June 2, 2024

On Kicking the Nostalgia Bug: I’m much more interested at this point in understanding the history and the origins of things we’ve come to cherish so dearly. It’s not that I want to eliminate guilty pleasures, at least not entirely. After all we do only have one life to live, and if we’re not having fun there isn’t much point. I’ve long considered being much more serious in my pursuit of really digging into the sociology and anthropology of everything that I once held dear, but have proven to just be clever corporate commoditized distractions and leeches. I am now only interested in art and sport for their own sake. What do people really mean to say? What is keeping them from living or telling their truth? And how much do people betray about themselves unintentionally?

June 3, 2024

… much of my verbal diarrhea is based on the nervous energy I’ve pent up over the years to propel me forward.  I need to truly be more patient with myself. I need to let things develop, not rush through them just to get to the next thing. It’s a horrible habit I’ve picked up from the world around me. I just need to be, and as I’ve long figured, I need to write, whether or not I actually want to. It’s my one true calling. And I don’t mean about what cards sold on eBay last week, but about real cultural, social, and philosophical issues that need to be  better understood. For example, we all need to be a bit more like Harley Quinn, because she’s beautiful, awesome, and brilliantly and shamelessly imperfect.

[Harley is still my favorite comic book character ever. That’s why her POP figure sits on my desk in front of me.]

…I’m not an idiot. I keep talking myself down because it’s the only way I ever “fit in” but no, I was the court jester. Much like Harley. People can’t deal with spontaneous genius. People can’t deal with others whom they can’t wrap neatly into a box. 

Also yesterday was Thomas Hardy’s birthday — the British writer, not the actor, although I am a fan of both of their work. I don’t know why that amuses me so much, except that I used to read his poetry out loud in senior English class in a really poor British accent and it was hilarious. I had him comment on many different things, especially when my peers expressed strong dislike for his verbosity. I think Hardy had more of an effect on me than I realized…

June 4, 2024

Nathan Baugh of the World Builders newsletter is back… he was finishing a draft of his fiction book, so that’s cool. The letter is about “subjective words” and how they can make writing bland. I still disagree with both he and Stephen King about adverbs being evil, obviously. Although I admit I don’t use them nearly as much as I once did, actually. 

What Nathan means by “subjective words” by the advice of John MacDonald — who is still relatively young and has quite a groovy farm — are words that don’t really add much color without significant context. Words like “old” and “noisy” don’t really provide much information and lead to bland sentences. The way Macdonald rewrites a simplistic “The air conditioning unit in the motel room window was old and somewhat noisy” is rather incredible. I have to just copy pasta it here because I’m blown away by the picture he paints with these words:

“The air conditioning unit in the motel room had a final fraction of its name left, an “aire” in silver plastic, so loose that when it resonated to the coughing thud of the compressor, it would blur. A rusty water stain on the green wall under the unit was shaped like the bottom half of Texas. From the stained grid, the air conditioner exhaled its stale and icy breath into the room, redolent of chemicals and of someone burning garbage far, far away.”

I need to write more like this. That’s the most epic opening paragraph to a story I’ve ever heard. And the story isn’t even written yet, probably. It’s an incredible leap into hyper-reality, or at least, a pretty neat super-reality.

Hyperreality being “an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.”

Also the Oxford English Dictionary now has a subscription to be able to access more uncommon or rare words. I couldn’t get a definition from them for “superreality.” So now our English language is being paywalled. What is next?

So, I turned to the trusty Merriam Webster, which gave me the tidy definition for “superreality” as “marked by extraordinary vividness.”

I suppose you could create a super-real Hyperreality with any sort of writing. That seems like a very worthy goal. And it gets people to use their imaginations, and that can’t be a bad thing in a world that is constantly numbing our brains.

Macdonald says our descriptions shouldn’t be mere judgments, but unique and specific. I say we tend to be very reductionist in our every day language out of a sense that we need to force ourselves into a sort of brevity, and in writing, this shouldn’t be necessary. People will get so sucked into writing when it’s hyper real because suddenly they can’t look away; they’re absorbed in the text and this is what you want. It makes your setting and its characters and situations more believable because you’ve sucked your reader into your own alternate dimension. 

Great cinema does this with visual storytelling; even in the age of tired retreads of nostalgic properties, there are still immensely talented filmmakers and writers and cinematographers that are putting some novel ideas on display, at the very least unexpected remixes of genre and tropes. If only we could remove the corporate meddling and let art be for its own sake once again… yes indie films still have their niche but they aren’t becoming hits like they used to… crazy thing, all this MacDonald wisdom is from his Writers Handbook from 1984. Wow, what other gems are in there?

June 6, 2024

RJ finally had a video about books again, this one about philosophy!

He talks about “The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell (available for free through the Gutenberg project and Apple Books), and these others…

• “Philosophy” by Poplin and Stroll
• “Mastering philosophy” of the Palgrave Master Series written by Anthony Harrison-Barbet
• Russell history of western philosophy anthology 
• “the history of philosophy” by AC Grayling 
• “philosophy for beginners” laid out like a graphic novel
• “Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers” by Philip Stokes
• DK Big Book of Philosophy (still need to get that)
• “The Story of Philosophy,” “The Great Philosophers,” and “confessions of philosophers” by Bryan Magee, (who did tv series, too.)
• “Think” by Simon Blackburn, 
• “Western Philosophy: An Anthology” edited by John Cottingham
• Penguin Classics like Plato’s Republic, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching.

What a great opening line of Bertrand’s book, “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”

That question is so much more difficult than it appears at face value, and Russell says as much.

(I’d end up reading “Problems of Philosophy” and it’s a great book!)

June 10, 2024

I’ve been watching old vs new superhero movies because I’m noticing a definite pattern in their nostalgic reboots. All of them shoehorn in a “big bad” to end the world. How many times can you bring the world to its knees and have it not get old? Batman killing people in the Zack Snyder films, the bat brand… that was going way too far. What’s really frustrating to me is these films have a lot going for them. They are visual masterpieces but the suffering and destruction  are things of nightmares. Like the 2022 Batman reboot… it wasn’t entertaining to me. It left me feeling cold and bitter. I think that was the point, but still…

People need to have things to actually look forward to… not just shilling products and services in order to create the content they want to make. I realize this has been the case for centuries… sponsors are as old as the Greeks, and even past that.

But art for art’s sake is important and the formulaic templates all these new series and films are forced to stick to is sickening me and actually making me more depressed. Everything is a retread. Even the Star Wars Hunters game that I actually find fairly good… it’s yet another arena game. It’s all laid over the same mold, just with some different mechanics and varied settings. There’s nothing new anymore. We’re just recycling nostalgia and creating variations on themes that are getting dated quickly. Rather than tell the story of where we are now, we’d rather be spoon fed nostalgia, which may as well be a narcotic. 

June 11, 2024

I woke up thinking about a spacefaring race of elephants. Sounds silly but it’s not actually that crazy. They are ridiculously intelligent social creatures.

I thought about how I’d reboot the next generation again. I already had ideas that I was working on awhile ago. I even came up with a new cast and even an alternate set of characters. But I’m sick of reboots. I’d rather do something completely new. Although a reboot TNG movie that isn’t simply another “end of the world” story that highlights the best of that series but delivers an exciting product would be cool. I feel like there are so many reboots that have great ideas that would be better served as their own stories… but we all know how that works out…

I asked Copilot: What are the best science fiction novel series of all time and what made them so popular?

Besides the Dune series, with which I’m quite familiar, and the Shadow Saga series by Orson Scott Card (which I’m only vaguely aware of existing), copilot mentioned a bunch I’m not familiar with: Zones of Thoughts series by Vernor Vinge, Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson, and the Heechee Saga by Frederik Pohl. 

Copilot says the common factors that made these series popular were innovative concepts (groundbreaking ideas in tech, space, and futurism), engaging storytelling (narratives often featuring epic adventures, political intrigue, and deep character development), and philosophical depth (exploring themes like human nature, society, and the cosmos, prompting readers to think deeply.)