Month: June 2023

I think as you age, different things are supposed to become more important to you. I find that I haven’t shifted too far from the core things I find that matter, though how much each matters in that give and take of my full attention varies. One thing that remains extremely important to me is being treated with love and respect. I get that, for the most part from over half my children. Even on Father’s day 5 out of 6 reached out to say Happy day. The 6th? Well, I cannot control everything in my life. I can only control my interactions and how I do things on my side of the interaction. I’m working on that part. I’m working on being a better dad and a better person overall.

I ought to add that I am working on being a better writer as well. By better in this sense I mean more creative and more creatively attached to the projects I decide to work on–and more selective in that sense in what I work on and when. I know what my level of ‘cognitive load’ is and I often butt up against that when I take on too much or too many different kinds of things. This is problematic in that it lowers the overall quality of everything that I do as well as my quality of life as my stress begins to build. Heck, my lifespan shrinks for that matter.

I am learning that all things we think and feel and do are connected and how you manage the one thing you can control–your personal involvement/investment/stance/emotion/effort–is how you can effectively manage your life. I am learning that my brain has suffered much over the decades from really being beat down by bad situations, emotional entanglements of the romantic and especially non-romantic kind, as well as poor inputs. As with birthdays, Father’s Day winds up being more about reflection than celebration, and that is a huge part of who I am–solitary reflection is my thing.

Now I just do it in a public forum.

Well, I finally saw the X-Mansion. No, seriously. It is a real place built by a famous coal baron and his family. They, the Dunsmuirs, built a lot of very cool stuff I’ve come across over the last few days. Makes me wish I’d been rich early in life–rich enough to be Dunsmuir rich later in life. nonetheless, I’ve done well enough for myself to put my kids in position to be successful–at the very least to get through college with minimum debt. That’s more than I can say for myself. That’s more than most of my generation can say for ourselves.

It has been an atypical day for me in RL. Beyond the X-mansion, I walked around for like half a day and wandered into a street festival and even saw a pretty good band performing outside. The thing is, that ought to be typical for me. I ought to live a life like that but I don’t. There are reasons. One being the level of attention and driving required as a dad to get my dudes to and from school. Another being the existential dread of being at home and waiting for a step kid to lose it and me to lose it right back, knowing what an endgame that begins and knowing I’m probably the only one out of that dynamic who cares. The other part is that I spend most of my year in a state that absolutely sucks. I’m there for the kids and the job, but it is a terrible place full of mean and vapid people. Sure, there are some amazing people there, but truthfully most aren’t that. Moreover, I think they know it.

The other thing is the writing. I’ve been struggling with it here, because I’ve yet to establish a real routine. I need to work on that with my partner. We need a plan that works and gets me through the work (and the new daily workout) alongside all of the wonderful living we’ve been doing. At least I need a plan for while we are here.

I don’t really have a plan for when I get back there.I know I ought to figure one out eventually.

Some Thoughts:

1. So… Madden is not entirely terrible. They’re trying to fix the errors, and I’ll probably buy the dang thing.

Leo’s Dead.

I knew from the moment I opened the door of the car. She–They–were laying in the backseat, the dim interior lights spotlit a mouth coated with foam and vomit. I stood there in the doorway, the darkness of the night closing in on me. Beside me my wife gasped and let out one long sob. She said, “is that?!”

“Yeah, Leo.” My voice felt like it came form a place very far away,

“We have to call Jon. We have to call the police!”

I stood stock still, hand still on the door handle, other hand holding the backpack I’d been about to toss into the backseat when I saw them. I stared down at the body–clothed in a half open Hawaiian shirt and jean shorts. Their legs were as blue white as their face. Their shoes were missing. “What the hell is Leo doing here?”

“I’m calling the police.” My wife said.

That got me moving. “No wait!”

“What do you mean, wait?! Jon’s daughter is dead in our back seat!”

“Yeah, but how did they get here?!”

My wife was silent at that. We were standing beside the car in an empty parking lot three thousand miles away from home. Jon, out neighbor and friend, told us his daughter ran away a few days before we left for Victoria, BC. Now here they were in the back of a car we’d only rented a few hours ago. I said, “What the hell is Leo doing in the back of our car?”

If you’re a die-hard Madden lover, you ought to just skip tonight’s post. It isn’t going to be happy for you.

Madden 24 is a mess. I’m attempting to boot up the game right now following yesterday’s closed beta updates… New update means the franchise lost is lost forever with a new error message: Franchise format out of date. That’s rich. It turns out they switched file formats mid stream in order to create a better experience, but we lowly playtesters didn’t get the memo. So, I’m back at it again trying to learn if this game mode is going to be better. It isn’t from what I’ve seen so far. It is longer and there are new elements, but the fundamental ‘collegiate’ way they handle scouting is not only wrong but entirely outdated by their upcoming NCAA game. See, they must’ve taken the early release core of that and made it their own. But those college cats are sneaky good… I cannot wait for their game to drop. Heck my kid may even be in it.

Bottom line is this: Game play is similar, but the deeper experience in franchise that was promised is not that deep. The option to improve positions in the draft is super good, but doesn’t entirely deliver better players–just a deeper draft class. Likewise, the trade difficulty and player motivation sliders offer more hoops to jump through in order to create a more realistic experience. So, good start but you aint there yet, Madden.

I’d like you to join me for a brief exhibition. Stick out your lips like you are about to kiss someone. Take your left hand. Press it firmly you your lips. Blow as hard as you can. That sound you hear? That’s Madden 24. This make or break year has swiftly devolved into ‘break’ which argues that truth is relative still. We know Madden is not going to give up the cash cow. We know that the efforts being made are also the best their present administration and tech can develop. We know it isn’t even close to being enough. Madden 24 is already broken. It is broken in some of the fundamental ways that Madden 23 was broken. Because of this, the game is destined to plateau as a failure on all metrics, even if it does receive a higher score than last year.

I’ll start with the bad: I already lost a franchise. This core problem with servers losing franchises has not been fixed. I’ve been at the game for two weeks and 50% of the franchises I began are already inaccessible. I’ve been playtesting the game, helping to track down glitches and errors and the biggest one is still entirely in play. This is huge. They brought thousands of people into the playtest and offered %50 off the game at launch because we suffered from this issue. Now we are faced with the same issue again. It is a game-killer to say the least. It is no mystery why the best working part of the game is the only part that involves micro-transactions and the worst performing sector is the one designed for individuals playing long-term. This fundamental philosophical break is what I believe will end the 25+year reign of the EA game. Eventually the NFL will nix the private contract, and we all know what is going to happen next. A better platform game will emerge. Quickly.

In the meanwhile, we have glitches-both visual and from a save game/franchise standpoint as well as shortcuts that make gameplay just meh. To name a few: graphical anomalies among drafted skill positions make the the jerseys glitch incessantly. Increased (albeit unrealistic) locations for moving your team but the same exact set and number of name and jersey options–which are no longer limited to a specific city. Mini games now are required to improve skill points during training.

All of this is bad. I haven’t even gotten ‘granular’ yet, so I suppose another ten minutes is required…

I want to go back pre-blog. I want to go even further back to the days I was running Multi-user battle tech dungeons on a hacked German server. Those were in many ways the highlights of writing. Things are great now but different. For one I’m older and lack that creative energy. I don’t know that it is gone—more like I feel disconnected from it because I don’t try new things nearly as much. I spoke on this recently: try new things. Experience new things—this is what you need in order to fuel and refuel your passion.

To continue the metaphor, my passion has long been in need of an oil change. I need to try different fiction and be inspired by that. Reading the same old stuff and writing the same old stuff does little to help me grow.

I spend a great deal of time and energy writing in Shared Worlds. The concept of a shared world is thus: You are adding to a universe that other writers also add to and may use your characters/plots/materials from and move them in directions different than your original intent. In this way plots and story and characters grow in unexpected ways. There is many positives to be found in this sort of writing–namely you’re building on a world that is pre-existing and you are pulling on complex threads and knitting them back together in ways that others may not have intended or others may do the same in ways you never dreamed of. All of this is the knife’s edge of good and bad really. If the person who picks up your thread does terrible things with it, then you may wind up stuck in a situation you don’t like or it may alter a character/scenario you’ve had longstanding plans for in a way that cancels out your plans.

I write for Shadowrun. There are about two dozen writers moving through these books on a regular basis. Often times I step completely away from a book when I feel I have no story to tell (i.e. no skin in the game). However, in doing so I watch the world advance in ways I could not have predicted and it makes my ‘thematic goals’ harder to achieve. All of this is to say, writing in shared worlds means letting go of preconceived notions of character and plot. You have to be able to adjust to these changes on the fly and build what feels like the natural next step to whatever changes come your way. I’ve been at it for a few decades now and I can tell you it never gets easier, because you never know what is going to happen next. I can also say it has helped me shape plot and story spectacularly, because I have to learn how to adjust and uncover what feels natural. Overall, it is worth the doing, if only a few times.

Bout time I get back to the freewriting. I’m in need of a serious jumpstart in that respect. The last week of writing has dragged to say the least. I feel like if I am unproductive for a long stretch of time I start to ‘lose the thread’ of the work. This happens faster when I am working on multiple projects and I am presently working on three. I regret the third one. I needed it to stay in the flow of things and get a sense of where things are going with the game side of that shared world, but it is already messy and sad and really not at all reflective of where I wanted that writing to go. The problem with cyberpunk is how narrowly focused it is. The genre existed in a pocket 80’s that remains unreflective of the actual advance of tech and culture. On the other hand, Cyberpunk RED seems to be doing a good job of it. Thus the problem with Shadowrun is vision and ability to merge magic and technology in a way that doesn’t just wind up being about one or the other and avoids falling into the classic romance tropes and traps. I see us doing that. I see us falling into narrowly shaped storylines about how X feels about Y and how Z feels slighted. This is not reflective of a world dominated by Dragons, AI, and Corporations–who ought to represent the big three powerbrokers but never ever do.

There. Rant over. Back to the word mines… or maybe Madden 24 (I be play testing) and then a round or three of Apex, and THEN the word mines.

Time has not been my best friend. I’ve grown old and fat and developed old man pains. However, I’m on a mission to turn the next 30 days into an engine to correct my ails. This first day found me in a gym and in a steam bath. I’ll be doing quite a bit of both over the course of a month, trying to get my body back to a metabolism level and fitness level where I can actually start to feel good about myself again. Feeling good about yourself physically and mentally is as important as feeling safe emotionally, physically, etc. I’ve put myself in a space where I do feel safe and secure, so that I can drop my guard and actually focus on working on myself and my relationship (because that is central to being healthy equally to the other parts). I have an awful lot to work on and I have nothing but time and energy to get it done. Change and growth is coming.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. It was mid-tier but decent graphics, etc. Big cast. Did I like it? Yes, but I also liked the Fast and Furious movies for a while. My taste is questionable at times.
2. Thinking about the scary nature of motion sensors. When they turn on when nothing is moving it is a wicked feeling…

If I hadn’t spent 8 hrs traveling across the planet I’d be doing a freewrite. Tomorrow instead. Honestly, this is a small bit of truth: You may not have the words in you every day. Sure, you make an effort, but you work within what you think you can do. Bodybuilders take rest days when they do just light work. Writers must rest our brains in the same fashion or we will completely burn out. fried. like chicken.

I think the above paragraph is some indication that I may already be there.

Some thoughts:

1. The Athletic has some of the best sports writing I’ve come across. It is hidden behind a paywall, because of course it is.
2. Looking forward to shifting gears and focusing on healing my relationship and my spirit.