Every morning I begin my day with a game of Clash Royale and a brief tour of the internet. I mean very brief. I peruse the selections curated by Apple News and then run off to my common three or four sites in this order: NFL.com, Cnn.com, foxnews.com, reuters.com. Yes, I said fox. I gotta know what the crazy spin is from both sides before settling into the Reuters reality. Occasionally I’ll skip reuters when I realize the other two aren’t actually talking about anything, so likely nothing is going on. Still, the entire process has me thinking. Why am I doing all of that each day? What is the gain? Is there a loss as well? Could I be poisoning my mind?
I am being dramatic to an extent, but the concept of garbage in, garbage out is not lost on me as a writer. Instead of keying in on Locus or Sci-fi daily, I am reading a lot of junk… and a lot of football that tells me not much new. That is really all the internet has become to me; distractions. My news cycle is not much different than my kids scanning through Tik Tok, or Quora, or Snapchat “News”.
So, yeah, I’ve identified a critical human problem for myself. I have grown accustomed and in a sense addicted to this sad series of inputs that are based in simplicity and accessibility and little else. I’ve given myself over to the cheap and easy fix in stereotypical American fashion. I’ve got to be better than that.
Some Thoughts:
- Scott Meyer’s latest entry in the Magic 2.0 series is very 4th wall. At one point his characters are having a conversation about concepts that are directly reflective of criticism of the last book. Without saying they are discussing the book they are clearly discussing what was said about the book. He goes one step further with the Villains (a thinly veiled caricature of Trump and his invisible puppeteer McConnell) to have one character straight up rant about the circumstances that led to why he wrote the book… Nice.