to fit this niche nicely at the moment by giving us non-scary witches who still have a lot of compelling things about them.

I'm not completely caught up with the show. However, Aubrey Plaza's character (Rio Vidal) is pretty intriguing. I wonder if we are actually going to get the Marvel version of Death. If you don't know, in the Marvel universe there are these entities like Death and Eternity who are really powerful and basically aspects of the cosmic power that is a universe (I don't say "the" here because Marvel has many different universes). Previously, we've had at least one version of Death, but never the actual Death itself. In Thor: Ragnarok we got Cate Blanchett as Hela, and she even referred to herself as "The Goddess of Death." But, I don't think that counts. In the original comics that featured the infinity stones, Thanos was in love with Death, but Death didn't return the affection (and was probably incapable of doing so). 

Thanos just reasoned in his weird twisted way that he would need to kill off half the universe in order to attract Death's attention. So, it makes me wonder if (at this stage of the game) Rio is supposed to be that version of Death. Or just maybe, she's an avatar of Death kinda like how Moon Knight is an avatar of Khonshu (you guys remember Moon Knight, right?). I also kind of wonder how Agatha and Death got together in the first place. My best guess is that Agatha drew Death's attention because Agatha was offing people who were immortal or extending their lives through the use of her magic. There's got to be some kind of deal that was worked out between these two.

In any event, a show where you can't quite figure out what an antagonist wants usually ends up interesting, and Agatha All Along is that kind of show. Furthermore, it adds to it by creating mystery around its supporting cast, and the protagonist (Agatha) is a mystery as well. So, it's pulling all of those strings all of the time. Every character in this show seems to have "something." Teen (my guess is that this is Wiccan in the comic books) can't say certain things like his name out loud but why? There's Agatha's relationship with Rio (above), Lilia has those delightful premonitions, Jen has the guy who bound her, Alice has the whole deal with the curse... I just hope that all of these story arcs lead to an actual answer. I also wonder if we will actually get to meet Mephisto at some point in this show. That would be something.

Anyway, those are my thoughts as of right now. Anyone else watching this show?

The October IWSG post is all about ghost stories this time around.

It's October, and all the spooks and haunts are starting to appear in my neighborhood. This is probably the scariest October I can remember due to the pending election, but that's all I'm going to say about that. Being the first Wednesday of the month, it is time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. If you've never heard of this before, you can go HERE to sign up. With that out of the way, let's talk about what exactly the Insecure Writer's Support Group is.

What is the Purpose of the IWSG?: It is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds.

When do y'all post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. This is when you should post your thoughts on your own blog. Some ideas of what you could talk about include doubts and fears that you have conquered. You could also discuss your struggles and triumphs. Or you could offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling.

How does this make your online presence grow?: Well, you should visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writers. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a dozen new people each time. When you return comments, you'll find that others follow the breadcrumbs back to your blog. That's it in a nutshell. 

The Twitter (X) handle is @TheIWSG and the hashtag you should use is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the October 2 posting of the IWSG are Nancy Gideon, Jennifer Lane, Jacqui Murray, and Natalie Aguirre!

Now, every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. You should include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

But, remember, the question is optional!

October 2nd question - Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What's your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

My favorite classic ghostly tale is probably A Christmas Carol. It doesn't scare me so much, but it is just a really good story that pretty much everyone has heard about. I think that Dickens really nailed it when he came to spinning a yarn, and the different versions of ghosts opened my mind to the possibilities that ghosts could be something other than scary. As a bonus, I want to say that my favorite scary story is The Monkey's Paw. This is a short story that involves a person making some pretty scary wishes on an old mummified paw from a monkey. But the way that the wishes come true are horrible beyond imagining. It was really the first time that I realized that maybe we shouldn't crave wishes, because whatever entity that could grant them might be really malevolent.

And that's it. Thanks for visiting.

I think people would stop pirating things if they had enough money to legitimately buy them.

I just read a short while ago that Disney+ plans on actually enforcing its prohibition of sharing a password with someone else in the near future. This disclosure then led to a way in which you could still get away with sharing a password, and that was to bring your device over to the original WiFi that houses the account, stream something for a few seconds, and then you should be good to go for another 30 days as the device gets registered with the service. And then people started weighing in about torrenting and pirating, and how people will just go back to doing that so that they can just watch the things they like for free.

This got me thinking about pirating music, movies, television, comic books...and you name it. The first service I remember that allowed people to pirate things easily was Napster. I remember using it for the first time and thinking... "wow, I get all of these things for free?" Eh... it was all stolen, yes. But you didn't feel like you were stealing because you had the anonymity of the internet, so it's not like you walked into Sam Goody or Musicland and just walked out with a CD. But...essentially...it was really kinda like that.

I have a friend who still pirates, but he also struggles to pay his bills, and he doesn't have health insurance from his employer. He's the same age as me. I haven't pirated anything in decades. I basically pay for everything, but here's the thing: I had the money to pay for everything. That simple truth gave me an idea that I want to share. I think that the rise of pirating decades ago should have woken people up to the fact that people weren't making enough money, i.e., that wages were too low. It should have been "the smoking gun." There's lots of talk about this now in 2024. But there wasn't talk about this in the late 90's, and there should have been. All those years ago, people were struggling. That's why they were pirating things by and large. These people wanted better lives, access to things that brought them joy (like music), access to television shows and movies that they couldn't afford to see. I remember reading somewhere that the guy who created Napster did it so that he could have access to music that he didn't have the money to pay for. I don't think you can spell it out any better than that.

In 2024, I see article after article and news report after news report about how the American Dream is dead. The new generation of people are depressed because home ownership isn't realistic and costs are too high. Wages haven't kept up with prices, and on and on and on. The truth of all of this is that it isn't a 2024 phenomenon. For a really long time, many people haven't been making enough money to get by, and I think that the clearest indicator of this is in the rise of pirating videos, songs, books, and other such things. People actually would pay for those things if they could. I don't know why economists never looked at pirating and said, "You know...what we have here is not a theft problem. It's a wage problem. I bet pirating would go way down if people just got paid a living wage." But all you ever heard was "piracy is bad" and "you're stealing from artists" and other such things. What if instead of "piracy is illegal" running ahead of a video you're about to watch you (instead) got a message like "Not paying a living wage to your employees creates crime"? How do you think that would have reframed the discussion around piracy?

I feel like the United States solves things by reacting to them. If there's a fire you pour water on it to put out the fire. If you are overweight then you take a semiglutide or you go on a diet. Our system never looks at the causes of things. Oh there's a fire? Anyone see if there's an electrical problem that needs fixing? Oh we have an obesity problem? Anyone look to see if people actually have access to low calorie nutritious food and access to exercise? Oh there's a piracy problem? Anyone want to look and see if people are not making enough money at their jobs? Oh there's a fascist candidate running for president? Anyone want to look and see if the people who support him might also be authoritarian and fascist? It's like we are stuck in this never ending cycle of "treat the symptom" but don't "treat the disease." I'm not sure why we do this. Anyway, thanks for stopping by. If you have any comments to add, please do so.

I'm skipping Monday, but I'll be back on Wednesday with an IWSG post. See you then.

I think Lovecraftian storytelling elements can strengthen any story.

On the Lovecraft subreddit, I recently came across some recommendations for old school movies that have a Lovecraftian feel to them. Specifically, the list included notables of horror like John Carpenter's The Thing. But it also included a film I hadn't seen (and was interested in watching) called The Abominable Snowman. Starring Peter Cushing (as a young man), this 1950's black and white science fiction film entertained me. But I'm not necessarily saying it would entertain you, so there is no recommendation to watch it forthcoming. However, I definitely see the Lovecraftian elements in play, and I can understand why the people on the Lovecraft subreddit listed it as a film that used horror elements of which Lovecraft was famous.

In The Abominable Snowman you don't really get a view of the monster. This is (I think) key because the special effects of the time were so bad that showing something like that would make the monster "silly." So, kinda like in the movie Jaws where the shark remains mostly unseen for the majority of the film, you instead get this feeling of "something sinister is out there." Other Lovecraftian elements that sprinkle into the narrative of The Abominable Snowman remind me of the short story The Call of Cthulhu. 

In that short story, there's this mysterious statue of Cthulhu that gets described in loving detail, and it makes the reader question the minds of whomever made the thing in the first place. Who could have possibly made this statue and why? Those are important elements in a Lovecraft-type story. In The Abominable Snowman the setting is in some Tibetan town high in the Himalayan mountains. In this town, the people are all superstitious, and the head of the village is an old monk who serves as both a wise person and as a spiritual leader of his people. An expedition into the mountains comes back with a strange silver canister with writing all over it. Inside the cannister is a single artifact: a claw/nail from the finger of some creature. When the old monk is questioned, he says that the cannister is a precious religious artifact that was stolen, and as for the claw? That was a thing carved by monks a long time ago...carved from bone. It obviously doesn't belong to anything real.

But then (of course) you suspect that the guy is not telling the entire story. And that right there is Lovecraft in a nutshell. Exploiting what is unknown so that the mind starts to fill in the details is a kind of horror writing that I never was able to master. But I can appreciate it a lot when I see it. That (I think) has been the terrible tragedy of the Alien universe films: they try to explain too much. But with regard to Alien, I get it. I'm a fan of the films, and I had lots of questions. So the writers made films to answer the questions. But when we all got the answers, not everyone liked what we discovered. And now that Alien has gotten so infused into the cultural zeitgeist that it may be getting a Lego set soon... it's probably safe to say that it has gotten away from its Lovecraftian roots. But maybe I'm wrong. Afterall, I know that there are stuffed Cthulhu's that you can buy online, and every presidential election year the meme "Cthulhu for president! Why vote for the lesser evil!" makes its circulation.

It was a real shock for me then to discover that J.R.R. Tolkien is highly regarded as one of the most outstanding Lovecraftian writers of all time. I came across this tidbit in perusing the Rings of Power reddit. One person laid out examples of Lovecraftian horror all throughout Tolkien's stories. There's the nameless evils in the dark places of the world, and the eldritch terror of Sauron and Melkor. In particular, the drums in the deep section of Moria is packed full of Lovecraftian horror, and the ringwraiths (the Nazgul) are embodiments of that kind of inexplicable evil that really isn't explained all too well. They are just there, they are evil, and they are intelligent. The development of all of those nameless things by people playing in Tolkien's sandbox (much to the chagrin of uber fans of his) has been at a steep cost: knowing all the answers doesn't necessarily make for a better story. I (for one) always wanted to know the connection the elves seem to have with actual light, because I could never quite get there on my own, and I don't think Tolkien really knew either (in clinical detail). With the help of the other writers just literally spelling it out to me, e.g., without light elves fade and so does their kingdom and their immortality...I could finally see why light was so important. But now I do, so I'm happy. But others are actually mad about it, and they think that the writers for Rings of Power have shat all over Tolkien's legacy.

If I were writing a story now (presently I'm not), I think that there would be a question in my mind: To Lovecraft or not to Lovecraft? I believe that the answer to that should always be "to Lovecraft" simply because withholding information and creating unresolved questions is a great way to build tension in a story, and it's a great way to enlist a reader's imagination. Given just those two things it honestly doesn't seem to have a downside.

Actual explosions are more powerful than they are portrayed on television.

Explosions are a lot more powerful in real life than you see on television or in the movies. I was at home on Thursday, and I started to hear explosions. They came about once every thirty seconds or so, and they were rattling my windows, and I could feel the shockwave through the floor. I wondered, "What the hell is going on?" I went online and checked NextDoor. It turned out that the entire Salt Lake Valley from the point of the mountain all the way north to Davis county was feeling these explosions (that's about one hundred miles). The news had reported nothing at this point.

Eventually, the explosions stopped and the news finally reported that the explosions were the detonations of old equipment at the Tooele Army Depot on the other side of a mountain range called "The Ochre Mountains." Yes, you read that right. There's literally a mountain range in-between the Tooele Army Depot and the Salt Lake Valley. Additionally, my windows rattled where I live, and that's about fifty miles away from the Tooele Army Depot. Fifty miles!

My co-worker and friend, Leah, was flying into Salt Lake City and captured these photographs of the explosions that were shaking the ground.

You can kind of see the scale and the distance in these photographs. To me, these explosions look much smaller than anything "nuclear" that I've seen on television. They look smaller than that "mother of all bombs" or "MOAB" that Trump dropped on Afghanistan when he was president. Yet, they still shook my windows in a house a great many miles away and hiding behind actual mountains.

So, I guess I was kind of in awe of how powerful these explosions of weapons/munitions are. They are nothing like what you'd see on television. Real explosions are far deadlier and more destructive than the way in which they are portrayed, especially when you have people just slow walking away from an exploding structure behind them. There's literally no way that they could do that, and these explosions that were felt in the entire valley just validate my point.

Reading a Halo novel made me realize that the act of reading anything isn't necessarily better than watching tv.

I've been reading a book called Halo: The Fall of Reach. The reason I was reading it was that I was a fan of the now canceled series on Paramount + of the same name minus "The Fall of Reach." There are a few similarities between what we saw in the series, and what we got on Paramount +.  But the big ideas that are present in The Fall of Reach would have been super costly to pull off (I think) in a television series, and the series looked really good. The fight scenes were fantastic. But the space opera like space battles would have taken a Star Wars level budget, and I don't know if that was ever possible for this television show.

As I was reading the book, I kept thinking: have I ever picked up a book that basically explained exactly what it was in the title? I mean...it's about the fall of Reach to the Covenant, who are these super advanced aliens pushing humans to the brink of extinction. "Reach" is a critical planet in the human civilization, protected by all of the human forces, and housing humanity's most important shipyard facilities. The destruction of Reach is a terrible thing. But usually, in a title, it isn't so obvious, right? It would be like naming Return of the Jedi to The Emperor Dies in the End. That just seems kind of...I dunno...a bit "spoiler-iffic?" But what do I know?

The book itself is decent entertainment. It's a consumable for fans of the franchise. But it isn't high literature. Aside from telling you exactly what it is in the title, it seeks to introduce characters like John a.k.a. "The Master Chief" and "Kelly" (these two are both Spartans) and some military brass who you end up liking because they are very clever, and then a doctor named "Halsey" who is also clever if not a bit unscrupulous. None of the characters are ones you can really like, because they don't have much of a personality. However, they do kick ass and take names repeatedly, which I suppose is what you expect from the Halo franchise. And when you frame your story against the high stakes of Armageddon for humanity, does personality really count? All that matters is that you are good at your job. And there is some deep satisfaction at watching people who are good at their job just go to work.

I do have some criticisms in the reading of the book, though. All of the chapter heads have an official "date" thing and time of events printed in courier font to make it look like someone typed them as official orders, or record-keeping. These things added nothing to the read. But, I get it. The nerds who love Halo want to feel like this world of military "super people" is real. It just got a little bit annoying to slow down and commit to memory when (in the Halo timeline) the last chapter started so that you could say, "Oh, this is just a few hours more" or "wow, this is three years later--I guess nothing happened in that three years except military training." 

And there's also the obvious need to keep these books clean of sexual details and other kinds of things because the audience for the books dovetails to the younger side. The way you write books and stories like that is you provide tons of high stakes combat so that there isn't time to get to know anyone. To quote Jesse "The Body" Ventura in the old movie called Predator, this is the "I ain't got time to bleed" moments of storytelling.

So you have all of these characters with the bodies of Olympians and yet they don't have any sex, don't have any relationships, and don't do anything because they are always fighting. It would seem silly to ask: why are you always fighting? When it is clear that the reason for all of the fighting is that humanity has been pushed to the brink. Duh? Don't you get that? Geez... I find some of this as a convenient excuse for a writer to not have to invest anything in the characters other than "they are kick ass" and I'm going to write the ways in which "they kick ass."

Maybe I wouldn't notice these things if I hadn't gotten old. But who knows? I see a lot these days that makes it harder for a person to suspend disbelief. However, after having read The Fall of Reach, I think I'm more convinced than ever that books aren't a sacred thing. There's this oft repeated mantra that I've run into over the years where someone says, "Any reading is great. That person is at least reading." I disagree.

I literally see no difference in educational content to the pulp fiction of The Fall of Reach to any one of the many Star Wars series on Disney +. Sure, there are no moving pictures, and this kind of book may "stimulate your imagination." But any other benefits you might get from books is woefully absent here. Even Halo's satirical message of fascism buried behind patriotism doesn't seem to translate well unless you realize that "authoritarian rule bad!" and know what to look for. But it certainly doesn't come across as bad. Rather, it seems to come across as desirable. It is entertaining, and it does scratch a kind of itch. Maybe in the end all that matters is that we enjoyed ourselves on empty calories.

What is fandom?

What is fandom?

I started pondering this question, because I live with some gamers. They both are fans of a game called Warhammer 40K and are playing the new game Space Marine 2. I'm not interested in playing it, but I do know from interacting with other Warhammer fans (not just my roommate), that many fail to see the satire in a story about genetically bred superhumans enforcing a strict imperial rule...and then dying...for a literal corpse on a throne (the Emperor is essentially dead or it is strongly eluded to that he is a corpse that is falling apart). It seems obvious to me, but satire takes critical thinking ability to suss out and not everyone is capable of doing it. So you end up with large swaths of people who get excited over this grim dark world and believe that fascism is actually the "true way" to live. It's really weird.

The same thing happens in Star Wars and in Star Trek and in Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien fanbase doesn't like anyone even messing with Tolkien's notes, which he was using to create the story that he wanted to tell. But establishing all of those things with the Silmarils and the Palantirs and ancient Numenor and the Maiar and the Istari and etc. were all things that he wrote down in notebooks to help him (as an author) world build. It's completely arguable that the character of Tom Bombadil is just a silly stand-in for the author himself, much like the character of "Dungeon Master" in the old 80's cartoons of Dungeons & Dragons was just a stand-in (a wink and a nod) to the actual story teller that hosts a game. If this is the case, in the author was poking fun at himself, is it really so egregious to say that the character of Galadriel was a kick-ass warrior or that mithril contains within it the magical and undying light of a silmaril?

Here's my point: fandom at its most fundamental level is not about anything real. What it does do is it sucks people into it (the fandom) to such an extent that they end up spending a lot of time and energy pursuing a fantasy that comes at the very real cost of the time, energy, and attention they could be applying to their own lives. Some even neglect to make friends, further their careers, or take care of their own health. These people can also get caught up in fights where one person is a problematic fan because their fanart or fanfiction isn't popular, or their particular take shines a light upon unsavory traits (like racism and sexism). 

There is also (I think) a lot of mental illness in a fandom community, and the people who are part of a fandom could be trying to cope with said mental illness via some form of escapism. In a fandom, even mentally ill people can find a community, constant mental excitement, and the chance to explore something you don't have access to in a vicarious way. So what can happen is you get access to everything else that you can't get anywhere else. However, all of this comes at a cost: you end up with a bunch of maladjusted people collecting together, and in many ways, this isn't good because some illnesses like personality disorders can be somewhat contagious.

A lot of times too, a fandom can result in groupthink, sometimes quite negatively. People can literally be doxxed and have their lives ruined simply because they don't like the same thing as most of the rest of the fandom. Anyway, no matter what I think, fandoms are here to stay for good or for ill. I only recently started really thinking of them in this other light as I've been enjoying Rings of Power on Amazon. As a result, I've looked to understand more than what I already knew (which is considerable as I've read a lot of Tolkien), but the fandom is so utterly toxic. They say, "This is just fanfiction!" as if that were some kind of insult when really...anything not written by J.R.R. Tolkien himself (who has been dead for decades) is "fanart" or "fanfiction." What are they going to do when the entire thing eventually passes into the public domain? Have a complete and utter meltdown?

I guess the only thing I can do responsibly is to manage my own role in fandom, and that is to be as self-aware as possible and to not become some kind of gatekeeper touting the phrase: "This is the only correct way to do this." But as I've gotten older, I've realized that most people do not have open minds even if they say that they do. Those doors got closed a long time ago for whatever reasons, and it would benefit all of us to keep this in mind when becoming a fan of anything.

I finished Star Trek Discovery and I want to talk about it now.

I want to talk about Star Trek Discovery, and its final season which I just got around to watching. If you haven't seen the final season, you may want to tune out for this blog post as there will be spoilers ahead. 

First off, I really liked Star Trek Discovery. Yes, it was tonally different than other iterations of Trek that we've had before. But the themes of exploring and discovering things that I had never seen before was a part of this show from the very beginning. I mean, they gave us a space ship that could essentially teleport around to parts of the universe (all of this made possible through the power of mushrooms). So yeah...it was an adventure to where "no one has gone before."

I feel a little bad that Discovery did not get to end its run on its own terms. If you've seen the final season, it is a whirlwind of action and puzzle-solving that is very reminiscent of the best parts of Indiana Jones (only on a galactic scale). But after that is all said and done, the final episode continues in a way that reminded me of what happened at the ending of the Return of the King. Do you guys remember that? Going back to the Shire, Sam being married, old Bilbo and Frodo making their way to the Grey Havens, and on and on and on. It kept going for like an hour after Sauron met his doom.

This is the same tack that Discovery took with its series finale. It wanted to wrap things up so it showed us old Captain Burnham, her kid all grown up, and then sending the actual starship Discovery to deep space to just sit there waiting for something in the far future...all so that it could tie into the "short Trek" episode called Calypso. All of that seemed kind of forced, but it is difficult to make an ending land like it should. Very few series manage to pull it off. To date, I don't think there has been a series ending for any iteration of Trek that I've actually enjoyed (don't get me started on how awful I thought Deep Space Nine ended).

I also think (suspect) that certain characters didn't get their due. For example, the Breen Prince who died in season five (his name is L'ak) is one of these. I think he was going to get brought back. The reason why is that throughout all of Trek, we've had multiple revived dead people. One in particular happened in Discovery (the doctor) who was brought back to life thanks to the miracles of mushroom space. I think that it is likely that L'ak would have returned in season 6, but they just got canceled before that storyline could be fully resolved. This may be especially true since we see L'ak's body getting preserved indefinitely in the pattern buffer, otherwise, why would they have done that?

Since Moll was presumably recruited by Kovich to be a temporal agent, this could have been laying the groundwork for Moll attempting to use time travel to save/revive him or maybe get a brainscan since they were very specific that the Progenitor technology could make a clone but with no memories. If we had gotten a season 6, it's of course anyone's guess what we would have seen. But maybe Primarch Tahal of the Breen would have become the major antagonist since the succession was (as yet) unresolved.

This would have allowed the writers to construct a story around some Temporal Cold War McGuffin and maybe even a search for the original creators of the Progenitor tech. This major questline could revolve around the crew of the Discovery hopping between time periods with the events of Calypso being that Zora gets lost in the 23rd century and hence, it needed to wait 1000 years to return to the present day 32nd/33rd century. As well, Moll was probably going to have a redemption arc to give Michael a chance to come full circle and become a mentor to someone that was in her place. The season and the series would have ended with L'ak and Moll ascending the throne of the Breen Imperium and ushering in an era of peace between the Federation and the Breen.

But yeah...we got none of that because the show got canceled due to Paramount trying to sell itself to any buyer that will take it. The details of all of this is a long story and goes back decades to a man that bought Viacom using money he had lying around from owning several successful movie theaters in the New York area. His heiress wanted to unload the company, and I have no idea if they've been successful. I just know that a lot of shows got the axe because Paramount needed to slim down its production of new shows to make it more appealing for a huge multi-billion dollar deal.

But isn't there a proverb that goes: "When elephants fight it is that grass that suffers?" I think this saying is appropriate here. Multi-billion dollar deals are the elephants and the grass that suffers is the content that all of us love...the art and entertainment that gets done that actually makes up the business. If we had seen a season 6 of Discovery, I think its ending would have been great based on the things I've sussed out. But they didn't have that option, and it is what it is. Anyway, if you've stuck around this long, thanks for listening to my thoughts. If you have any you'd like to share, please post them in the comments below.