Easing back to writing. Also magic.

I made a big deal a few weeks ago about how I finally had an idea for a novel that could work and I'm actually going to do it this time.

On October 23rd the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2 launched and I have literally not written a single word of novel since that day. When I haven't been working or sleeping or out with friends, almost every minute has been spent playing Guild Wars.

I don't know if I'm slowing down yet on that front, but during my hour-long transit to and from work, and occasionally during quiet moments, my brain has slowly been drifting back towards the story and an element I've been considering for some time.

In this story, dreams and ghosts and spirits all exist and have their own parallel worlds. There are various ways for the human world and the other world, or the populations of both, to interact or cross over into the other worlds. A lot of people or beings have special abilities relating to these kinds of interactions.

The question I've been turning over is whether there's any magic in the world. Like, fantasy wizard magic with spells and spellbooks and magic schools and enchanted artifacts.

In the original idea, which was for a D&D campaign setting, magic was a given. It was going to be a D&D game, of course there would be magic! That changed when I decided to give the world more of a 1950s noir feel. Suddenly the setting became "like the real world, except ghosts and spirits and dreams are real", and I decided to cut out high fantasy magic entirely and focus solely on the interactions between the worlds. But that line is blurring the more I think about how the setting works. 

Example. Ghosts are real. They exist. Some are trapped in our world; most hang out in the Ethereal (ghost world). People can summon and bind and free ghosts, or cross over into the Ethereal.

But how does that work exactly? What is the process of summoning a ghost? Is it a ritual? Because that feels a lot like high fantasy magic. Is it done by sensing and manipulating energies? That sounds  like a D&D sorcerer. Or like the Force, which is space magic.

Now I'm thinking maybe high-fantasy-style magic does exist, and its actually pretty common - most people have either the natural talent or the learned knowledge to do some kind of magic. However, most of that is going to be weak, and most people will only know one or two basic tricks or own some nifty trinkets. Maybe I can light a candle by snapping my fingers and turn off the light without getting out of bed, but nothing fancier than that.

A few people, though, can do quite a lot more, either through greater natural ability or through education. But even then, powerful magic requires confidence and force of will. "Learning a spell" isn't really about memorizing formulae, it's more about convincing yourself you can pull it off. 

In terms of actual function, how you believe it works is far more important than how it "really" works. If you believe that magic is really a science and it can be mastered through study and calculation, then that is true for you. If believing that magic is about meditation and tapping into the energy of the world is how it works for you, then great, it is.

And confidence is key. If you believe you don't have the capability of doing anything more than lighting a candle with your fingertip, then that's all you can do. You do need some amount of natural ability or training to throw fireballs around, but once you have that, you're golden. If you can throw fireballs around but something makes you doubt your capability or the spell's effectiveness, then you're going to have some trouble.

So I think that's going to be my basis for now. It's interesting enough to feel like a real system, but vague enough to leave me a lot of wiggle room. I'll play with that and see where it takes me.

P.S.: this post was written to put my thoughts into words and force it to make some kind of sense. Thinking with a keyboard, if you will. I'll probably do more of these to settle arguments with myself as I make more progress.

Writing novels and not finishing them

Up to a week ago, I thought novels weren't my thing. Over the years I've started writing three novels and haven't managed to finish even one complete draft.

The first novel I tried to write was based on a Dungeons & Dragons game I ran for my three brothers. Well, when I say "based on", I mean pretty much a transcription of the D&D game with some adjustments here and there. If I recall correctly, and I may not, I had probably a hundred and thirty typed letter-size pages - about a hundred thousand words - when I deleted the whole thing off the family PC.

This was back in high school. It was the first D&D game I'd ever run, if you don't count the aborted single-session game where I realized after an hour or two that we all needed to read the rulebook again. My brothers had fun with the game, which obviously meant I was a good dungeon master, and maybe this story is worth writing down!

One hundred thousand words in, after showing what I had to my parents and a couple of relatives, I had an epiphany: I wasn't a very good writer. I was in high school and had no real practice or training in writing fiction. When compared to real novels, like The Lord of the Rings or the Thrawn trilogy (Star Wars), my story was formulaic, full of old tropes that I hadn't thought to dress up or disguise. An ancient evil has returned, the characters have to collect four MacGuffins hidden in four dungeons to unlock the dungeon where the weapons that can destroy the ancient evil are hidden. Yawn. So I deleted it.

(sidebar: I don't mean to say I was a horrible dungeon master and writer who shouldn't dungeon master or write things. There were some good ideas in there. I was a new dungeon master and writer who still had a lot to learn. The next D&D game I ran, which I called Ravenshore, was a lot better in almost every way. When I had another couple of years of experience I ran Ravenshore for a new group of players in university, better than the first time. With feedback from that run, and experience from several more campaigns, I have more improvements in mind and want to run it a third time in the future... but that's a story for another blog.)

The second novel I tried to write was based on a concept of a man stuck in two different times, switching between them each time he goes to sleep, holding himself together by building nearly identical lives in both eras but desperately yearning for a way to break his "problem" and live only one life. The story introduced the concept of the time-split life, then jumped into a shake-up: he met an identical man in both times, a man who seemed to be watching him. In the end he'd have to choose which of his two families he'd abandon.

I wanted to write it as a sci-fi noir mystery story, and I quickly banged out a strong beginning and end, but I had no middle. I introduced the core concept, then I introduced the hook for the mystery, and then jumped straight to the conclusion with no idea what to put in between. I think the problem was that I hadn't seen enough mystery stories to have any idea how to build up the complexity I'd need for a full novel. A little later I decided the ending was sickeningly positive and preachy and changed it, but may have swung too far in the opposite direction. I still had no plans for a middle so I shelved the idea after about twenty pages of writing.

The third novel I tried to write was going to be a sci-fi adventure epic of a ship's crew on a mission to remap and rebuild the fringes of a human civilization that had gone dark sixty years ago when all faster-than-light communication technology failed. I mapped out systems and planets, and even came up with some reasonably plausible scientific explanations for how the ships' weapons, shields, gravity, and drive systems worked (or at least, a friend studying space engineering didn't tell me any of it was blatantly terribly wrong).

This time the problem was that all my efforts went into the setting, and the "characters" did only what was necessary to get the reader to the next bit of worldbuilding. I pushed the main character arc too hard and too fast, and tried too had to make the future seem progressive about gender. I ended up writing an introductory adventure and putting the whole thing aside because I ran out of steam without any ideas for a major story arc or characters that actually seemed like people instead of plot devices.

At this point I decided I just wasn't a novel guy - I could write good short stories and video game reviews and D&D campaigns, but not novels. That was fine, lots of good writers don't write novels. I kept doing my other stuff.

Recently I decided that when writing D&D I shouldn't just focus on one core idea - the more I toss in, the richer and more complex each world would be. With that in mind, I was going over some of my dozen or so half-baked D&D world ideas. One of them was for a setting where there was the mortal world and a parallel ethereal world where souls went after death, with all kinds of specifics on how various types of ghosts and undead worked. This is exactly what I'd been thinking about: a world that could be interesting, but could be a lot more interesting with even more stuff going on. So I tossed in even more stuff.

Where it really took off was when it occurred to me that this setting would be way cooler if I skipped the standard D&D fantasy ideas and instead had a strong 1940s/1950s noir theme alongside parallel worlds of ghosts, spirits, and dreams. That combination suggested some possible characters, which suggested a possible story and meaning, which in turn suggested more worldbuilding and history, and so on and so forth.

All of a sudden I feel like I've got the full package tumbling around in my head: a three-dimensional protagonist with complex motivations and relationships, a rich world with tons of room for exploration and expansion, and a long-term story arc and antagonist with personal connections to the protagonist that will allow for change and growth, with some actual meaning to boot.

And before I know it my word count is over nine thousand.

I'm starting to suspect I might finally have a real potential novel.

The Forever War, Forever Peace, Forever Free

These three books are by Joe Haldeman. The Forever War in particular has shown up on a couple of "top 25 sci fi novel" lists so I figured I'd get around to reading it. As a warning, this post isn't super extensive - possibly because I read all three books before I started to write down any thoughts.

The Forever War seems on the surface to be about a really long war with an alien species, but really it's about a soldier coming home after his tour of duty to find that he doesn't have a place in the world anymore except in the military. Or at least, that's what I was told after finishing the book. As I was reading the novel, that theme didn't particularly stick out to me as primary, probably because I was more interested in something else.

Personally I was fascinated with the idea of a war that's temporally out of sync due to the restrictions of space travel. The novel mentioned that individual forces would destroy an enemy that didn't even know what a gun was, and then with a couple hundred years of real time between battles due to relativistic flight, in the next engagement they'd be crushed by an enemy with tech far ahead of theirs. That stuff wasn't explored enough for my liking, having been referenced a few times and mentioned as a possibility for one battle (which didn't pan out), but it did do a better job showing a soldier dealing with a thousand years of social change (though some of the ideas there feel out of date, particularly regarding sexual orientation).

Forever Peace is by the same author but has no relation to The Forever War. I actually liked this one better because it was a lot more thorough with the ramifications and side effects and personal impacts of its core science fictional idea. The novel deals with the military applications of mind-sharing and the safety issues of those military applications; the impact on romantic relationships when one can jack in and the other can't; the social prejudice from those who can't or won't get the enabling surgery; an unexpected side effect that could change the world.

Forever Free is a direct sequel to The Forever War, and it did not do what I expected. Resistance to the cloned hive mind is something I did see coming (even if the buildup was rather slow), but the consequences of the resistance and the big reveal of the true cause were not what I had in mind. 

Spoilers ahead.

Normally I'm intrigued by the idea that our understanding of the universe may be completely wrong and that there are impossibly powerful beings that we can't hope to understand because we're so limited and insignificant. That's why I like H.P. Lovecraft. I don't believe that certain things shouldn't or can't be known, but I like exploring the idea in fiction.

But I don't know what to think of Forever Free's revelation that our galaxy is an experiment set up by beings that are, to us at least, essentially omnipotent. My issue is probably how relatable those beings seemed to be. Rather than some incomprehensible elder god or titan from outside the universe, the being that the humans interact with just seems like... some guy. Some random scientist who happens to have the power to set up an entire galaxy and sentient civilizations for an eons-long experiment.

Spoilers finished.

Anyway, they're good books that are worth reading. I'm just picky about what I want from my fiction. Maybe I'll write a post on that.

Nineteen Eighty-Four & Starship Troopers

I normally only post about one thing at a time. Why am I writing about two? 

Because they're both classic, genre-defining science fiction novels, and my reactions had something in common.

I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and... well, I read it. It actually didn't make much of an impression on me. I'm sure this is just another example of "Seinfeld is unfunny" hype backlash - having waited so long to check out the original, the ideas it pioneered aren't novel or interesting because they've been used so extensively elsewhere.

Which is not to say I found the story boring or uninspired. On the contrary, I was actually impressed at how fully developed the ideas and philosophies turned out to be, and it made me think that a lot of later stories copied the surveillance dystopia without paying as much mind to the details. Nineteen Eighty-Four explores how and why IngSoc and the state of perpetual war came to be, the complete philosophy and practices behind the Party, and the minutia of day-to-day life - work, relationships, leisure, psychology - under an always-watching police state.

Unfortunately the actual reading of the book was often rather dull. Long passages are devoted to exposition of history and philosophy - sometimes so blatantly as to go "Winston read a book and these are the exact words on the page". Those dry infodumps bothered me a lot more than any sense of the prose being dated.

In the end Nineteen Eighty-Four didn't have a particularly strong impact on me, so at the time I didn't write anything about it and instead just moved on to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Before starting the book I was aware that Starship Troopers heavily defined the military science fiction genre, invented the idea of powered armour, and was the inspiration for the "space marine" concept (that last is ironic given some of the novel's content). I knew there was a movie, and might have seen it but don't remember much - regardless, I've been told the movie is based on an unrelated script and later got the license, so it's quite different and satirizes a lot of the novel's themes. But the movie's not important here. Except maybe for the fact that the cast agreed to a co-ed nude shower scene only if the director directed naked, which he did. 

Anyway. I read the first chapter of Starship Troopers and was excited but concerned. The first chapter deals with a hit-and-run Mobile Infantry raid and introduces the capabilities of the armour. That's cool! But the part that bothered me was how light on actual detail it was. It read like a summary rather than immersing me in the moment - it didn't make me feel like I was there experiencing the action with sensory and emotional detail, it made me feel like I was reading a report. The only other extended combat sequence reads the same: "this happened, then that happened, then we did this".

Most of the novel feels like military propaganda in the guise of training retrospectives and philosophy "debates". I put debates in quotes because they're all one-sided: the discussions are contrived to push a "mathematically provable" philosophy, not to actually explore an issue. I didn't get the sense that the book was pro-war, but it was heavily pro-military (and corporal punishment). Everything the army does is justified, every officer is only hard on his men because he cares so deeply about them, and all punishments are fair and regrettable but necessary for the good of the troops and therefore the good of society. Any faults or weaknesses that you can think of in modern militaries have been dealt with in the perfect sunshine-and-rainbows-and-guns military of the future, and the only people there are smart, kind, effective people with only the best intentions and never any malice or rivalry.

The novel talks about how only army men are allowed to vote because only army men are REAL MEN who care about more than just themselves. Not even the navy are REAL MEN, because they're not army, and the navy has no idea how hard the poor . Pilots are revered and would be real men if women didn't make better pilots. There are all kinds of little morally-superior asides, like the comment that since there's always fighting somewhere, "peace" means the times when civilians stop caring about military casualties.

Basically, I went in expecting hard military sci-fi action, and through the entire book I was wondering when the propaganda would stop and the action would start.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that my reactions to both novels had something in common. That something is a kind of neutral indifference. I didn't enjoy Nineteen Eighty-Four or Starship Troopers, but neither did I hate them. I'm glad I read them and that I have a better understanding of the history of science fiction, but I won't read these books again and wouldn't recommend them for anything but scholarly interest.

I'm not saying they're bad - obviously, if they were, they wouldn't have created entire sub-genres and tropes. They're just...  not for me.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Yes, that is a book title. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. This is the kind of sci-fi novel I really love: big ambitious ideas that wouldn't work in any other genre, explored and fleshed out with a lot of depth.

The actual core plot of the book is somewhat unspectacular if you boil it down to its essence: people who don't fully understand the risks awaken an ancient evil that could consume everything, and a tiny handful of people are the only hope to stop it. The set dressing is more interesting than usual - the evil is a transcendent intelligence rebuilt from blueprints found in a five-billion-year-old archive written and re-written by thousands of civilizations, accidentally unleashed by a hopeful culture that took one too many risks and was fooled by a vastly superior intellect - but that core story of awakening an ancient evil is fairly unexceptional. I mean, if you want to get technical.

What makes it great is the universe and the ideas that tell the story.

The big thing is that the galaxy's laws of physics aren't uniform. The galaxy is divided into several distinct zones. The borders between the zones aren't easily visible and change slightly over time. People are generally unconcerned with zones below them, seeing them as insignificant and backwards, while often aspiring to ascend to the zone above.

• The Unthinking Depths, around the galactic core, where only minimal intelligence and technology are possible.
• The Slow Zone, basically our kind of place, where faster-than-light travel and communication are impossible.
• The Beyond, further towards the galactic edge, where artificial intelligence and antigravity and faster-than-light travel are possible, allowing interstellar civilization and culture and organizations.
• The Transcend, the edges of the galaxy and farther out, past the point of technological singularity where individuals may as well be gods compared to even the heights of the Beyond.

There have been a lot of solutions or workarounds to accommodate faster-than-light travel in fiction, but the idea that physics simply aren't the same everywhere is a new one for me. And the book does a good job of exploring the implications: it features characters from every zone (except the Unthinking Depths), and there's a big chase scene descending from the Beyond down to the border with the Slowness, during an unprecedented zone storm where the boundary is in flux. It shows the dangers of taking technology designed for a high zone into a low zone, and even includes some workarounds that "trick" lower physics into allowing higher technology.

The other big idea is pack intelligence. There's an intelligent species, the Tines, where the minds and souls of individuals are formed by the constituent members of the pack. A pack of six isn't a group; it's a single person with six appendages. They think and communicate with sound, so individuals can't get too close to each other or they'll interfere with each others' "thought sounds".

These things probably sound interesting on their own, but what's really fantastic is how A Fire Upon the Deep explains and explores the implications and consequences of its ideas. That quick paragraph I just wrote about the Tines really doesn't do them justice. Many of them are point-of-view characters, and it's amazing how the book keeps their point of view and gradually gets you to understand their minds and culture. In fact, I assumed the first Tines I met were "regular" people, and it wasn't until they started to mention "sending out members" that something seemed odd.

The way the Tines' minds work is explained through trauma: an individual's member dying, the person nearly splintering, but then incorporating a new fragment and becoming a new whole. There are Tines who experiment with crafting purpose-built personalities by breeding and selecting the right pack members. The species' big weakness is their reliance on sound to think; individuals have to remain meters apart to hear their own thoughts and stay coherent.

All of this is done without relying on infodumps. Occasionally some finer points are explained to humans, but it's amazing how the novel is written to lead you to understand. In fact, I'm confident that you won't properly understand how the Tines' pack mind works from the descriptive text I'm writing here - you're much better off reading the novel to get all the subtlety and the point-of-view thoughts to truly understand the concept.

Actually, quite a lot of the background information in the novel is told this way - the reader gradually piecing together the whole picture from several viewpoints, or learning/inferring through comparisons and exceptions. None of this "As we both know..." crap. Even great books have exposition, but the natural discovery of how things work in this novel feels like something special.

What's really crazy about A Fire Upon the Deep is that it's composed of many ideas that are each complex and interesting enough to build a whole novel on, but they're all worked in here together, and it not only makes sense but creates a world that feels incredibly rich and complex. I'll admit to feeling a little off balance in the first few chapters after being thrown into the world without knowing how anything worked, but figuring it out along the way made for a rewarding experience.

Read it if you're a sci-fi person.

Snow Crash

I read Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash a week ago, after a couple of friends have been bugging me to read it for literally years. I meant to write down some thoughts sooner than this, but I had to digest to pin down what was bugging me.

First, the good stuff. The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist and that's pretty much the best character name of all time. He's the best swordfighter in the world and an expert hacker, but despite being such a cool skilled guy, he's cleverly not portrayed as unbeatable as he constantly gets into trouble that can't be solved with swordfighting and hacking. There's lots of action and chases across franchise-countries, the deadly serious Mafia pizza delivery business, and eventually on a privately owned but still armed aircraft carrier.

The digital world is neat because it's not just a magical computer land - there are quirks and workarounds and backdoors because of haphazard development, and the history and reasoning are frequently explained.

The core plot deals with a neurolinguistic virus and all kinds of really cool ideas and history, which is normally the kind of thing I love. My issue with Snow Crash is that, unlike the rest of the book, all the neurolinguistic explanation is done via infodump dialogue - Hiro researching with the help of a librarian program that explains everything. The delivery of these segments feels clunky compared to the more natural revelations of the other history and background of the world.

Anyway, a neurolinguistic virus is an extremely cool idea, and actually quite similar to an idea I've been working on for a D&D game - a memetic infection, or "thought plague" - a plague that infects the mind through the spread of words and ideas. Stephenson's virus is more fleshed out and historically-based than my D&D ideas, which are more fantasy/horror than sci-fi. So that's given me some food for thought for D&D planning.

Oh yeah, and you should probably also read Snow Crash.

Kill La Kill

Here's a weird thought: I love the anime Kill La Kill, but I'd hesitate to recommend it. That's odd, isn't it? Why wouldn't I recommend a show I enjoy?

Kill La Kill has fantastic fight and action sequences. Everything about the show is over-the-top, so the fights are just crazy awesome. The fights are easily some of the best I've seen anywhere, on a level with Gurren Lagann (of course, because it's the same creators). One of my favourite little details is how the show does debris in explosions - instead of rocks and dust, it's often dozens of people thrown screaming into the air. It's just a background detail, but it's hilarious. 

It's also got some surprising depth to it with commentary on fascism, our relationship with clothing, self-confidence, and rejecting society's hangups. There's a lot of subtext if you're paying attention. It's notable that the first scene opens with a history lesson on Hitler's rise to power.

The big reason I hesitate to recommend Kill La Kill is because of how fine a line the show walks . 

The show frequently and extensively sexualizes its high school girls. From what I understand that kind of stuff isn't taken as seriously in Japan, but here in Canada, the amount of skin and butt shots and voyeur gags make me want to avoid having the anime on around other people. The main character's outfit is very revealing, and action scenes work in gratuitous butt shots or excuses to show more skin. Male characters frequently gawk openly and it's treated as an "oh, you" thing, as if the writers are shrugging their shoulders and saying "boys will be boys".

On the other hand, the four most important characters in the show are all women, and of those, the three fighters are the most powerful people on the planet (and the other most powerful is also a woman). They have unique personalities and complex relationships with each other and with the supporting cast. They deal with challenges to their viewpoints and relationships that force them to confront themselves. The hero and the antagonist actively reject society's conventions on how women should dress and are stronger for it. The show mostly doesn't even acknowledge romance as a thing - everyone's too busy dealing with more pressing issues - which strikes me as very unusual for a series about high school girls.

(as an aside, male characters spend more time naked than female characters, but it's usually played for laughs rather than titillation)

Whether Kill La Kill is empowering or demeaning or awesome or embarrassing is going to come down to individual taste. I'm usually very good at judging whether someone I know will like a given piece of media, but I'm really not certain about this one because of how it takes both sides of its issues to the extreme.

So rather than recommend it to anyone I know, I'll just leave this here and you can decide for yourself if you want to give it a shot.

Why and how I'm losing weight

I've been working on losing weight over the last few months and I've been making some progress. Some people have asked me why I'm losing weight, or told me that they didn't think I needed to, so I thought I'd write about it here. It's also an excuse to post something because I haven't updated this blog in months.

I've never thought of myself as fat. I don't recall anyone calling me fat or making fun of my weight. If you passed me on the street, "fat" would not be a word you'd use to describe me.

But I have been carrying a little extra weight for a long time. After a certain age, if you look at photos of me with my three brothers, you can tell that I'm proportionally the heaviest. I've never been ashamed of my weight or embarrassed to be seen without a shirt, but when I look in the mirror I think I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. No one's ever called me fat, but a couple of people whose opinions I care about and who meant well have told me that I'd be more attractive if I lost a little bit of weight. 155 pounds at five-foot-six isn't considered unhealthy, but it's a little high for someone who doesn't work on their muscle.

In other words, it's never been a health concern and has never bothered me enough to make a significant lifestyle change. Every once in a while I decide to start going to the gym in the off season when I'm not working, but boating season starts again and work eats twelve hours a day five days a week, it's hard to put any meaningful amount of time into exercise and still have hobbies and see friends. Or maybe those are excuses and I just don't like it. Over the years I've made some changes to what I eat, and those I've kept up with - I've been eating fewer processed foods and smaller amounts of sugar. But those relatively minor changes weren't having an effect.

A few months ago I read that cutting fat is 100% down to "calories in, calories out". To put it simply, if you want to lose weight, it doesn't matter how much you exercise if you're eating too much. Of course it's much more complex than that if you have specific health goals or want to build muscle mass, but if you already eat relatively healthily and just want to lose a few pounds, that's all there is to it.

At the same time the MyFitnessPal app was recommended to me. You punch in your current weight, your target weight, and when you want to get to your target, and it'll tell you how many calories you should eat each day. It also has a huge database of foods and nutrition information to make it easy to see what's in the food you eat. If you want to be really accurate you'll need a food scale, but you can get those for $20 or less.

This app is pretty much 100% responsible for my weight loss. Once I started accurately tracking my meals and snacks, I realized that what I was eating wasn't the problem - the issue was how much I was eating. All I had to do was pay attention to portion sizes and stop eating when I hit my daily limit. There's a bar code scanner, so most of the time I don't even have to search for what I'm looking for - just scan the code, punch in the weight, and that's it. And for pre-portioned foods (like a single-serving yogurt cup) I don't even have to input the weight. If I knew it could be this easy I would have done it years ago.

The best part is that I'm not dealing with any big restrictions. I can still split a pizza or go for drinks after work every once in a while as long as I make sure to stick to my limits most of the time (though it's even better if I plan ahead and work that stuff in). On the other hand, the biggest challenge was that I was really hungry for the first few days of eating less, but I got used to it. If I get hungry when it's not food time or I've already hit my limit, I drink some water.

In the last month a lot of people have told me I'm looking good and asked me if I've lost weight. I have - about ten pounds so far. But despite the compliments and the numbers I wasn't feeling like I was making any significant progress, probably because I've been seeing less progress in the mirror day-to-day than people who have gone a month without seeing me. 

Today, though, I put on my belt and it felt too big. I had to tighten it a notch. Maybe I'm not seeing the progress with my eyes, but I felt it this morning.

Social justice and why I avoid it

(been a while since my last post here... but I did say updates would be occasional)

For the most part, I tend to stay out of discussions on feminism or men's rights. I've seen enough crap on the internet that I don't particularly feel like associating myself with either, no matter how valid their points might be. But having done some thinking over the last few days, I figured I'd write down some thoughts.

I fully expect at least some of this to be controversial, but hopefully I can explain all this well enough that it makes sense. You don't have to agree with me, but these are my personal thoughts and interpretations on what I've observed.

First up: men's rights. From what I understand, the MRA movement was founded as a reaction to modern feminism, based on the belief that feminism has either ignored men or begun to actively push against them. Some MRAs I've read seem like very reasonable people trying to point out legitimate men's issues that feminism actually doesn't seem to have addressed, such as the vastly higher rates of homelessness, workplace injury and death, and suicide in men compared to women. 

But large numbers of people calling themselves "men's rights advocates" aren't advocating men's rights so much as hating on feminism and women. The best men's rights communities I've come across online are still at least 50% outrage topics of "look at how horrible and/or negligent feminism is because this one person or group's actions are obviously representative of the entire movement". And those are among the better communities I've seen. The worst attack and threaten any woman who invades what they consider "men's spaces", or rationalize/justify abuse and violence because the woman obviously deserved it, or suggest a return to "when men were real men and women were real women" (or in other words, "go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich while the men deal with serious business").

While I'm on this topic I'll take a small detour. I often see The Red Pill and men's rights confused or equated. Men's rights is (ostensibly) about men's rights, while The Red Pill is a seduction community based on the belief that they know what women want better than women do, and that what women want happens to be a dominant alpha male (aka an egotistical jerk who cares only about what he wants, and takes it when he wants it). Which is actually a lot more horrible than the idea that men have issues that aren't being addressed - when you take it to its logical conclusion, The Red Pill philosophy is straight up advocating abuse and rape because "that's what women want".

So I avoid men's rights because while there are some legitimate points in there that deserve attention, an awful lot of the members are dubious to terrible in their views on women and feminism. Plus it tends to get confused or lumped in with The Red Pill (which I still can't believe actually exists) so that's definitely something to avoid.

Which brings me to my views on feminism, and where I expect to see more disapproval. It's cool to hate on MRAs, but criticism of feminism is not well looked upon. Anyway. It should be obvious to any rational person that feminism is full of legitimate concerns and issues. It's not an opinion that women have less representation and less diversity than men in just about every form of media ever - it's a simple fact that anyone can verify by watching movies and TV, reading books, or playing video games. It's a fact that women hold vastly fewer positions of power - you can verify this by looking at the makeup of governments or corporate boards.

But it's not quite as simple as "men are privileged and women are oppressed", which is an idea that I'm seeing pushed more and more. I'm a firm believer that almost nothing is as simple or black-and-white as the narrative often wants you to accept. I'm not going to argue that feminism is a negative force, but when Emma Watson's speech at the UN is hailed as a shining beacon of what feminism should be, that gives me pause. She makes this brilliant speech about how we're all in this together, and that men have issues that need to be addressed too, even making it personal with the struggles she's seen her father go through. But then she ends the speech by asking men to pledge to help women in their struggle against oppression. What happened to and "we're all in this together"? Feminism is for everyone and men have problems too, but men should help women and forget about vice versa? And this speech was almost unanimously praised, which, again, is a little troubling to me given its conclusion.

And, like men's rights, feminism has its less reasonable, more radical groups as well. Feminism as a whole is much bigger and more legitimate than men's rights, but as a bigger movement it also has a bigger radical division. I could quote specifics, but I don't think that's productive, so I'll just move on to my next point.

You might have noticed that I mentioned that critique of feminism isn't well received. I often get the feeling that feminism has developed a sort of reactionary shield where, in the interest of creating safe non-threatening spaces, any disagreement or criticism is either accused of misogyny or outright banned. This feeling in particular is why I tend to avoid discussion on feminism or feminist topics - the common accusation that disagreement equates to sexism or hate, that atmosphere of "if you're not with us you're against us". I find this incredibly counterproductive. Accepting legitimate criticism is a hugely important way to learn from your mistakes and improve. Of course, the counterpoint is that feminists receive a lot of backlash and hate, so it's not always easy to filter legitimate criticism from aggression without wading through both. But then again, my concerns about Watson's UN speech went ignored when I tried to discuss.

And here we come to the No True Scotsman fallacy. Whenever you see someone write or say something particularly vile under a feminist or MRA flag, or enough backlash against a particular statement, you'll see others coming out of the woodwork to reject it and say "well, that person isn't a true feminist/MRA". The problem comes in how you define a true feminist/MRA. Both movements have so many factions and splinters and alternative philosophies that you can't really say which one is the "true" one.

When someone who calls themselves a men's rights advocate says "she was asking for it" or someone who calls themselves a feminist says "cishet white men should be killed", or when a member of the movement criticizes the movement, it's easy to say that he's not a true MRA, she's not a true feminist. But they're making their claims under the banner. Who decides what true men's rights activism is, or what true feminism is? What gives you the right to conclude that someone calling themselves a feminist isn't a true feminist just because you don't agree with their brand of feminism?

Perhaps just as importantly, how representative of the core are the extremes? People seem quite happy to judge groups by their extremes, which is another thing I'm really not comfortable with. A thirteen-year-old girl on tumblr who desperately wants to be included in justifiable outrage is not representative of feminism as a whole, and equally, an unemployed thirty-five-year-old man who blames feminism for his lack of work and girlfriend is not representative of men's rights as a whole. And yet it seems that both groups are pretty okay with making those accusations. 

And finally there's the idea that feminism and men's rights are in opposition. Both claim to fight for equality between men and women, and yet each accuses the other of sexism and hatred. Now, I'll grant that MRA groups seem to be proportionally much more confrontational and oppositional than feminists, but I still see plenty of feminists using "MRA" as basically a curse word to represent anyone who rejects feminism.

I usually try not to get involved in any of this because people tend to lump the extremes in with the whole and take disagreement or critique as sexism or attack. I'm not thrilled with the frequency with which I'm labelled into one camp or the other when I talk about gendered issues. I don't like the imposed labels, the idea that if you support women's rights you are a feminist, or if you support men's rights you are an MRA (or, for that matter, the idea that if you support men's rights you're also a feminist). I'm not a fan of the baggage that's been attached to both terms so I don't appreciate having either title imposed on me.

So I try to stay out of it. Which is getting harder and harder as awareness spreads. And I feel it says something about the state of criticism that even though I know my friends are reasonable, intelligent people, some part of me still worries that I might make some enemies by posting this.

Sometimes I feel like the Neutrals from Futurama.

New D&D blog post: magic and tech

Some people say that fantasy worlds with magic wouldn't develop technology.

I say that's dumb.

Ex Machina and a personal revelation about worldbuilding

I watched Ex Machina tonight. It was extremely well put together and had great characters and moments, but I didn't really like it. I couldn't put my finger on why until I had a sort of mini-epiphany and learned something about myself. (I've had a few of these in the last couple of years, maybe I'll write more about them).

Spoiler alert, this post isn't actually really about Ex Machina, so don't expect a review.

I've been aware for quite some time that I prefer fiction with an element of the fantastic - something you don't see in the real world. Most often that means science fiction, but also some absurdist comedy (like Airplane, Police Squad, or Hot Fuzz). I was never really drawn to fantasy, though. There are a couple of exceptions - I can't not like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - but as a general rule, not too into fantasy.

A lot of fantasy strikes me as generic. The same magic, the same medieval Europe style, the same creatures, the same elves and dwarves and orcs. It's the main reason I didn't like Dragon Age: Origins - a third of it felt generic, and half felt like it was trying to put its own spin on standard fantasy but not going far enough.

Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere.

Despite having little interest in fantasy, I love D&D. Not the pre-built adventures and worlds, though - I make my own. I love coming up with or mashing together ideas, building a world, and exploring the implications and consequences of the setting.

So now we're getting around to it. Ex Machina has an excellent story and characters, but it has no worldbuilding. We get in-depth character studies, revealing personalities and motivations and emotions, but it's all set in the real world, and we don't get to see the implications or consequences of the events and decisions. And I think that's what bugs me. I love clever, original worlds, and I love examining the philosophies and differences and choices that emerge from these unique places and situations. That's why, the only times I have used pre-existing D&D settings, I tinker with them and change things to put a new spin on the world and see what happens.

Long and meandering story short, that's why I didn't love Ex Machina.

Lockstep

Apparently I'm on a sci-fi book binge all of a sudden. I blame birthday gifts.

Second book is Karl Schroeder's Lockstep. I love the worlbuilding, but the actual story has a lot of bits that come off as "generic young adult dystopia".

The core world idea is that there are about 70,000 starless planets between Earth and Alpha Centauri that run on a lockstep cycle. The entire population hibernates for (on some planets) thirty years, then wakes up for a month to do normal life things, then hibernates again. This allows decades for robots to harvest, manufacture, and from the humans' perspective, you go to sleep for a night and suddenly you have thirty years worth of resources to trade or spend. 

There's also the idea of stowaways or pirates or just regular people who are exploiting or not participating in the lockstep cycle - they either don't hibernate, or deliberately offset their pace. To people who don't hibernate, they're living normal lives, while locksteppers seem to age at a thirtieth (or less) of the normal rate.

That's all awesome. Fantastic ideas. Something I've never seen before, but is also a great, logical way for a huge non-lightspeed space empire to function.

The problem is when the book gets bogged down in stock-standard YA dystopia tropes, the big one being the cartoonishly evil corporate monopoly empire opposed by the pure-hearted poor folks.

But that's just a trick! The book only makes me think it's generic YA dystopia early on because the main character, Toby, has been thrown into a world he doesn't understand and everyone's trying to find a way to explain fourteen thousand years of civilization in a way that won't blow up his brain. So the story turns out to be much more interesting than I initially expected in my moments of eye-rolling.

That said, the romance subplot does feel a little shoehorned. But more importantly, I'm a little disappointed that the lockstep concept wasn't as fully explored as I would have liked. There are some ideas that are touched on but not expanded, such as the idea of differently-paced locksteps raiding each other, non-locksteps raiding locksteps, and entire civilizations growing and dying in the span of what feels like a few years to the locksteppers.

So now I'm totally thinking I'll steal the lockstep civilization idea for a D&D game. If I want to go with a fantasy setting, then it can be a difficult, restricted spell or ritual instead of tech-based. Gonna have to put some thought into this.

The Andromeda Strain

Finally read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain for the first time today on the bus back to Toronto. Blazed though it in three hours since the science was pretty easy for me to pick up due to a combination of a couple of years of university-level science classes and the book having been written in the late sixties.

So, overall, pretty great. I especially liked the "spoilers" the book kept feeding me - the science team tries something, and the book explains the error in judgment they just made and ominously calls it a big mistake.

Spoilers ahead.

Personal blag

I've been running Post-Launch Reviews and D4sign for a while now. Every so often I have some thought or another that I want to write down, and never do because I don't really have a good place to do it. 

Well THIS ENDS TODAY!

So this is just gonna be random stuff. Thoughts on books or movies, links to my other blog posts, maybe photos. I don't know. Things. We'll see.