Category Archives: Miscellaneous

About me, Miscellaneous, Observations, Writing

I Am Not A Robot (I Think)

It’s funny when you think about it, but the most productive times for some forms of writing are generally the ones that look the most idle from the outside. You know that you wrote 2,000 words in a day and edited a couple chapters from your last project, but the outside world isn’t going to know the difference until you’re ready to publish. And in a stroke of irony, the people who look the most productive to the outside world, broadcasting their progress and talking about their process, are the same people who had to step away from the work to do it. It’s a balancing act, how much of your mental bandwidth are you going to dedicate to the actual tasks at hand and how much are you going to dedicate to making sure others recognize what you’re doing. But some people are masters at doing this and come across making it look effortless, weaving between productivity and self-promotion with grace and charm.

I am not one of those people.

I’ll make a confession today that I’m sure is no surprise to anyone who’s actually spoken to me: social media is exhausting. I’m an introvert and spend a lot of time in my own head, so the notion of spending time specifically trying to appear social is actually more tiring than just doing the work. It’s not that I hate people either, just that I kind of like to daydream and if I am going to talk it’s going to be a long form ramble about some silly idea I just came up with which is far too long for a 280 character limit. To put it simply: I am an opinionated blowhard and twitter can’t contain me.

But recently, after finally getting caught up on a couple projects, I discovered something amusing: apparently my recent twitter activity made some people (and “people”) think I was a bot. Continue reading I Am Not A Robot (I Think) →

About me, Miscellaneous, WTF

A Jackass Never Forgets

Over the years, talking publicly about creative industries and the patterns I tend to see, there have been a few instances where I make predictions based on the things that I’m seeing. Obviously, that’s not unique to me, everyone tends to do it. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong, and generally people just shrug and move on with their lives after it’s all said and done. But from time to time we may say something stupid that gets us stuck with the prediction we’ve made. If we’re lucky, the thing we said didn’t involve the words “I’ll bet you $1000 that I’m right.” Fortunately, in this instance, I wasn’t stupid enough to say it. Unfortunately, though no one’s actually held me to this, I did happen to say that I would admit that I was wrong in public. So here we go:

I was wrong about Disney’s live-action adaptations, and specifically, I was wrong about Dumbo and the writer behind it.

Continue reading A Jackass Never Forgets →

Miscellaneous, Observations, Writing

Thanos And Objectionable Choices

There’s a saying that has always stuck with me over the years: “everyone sees themselves as the hero of their own story.” And it’s true, no one does an action thinking they are the absolute villain. They had reasons, they felt motivations, they were doing what they thought was right. Yes, they may later regret their actions, but in the moment of doing them they felt correct even if everyone in the world may think otherwise. No one commits crime because they want to be the bad guy – either they’ve convinced themselves that they are in the right or they have a mental condition that detaches them from a sense of right and wrong. Even the greatest monsters in human history were convinced of the righteousness of their own cause, no matter how abhorrent their actions seemed to the rest of the world.

So then applying that sort of thinking to your fictional characters can make your villains feel all the more real. If you make it so that you can see where the villain is coming from, it feels more natural to us by default because we can understand, on some level, why they would act that way. Do we have to agree with their actions? Not at all. But if we can understand why the villain thinks they’re right then we can at the very least feel like that villain was realistic, even if their methods and actions are far outside of the realms of reality. For instance, while none of us would have the opportunity to assemble a gauntlet of god-like power, a lot of us could understand the motivations for wanting to do so.

But one of the problems with writing villains in those grey areas is that sometimes people mistake moral objection with a plot hole. We all do it on some level, seeing mistakes made by characters – whether they be due to a lack of planning or lack of moral fiber – as a mistake by the creators and not simply a failure of the character. Sometimes, this results in people demanding answers to questions that were actually answered within the material. And our balancer of the universe, Thanos, is no exception to this. Faced with the uncomfortable ramifications of Thanos’ ruthless “solution” to a problem he saw as a threat to the universe, a lot of people online cried foul and some even said it was a failing of the movie. Then, in almost every case where someone pointed at this “failing”, they inevitably recommended a solution of their own – almost always the same solution.

Ironically, the solution those critics recommended kind of prove that Thanos’ mistake wasn’t a plot hole. Because, when you step back to actually consider it, the solution everyone recommended would actually kill more people than Thanos did… Continue reading Thanos And Objectionable Choices →

About me, Futurism, Miscellaneous

Fear of the Future

There are a few quirks of my personality that I can’t quite blame on outside influences. Though I could probably find a root cause somewhere in my past, probably when I was a toddler and can’t remember anything, there is generally no rational explanation I can think of. One of them is a tendency to hold myself to oddly strict rules that no one else will generally recognize or care about. In fact, even when I outright announce some of these rules I hold myself to, most people tend to forget them if given enough time – but I never do. And one of those is that every blog entry that I post to this site has to fit a certain variety of topics for specific days. It’s not iron clad, there’s always some wiggle room involved, but from time to time I’ll have a blog idea that I want to write or have already written and think, “man, that feels more like a Monday or Wednesday topic.”

It’s a little silly, but I’m often a silly man.

One of the topics I’ve allowed myself to post on Fridays is anything having to do with the future or sci-fi. At first it was because I momentarily considered calling it “Futuristic Fridays”, but then a few eyes were rolled and I realized it was a bridge too far. Still, it’s one of the approved topics for the day, and it’s ironic because a few things I’ve seen on twitter over the last few weeks and a few personal experiences have had me thinking about the future, specifically how much we as a species get freaked out about it. I’ve touched the topic before with talks about technophobia and the like, but all of the individual fears of future times really kind of root back to the same essential fear when it comes right down to it.

We don’t like uncertainty, we don’t like things beyond our control, and the future is full of both… Continue reading Fear of the Future →

Fantasy, Miscellaneous, Mythology, Satire, Sci-Fi

An Asshole’s Guide To The Apocalypse

Though statistically we’re living in the most peaceful time of human history, it’s hard not to feel like everything is about to come to a terrible end. Be it the media, or the ready access to information we didn’t always have, or the fact that everyone feels nostalgia for their early years when things were simpler – it’s hard not to feel like this is the worst timeline. With events that once were local now feeling national and things that were national now feeling local, we’re all understandably on edge. After a moment to breathe, most of us can step back from that feeling of impending doom and put it all back into perspective. But others…

And looking at people like this, with their crazed ramblings and demands for us to repent before the end comes, leaves us with one very important question: what do they know that we don’t?

How are they so confident of this doom? Have they been gifted with visions of this dark future by a god? Are they Oracles who’ve come to warn us of our fate? Which ones are we supposed to trust more, the guys with the cardboard or the billboard? More importantly: how do we prepare for the doom they warn us of? Continue reading An Asshole’s Guide To The Apocalypse →

History of the Holidays, Miscellaneous, Mythology

Witchy Holidays

When looking at the history of Europe, one of the interesting things that comes up time and time again is the overlap of Christian holidays (particularly Catholic) with Pagan precursors. It’s pretty well known that Halloween is actually a Christian holiday that was created to overlap with the Samhain. Christmas probably had some influences from the Saturnalia and Yule. Easter may have straight up taken its name from a pagan goddess. But how Christians react to these holidays today is based in large part on just how much the church sold the “Christian” aspects of it. Easter and Christmas, anchored deeply into the lore of Jesus himself, is now generally forgotten by the general worshiper to have some pagan roots, but Halloween?

And because these three holidays are the most widely celebrated of the Christian holidays, they kind of shape how we think of Christian holidays as a whole. For those who don’t go out of their way to find these origins, it seems ridiculous that these holy days may be related to pagan holidays. Meanwhile, for those who’ve been told about this often, it often leads to the belief that every single holiday Christians ever came up with were to rip off the pagans (even when this isn’t necessarily true). But when someone takes the time to really look into the history of these holidays, it often turns out to be more complicated than first glance.

Like, for instance, when people celebrate the same holidays in the same fashion for the same reasons… to completely different gods. Continue reading Witchy Holidays →

Miscellaneous, Writing

Multiple Discovery

Anyone who’s had any exposure to other people will know at least one person who’s said that there was no such thing as a new idea anymore. These people come in a few flavors, from the people who say that all “new” ideas are really amalgamations of old ideas to the ones who endeavor to be pedantic by pointing out that “ideas” were just things waiting to be discovered and someone would do it eventually. But the most common, and arguably the most annoying to creators, is the cynic who believes that we’ve run out of ideas and that creativity is dead. And, frankly, when you look at the swath of similar products coming out at once from studios and publishers, it’s kind of easy to see where they’re coming from.

From the perspective of these people, once any idea is put out there, everyone is going to race to copy it as fast as possible. There’s no coincidence between similar products, it’s all a matter of quick cash grabs. After all, how else can you explain so many similar stories being put to print and film back to back? It’s hard to argue with, because we can all see with our own eyes how publishers and studios can churn things out. So whenever one thing becomes successful, dozens of copycats will follow up. Is a dystopian YA story the new big thing? We’ll see 20 of them by the end of the year. Did a formerly terrifying monster suddenly become sexy? We’ll run that into the ground. And if you’ve managed to put out something original in that time, there’s a good chance you might get lumped together with the others whether you knew of them or not.

But what those cynics don’t realize is that often this race to hit the iron when it’s hot usually means the studios and publishers are digging up old submissions or overlooked IPs, and that the creators behind those ideas generally had no idea the others existed – but came to the same idea anyway. Continue reading Multiple Discovery →

About me, Miscellaneous

Time Well Spent

One of the great forces that separates humanity from other animals is the fact we’re aware of the passage of time. We’re aware of things that other animals just don’t notice or care to notice. We know how short life is, how long it may sometimes feel, and we base a lot of our opinions on how we’re doing against that clock. Dogs don’t understand time, everything feels forever to them, which is why they’re always so happy to see you at the door. Despite the fact you were only gone for half an hour to pick something up from the store, you were clearly gone forever – they counted.

But we don’t have the luxury of seeing everything as forever. Sometimes we can fool ourselves into believing it for a while, and even tell others that things are going to last forever. This feeling is going to last forever, these hardships are going to last forever, that relationship you had in high school is going to last forever. But we know that none of them actually do. Though we can fool ourselves for a time, the ability to fool ourselves also fails to last forever. And the beautiful, if somewhat bitter, thing about that is that means a person’s time is probably the most valuable thing they have in the long run. Sure, money is really nice, and don’t believe anyone who says it can’t buy you happiness – those people weren’t shopping in the right places – but time is our ultimate finite resource. No matter what you do, eventually you will run out of time.

So am I dying? No. Well, yes, but very slowly – I probably have a few decades to live. But the day I post this is my birthday and I like to navel gaze on my birthday. And, because I’m a narcis-… because I’m a writer, I’m going to tell you the contents of my navel gazing.

You have been warned… Continue reading Time Well Spent →

Miscellaneous, Observations

Monday Musing: Art And Purpose

Though it may sometimes take up too much of my time, one of the things I like to do most is to soak up random information and learn new things. I love to watch videos or read articles about science that are way above my pay grade. I’m fairly in tune with political debates and keep informed on current events around the world, particularly if they’re about countries I otherwise don’t know too much about. I’ve sat through discussions of psychology and sociology that really have very little to do with me but explain things about the world and the people in it. On the one hand, little if any of this is actually useful to me in my day to day life, but at the same time it’s something I can use to try to add more to my own work. As I’ve said many times before, anything can be used to inspire new writing – even if it’s sometimes peculiar.

And one of the fields I’m really fascinated in that I can see some real use to my work is psychology – particularly as it relates to the motives behind actions. This is great for figuring out character motivations, understanding why people think the way they do and what they may do because of it. If everyone is the hero of their own story, then how can people who see themselves as good do terrible things? If addicts know their addiction is hurting them, why can’t they stop? Besides being fascinating, it gives me insight that I hope to use to better my characters over time.

Though sometimes what really gets me is when I listen to these talks and it reflects a mirror back on myself. If finding out why someone else does something is useful, finding out why you do something yourself is invaluable. There are may facets to my personality which I’ve listened to someone take apart, but one facet in particular has gotten dissected more than any other in the talks I’ve listened to: why do we create art? Continue reading Monday Musing: Art And Purpose →

Fantasy, Miscellaneous, Mythology

Atlantis and the New Age

Over the years, one of the points of pride I have in my work has been in the effort to do things that may seem almost pointless to others. The story of an agency policing the supernatural isn’t particularly new and there are certainly more well known examples even in the last couple of months, but I’ve always made an effort to look harder at the details. Anyone following the Alterpedia or Alterpedia Historia can see this pretty clearly. Where as some versions of the concept are willing to simply go “everything is exactly the same, there’s just magic here”, I tend to look harder at the idea of these two worlds colliding. Wouldn’t the existence of Vampires motivate the creation of a viable blood supply that doesn’t require armed conflict? If magic wands were genuinely a thing, what would prevent them from overwhelming the whole planet? And if mythical creatures had to deal with a world like ours, full of the messy and troubled conflicts we’ve had, wouldn’t it have left an impression on them?

what about our news?

So I’ve always made an effort to take concepts from fiction and then find ways to work them into the real world as much as possible. A little tweak here, a modification there, and we’ve got something that looks like it could live in tandem with our world and our history. But there are some details where I’ve hesitated because I’ve seen just how deep the rabbit hole may go – not in fiction, but in the real world. I’ve been chewed out by people who really believe in Witches and others who think I’m somehow shilling books about actual Ghosts to prey on the gullible or grieving. Neither of these were anywhere close to having substance to them, but they make me realize some things have genuine believers, and I always tread lightly in those spaces.

But, sometimes, the things that I include started out purely as works of fiction… and then people started believing in them later. Continue reading Atlantis and the New Age →