Monthly Archives: January 2019

Observations, Writing

A Zero Sum Culture

One of the benefits of maturity is growing to have a new perspective on things that I didn’t in the past. It’s not that I’ve become particularly mature – I chose a profession dedicated to manipulating really complicated imaginary friends – but life experience colors your perceptions of reality even if you do everything you can to stay detached from it. When you’re young you can have all the intelligence to understand complicated ideas but none of the time and experience necessary to see all the facets of a subject. But as you gain life experience and grow, your perspective on things grows with you and eventually you start to recognize just how big of an ass you were as a kid.

Hell, sometimes you recognize how big of a dick you were just last week.

Over the last couple of years, one of the things I’ve come to gain new perspective on is how often criticism can evolve into something different than it was originally intended. We’ve all been in that situation where we wonder if we might have been too harsh on something, but lately I’ve started to realize just how much it actually impacts us on both a personal and cultural level. In an age of social media, when it’s so easy to organize a group around any project, idea, or fandom, it’s even easier for the criticism evolve and harder for people to recognize when it has. Even if it were just between two people within the group, the act of being within the group can sometimes lead to the critic becoming emboldened by the association.

And, essentially, there’s a point where criticism starts to cross the line into… obstructionism.

Continue reading A Zero Sum Culture →
Futurism, Miscellaneous, Observations, Sci-Fi

Virtual Entertainment

If you read or watch enough science fiction over time, there are certain tropes that tend to appear almost everywhere. Most of them are centered around external forces that provide a mirror to look back on ourselves. This alien world happens to be populated by a race that has an extreme philosophy that mirrors one of our own. This other creature we thought wasn’t intelligent has made us question our prejudices. These seemingly natural phenomenon are trying to communicate with us, making us question the nature of life itself. Sometimes these tropes will fall into cliche if done improperly, while they tend to say something of value if done correctly. But not all of these mirroring tropes happen to be external forces – sometimes they’re man-made.

Our own creations, or things that we do to ourselves, are often good reflections on what kind of people we are and what’s important to us. When we’re writing stories of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, or science run amok, we tend to show not only our general motivations as a species but also our fears of our own ability to screw it up. However, there are other tropes about things that we create that are much more mundane in concept but still give us just as much of an insight into what we hold important. And, lately, one of those fantastic but strangely mundane technologies has been catching my attention more often -virtual reality.

When I say virtual reality I don’t just mean VR headsets but just about any technology that happens to simulate a different world for us. From the VR gear in Ready Player One to the holodecks on Star Trek, there’s a wide variety of approaches in sci-fi that reflect our efforts in the real world. And, despite how fantastic it may sometimes appear, we’ve been making great strides in this technology in the last couple decades to the point that a lot of graphics cards and game consoles now have VR support built right in. But while our real world vision of how to use VR can be a tad stunted from time to time, generally reserved for gaming, the world of sci-fi has shown us a variety of other uses that we only briefly touch on here in the day to day.

And, it’s strange, because when I look at the potential of fully immersing in fictional worlds, I actually think traditional video games are the least likely to take the lead…

Continue reading Virtual Entertainment →
About me, Observations

Resolutions

There are certain patterns of human behavior that are inescapable. We’re likely to fall back into old habits unless we’ve made sure to replace them with something else and make a dedicated effort to reinforce our new habits. We have tendencies to hold onto ideas even if they’ve been disproven. There are certain reflexive actions and reactions which we always promise we’re going to try to sort out but usually find ourselves too rooted in to really deprogram on our own. And all of these, of course, tie into the notion that many of us have that the “new year” is a time that provides us with a clean slate and that this is exactly the time to make the resolution to change all of that.

Of course, another pattern is that more of us fail at those resolutions than we’d like to admit – especially we creative types.

Continue reading Resolutions →