Fan Fiction

“Of all of my students, Appollonius, you are the most exasperating! I’ve been teaching students in Rhodes for decades now and never before have I seen something to rival the sheer magnitude of crap that you are offering. You make up these ‘stories’, and I’m being generous with the term, with no thought! Seriously, what are you thinking of?”
“It’s the way that things are should be.” Came the mumbled reply.
“No, ok, let’s take a look at this first scroll”, the teacher unrolled the papyrus to the offending passage. “For no reason whatsoever, you marry these two characters. Nowhere is this referenced again. No reason is given for it. She cheats on him constantly and he just seems to exist. There’s no explanation or rhyme or reason.”
“It sets up conflict.”
“It sets up NOTHING! Failing to explain why we should even care about these characters, much less why they are the way they are makes no sense. I have spent years trying to inculcate proper respect for storytelling and basics of narrative design and yet you bring me this dreck. Ok, here’s another example. This other main character, he has sex with anything. As anything. Despite his power and awe inspiring visage, he has to seduce women as a duck? As a golden shower? As a bull? Just logically, this makes no sense.”
“He can do anything he wants”
“He CAN but you have failed to set up why he SHOULD. He is one of the most unrelatable characters you have created! You start off well with him, setting up a classic father conflict-though the eating children thing is nonsensical too-but then you jump the shark! He fucks anything that moves and everyone loves him but he’s sneaking around and tricking people into sleeping with him. Where’s the logic there?”
“It’s because his wife gets mad”
“His sister/wife gets mad? So what? What can she do? Why are they married? Why do we care? Do you see my problems here? There are so many unanswered questions that you could drive a chariot through the plot holes. I mean, look at the continuity skips. At one point, you have the Sun driven by one character, later on, there is a minor character that has the power himself. That’s just a basic continuity flaw! You know better than this.”
“I needed the new character for the story. I wanted to show the perils of overreaching.”
“The only thing overreaching is your belief in your abilities! Ok, look here-you have a whole story that says stealing girls from their home and raping them is ok, provided that you make them eat some of your food. What kind of message are you sending to kids these days? Pro-rape? What would your mother think? Why would you ever want to tell a story like that?”
“To explain the seasons”, the student mumbled.
“What explanation is needed beyond axial tilt of the Earth in its revolution around the Sun? Seriously. Get these scrolls out of my sight, I don’t want to hear any more of these fantasies. Focus on your drama and comedies-leave these ‘myths’ for drunken shepherds.”
His shoulders slumped, Appollonius walked out into the courtyard as the teacher turned to his wife.
“The absolute worst part is that he has the other students caught up in his fantasies. Some of the boys are making art using his stories and I even saw a girl weaving one into a tapestry. If this keeps up, what stupid things will people think the Greeks believe?”

My take on a personal conversation exploring the potential that maybe our history and beliefs are the ultimate fan fiction. Think of the cultural debris future generations might think we believed. Or maybe Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter.

Psychohistorian For Hire

Ask anyone who reads science fiction who the greats are and the name “Isaac Asimov” better be one of the first on the tips of their tongue. If it’s not, they are fools and charlatans and deserve nothing but contempt or the back of your hand. The man is one of the most prolific authors I’ve come across. I cut my teeth on the Norby books he wrote with his wife, I wasted after-school hours on his planet and solar system books, but in the end there is a single magnum opus. Foundation by Asimov is not only one of the great classic sci-fi books, it’s the most influential book I’ve ever read.

I’m one of the few people I know who got into sociology not to study a specific topic, but because of a particular orientation towards the world. I always wanted to know things, to apply scientific rigor to asking questions of the world around me. For the longest time, this led to me wanting to grow up and be a biologist. I needed to be able to develop rules that explain and capture the world as it is and that seemed the way to do it.

It was in this mindset that I first came across Foundation. For those of you who have not yet, but hope to read it in the future, you might not want to read the next few sentences. You have been warned. Seriously, there are spoilers here. Hari Seldon is a mathematician who, in applying math to history and society, determines that the Galactic Empire is dying. What is worse is the 30,000 years of barbarism that will follow its fall. While he cannot forestall the Empire’s destruction, what he can do is shorten the following time of darkness. By sending a small colony of scientists to live alone on the edge of the Galaxy, he can save humanity 29,000 years of war and strife. The book follows the initial founding of the Foundation and it’s first 100 years of survival from crisis to crisis.

This book provides a view of human society that is exactly what I wanted. It postulated that history, societal change, and populations themselves could be understood by virtue of mathematical rules and models. People and populations could be statistically predicted. A particular custom had a 85% chance of fixation in a given environment. A particular world had a 97% chance of being conquered by a neighbor. Religious institutions fell to secular institutions at a given likelihood in known situations. This was music to my ears, this was my holy grail. And I thought it was all fiction; at least until I took my first class in university.

Through a weird set of circumstances (tons of AP credit, lingering belief in early morning wake-ups, need for a social science credit, and our particular residential system), I ended up in Demography at 8AM. This class opened with a lecture about understanding population size and dynamics in terms of just fertility, mortality and migration. And just like that, my collegiate search for a calling was over. Here it was, the thing I had read about, given up as just a pipe dream, and it was real.

From that moment, I was hooked. Everything else was just the prologue. I was a demographer from the day I met Hari Seldon.

This post is an entry to a series on “A Book That Changed my Life” for the Creative Collective.

Warp Speed

Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.

One of those things that people always try to prepare you for, but inevitably fail with, is how fast time moves as you get older. Adults hint at it constantly when you’re younger, but it seems like they can’t possibly be right. Time moves so slow, except when you’re at a birthday party (preferably roller skating or video game based) or out playing with the other kids in the neighborhood.

Time when I was young moved so very slow. Everything seemed to last and drag on and on. Sitting in class, I would watch the minute hand sluggishly chase across the clock face. I counted the seconds (yes, I was *that* kind of kid) until I could leave school. Then, given how far away my school was, I would sit on the bus, waiting for the hour it took to get home. We passed the time various ways: spades or other card games, rumor mongering, throwing things at passing cars, discussing the (at the time) mystery of boy-girl differences. But no matter what we did, each and every kid was keenly aware of the passage of time. Things took so long.

Childhood is defined in so many ways by waiting and the interminable nature of time. You wait for 3pm so that you can go home from school. You wait for the good television shows to come on in the evening. You wait for Friday to have your weekend. You wait for the summer to come. You wait to have your birthday party. You wait until you can open your Christmas party. Every direction you turn, you have to wait.

The shift to a non-waiting based lifestyle was so gradual that it wasn’t until recently that I noticed the difference. Anymore, I’m always doing something. With a class, a dissertation proposal, like 5 different research projects, a girlfriend, friends from all sorts of different circles, reading (either for work or pleasure), video games, movies, shows I want to watch, and some periodic stretches of sleep, I don’t spend a lot of time waiting for things. Instead, I am just switching task constantly to keep up.

But this isn’t a post about how I’m busy, both because that’s whiny and also because no one cares. This is about what that constant buzz of activity means for my perception of time. No longer is time something that grudgingly wears down. Now it’s strapped itself in and moving at Mach 5. Minutes blow past me, hours disappear in a blink and weeks seem to slip through my fingers. Thinking on how long I’ve been in graduate school now, it’s a crazy how fast it’s seemed to have passed me by.

Everyone tried to prepare me for this, but this is one of those adulthood changes that I guess everyone has to learn for themselves. Time and time again, my parents or other people laughed at me when I complained about how slow things were moving. It turns out that it just took me a few decades to understand. But I finally seem to get it now-life gets busy.

Remember that scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon is drifting in space until Han pushes the lever and it shoots into warp speed, the stars flashing by as rays of light? That’s what time is like during life as we age. You wait for a bit, until it kicks in and BAM, next thing you know, it’s streaming past. The older we get, the faster we go. It just makes it all the more important for us to enjoy the trip.

This post is an entry to a series on “Speed” for the Creative Collective. You’re lucky I didn’t do a dramatic retelling of the classic Keanu Reeves vehicle or an essay on why you should love Speed Racer. But hurry, hurry and go read the others!

Revelation from Skyrim 2

After I posted yesterday about the perils of arming your deceased loved ones, I realized that my critical eye had now been forever turned on my game. Not to say that it’s a bad game or anything-I do love it. But it’s a more mature love now, like loving your wife even though you know she’s covering up a zit or just farted under the covers, that kind of deal.

So I was fighting a dragon the other day, just another ho-hum day for a continent crossing deal death dealing agent of all the gods and demons. The fight basically went like this:

He flies in a circle.
He lands (sometimes really poorly).
He shoots his breath and shouts at me while I hide behind a rock.
I peek out and shoot him with an arrow.
He flies in a circle while I run around my rock.
Rinse and repeat until he dies.

Note: Given the indeterminacy of dragon gender, I use the pronoun he. I fully accept that at least a portion of my kills are genderless or female, but lacking knowledge of dragon gender, I went for the easy way out. A way out that this paragraph kind of counteracts now that I think about it.

Basically, I was playing that “run around the table and they can’t tag you’ game. With a dragon. That can fly.

I know that the dragons in the game have been asleep/dead for eons and are, in essence, just waking up. Having slept for long stretches of time in the past, I can attest that it can leave one groggy and incoherent for some time. But these are creatures defined by their ability to fly. A 2 dimensional “run in a circle” game really should be easy to overcome. You just fly up and shoot down. Think outside the box and Gordian knot my annoying little Wood Elf archer.

But don’t anyone tell them that-I need more scales to make armor.

Revelation from Skyrim

Since I was so busy at the end of the semester when Skyrim first came out, I was late to the party. However, thanks to the wonderful Steam holiday sale, I am the proud owner of TES:V.

I’ve been playing recently; running around like I always do in these games, a stealth assassin build. As I’ve been making my way through dungeon and tower and city, a few eccentricities have stuck out. After laughing about some of them, I’ve decided to share.

Now I want you to put yourself in the frame of mind from someone from this world. It’s like a medieval type setting with magic and gods and everything. We’re in the world derived, in most ways, from the Viking way of life that has been conquered by the nearby Roman inspired empire.

And here’s my problem: they bury their dead with weaponry.

I understand why you’d do that if you believed that in another world, your dead friends and family would be able to live and fight in honor and glory (read: Valhalla), but that doesn’t make sense here.

The dead, literally, walk.

If you knew that the dead could and would be raised, why would you bury your family or, even dumber, your enemies WITH WEAPONS? What possible logic is evidenced by that? It’s like saying “oh, that man eating tiger is missing something, where did his laser beams and poison darts go?”

What idiotic mortician decided “hey, I bet these people will come back to undeath, better arm them”

When the character say the same thing 10,000 times or sit and watch you pickpocket them, that’s not smart. But burying skeletons that will come back to life with weapons is just stupid.

The Maw

I often have those moments when, despite my protestations of telling the truth, no one believes me. I’m sure it’s because I am, when I desire, able to lie with such fluency that I have cried wolf and deadened people’s sense of belief, or at least of belief in me. I always took this as a huge upside as I could cloak my intentions and thoughts as truth as still have them disbelieved. However, as time goes by, I really wish these tidbits of me, these facets of my soul, that I have strewn about our conversations were taken seriously. The one I wish I could communicate is how much I have to KNOW.

No one desire or drive is as important for me as curiosity. I am insatiable about learning. There is no way that I can adequately communicate what this drive is like. It’s not even like a targeted need; I do not hunger specifically for sociology. Instead, my mind is a gaping black maw that insatiably cries out for constant new information.

This hunger manifests in odd ways. I have to be doing things all the time, not because I can’t live within my skull, but because I require constant new information. My multitasking can get to extreme lengths. In college, my roommates once walked in on me when I was watching a movie, listening to music, watching anime on another screen and playing an MMORPG. In grad school, one of my friends thought I was insane when I casually mentioned that I had been reading a book while playing the recent Final Fantasy game. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I often read the last pages of books first.
I’ll look up episode summaries of movies or shows I’m watching-as I watch them.
I’m the first to pull out my phone to look up anything.
I have long advocated having a wire that could plug the Internet straight into my brain.

I’ve lost days on wikis just reading information. And not just Wikipedia (though when I found the “Random Article” button, I was in front of my computer for 4 straight hours reading), but wikis on everything from responses to Christian arguments against evolution to Starcraft 2 (a game I don’t even play) strategies.

I just have to know what is/has/will happen.

I guess in some ways, I’m lucky that people don’t really get that this need burns so bright in me. Those that do have a powerful weapon to use against me. Telling me a little about something but then not telling me all I need to know is quite possibly one of the cruelest things that someone can do to me. It burns. L sometimes will laugh when I have to run to the computer or my phone to look something up that has been hinted at. But I can’t let those situations stand; they gnaw on me until I resolve them.

It worries me at times. There are worse hungers for a scholar to have, but the omnivorous nature of my need makes me in many ways an academic dilettante. I know a little bit about a lot of things, but every time I try to focus, I come across a different field that I want to follow and I’ll pursue that.
I don’t know how to tame this beast, but until I do, I am an owned man. I have to deal with having this smoldering fire in my belly that looks at every book, news article, movie, song, website, TV show and cries “more!”

This post is an incredibly late entry to a series on “Hunger” for the Creative Collective. Why are you still here when you could be reading them?

Thou Art Mortal

As an avid movie watcher, I grew up wanting to be the man of iron will that always graced the silver screen. I wanted to be John Wayne. I wanted to be Clint Eastwood. I wanted to be the Terminator.
I had this ideal of what I was supposed to be like: a man who never stopped, never compromised, and never surrendered. I secretly wanted to face the kind of adversity that they suffered, if only to prove to myself that I had what it took. It’s childish and immature, but there it is.

This early need to prove my willpower manifested as an ongoing series of small games. I constantly set challenges for myself to test myself.
No sleeping until I collapsed
No eating for days
No potato chips for a month
No alcohol for 3 months

While I could do all of these little tasks, the problem came when I tried to transition them to something bigger. I could skip chips for months, but if I tried to exercise that level of control over all of my food, I invariably failed. I could deny alcohol for long periods of time but I couldn’t give up Coke as well.

And therein is the limitation of all those depictions of the iron willed protagonist. In each movie, in order to set the scene or create a narrative, there is an inevitably slicing away of context. Rambo wasn’t worrying about his car insurance. Ripley wasn’t thinking of who would ask her to the space dance. John McClane was not best by the conundrum of AT&T or Verizon. These stories exist thanks to the stripping away of context but it is the context that is so essential to understanding the true function of will. In real life you cannot exercise the sort of iron control that these people embodied for me growing up.

So here dear reader, is my theory of willpower.
Thanks to our limited attention, each and every person has only a finite amount of will that they can assert. Though the means of assertion can be improved, the actual number of domains in which you can exercise control are, by necessity, finite.

For me to exercise control in some facet of my life, I have to be able to be aware of it. I have determined that I can control about 3 different aspects of my lifestyle. After that, something has to give. Maybe I’m crazy or maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but here’s an example that led to me putting this idea together.

Since I can remember, I’ve weighed more than I want to. Since I’ve been an adult, it’s been a real annoyance for me. I tried all sorts of little changes and things to be healthier. I have given up different foods, cut down on alcohol, started exercising, changed when I eat and more; in short, I’ve played with all the different factors in this particular equation. And to some degree, they have worked; hell last year was amazing for progress on this front. The problem comes with sustainability. Each of these changes works fine when I’m focusing on it. The problem comes when I have to focus and force myself to do other things. The recent need to force myself to make strides on my academic work has led to me slipping on the exercise front. The drive to spend time with my girlfriend has led to me slipping on the food front. Right now, I’m trying to force myself to get back to the habits, but I am unsure I can if I want to keep the other issues at a higher priority.

It’s all a matter of attention. You can only keep your eyes on so many balls and you can’t catch the ones you can’t see. I know it’s a depressing thought (most times when I think about an inherent human limitation, I am depressed), but I think it’s good to own our heritage. You can be the Terminator, but not in all things at all times. Maybe this insight will help you as you sit down to plan your resolutions for the next year, that handy list of aspirations. Or maybe this insight just proves that the best resolve I can hope for is the one to clean my carpet.

This post has been part of a series on “Resolve” for the Creative Collective. Read them.

Little Acts

I have a slight problem with the world around me. I require that the things that I am asked to do make sense. Otherwise, I grumble and think of ways to throw wrenches into the system. This particular behavior often results in me clashing with those who hold (typically) nominal power over my activities. I don’t have a problem with the police (usually), as I see the benefit of what they do. For the last couple years though, my anger has had a different target: the TSA.

I have been a TSA hater since it was formed. It was a haphazard, political response from the outset. While it makes sense to make airport security a government domain, if nothing else it standardizes it, there is a whole ridiculousness to what they do. Security experts constantly hail their actions as not actually increasing out security (photoshopping a boarding pass could get you through!), but the burden they place on the public is obvious. The workers are clueless, arrogant and half the time there are like 10 people standing around while travelers pile up. It is security theater, that’s all and for that reason, I detest being asked to comply with their capricious mandates.

Because I hate them but don’t want to actually force a confrontation, my rebellions were always small.
It started with my appearance. Each trip I got a little further from my photo ID. There was one trip when I walked up to security wearing a beat up army surplus jacket 4 sizes too big, sunglasses, a bandanna, hair down to my chin and smiled as the agent looked at my nice, cleancut photo. She looked me up and down before telling me to “take off those shades” and that “I didn’t match my ID at all.” That seemed to be as far as I could take that small rebellion without consequence, so I needed a new outlet.

Luckily (haha) for me, about that time, the TSA introduced the newest technology to “keep Americans safe”(tm) -the millimeter wave scanner. From the first time I heard of it, I found the machine and the nature of its adoption repugnant. Basic safety tests did not seem to be have been done on it, the former head of Homeland Security was getting money from the company providing it, it was claimed that the machine could not store pictures despite the clear evidence to the contrary and much more. The list of reasons for my annoyance would take more than my 750 word limit, so I shall leave the depths of my hate unexplored for the nonce.

Every trip through TSA now became an effort to dodge the machine. It started by seeing which airports and terminals had it in operation, and then choosing to either fly into other ones or go in through the other terminals. As they became more prevalent, I had to adopt new strategies. I would watch which line they were favoring and go through the other, I would hurry behind people that seemed sketchy and therefore doomed to getting checked, I would rush to get in line when the machine was backed up. My whole goal was to get the exasperated agent to wave me over to the X-ray instead of the new fangled machine.

And this worked.

For years.

Until finally this year, I got into a situation that I had no way out. Due to wrong turns in the airport, I was running late (and therefore unable to request the pat-down instead) and my local airport has recently switched so that all travelers through the main terminal have to go through the devil machine. So I got up to security, did the meaningless ID check ritual, dropped my bags on the conveyor, removed my coat, took off my hat, undid my belt, pulled out my laptop, dug through to free my 3 oz liquids from my bags and I stood, finally, before the machine. The agent waved me forward. I stepped inside the claustrophobic little booth.

“Face forward and step on the yellow areas on the mat. Place your hands over your head and look forward.”

Here it was. My worst TSA nightmare come to pass (save the one with the cavity search by Tom Ridge). At the last second, literally right before the moving parts whirred by to scan me, I decided my small act of rebellion would be to give the TSA checker a one-finger salute. The agent watching the machine was none the wiser, but I know that the person checking the scans saw what I did. They had marked the tips of my fingers with a yellow box. Apparently giving TSA the finger draws a warning.

This post is part of the series on “Authority” by the Creative Collective. You should read them.

Addiction

Growing up my dad and I saw eye to eye on most things. Sure there was the inevitable disagreement about money I believed myself entitled to or chores that I didn’t feel were my duty, but on the whole, we got along well. Probably because we’re like 95% the same person.

The one area where we disagreed was in my showers.

I love water. Particularly hot water. Warm water falling down on my head is like an amazing thing. It’s a cure for cold weather, it’s a perfect medium during the heat. At no time of the year am I opposed to hot showers. I spend so long in the shower that even my girlfriend makes fun of me. Apparently taking more than 5 minutes to clean my short hair is “overindulgent.” If only other people understood how great this is! /sigh

But come to find out, this drove my dad wild when I was growing up. Not because he wanted to use the shower (his normal 5AM wake up time precluded most overlaps), but because as the person paying both the water and power bill, these extended hot water sessions actually cost him. Every month, he would open the bills and then shout for me to come out to him. I’d stand in front of him, shaking ever so slightly with fear (the rarity of my dad upset makes the realization of it that much more frightening) but unwavering. I would smile, nod and say I would do better while at the same time knowing in my heart that I could never change.

And I haven’t. To this day, despite the best efforts of parents, roommates and my current girlfriend, I luxuriate in my long showers. My name is REDACTED and I’m a water addict.

This post is part of the series on “Water” by the Creative Collective. You should read them.

Mean Streets of Jeuno

Who am I going to be today?

Each day I wake up and hear the cries of my fellow adventurers. They need so much, but there is so little I can do. I vainly run from neighborhood to neighborhood trying to hide from the frantic and unintelligible shouts. The attempts to bridge cultural divides have resulted in a agglomerative, ungainly language that neither side can recognize or make any sense of. Lucky me.

Finally I give up on the public streets. So much for enjoying my time off by walking among the fountains or catching the airship home. Run off, not by my prey or the hidden predators of this shattered world, but by my “fellow” citizens. If only the Yagudo would stab each and every one through the heart. Again I am let down by my luck.

So in to the house I go. At times like this, I wish I had gone a little less on the function and a little more on the form during the last remodel. I have a crappy bed, a wardrobe packed full of rare gems and useless equipment (a leather hat? A bronze club? What the hell was I thinking?) and a plant in the corner that is (hopefully) crystallizing wind energy into something I can craft. Altana alone knows I could use the gil.

But of course there is no respite from the communication. I receive a stream of messages, as the only white mage in the city, I’m in high demand. People need healing, people need me to teleport them, people want advice or just a picture with me. I hold court with the city leaders, I run errands for the lowest street urchin. My name rings out, and the adulation and demands follow. They say that there’s a price to being popular, but celebrities don’t know the half of it. People don’t want just my time or effort, they want me for nothing else but the role I serve. Not for long can I don this mask.

To hell with it.

I turn to my butler, confirm and I’m a white mage no longer. Gone the ability to heal or help, now I’m a tiny battery of the cosmic forces. Lightning, fire, ice, water. God it feels good to stretch my legs to destruction again.

Ding.

Damn.

Another message.

A group of fellow black mages want me to join them. Every moon it gets harder and harder to get by as an unaffiliated mage, but this is ridiculous. They’ve been after me since I closed down the Ark Angels, hounding me to join. When I’m like this, there are few others that can do as much damage as me. As it stands, they have nothing to offer me. I’m just another pointy hat and dark cloak to them. Another back to ride; another meal ticket for the useless dragoons and listless samurais of the world. They say the shells rule the world, but I walk alone. I need to hide again, so much for being this today.
Fine. Fine. Another confirmation, another swirl of magic.

Another identity gone.

I’ll be a red mage then. I’m good but not stellar at this job-my mediocrity should buy me some peace and quiet.

Ding.

You have got to be kidding me.

The downside of being able to channel raw magic into usable mana is that people expect you to, you know, ACTUALLY DO IT. Another refuge gone. How these jokers and scoundrels keep finding me, I will never know.
I start to call it quits for the day. If it’s going to be like this, I don’t want to be here anymore. Right as I reach for the point of the arrow to end it, I hear it again.

DING.

Another message, this one from my friend.

>>Wassai: Hey man, want to team up with me?
>>Wassai: What are you coming as?

Another swirl of magic, another class change.
What solidity exists in identity when we’re all trapped in this Final Fantasy?
I have got to get a different game.

This post was written as a response to “Identity Crisis” a part of the Creative Collective . Read them, they’re better.