Category: General

Just the random, everyday stuff.

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New stream layout

Not what I intended to be working on this evening, but it’s what ended up happening.

A little video of me testing out a new stream overlay and some stream deck settings (if you have never used a stream deck as a productivity hack, let me tell you, having it plugged into my desktop for pulling up files alone is amazing), preview of a tweaked layout, and a little teaser of something.

The something is a consequence of my looking over some really old work and starting to reconsider it. I guess we’ll see what shakes loose here.

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Submerged Rock (troll)

One of my favorite places in the whole damn world is Museum Campus on Chicago’s lakeshore, specifically the area around the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium.  On occasion, usually when the weather is good or I have time to kill or just feel the need, I’ll walk down along the walking and biking paths in the area, the ones that wrap down around the back of the aquarium, whose edges drop straight down into Lake Michigan.  Sometimes they’re closed off because of ice or because the waves on the lake are too high, making them dangerous to walk.  Sometimes even when they’re open, you’ll get sprayed by water from a freshwater sea that isn’t as the waves crash against the edge of these pathways.

It’s one of those places that I sometimes wonder if visitors ever think to wander along, or if it tends to be the provenance of locals, who bike along it in their lane, take their morning runs along the slanting walkways and the quiet that can come in those spaces, especially before the day really begins.  The view is really spectacular, even on misty days when the fog hangs heavy over the water and you can’t even see the park a few hundred yards away.  Of course, maybe I’m biased.  It is, after all, one of my favorite places, and I know that if I lived in the city I’d be there as often as I could be, convenience be damned.

Another point in favor of my eventually moving there, I guess.

Along one of those pathways are old warmings painted onto the pavement, telling passersby—and anyone who might consider jumping into the water—that there are submerged rocks in the area along the shore.  On the one hand, it seems silly that the warning would be needed.  It’s not a beach, not a swimming area, but there are certainly folks who fish along that pathway amongst the runners and the cyclists and wanderers.  The warning would be as much for them, who could lose a line in those rocks, or anyone who falls in or would-be rescuers.

Five years ago while walking the pathway, I snapped a picture of one of those warnings.  Someone with a sense of humor and a touch of whimsy decided to add a bit of extra flavor to one of those warnings.  I haven’t been back in the last year or so to see if it’s still there or if it’s been repainted, but it was still there a few years ago, the last time I was able to come down while the weather was good enough to wander down toward the water.

Spotted in the wild out on Museum Campus, behind the Shedd Aquarium

I’ve wondered since the first time I saw it—it’s been there for a lot longer than five years—about whoever painted the word “troll” onto that warning.  A college kid on a dare, a nerdy one out with friends?  High schoolers out for a laugh?  A creative with a penchant for a little bit of graffiti?

There’s a story behind it, one I know that I will never know.  Somehow, though, that makes it that much more interesting, that much more magical.  A touch of whimsy to the mundane, something that exists if you’re willing to find it.  That’s a little something we all need, now more than ever.  A little touch of magic to a gray, hard world.

So here’s to the magic makers and those who seek it—the ones that make joy and those who find pleasure in what’s been made.

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New-old posts dropping in

Since I finally figured out how to make Patreon and WordPress talk to each other, there’s about to be a lot of new-old stuff dropping in.

Some of it’s really old and outdated. Some of it’s not. Either way, have fun with it for what it is, what it was, and what may or may not end up being some kind of canon something someday.

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23 Septembers later

Today I was thinking about how much the world has changed in 23 years, how different the world was on that beautiful Tuesday. Not just about how what happened on that day changed the world, but how it was a reality that would be all but unrecognizable to the generation that has been born and grown up since.

On that September Tuesday, cell phones were still relatively new. The smartest phone you were likely to have was a Blackberry. The internet was still young. I remember my university had only that year transitioned from Telnet to a more modern system for network access around campus.

Televisions were still usually hardwired into a wall to get broadcasts via cable, or had an antenna attached directly to the set. They were still big, boxy things and they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous in public spaces as they were even a few years later.

I remember calling on a land line to check and see if my first class of the day was going to be cancelled or not. The Classics department hadn’t heard—of course they hadn’t. Unless they had a radio on, or someone happened to check a news website (not a common occurrence in those days unless you were of a certain major, to be honest), they wouldn’t have known. There was no TV in the department office. Email was barely in use as a mode of communication between professors and students that day—it was still very new, something that people in academia were still getting used to using. Class cancellations were posted on classroom doors, not emailed out in advance—most of the time.

Classics Department—and my professor—found out what was happening from me.

After that class lasted all of five minutes, I remember going to the dining commons and some of the food service staff and other people who worked in the building had a TV rigged up in a side room, plugged into a jack and the wall so they could watch the footage. Everything was eerie and surreal.

It was a different world.

I didn’t have a cell phone yet, didn’t have my dad’s number memorized, didn’t have most of the family’s numbers memorized. I had a land line and a prepaid calling card. I wasn’t the only one. I spent most of the day on the floor of my friend’s dorm room, most of us uncomfortable with the idea of being alone.

There are some things you don’t forget, but it’s easy to forget how different the world was, how strange—why the video and pictures of the events are much more rare (and remarkable) than they’d be today. Why it took so long for word to spread.

Why the world slowly stopped in inches and measures as the skies empty out and there was nothing but the quiet and a cloudless blue sky on a September Tuesday 23 years ago today.

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Musings on current

I can always tell that I’m completely over summer and longing for autumn because I tend to end up consuming (via television/streaming, audiobooks, and podcasts) random paranormal and spooky stuff at higher levels than normal. It’s no secret that to a very great extent that the fall is really my favorite season, followed by winter. Spring and summer I appreciate for the storms and sometimes the blue sky sunshine and various other things but not so much the heat and humidity–I’m just not built for that.

Times are weird right now and feel as if they’re going to continue to get weirder. I’m not sure what’s triggering that feeling, but something is certainly driving it. Either I’ll figure it out or I wont, just like some character in a novel or a game or another media. Maybe it’s just not important to know, but to feel and acknowledge.

There is a restlessness right now coupled with an exhaustion and a readiness for whatever’s shifting to just well on and do it so we can brace ourselves for what’s coming next. Another thing I’m not sure about, one way or another, but there it is.

Creatively and intellectually, I’m considering what to do going forward. There’s a little bit of a desire to possibly put together some brief research essays for Patreon and this site and see what happens. Professionally, I’m starting to take a look at things like knowledge management and content management, above and beyond what I already do in my day to day (let’s just say even though Tech Writer is my title, I’m doing a lot that is not that). In some ways, I miss the research and the digging and the piecing of things together, so maybe that could be coming in the future. I doubt there will be a consistent theme to any of it because part of my academic problem has been that I am, in fact, interested in far too many things to focus on one thing forever. Specialization is a beast but I have a very bad (good?) habit of drilling down on whatever interests me in the moment, which has rendered me a bizarre kind of generalist in some ways.

It’s an interesting idea, anyway. Something I need to think about–something I need to give myself permission to think about, to possibly try, and to accept that I’ll either love it or hate it and either is fine. Failure is fine. Success is fine. The joy is what I make of it.

We’ll see.

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Musings on space opera and science fiction

I am not going to take up this post trying to define what the line between true space opera and science fiction actually is–I don’t have the patience for that when the landscapers have unexpectedly started up outside on a holiday and really, it would be yet another rabbit hole that I’ll probably jump down in another post somewhere along the line.  For my purposes, I’m collecting both into one bucket to talk about it, in part because I know there are people out there that would try to draw a line between them and while a line probably exists, it’s all semantics anyway when 90% of the time when talking about genre in a bookstore (virtual or otherwise), it’s all collected into the broader “sci-fi and fantasy” category anyway.  It’s all speculative fiction and it’s all storytelling, regardless.

In the past few days, I’ve found myself trying to decide what to pick up and read again, what series I have on my to watch list and haven’t yet (I’m looking at you, Strange New Worlds and The Expanse–and before anyone @’s me, I’ve watched some of The Expanse, just not all of it, and I haven’t started Strange New Worlds because I just haven’t yet and it’s because I don’t want to multitask while I watch them and I am in a constant state of multitask) and that’s brought me to a bunch of scattered thoughts.

One thing that I’ve come that I appreciate the older I get and the more I experience is the vast richness of history that is often built into many of the longest-lasting worlds and series in the genre.  I say series deliberately, because I very rarely find myself immersing myself in science fiction or space opera where there isn’t a series involved.  I would even argue that two of my favorite books in the genre–LE Modesitt’s The Parafaith War and The Ethos Effect–are a series in this way, though I’ll admit that both weave a sense of place and history into the narrative that would fit my interests anyway.  I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation (thanks Mom) and then branched out on my own into other series as I grew older.  I was the nerdy one in the back of the bus, reading a book–sometimes a Star Trek novel, then increasingly Star Wars and a lot of fantasy through middle school and high school.  In some ways, those were gateways to things like Shadowrun, Battletech, Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series, the aforementioned Parafaith War and Ethos Effect, Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series, the Honorverse (which I will admit that I’ve read very little of but someday intend to read more of), and so many more.  I consumed Babylon 5, SeaQuest DSV, X-Files, Star Trek in all of its 80s and 90s flavors, the sadly short-lived Space: Above and Beyond, Stargate (both SG-1 and, for a time, Atlantis), and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which remains a favorite of mine and one of the few series I own in its entirety in multiple formats.  There is a sense of scale to much of what I’ve read and enjoyed, a depth to the worlds they exist in that you as reader or viewer get in bits and pieces throughout the narrative.  I often found myself hungering for more information, wanting to know more about the universes.

In the end, very little of what I consumed was singular–they were expansive, parts of a larger hole, a single episode in a sea of so much more.  The depth and breadth of the storytelling available in a series, especially an extensive one with evident world-building behind it, is something that’s very attractive to both me as a consumer of the genre and a writer of it as well.

These reflections on what I’ve read and watched over the years have led me to some conclusions about my own work, in fact.  I am constitutionally incapable of writing anything with a shallow history, and I will often get stuck if I can’t figure out how to fit pieces together, especially if I’ve decided that they’re important to the story.  How events unfold in the present of a story is often informed by or echoes events in the past–this is something that I’ve learned as a historian: there are patterns to the world, and they’re not that hard to find.  When you’re like me, and most of your work deals with the interesting things humanity could end up doing to itself, the need to be informed by not only the actual past but the past embedded in any kind of far-flung narrative future is something that’s always on the radar.

Which I suppose is to say that backstory–back history–is important and attractive and I appreciate it in so many ways as a consumer of the genre–because I feel like it makes the storytelling richer and the worlds more immersive and engaging.  It can also be frustrating to me as a writer of the genre because sometimes there is just so much to figure out.

But the figuring out can definitely be fun, too.