The plan today is to write “something about goals.”

What do I have to say on this topic? Past Brian really set me up today because when it comes to writing blog posts, specificity is key.

Come to think of it, specificity is key with setting goals, too. You can start with a goal like “I want to buy a house some day” but if you can turn that into “I’m going to buy the house on Maple street next year,” you’re more likely to achieve what you set out to accomplish.

I have a goal to get one of my novels traditionally published. It’s not a very specific goal, though, which may be why I haven’t moved much closer to reaching this goal. I keep writing and showing up, as it were, but maybe I’ll find more success if I focus on publishing a specific novel. Narrowing the focus to Spin City or Synthetic Dreams would make it possible to set specific steps and timelines.

I’m not narrowing that goal down tonight, but it’s something I will definitely consider.

The difference between a goal and a dream is action. You can imagine how your life will change when you win the lottery, but until you actually buy a ticket, it’s a dream, not a goal.

Goals don’t always need to be practical, but they should be achievable. You should be able to make plans and take steps towards getting closer to your goal. Setting a goal to become an astronaut or a professional athlete is actionable and achievable until you age out. Until then, you can study and work out and try to make contacts with the right people. Once the window closes, however, it’s healthier to shift to more possible targets.

Goals don’t have to be life changing. I set smaller goals for myself in my writing and at work all the time. Writing a blog post every day for 31 days in a row is an achievable, actionable goal that I’m accomplishing. Writing 50,000 words in the month of November is a goal I succeeded at 3 times in the past, and plan to do again this month. But sometimes I just focus on my daily goals. Make the bed. Clean the garage. Attend all the meetings on time.

Succeeding at things we set out to do makes us feel good about ourselves, and it leads to being able to achieve larger, more complicated goals. When I have a monster project at work, I break it into smaller tasks, focusing on the easiest at first so that I can leverage the feeling of accomplishment to launch into more challenging tasks.

When you fail to achieve a goal, when something goes from possible to impossible, it is important to forgive yourself. Trying to hit a target is laudable and good, and sometimes it has to be enough that we tried, even when we fail. I have certainly become discouraged after missing the mark. I’ve been downright depressed for weeks at a time after some particularly poignant misses. As of this writing, I’m on my feet and moving forward. I might still trip, but forgiveness and perseverance are just as important in achieving goals as focus, skill, and luck.

It may help to write your goals down. Do you use daily planners? Write your goals in there, or in some other journal. Or post them in public on a blog. Just having them on a page in front of you can be beneficial, even instrumental in being able to find success.

I like to use a whiteboard to list short term goals and the tasks necessary for completing them. As I finish tasks, I put a checkmark next to the item. Every time I check something off my list, it feels good.

Give yourself time to not be goal focused. This might be hours, days, or weeks. We all have different needs and different requirements to regain our mental fortitude. I try to play computer games in the evenings. As important as I believe it to be to have goals, it’s just as important to have waking time without any structure or plans.

Anyway, I suppose I don’t have that much to say about goals. Probably nothing you haven’t heard before, but maybe someone out there could use the reminder.

Also, if you need these two things…

That thing you’ve been thinking about doing but you’re afraid to take the first step? You have my permission to go for it, if you’re looking for permission. You have my support, if you need it.

If you’re overwhelmed and overburdened, and you just need to stop and breathe for a while, you have my permission to do that, too, if you’re waiting for someone to give you a break. You also have my support, if you need it.

My senior year of high school was 1990-91, which meant we should probably have had a 30 year reunion in 2020 or 2021. Probably thanks to Covid, the reunion didn’t happen.

I say “probably” because I didn’t see anything about it from anyone. Before I talk more about that, let’s talk about my 10 and 20 year reunions, which I did attend.

I remember feeling a little bit nervous going into the 10 year reunion. I was not particularly popular. I’m still not, but I have better tools for dealing with that now.

My 10 year reunion was after I finished my time in the Air Force. I had an okay job at the time, had just bought a home in Sacramento, and my kids were the cutest ages, 2 and 3. I may have been nervous going in, but then I felt this swell of confidence come over me, and I was fine. I had a good time, and I genuinely enjoyed seeing a bunch of people I hadn’t talked to in a decade.

Another 10 years rolled by, and I went to my 20 year reunion. The first reunion, I went by myself. Melissa came with me for the next, and I expected it to be a really good time. I had an okay job, my kids were doing great, and the only debt we had was the rest of the mortgage.

The 20 year reunion was weird. I felt very disconnected from everyone, and it was like these adults were trying to force the same social dynamics we engaged in during high school. Maybe that’s how most reunions go, but I don’t remember feeling it at the first reunion. Melissa and I left a little bit early, and I remember feeling profoundly sad about the whole thing.

Covid probably ensured there would be no 30 year reunion. How do I feel about that?

At this point in my life, I have a great job. My house is paid off and I have no debt. My kids are adults and doing great. I’m very proud of them. I’ve succeeded in getting a short story published. I have more accomplishments to be proud of at this point in my life than any other.

I don’t need to hang out with a bunch of near-50-year-olds in order to feel validation. People that repeatedly made me feel awkward or insignificant.

It might have been nice to attend just one more reunion, just to see if time and experience might have turned us all into decent people that could get along and be happy for each other. There are still a few people from high school that I see on Facebook, and they seem like nice people.

Covid robbed many of us of wonderful opportunities. Missing my 30 year high school reunion might have been a blessing in disguise, however.

Maybe we’ll see what comes up in 2030-31.

I want to talk about discrimination, even if though I have been fortunate enough to rarely be a target. I don’t expect to change the world. I doubt I’ll even have the opportunity to change any minds. I want to talk about it as “othering” because it weighs heavily on my mind every day, perhaps more so than any topic.

Every single day, I see examples of discrimination. From blatant, overt racism to silly blonde jokes. Fat shaming, kink shaming, ageism, ableism, sexism. Liberal versus conservative. Religious intolerance.

Discrimination manifests in ways as subtle as microaggressions to as overt as physical assault. Some people just like to pollute the air with slurs. The worst is the discrimination we don’t see, where people are denied jobs and loans and opportunities just because someone else takes offense to the way they look or the way they live their life.

Maybe it is difficult for some people to look at others and see the differences while retaining the idea that we are all the same.

Some individuals are true monsters, but not because of their cross section or identity. It’s okay to judge a person on their actions. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. But let people show you first.

This is not simple. It takes practice and patience. But it is necessary.

I’m no saint. When I was younger, I took the messages from my church to heart, and I was not as kind as I should have been to someone that came out to me as gay. I hurt them with my disapproval. It’s one of my biggest regrets, and I’m sorry they had to suffer for me to learn the lesson.

It’s like we’re taught to Other people early on, and then we’re encouraged to practice it daily. Have you ever seen someone shout at someone for liking a different sports team? Have you been part of an organization that regularly hazes the newest members? How do you feel about patriotism? If you’re in the US, how comfortable are you with talking with someone with a thick accent? We’re trained in school, during pep rallies, to hold some other group of people in contempt, and as we get older, we continue to practice those ways every day. Reducing people to the place they’re from, or the way they look or sound.

There are worse forms of discrimination than others, and I’m not trying to diminish racism by also talking about sports fans treating each other badly. People are dying because of the color of their skin, every day. Although some sports fans tear their town apart and overturn cars based on the outcome of an event, it’s different. I’m talking about discrimination and othering broadly because I think the type of thinking involved is the same, and I want to reiterate that we are encouraged into this type of thinking in every walk of life. It’s systemic.

Is there an answer? Is this just how humans will always behave?

I want to believe things are getting better over time, but I don’t know. Individuals can certainly overcome ingrained habits and treat other people with respect and kindness, rather than reduce them to whatever cross-section is present. It takes a little bit of empathy and active listening. If enough individuals choose to overcome prejudice, then positive change can occur.

There are no easy answers. There are just people.

Several of my posts this month have been down on technology, from social media to cell phones. I even suggested that technology is responsible for slowing down the evolution of media, which in turn causes pop culture to stagnate. If one didn’t know me, they might ask if I was some sort of luddite.

The short answer is no, I’m not a technophobe. Thank you for stopping by.

The long answer is nooooooooooooo.

I’m a technology enthusiast. Both my leisure and professional time is spent enjoying technology, specifically computers. I love building hardware and writing software, but I also enjoy learning electronics and aviation and physics.

There’s a reason I’m more drawn towards Sci-Fi than Fantasy.

Many years ago, when Melissa and I were looking for another school for Bryanna and Chris, we stopped by one of the more popular private school options and talked to them about their curriculum. They seemed pretty good, except for one thing: no screens. They took pride in denying kids time in front of computers, and they expected the kids to not have computer access at home. That struck me as incredibly short-sighted, because you really need good computer familiarity in order to accel in STEM programs.

Granted, I may have gone too the other way. I made sure the kids had their own computers, their own access to the internet, and their grades may have suffered a time or two because they spent more time playing games than doing their homework. Then again, they’re very comfortable with systems, with Chris going so far as to build and upgrade computers for both himself and his girlfriend. My kids turned out fine. Also, a technophobe wouldn’t have raised their kids the way I did.

I genuinely think our technology will save us in the long run. We’ll generate cleaner energy. We’ll build robots that pull plastic out of the ocean and pull carbon out of the air. If we’re lucky, we’ll design artificial intelligences that help us step back from war and division, allowing people greater opportunities to express themselves and enjoy and create art.

While teaching high school kids programming in an after school program, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, and I could not stop thinking about it. I told the kids about it, how automated systems flew into the atmosphere, lowered the rover via a sky crane, then flew off so that it wouldn’t crash on the newly deployed robot. It happened on another planet, far enough away that humans couldn’t help even if they wanted to. And it worked.

I love technology. Science is experimenting and learning. Technology is doing. We need both.

With that in mind, when I look back on my recent posts where I disparage some of our technical achievements, it’s not the technology I have a problem with. It’s the people. Social media as a technology is fantastic, offering people the ability to connect in ways no one else could connect at any other point in history. And we use it to bully each other and elevate people that do not deserve to be elevated.

Cell phones are incredible pieces of technology that can give us access to information in a moment’s notice. We can talk to them, and for the most part, they’re able to interpret what we say and answer our questions or act on our requests. I don’t dislike cell phones because of the technology. I dislike them because other parts of my life have turned cell phones into an obligation. I want to love cell phones. I just can’t.

I am not a technophobe, but I like writing about characters that are afraid of technology. I think I can understand their perspective, even if I don’t share it.

My first cellphone was a Nokia in 1999. I don’t remember the model name or number, but it was the little brick-like thing that basically everyone had back then. I just got out of the Air Force and not only were Melissa and I looking for a home, I was looking for a job. If prospective employers were going to be able to call me back, I needed a phone number, so a cell phone made sense. I still have that original number.

I kept that brick for a really long time. I don’t remember what the phone was after that, but I think it was Windows CE based. I think it had a stylus? I really don’t remember. I liked it for a really long time, and then I didn’t, just like all of the phones I’ve ever had.

In 2008, I picked up the iPhone 3gs. I kept that until I started working for Trimark, then jumped on the Nokia Lumia 920. I really loved that phone. Unfortunately, the world conspired to kill Windows Phone, and Microsoft finally complied with their wishes. Then I switched to the Galaxy S7, and now I’m on the Galaxy Note 9. Both of the last two phone updates were somewhat hostile.

I’m not sure what happened, but with the Galaxy S7, I reached the point where I legitimately started to resent having to have a phone at all. It’s supposed to be this powerful device that puts the sum of human knowledge in the palm of my hand, simultaneously connecting me with friends and family at a moments notice. It feels more like obligation in physical form, and a way for government and corporate organizations to track and spy on me, if they wanted to.

With the proliferation of 2 factor authentication, I cannot do without a cell phone. I don’t really have a choice. If I want to be able to do my job or log into my bank account, I have to have a cell phone. It’s an indelible part of my life experience now. Not having a choice in the matter is probably a good part of why I do not care for cell phones anymore.

Apparently, AT&T thought I was still using the old Lumia, and since that device is 3G only, they decided I needed a new phone. I knew the S7 used LTE, so I knew that when the 3G network stops in a few months, my phone would be fine. AT&T sent me emails stating that my phone wouldn’t work when 3G went away, and I ignored those emails. I barely noticed when the emails switched from warnings to “We are going to send you a new phone.”

They selected the Galaxy Note 9. There’s some letters after the 9, but I don’t remember what they are. It supports 5G, and it has a stylus, and it’s a little bit larger than the S7. Large enough that it doesn’t really go in my front pocket very well anymore. Other than the size, it’s a fine phone, and a suitable replacement for the S7.

I thought when I received the new phone, I would transfer my hate from the S7 to the Note directly. I knew I was going to hate transferring apps and credentials and all the 2 factor stuff. I was right, in that was very inconvenient. I’ve had the new phone for a while now, and even tonight, I had to bust out the old phone in order to log into my Steam account.

A funny thing happened, though. I intentionally chose to remove a bunch of apps from the Note. I didn’t install Wordscapes, or Pokemon Go, or Twitter. I tried to uninstall Facebook, but the phone itself doesn’t allow for that, which is pretty scary. I allowed myself 1010! for games, and I installed Discord and Spotify and a few other apps I deemed essential.

Now… I kind of like my phone, again.

It helps that it’s new, and I don’t have to charge it every night. I’ve been getting away with charging it every 3 days.

The big quality of life improvement, though, is that I’ve reduced my access to social media, which was bumming me out at all hours of the day. I also reduced the games I was playing, because ultimately, those games weren’t as much fun as they were secondary jobs. I reduced some of my daily obligations just by not installing a handful of apps. It has improved my quality of life.

I suppose that’s the point, and it is almost certainly applicable in other areas. Less can be more. I don’t need the shiniest, newest cell phone, because the newest devices exceed my needs. That excess turns into a kind of weight on my mind, where I feel like I need to do more with the device in order to justify the cost and its existence.

If any of what I’ve just described resonates with you, perhaps you can do what I’ve done and simplify. Take a look at the apps on your phone that you’re using, and ask yourself if you need them. If you don’t need them, ask yourself if they’re making you happy. If they’re not making you happy and you don’t need them, uninstall them. Don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy. It’s not worth it.

In 2007, a handful of coworkers talked me into joining Facebook. I liked the prospect of reconnecting with old friends and family, but in the beginning, I joined for the games. I recall enjoying Mafia Wars, Heroes, and a little bit of Farmville.

Not long after that, one of my coworkers was talking about Twitter and how much fun they were having following some celebrities, but micro-blogging sounded lame to me. I didn’t join Twitter until 2011.

I remember thinking Google+ would be cool and played with it until it shut down. I never really had a lot of interest in Instagram, and I wound up creating an account there by accident a few years ago. I still haven’t posted any pictures. I even remember joining one a few years ago that was trying to be a Twitter replacement. It had an elephant for a logo, or something like that.

It’s fair to say my entrances into social media platforms have all been reluctant. With that in mind, you can take the following criticisms about social media with as much salt as you like.

In short, I think social media is the Internet’s biggest mistake, and it’s never going away. This is not a controversial opinion, which is weird considering how many of us are still using Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.

They Make Money Selling Our Data

You can create an account on these platforms and post information for free, but this is not a free service. As you upload your personal data, you go into a database, and algorithms using the pages you view and the words you post extract specific and detailed information about you. This information is then sold primarily to marketers, but it can wind up with anyone with enough capital to buy this information.

Facebook went so far as to buy a company that specialized in spyware and made it part of their mobile application. We have Apple to thank for cracking down on that, but Facebook continues to use unscrupulous methods to attain information about you. The Facebook app came installed on my brand new Galaxy Note 9, and unlike other applications, there is no option to uninstall it, which I find fascinating.

When the company you’re dealing with is making money off of you by selling your data to a third party, you’re not really a customer. At best, you’re a product. At worst, you’re a victim.

We Engage with the Worst Aspects of Humanity

If we only clicked on cat videos and harmless memes, social media wouldn’t be as much of a problem. I think some people actually do manage to avoid the worst of it, so all of my criticism of these platforms must seem out of place. Melissa sticks mostly with recipes and funny videos on Facebook, and so by avoiding Twitter, she’s not in constant danger of having her day ruined.

For example, earlier today, one of the trending subjects was “Bean Dad.” Do you know what Bean Dad refers to? If not, consider yourself lucky. In fact… if you’re unaware of the problems with social media and you don’t know anything about Bean Dad or why I’m bringing this up, click away and enjoy your day. I am not interested in bumming you out.

If Bean Dad sounds familiar, though, and you’re curious, it refers to a man that had a hungry 9 year old daughter. This little girls asked the Dad for lunch, but the Dad was busy putting together a puzzle, and told his 9 year old daughter to make some beans. The girl asked how, and the Dad said open a can of baked beans and put them in a pot. The girl didn’t know how to open the can and asked her Dad to do it. He told her to do it herself. She struggled to get the can open for 6 hours. She finally figured out how to get the can opener to work.

Maybe it was a good opportunity to teach the little girl how to make baked beans. But this little girls was hungry, and struggled for hours. Obviously the Dad is a tremendous asshole, and did his daughter no favors that day. She probably learned how to open the can on her own, but what she learned about her Dad is going to stay with her.

This happened in January of this year. Why is it trending today? Because some woman on Twitter said today that in order to force her 7 year old son to eat, she burns the boys Pokemon cards. Twitter became obsessed with this, and compared this woman to Bean Dad from 9 months ago.

I just talked about 2 extraordinarily bad people, but the behavior of the parents isn’t the point. The unfortunate truth is that there are lots of bad parents in the world we don’t know about. My Mom was inappropriately mean to me in a similar way, threatening to cut off my fingers in order to try and motivate me to clean my room when I was 4 or 5. Bad parents hurt their children, and those children grow up with scars, both physical and mental.

We on social media are also behaving badly, because we reward these bad parents with attention they have not earned and do not deserve. They get nicknamed things like Bean Dad, and for better or worse, they get their 15 minutes of fame. For some people, it ruins their lives. Other people somehow turn that attention into profit. This is how we end up with Ben Shapiros, Glen Becks, and Ann Coulters — monstrous people saying monstrous things and retaining a following by remaining in the public eye.

Perhaps you think I’m making a big, politically motivated stretch by mentioning those three after talking about the first 2 terrible parents. I haven’t given you the final bit of information that brings this all home. The woman that said she was burning her son’s Pokemon cards? It’s fake. She said it specifically to get attention. She’s a political communications strategist that’s worked for people like Rand Paul.

To summarize this point, we engage with the sensational, so the algorithms show us the most sensational news. Media outlets are encouraged by our behavior to post clickbait titles and slanted stories, because that’s what gets people to click their links. If people land on their stories, they get ad revenue. The way we engage with social media encourages the growth and prosperity of “fake news.”

Dirty Political Money and Lies

There is monetary incentive to sell ad space to Russians and foreign agencies that want to influence our election. These are sensational messages that get clicks. Facebook continues to spread a lot of propaganda, and there is no reason for them to question it, let along stop.

With the way social media works, we group ourselves into comfortable corners, sheltered from reasonable, opposing views. We’re continuously fed information from extreme perspectives, and we’re actively discouraged from trying to find any sort of common ground to work from. This results in greater polarization and widening gaps over topics that should not even be political.

In the middle of a pandemic, masks, social distancing, and the use of vaccines has become a political issue. Social media is a large part of why these matters remain political, because it acts as a megaphone for people with exceedingly narrow and extreme views.

It is reasonable to be concerned with injecting a virus into your system that is new and untested. It is reasonable to want to have a conversation about the vaccines, in order to assess that the cure isn’t going to be worse than the disease. 98% of people survive Covid, right? What if the virus has some long term effect that’s worse?

I can appreciate these concerns, and I can even address some of these in a reasonable fashion, with empathy. The truth is that these mRNA viruses are not new. They were started in the 80s as a way of fighting HIV. We have long term data, and Covid can actually be worse than the vaccine, because we know how the vaccine works, and we know that even if you survive Covid, you may have severe health problems for the rest of your life. Also, every time Covid spreads, we increase the likelihood of a new variant that will be more deadly, more resistant to treatment. Getting vaccinated is safe, and it is the kind thing to do because it reduces the chance of other people dying.

Matters of health and science should not be subject to sensationalism or political messaging, and yet the way we engage with social media encourages politicizing these subjects. For that matter, law shouldn’t be sensational, either.

Social Media is a Mixed Bag

For every good aspect of social media, there is one or more downsides. I like that I can use these platforms to stay in contact with friends and family that are socially and geographically distant. I like that I can connect with other people that have shared interests. I have enjoyed meeting other writers through Twitter. Some of these connections have turned into genuine friendships.

On the other hand, a lot can be lost in translation when we’re conveying our thoughts through text. Context can be lost. Emotions misread, which can lead to hurt feelings and unnecessary conflict. This is true in other mediums as well, but for all of the reasons I have already listed, social media magnifies and rebroadcasts simple conflicts, because nothing draws a crowd like an online fight. In fact, because of the kind of attention it draws, we’re sort of encouraged to pick fights online.

In addition to everything else I’ve described, I just don’t think social media is healthy. One moment, I’m reading about the passing of an old friend’s father. I’m filled with grief for my friend and their loss. I scroll down, and I’m immediately presented with a legitimately funny joke. The context switches are too fast. I’m not given a chance for my emotions to catch up. I read the joke and I laugh, and I feel like a monster for so quickly shifting from the grief my friend is going through.

There’s more I could talk say on this subject, but it’s all so exhausting. If we were wise, we would not engage with the extreme views, and focus on the things that matter. We would stop scrolling after finding out our friend lost their father. Or, we would skip over the individual that’s posting vile behavior to garner attention.

As a whole, we’re not wise enough to do these things, and so things will continue as they are until something finally breaks.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been doing 1 of 3 things. Working the day job, writing these blog posts, and playing Valheim. I might be eating and sleeping in between, too, but that cannot be confirmed at this time.

Why am I still playing Valheim? What is it about this game that’s captivated my attention?

The short answer is that it is a solid game and I just like it. I have a LOT more to say on this subject, so if this is where you want to get off, that’s okay. Thanks for stopping by. If you’d like to play with me, let me know. I have at least one dedicated server running all the time.

For the long answer, I’m going to talk about what Valheim is, what it isn’t, and compare it to a few other games.

Valheim is an open world, sandbox adventure game set in a Norse-Viking, low-polygon world. The game is currently in pre-release, purchasable on Steam for $20, and it’s been out since February 2nd, 2021. It is developed by Iron Gate Studio, and it gained a huge amount of popularity early on, which forced the small development team to rethink their strategy and focus on bug fixes rather than new content. Recently, they released their Hearth and Home update which changed the weapons and food, and added a small amount of content, though it hasn’t opened up any new bosses or zones yet.

It’s received positive reviews. The Reddit community is not bad. It can run on PC and Linux, takes up very little space on the hard drive, and though it has low polygon counts, it can be absolutely beautiful at times.

What do you do in this game? What’s it all about?

When you start, you are flown into the world by one of Odin’s Valkyries. You are a warrior that has died in battle, and you have been recruited into Valheim to fight a series of monsters that upset the balance of the world. You are there to train up and prepare, so that you can prove you are worthy of moving on to Valhalla.

That’s more backstory than actual gameplay. What you actually do is survive in a world that kind of wants to kill you. To survive, you gather resources, build homes, forge weapons, and then pit yourself against the 5 bosses in the world. Defeating each boss opens up new resources which you’ll need to move on to the next boss.

There is progression in this game, but it’s very natural. Unlike some games, you aren’t leveling up a particular character class. You’re not going to become a level 20 warrior before you move on to defeat the swamp monster. Progression is more about what you as a player are capable of achieving, given the resources that are available to you at the time.

In the picture above, my character has the best weapons and armor available in the game. If I were to create a brand new character and pass all of that equipment on to them, that new character would be almost as powerful and effective as the old. I say almost as there are skills in the game, such as running, jumping, swimming, sword use, etc. The more you do those things, the better your character gets at doing them. However, player skill plays a larger role than the programmed skills. The programmed skills just makes you more efficient.

Your health and stamina in the game varies based on the food you eat. If you eat some serpent stew and bread, you’re going to have really good health and stamina until the effects from those meals wear off. In the beginning, you don’t have access to serpent stew, blood pudding, or any of those other meals. But you have access to berries and mushrooms, and you can hunt boar or deer for meat. Again, there is progression, based on the resources at hand. And just like with the equipment, it doesn’t matter if the character has been played for 5 minutes or 5 months. If I load both characters up with fine foods, they’ll both be equally tough.

I really like this kind of progress. It feels natural to me. It makes the experience more immersive.

So the point of the game is to eat the best food, put on the toughest armor, and fight the bosses, right? Well… that’s one of the things you can do in the game. Personally, I like establishing a base and getting comfortable before I move through the progression. I usually start with a relatively humble house. A place where I can store materials and rest when I need to.

Eventually I move on to making more extravagant structures, as I get access to stone working and iron supports.

Valheim has some of the best qualities of Minecraft mixed with some of the open world feel of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or whatever your favorite sandbox adventure game might be. When you first set up the world, it’s procedurally generated, so it offers lots of opportunities for exploration. In that respect, it serves the Explorer player type the way No Man’s Sky does.

By Explorer Type, I’m referring to the Four Player Types. I wrote a long write-up about the Four Types on Reddit some time ago if you’re interested.

Valheim is a game you can play by yourself, or you can play with friends. I did a full run through with Chris, and I shared an open world with Bryanna and her friend Eric for a while. Those were really fun adventures, and I’d love to play with people again.

What else can I say about this game? Death is not permanent. When you die, you drop everything you were carrying. which can be recovered. The skills I mentioned before drop a little bit when you die, but it’s not the end of the world. Since you respawn at the last place you slept, you might be quite a distance from your body.

Quests in other games might have you go out in the world and hunt deer to harvest 10 hides, to give to some NPC farmer so they can patch up their barn, or something. In Valheim, you don’t have any NPCs to give you quests. You give yourself quests. You may figure out you need 10 deer hides in order to construct a faster boat. This means that you might do similar activities to what you may find in an MMO, activities many people might call grinding, but it doesn’t feel like a grind since it is all self motivated.

If you enjoy open world, sandbox games and you’re curious about Valheim, I recommend giving it a try. I find it very relaxing. Maybe it’s the game for you, too.

I spoke with Mary Robinette Kowal during the retreat about a variety of topics, including genre and the cycle between Fantasy and Sci-Fi. We’re coming off a long cycle of Fantasy dominating popular media (with things like Game of Thrones), and if history is any indicator, a Sci-Fi wave should be starting soon. Mary Robinette recommended that if I have a Sci-Fi story with comedy elements, now would be a good time to work on it.

I agree with her, and I’ve been feeling for a while that people will be hungry for good Sci-Fi soon. I love writing Sci-Fi, so this would be fantastic for me if it holds true. Also, I’ve got a couple of Sci-Fi books I’d like to sell. It sure would be nice if the timing was in my favor.

Considering what I wrote yesterday, is it true? Will popular media shift and change as it has in the past, or will the fidelity and omni-presence of older works slow down the progress and evolution of stories?

I’m honestly not sure. Peter Jackson’s take on Lord of the Rings is a permanent part of our culture and regarded by many as their favorite movie. The ill-conceived Hobbit trilogy may not have delighted all the fans the way Lord of the Rings did, but it still made money, and it didn’t damage the popularity of Lord of the Rings the way the sequel Star Wars trilogy may have damaged its franchise. Game of Thrones is also still present in everyone’s minds, in spite of the dreadful last season. HBO just released a teaser for the next spin-off series.

On the smaller screen, we’ll have the Wheel of Time series very soon.

Fantasy doesn’t appear to be going away or receding. I can’t think of any Sci-Fi franchises on the cusp of seizing everyone’s attention.

I wonder if Superhero movies have taken the place of Sci-Fi in popular media. We certainly are not starved for that content, and I’m not complaining. I love all of it, even if I have very little interest in writing any of it myself.

The last time I visited Barnes & Noble, the Fantasy and Sci-Fi section seemed smaller than I remember. The Sci-Fi section in particular seemed very small, with only a few shelves. It makes me think that the Sci-Fi wave I’m hoping for is not yet on the horizon.

It’s hard to say. I don’t have anything concrete I can point at.

In the long run, it doesn’t matter what the market is doing. I’m going to write what I like to read and write, and if I’m lucky, I’ll find a way to put my stories in front of people.

Maybe the world won’t start on a huge Sci-Fi wave until I put some of my short stories out and give people a reason to be invested in that sort of content again.

I may have written about this idea before, but I want to revisit it because it still fascinates me. Modern culture appears to be frozen in time, and I believe it is modern technology that is preserving it.

For this post, I will talking about American culture, because it is the only one I’m qualified to talk about. Mostly I will be talking about music, movies, and books. To a degree, I’m just talking about pop culture, the music and media primarily broadcast at a younger audience, but I think this idea has broader application.

Find a young person. Someone in their teens or early twenties. Don’t be creepy, though. I’m not advocating that you go and stalk high schools. Just casually strike up a conversation with a young person that happens to be behind you in line, or maybe someone at a drive-thru that has been told to “engage with the customers” and is doing their best.

Ask this young person if they know the song “Take on Me.” You know the song. It’s by A-Ha, in case you didn’t know. It had a video where a young girl falls in love with a pencil drawn singer that breaks out of his comic book by thrashing against the walls of her hallway.

Whoever you ask, young or old, will know that song. They might even go into falsetto to prove it. It’s a part of our pop culture.

That song came out in 1985, nearly 40 years ago. To put that into perspective, it would be like a teenager in the 80s bopping around to Doo-Wop. Sure, there were some teenage music geeks listening to older music back then, but for the most part they were busy listening to the stuff being invented that decade. Even disco, which had been popular 10 years earlier, was considered gauche in the 80s.

Compare that to Cee Lo Green’s “Crazy.” I might be wrong, but I believe it’s still a well loved song that is familiar. It seems like it came out just a few years ago, right? It came out in 2006. That’s 15 years.

It could be a matter of perspective. That is, I’m naming songs that I grew up with, so maybe I just think other people know these songs. My kids know these songs, and it seems like they could have heard them from me, right?

That’s not generally been the direction of musical discovery, though. For the most part, I learn songs from them. I’m always hungry for new music, and Bryanna is an amazing source. Also, I’ve talked with my kids’ friends, and they also seem to know all this music.

Some of it is because of movies. Studios choose these songs as backdrops in scenes, and to change the feel of a teaser or a trailer. Some of these songs are fuel for memes. Everyone knows “Never Gonna Give You Up” because Rick Rolling is an indelible part of our culture now. That song came out 35 years ago.

Memes and movies provide an introduction, but technology serves to preserve the media in perfect fidelity. A person might have watched Watchmen and got Hallelujah stuck in their head. If they wanted to, they could look it up online and listen to it in perfect digital quality immediately. Hallelujah originally came out in 1984.

Technology preserves the quality of the images and music for all time, and it makes the media available on your cell phone whenever you want it. Also, it simplifies the means of production. Instruments and autotuning, recording and enhancing, packaging and marketing. It’s easier than ever to make music or art and put it out in the world. With the ease comes a homogenization of tools and patterns, which means the music made 10 years ago has similar sound and production value as music made today. That’s why Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” can fit easily in the same play list as Ava Max’s “Kings & Queens.”

I’m making a lot of assertions without much proof. As a means of verifying some of my claims, let me ask this: What did music sound like in the 60s? The 70s? The 80s? Even the 90s? These decades have distinctive sounds to them, right? The internet and digital media bloomed in the mid to late 90s. What does the music sound like in the 00s? The 2010s? The 2020s? Popular music in the last 30 years has homogenized.

This is not me saying that modern music isn’t good. I listen to lots of new music and I love it! It just seems like the evolution has slowed down as the shelf life of songs has grown longer and longer.

Michael pointed me towards a quote from Plato:

Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.

If music is the soul of culture, what does it mean when the music slows in its shifting into newer forms, lingering longer in our hearts and minds well after the musician has put down their instruments and left the stage?

I love Star Wars.

It’s good to start with a straight forward declaration like that, because when I get into some of my criticisms of the franchise, I’ll remind people to look at the first sentence, because everything I have to say about this fixture of our culture comes from a good place.

I considered starting by ranking the movies, but that’s not the greatest way to engage in a productive conversation about Star Wars on the Internet. Some of the fans have definite favorites, and the discourse dissolves as soon as we start arguing over which one is the best. I have a favorite flavor of ice cream, too, but if you offer me a bowl of vanilla, I’m not going to be upset. My favorite ice cream flavor is mint fudge, by the way. It’s a flavor that is hard to find now and is distinct from mint chocolate chip.

It is better to talk about why I love Star Wars. Usually, it’s the characters. I say usually because some Star Wars movies do a better job giving us characters that are memorable and fully realized. I like Rogue One just fine, but I still can’t tell you the names of half of characters.

The spectacle also draws me in. As maligned as The Phantom Menace may be, it gave us Darth Maul and the best lightsaber duel we’ve ever seen on the silver screen. Other lightsaber fights come close, but Ray Park gave us a physical presence and performance that no other Star Wars actor has matched. More than just lightsabers, I love the space combat, and the unique locations, and the vast, vibrant universe. The Star Wars world is at its finest when its a little bit dirty and lived in, because it feels like a real place that I could visit and enjoy. That’s all part of the spectacle.

I like how most of the Star Wars stories are put together. Many classes on story structure include Star Wars for a reason, because it gets the structure of the story right, most of the time.

There seem to be exceptions to all of the nice things I have to say about these movies. It’s almost as if I don’t like all Star Wars movies equally.

If we were talking about Star Trek, that would be fine, right? The rule of thumb used to be that every other Star Trek movie is good. Diehard Star Trek fans know in their heart that Wrath of Kahn is the best, Search For Spock is kind of terrible, and the one with the whales kind of rules. It’s not as easy to be so cavalier about the quality of Star Wars movies.

Star Wars fans are allowed to say that Empire Strikes Back is the best. Note that when Empire came out, it was not universally loved. A number of people didn’t like the idea that Luke’s father was Darth Vader. People that shipped Luke and Leia after the first movie couldn’t stand seeing Leia paired up with Han. Also, it ended on a down note. Han’s fate is uncertain, Luke was defeated by Vader, losing both his hand and his lightsaber, and the rebellion is floating homeless in space.

Critics panned Empire as well. It wasn’t until much later that a large portion of the fan base began regarding it as the best of the original trilogy. But they were all considered good, and no one got too upset if someone said the original movie was their favorite, or Return of the Jedi.

It’s difficult to be a Star Wars fan on the Internet and praise less popular aspects of the franchise. The level of rancor and toxicity grew to the point where it created a petition to declare The Last Jedi non-canon, and it bullied Kelly Tran so hard she killed her social media presence. Kelly Marie Tran was the biggest Star Wars fan getting to live her dream for a while, and other so-called fans tried to ruin it for her.

Worse, it appears this toxic fandom influenced the production of the final Star Wars film. Kelly Tran’s part was effectively deleted from the trilogy, John Boyega’s character reduced to mostly running around screaming Rey’s name…

Rey. Rey Palpatine. Another place where the toxic fans got their way, because they really couldn’t live with the idea of Rey being unrelated to any of the characters from the original trilogy.

I really didn’t like Revenge of the Sith. It came loaded with spectacle, but it did a lot of characters dirty. We could point at the plot and how it doesn’t make sense, but the reality is that you can tear apart the plot of any Star Wars movie with a little bit of effort. Even Empire. At their core, they’re whiz-bang adventures with characters we love doing cool stuff. Revenge of the Sith is the only Star Wars movie that went out of its way to go against the grain of the characters in order to serve plot. But since the plot was dumber than a bag of hair, it served nothing and no one.

If you loved Revenge of the Sith, I’m not going to yuck your yum. I’m glad you had a good time with that movie. I did not, and even after all this time, it still bothers me. If you enjoyed it, I wish I could see that movie through your eyes and enjoy it, too.

I’m not going to bully you for liking Revenge of the Sith, or tell you that you’re dumb, or that you have bad taste. I’m not going to do the things the rest of the Star Wars fandom has done online. I don’t believe those people are actual fans, by the way. Fans celebrate of art with other people that share their passion.

Star Trek fans, for example, walked out of Star Trek 5 and knew immediately that they’d watched something kind of terrible. Those fans spent a little bit of time lambasting it, then moved on to watch Undiscovered Country and start celebrating it again. Star Trek fans don’t really talk about The Final Frontier, or Insurrection, or Nemesis, because (for the most part) they’re too busy talking about Wrath of Kahn or First Contact or The Voyage Home.

I haven’t really touched on Solo or Rogue One. I thought both of those movies were mostly fine. Solo had some outrageously dumb and shallow fan service in it, but I still had a good time with it, and I would have liked to see more stories in that series. Rogue One had a really strong plot and some memorable sequences, even if the characters themselves were not particularly memorable. Solo and Rogue One were fine.

What about Mandalorian? I loved it, though it had a few problems. The first season felt like 3 hours of content spread over 10 hours. The second season was better than the first, but still felt a little thin in places. The look and feel was perfect, though, and it felt like good and proper Star Wars storytelling.

I haven’t watched the Clone Wars or any of the cartoons. I understand those are really fantastic, and I’ll watch them eventually. I suspect that some of the rehabilitation of the prequels comes from the cartoons being really excellent, lifting the source movies by association.

I love Star Wars, but I do not like Star Wars fandom. I hope we get some more great Star Wars movies in the future.