10 Minute Rule

Voltron is back! As a tremendous fan of the classic and straight up hater of the last efforts to evolve something from that classic, I’m very happy. This is what a reboot ought to do. This is a show that takes some of the key tenets of the original as well as some of the funner aspects developed along the way and adds just enough of the intelligent writing and conflict driven scenarios reflective of a new generation to make it feel original. I was a fan of Ben 10 and while the art is highly reminiscent of that show, the work here was done by the team who did The Legend of Korra. You can see their fingerprints on every panel and in the way the action unfolds throughout each scene. The elements of classic anime abound.

People are going to make of the new series what they will. For example, one of the characters is being portrayed by some outlets as a transgender character. That characterization falls terribly short of the truth. In truth the character is has shown no proclivities towards sexual orientation one way or the other. Instead the character is following a classic trope to avoid detection and a reduced sense of equality. In other words, this is based on the idea of gender roles as opposed to any real desires on the part of the character.

Though only six episodes into the first season, I’ve already connected my dynotherms and activated my interlocks for the long term. This is a reboot of a classic of my generation that I am going to enjoy sharing with the new generation of talisleggers.

Today some dude in a powder blue polo knock off just got named Madden 2016 champion. Its a thing. Really. The 2017 cash pool is a million dollars. The cash value of the grand prize for the NBA 2k16 Road to the Finals tourney that ended on June 1st was 256K. In other words, gaming is big money. Not just the playing of the game but the podcasting of the games and vlogging and live streaming through Twitch, etc. In fact, the top twitch streamer is someone named Syndicate who has over 38 million channel views. That is crazy coverage. That is also the new media and part of a world of digital sports that have built a realm of digital communication around itself.

With that thirst for communication comes the requisite seedy side and, of course, profit. Those two walk hand in hand and mostly take human form as buxom female gamers who do everything but get nude in order to curry more views. Is it working? Yep. There are multiple top ten lists of the hottest twitch streams out there. Some are straight up posing like porn stars. Others are legit gamers who are also playing on their looks to build a following. Of course they are. This is a business and this is really big money nowadays.

 

Another mass shooting has awakened the anger and horror of the american people. The Miami shooting (which comes on the heels of the murder of an amazing young singer–lets not forget some crazy killed Christina Grimmie only days ago and a few miles away from the Miami attack) left 49 dead and more dying from injuries doctors consider grave. I send my condolences to the families of those lost and injured. I truly hope those deaths spur some change that can prevent such a thing from happening in the future, but I am not holding my breath. We have experienced mass killings with such a regularity lately that it is impossible to assume that anything more than political banter and leveraging will come of it.

Here is what hurts me the most about this entire event: The Westboro Baptist Church has glorified the shooting by claiming God sent the shooter to do this horrible thing. Westboro, a group known for their anti LGBT hardline is couched in Christian philosophy and as such is not considered a radical group or anything remotely like ISIL or any other terrorist leaning organization. However, the fact that this shooter, as deranged as he clearly was, believed in the Muslim faith the case is being declared an act of domestic terrorism. Westboro’s support meanwhile is not. Why? Because, in part, they are of the right sort of faith and haven’t actively contributed to a mass shooting yet.

This case is about hate more than it is about faith. This individual gravitated towards islamic extremism the way an outcast kid gravitates towards the emo coalition because it feels like somewhere they can find friends who feel like they do. Only this guy didn’t find any friends or manage to be radicalized (he was already there by most accounts including his ex wife’). Instead the dude decided that the way to be noticed–to become part of the flock–was to enact a mass killing so that someone would say, hey you did a really good thing. You mattered. That right there is the problem and perhaps a key to the eventual solution.

Today I had the opportunity to lead a writing workshop for a handful of writers who gathered at Barnes and Noble under the premise of becoming better writers. I had the chance to work with one of my best friends in the world as a co-leader of this session. We spent the time we had together talking about character development and the things that really power stories forward. For me it all boils down to what a character loves and what they fear. What they love ties into what they want and what they need. What they fear tends to serve as an opportunity to force them to face those fears in order to move forward.

I did all of this while bearing the memory of my worst nightmare in ages. That nightmare came to me last night as an end of the world scenario. There was an asteroid poised to end life on earth and perhaps shatter the planet itself into unrecognizable pieces. Early in the dream I watched the asteroid’s precursor rocks shatter the moon, casting fragments down upon the earth. I remember, later in the dream, looking up and seeing the moon back in its rightful place but moving unusually fast through the suddenly calm evening sky. It was not the moon but the enormity of the earth-killer asteroid that filled the sky, warning me that the end was so very close.

I am scared of a number of things, all of which are outside of my control. Ghosts scare me, for I do not often know what they want. Death scares me, for I do not know what it means for my awareness other than the suspicion that it is the cessation of my awareness; an end state as though I were a computer suddenly unplugged. Worse than these two is the fear of a cataclysm that would end not only me but those who I love. I faced that fear in the dream and found that it lingered long after I woke.

In a story I would face down this fear and defeat it or perhaps come to terms. In life I can but hope that the feeling fades as do my occasional terrors and stark awareness of my mortality and impending end. This terror, that all that I have made in this world shall be swallowed and made to bear the pain of the end is yet another example of what I cannot control.

Perhaps that is what I truly fear the most.

A recent NYT article highlighted the strategies Donald Trump used to become and remain successful in the business world. To sum up the article, Trump made a lot of money on losing businesses by developing sweetheart deals to sell said businesses and avoid the debt for those businesses and their subsequent failure. This is in essence his plan for the U.S. Economy. Any basic analysis of the Trump budget strategy shows that he intends to put the responsibility of American debt on the countries we help support around the globe. He, perhaps falsely, plans to build a wall across the Mexican border and make the Mexican people pay for it. He expects Japan and many other countries to pay for the assistance we give them. This is a dangerous strategy beyond the scale of all the other rhetoric he’s created. The only reason people aren’t saying more about that is because it is so absurd that the republican led congress is completely ignoring it as a possibility.

Our country trades on reputation, presumed wealth, and military might. Our reputation is tied intrinsically with our presumed wealth. We give away a lot of money. We assist nations all over the world in an effort to curry political favor. We set up trade deals primarily designed to help them on the front end and build favor on the back end.

Trump wants to make America great again by making America a bully that takes advantage of international law to bully other countries and demand ridiculous arrangements that benefit America and screw the rest of the world. All that we’ve built with the world will begin to dissolve into resentment and realignment towards rising countries who are willing to offer support (see: China) eventually putting us in a position where we are the bad guy, and that can never end well.

Tonight I took the family to the drive inn for their first experience and my first in a good fifteen years. This drive in had screens fanned out in a circle establishing the rim of the place. As I scanned the various films, all of them silent except the feed to one pumping from the truck speakers, I realized something. All the films were following the same precise pattern to develop the opening moments of the story. In other words, all six films were taking the time to establish the world from the perspective of the viewer and of the characters we would be viewing. This is an often overlooked aspect of writing. We build a world and we either want to talk about it or talk about the people in it, but rarely does this happen in context with new writers.

By context I mean showing the rules of the world in a way that pertains to how the character is presently interacting with the world. The rules of the world impact us every day. I cross at the crosswalk because I know doing otherwise might set me up to get smacked by a car. If I were to write this world building moment I would show me crossing as another person crosses inappropriately and I would take notice of them as they narrowly avoid a car or interrupt traffic–which can also show how a person is self-centered vs. someone who wants to blend in as a rule follower.

The best writing is that which strikes a cord in the reader–a moment where the reader gets what you are saying and is able to reference/connect it to moments in their own existence. World building is bridge building, because you are building a bridge of understanding between your world and wherever the viewers come from and wherever they keep their emotions.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I heard someone today (a commercial I think) argue about how we ought to keep dreaming when we are adults and not give up on the hope that we can be anything we want to be. It resonated with me because I think people do give up all too quickly. At the same time I think we all need to be a lot more honest about our skills and where we are at in the world. I’m a mediocre teacher, an occasionally decent writer who doesn’t take the proper time the craft deserves, and someone who vacillates between having his head stuck in the clouds and into too many projects/schemes to be truly effective at any of them. There, how’s that for honest.
2. Okay, that felt freeing, but now what?

This is one of those weird nights when i’m trying to get the blog done early so I can finally close my eyes…before 11 PM. It has been a week. Twilight broke me then I finally had occasion to go to the pool and even play some hoops with the kids. Turns out I have zero lung capacity and get winded considering whether or not to track down a rebound. Speaking of sports, I wanted to give further consideration to my piece on coaching. I think it bears saying that these coaches care. They work extremely hard for no money and put everything into making the kids successful. I cannot complain about that. All I can do is praise them. However, this isn’t going to be about them. This is about the idea of competition as a whole.

I’ve been thinking about the organized sports world all wrong. It is and should be highly competitive at each level. I say this because these aren’t a bunch of kids gathering on sunday for a pickup game at the temple. That right there is what rec sports ought to look like–kids who are not entirely about that life having fun. Once you slap on a uniform; once you play organized athletics you are signing up for competition. You are saying ‘I am here to represent something’ be it the team on your jersey, your teammates or what have you, the point of being on the team is to respectfully carry on the legacy and tradition of excellence. Nobody gets into sports to suck. People do however enter sports without caring.

That is what I get upset about. I don’t like it when it is clear that some kids are about it and others want to pet a butterfly. That mix of mentality brings the team down and turns the experience into something you could’ve gotten in the back yard, not something that you paid a bunch of money to see happen.

I’ve talked about Twilight in class and to friends and on the web and basically anywhere I could preach. I’ve said the stories are classic examples of bad writing–purple prose wrapping an unbelievable conflict and useless protagonist like gift paper. I read through a good deal of the first book in order to form this opinion and knew that I would never ever see the movies.

Never say never.

I struck an accord with my lady that involved Zac Effron and what I know is going to be a terrible film. For my part I had to watch Twilight. I really tried. I watch some awful cinema on a regular basis. I saw all three Sharknados and will gladly sit through a fourth. Twilight is not even close to their level.

Here is the key difference. Sharknado knows what it is. Sharknado plays upon the campy nature of the film to create some built in expectations it can later riff off of. Twilight thinks of itself as a serious teen romance flick–with glowing freaking vampires. Moreover, these things are not vamps. Instead they are the twisted imaginings of someone who knows the general (religiously watered down) idea of vampires and decided to build on that in a way that makes them unrecognizable. This is not Justin Cronin’s Vampire nor is it even Count freakin Chockula. No, this is a poorly constructed representation of a false perception built on a bed of lies and misdirection. Twilight is crap.

 

I figured I better write a few things down before I lose myself at the bottom of a bag of chips. Yeah, that is happening. Some days you just gotta stress eat. What stresses me out the most as of late is the peculiar disconnect I see happening between nearly everyone in my line of sight and reality.

It isn’t even about the same stuff.

Perhaps that is the real revelation. We all have stuff that we actively decide not to be real about. For example, when I go to the basketball practices I can watch the excitement coming off in waves from the coaches. I love the competitiveness and recognize it in myself as a coach, but every so often I take a step back and don’t coach–don’t get locked into that myopia of competition and practice. When I look up, I realize that these are kids playing rec ball. I think every coach ought to do that–ought to evaluate their goals and roles here. I mean, geez. Yesterday the coaches had my kids pushing a truck at the workout.

Meanwhile today I had the most peculiar interaction with the neighbor kid. This neighbor is one who recently married and the new lady isn’t very social. He wasn’t social to begin with–at least towards me, so adding her into the mix is like putting an eraser over the word ‘opportunity’. They didn’t exactly come a knocking today but we had a moment where the kid got out of the family truck, so me and my littlest talislegger tossing around a football and had a moment of clarity. In that moment he realized that a kid exactly his age and fun as heck lived right next door. I know this because he repeated it out loud. His mother responded by dragging him inside and shutting the garage door. Such is life.

Some Thoughts:

1. There is one other dude on the facebook with my exact name. He lives in Indonesia, which is weird because neither my first nor last name is particularly indonesian and he is very indonesian. On the other hand, he appears to be muslim, which would explain the shared first name to some degree but the rest is so very random. So, what’s up, man?
2. Finally watched the last episode of flash. Just odd. What makes the show so difficult for me is that it is a form of soft sci-fi but masquerades as hard science, especially in terms of the time stream. But when you look closer it falls apart, becoming little more than made up terms and unanswered questions. I’m getting frustrated.
3. Haven’t had my boys for a week and the first day back they are so solidly amped and competing for private moments that the whole thing ended in disaster.
4. Lost track of my dieting and the body has quickly returned to the fat quadrant.
5. Been sleeping on the couch for a few nights while waiting for a much needed AC repair. My neck is jacked up beyond recognition.

Here’s the thing. I truly believe that people, deep down inside, are about self-fulfillment. I am convinced that in a simpler age self fulfillment was much easier. If your life consists of hunting, gathering, and the occasional sexual act your life is satisfied if you can meet those three needs. As we developed an increasingly complex world it became harder and harder to find fulfillment.

Sort of.

Perhaps now fulfillment is primarily attached to one key vector: respect. I present to you the curious case of the Arizona Del Taco Clerk:

When I stepped back to think about what was really going on here, I saw one key thing: Both sides of the conflict wanted respect. Obviously the guy at the window felt affronted and entitled and definitely felt like he deserved the respect of the customer. Meanwhile the customers were literally trying to get this guy fired because they felt disrespected. This conflict can be mapped on to any existing disagreement and have the same stakes. Both sides want respect and always have a different idea of what respect looks like and how to receive it.

Was the guy a jerk? Yeah, sure, but aren’t the customers doing the same thing by creating and continuing to maintain the situation? In truth, the store had the right to refuse service and the manager could have leaned on the tactic of calling the cops to force these guys out–thus forcing them to respect his will in some fashion.

I’m really tired of people trying to destroy each other. If we want respect we ought to try a new approach to this time we all share on the planet. We ought to work together to find a way to make the world a better place and not try to push someone down in the midsts of what was clearly a bad day. I don’t know the dude. He might be an asshole. Still doesn’t make it right to ruin him.