rvaldrich

I live my life in twelve-week cycles. I train and work hard for twelve weeks, and then I take one week off. During that time, I do not write, exercise, and am far less strict about my diet. I turn off my alarm clock and wake up naturally and I go to bed as I wish, rather than adhering to a schedule. It's pretty fun. And the benefit of it - aside from the obvious - is that when it's time for me to return to my regiment schedule, I am hungry to do so. Because living so carefree doesn't suit me.

As both a creative professional and a pretty serious athlete (or at least I like to think so), I think there's a benefit to completely throwing it all away for more than a few days at a time. Weekends are great but you can only do so much decompression and recovery (both mental and physical) in two days. Having a full week off where one doesn't work, it allows you to fully recharge.

The trick, I think, is to staying on this 'I ain't doing nothing' lifestyle until you start to get bored. For me, that takes about four days. About Wednesday night or Thursday, I'm starting to get antsy. I get restless. My mind begins to bubble over with story ideas and scenes and clever concepts waiting to be put to the page. And I start getting hyper-active, ready to get out and do something. By Saturday, I'm anxiously awaiting the coming week, the coming start of the new cycle.

Having this week off has other benefits as well. It helps you define success with greater clarity. Living in these twelve-week cycles makes it easy to set medium-term goals. "In this twelve-weeks", I might say, "I'm going to write a full book, six short stories, four essays, publish two articles, and prepare two convention presentations/panels". And by having a clearly defined start date and end date, I know how to further breakup my tasks for easier accomplishment. But I also have a period when I call it. I have a date where, after this, I stop. I no longer work on this book, I no longer push to get this article published. If it didn't happen in this twelve weeks (barring a few extenuating circumstances), I drop it and move on.

And that clean slate every three months is intensely valuable. During that week off, I am able to let go of all the baggage and issues and static that's built up. I'm able to clear my head and let go of everything that was unnecessary. So that way, on Day One of the new cycle, I am focused and eager, with clearly defined goals and a timetable for achieving them.

And that's where I am. Day Two of my week off. It is restful. It is relaxing. And I had candy bars for breakfast.

Sexism is a disease, only a mental one with a social component. In theory, it could be considered a sexually-transmitted mental illness. It is an inability to recognize an individual as a person, and instead seeing them only as a collection of sexually-desirable elements.

To present this another way, tell me what you see:



Do you see a duck? Or do you see a rabbit?

Now, take a look at this one:



Do you see an impressive costume worn by a beautiful woman dedicated to her craft? Or did you see large breasts?

In essence, that's sexism. Everybody looks the same picture of the highly revered cosplayer Yaya Han. But some people see a cosplayer at the height of her professional craft. And some people see large breasts.

One of the great dangers of sexism is how poorly it is understood. Sexism comes in a lot of forms and a lot of varieties, and manifests itself in many ways. But it all boils down to a single question that might as well take the form of an optical illusion: do you see a woman, or do you see boobs?

Men - not just quasi-sexists but also legitimately good and decent men - turn a blind eye to sexism and its resulting debate because they do not understand it. Most men cannot quite grasp the difference between appreciating beauty, especially sexual beauty, and sheer objectification. And it is that objectification that is the key to sexism; the reducing a person to a thing, the reducing of an individual to an object to be possessed.

This isn't about 'the Disease of Sexism'. This is about 'the Cure of Sexism'. Sexism, viewed as an illness, cannot be treated with a vaccination or any other tangible medicine. It can only be treated with awareness, acknowledgment, and vocal opposition. Not from women alone, but from men as well. A lot of good men are staying quiet in the sexism debate because they don't well enough understand the situation, or they feel this is a fight between women or bigots, Or worst of all, they fear they are hypocrites if they decry sexism and still enjoy sex and sexuality. The thing is, men, you don't have to trade in your love of sex and sexiness to oppose sexism. You should just do what men should always do: behave respectfully and speak up when you see wrong being done.

This past weekend was May the Fourth, a celebration of geek culture in general and Star Wars in particular. Most observances were small and subtle, little more than the sharing of memes on Facebook and the like. Others were a bit more involved (if you don't get it, don't worry; you have to be a regular follower of the whole site for it to be funny).

I used to like Star Wars - love it, even. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, lightsabers, the Force. It was really rad. Even though I identify with Star Trek more than Star Wars, I always enjoyed the Holy Trilogy. But something has happened to my enjoyment of this franchise, something that has marred and marked this icon of geekery.

The franchise itself.

It seems unfair to dump all my dislike on Episode One and the Prequel Trilogy as a whole, but that's really where it started. Episode One was so subpar, so mediocre, it hampered my enjoyment of the franchise as a whole. And subsequent releases only further distanced me from the series. Once the entire Prequel Trilogy had been released, I found myself disillusioned with Anakin Skywalker and the efforts of Obi-wan Kenobi. Darth Vader no longer seemed like an elite and revered warrior; he seemed like an easily manipulated goon. He stopped being the big bad and became Oddjob or Jaws from James Bond. The reverence and awe I once had for Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith, was completely undermined by what I now knew about Anakin Skywalker.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was the same way. Whereas I'd once thought him to be a noble icon of intelligence and mastery, I now had learned that he was kind of a moron. He was being actively sought the universe over and he hadn't even changed his last name? And was living down the street from the family of the guy he was hiding from? So much respect was lost.

But the Prequel Trilogy only started it. In the wake of the Prequel Trilogy came the video games. Unlike pre-Prequel Trilogy games that expanded on the Original Trilogy (tales of the Rogue Squadron or referenced battles in the movies), these games sought to expand on the mythology. The result after seeing games like Knights of the Old Republic was to dismiss the entire universe as living in a stagnant death. The universe in KotOR was almost identical to the one in the Original Trilogy, yet it took place a thousand years prior. If technology was the same across a millennial gap, then how could one take seriously a political upheaval? That wouldn't be news, that would be inevitable. Seeing the story of KotOR unfold, I suddenly WANTED the Empire to take control because then maybe they could get something done!

And then there was the animated series. While I loved Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars series set between Episodes II and III (which very nearly redeemed the Prequel Trilogy), the current running Star Wars: the Clone Wars series was okay, but was just like the movies it was based from: maybe worth a watch if nothing was on but nothing remarkable.

And it was on this most recent May the Fourth that it occurred to me that I really don't like Star Wars anymore. Something I used to really love had been retroactively ruined for me by sequels, video games, and an expanded universe that seemed destined to just ruin these three films. I couldn't recall the last time I talked to anybody about Star Wars that didn't center on Anakin Skywalker instead of Luke Skywalker. In some ways, it almost seems like the collective geek culture has just decided that the Original Trilogy never existed, perhaps because to do so would be to admit just how much the franchise has deteriorated.


There was a time when sci-fi was ruled by four stars: Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Battlestar Galactica. And looking at the four now, it would seem the light of Star Wars has burned out for at least this fan.

I had several dozen other things I wanted to talk about today, but given recent events*, I thought it appropriate to tackle this one.

I use Internet Explorer. I always have. I like Google Chrome well enough, but it doesn't do anything IE doesn't also do, including crash unexpectedly. I actively dislike Firefox. I've used Firefox on a variety of computers and it's never run at anything more than a ponderously slow pace, often at a speed that made me feel like I could get faster processing speeds if I was just yelling '10101000100100100010101' through a Dixie cup on a string.

I've been well aware that many people look down on IE users and I generally don't understand why. There was a hoax awhile back that IE users were proven to have lower IQs than other browser users and that was kind of funny, especially because of how readily everybody who wasn't an IE user was to believe it.

I don't quite know why people dislike Internet Explorer so much. It's buggy as all hell, sure, but I've never used a browser that wasn't (including Mac's own Safari). I've seen IE outperform, and be outperformed by, other browsers but never in such a way that impressed me. They are all means to an end - exploring the internet - and none of them do it staggeringly better than any of their peers.

To me it comes down to a simple question: why would I bother downloading a product that does the exact same thing as what already came pre-installed on my computer by the people who wrote all the programs I use as well as the operating system I'm using it on? I'm not an elite computer user. As a writer, my computer is largely a glorified typewriter and jukebox. The most demanding website I visit (as far as processing power goes) would probably be Youtube or Facebook; maybe Crunchyroll. I don't need a super-elite browser; I just need a browser that works. And having tried all the common ones, IE worked just as good as any of the others but had the added benefit of being right there when I first turned the computer on.

So Internet Explorer is what I continue to use, and will probably keep using for the foreseeable future.

* - The recent events in question was installing an Adobe update that automatically downloaded Google Chrome. That has had a deleterious effect on my computer and I've spent several hours today, performing every computer trick I know, just to remove this one program I never wanted to begin with.

Last night, I received the first draft of the cover art for my upcoming book, Rhest for the Wicked. It's still in the early stages (thus, no teasers, sorry), but it looks very promising and I think it will pair well with the book itself.

I'm quite anxious to return to print publishing. As many of my long-time fans can probably attest, I've been unable to find a comfortable niche since the fall of 2009. Having signed with my new publisher, things are starting to 'get back on course' as it were.

And in theory, they'll get back on course quickly. After Rhest for the Wicked, several more books should follow in short order. A cyberpunk lovestory is slated for release in September, while the re-publication of Ghee (my oh-so-infamous gay ninja book) should see release this December or January, and lastly Teach The Sky will be in print for the first time around this time next year. All these dates are tentative, of course. Publishing, especially in this day and age - and especially with a small press - is a unique and unpredictable beast. But with each subsequent book that is released, the process should become hopefully smoother. And from that experience, hopefully more ambitious projects shall follow.

A lot of people have wondered about Crossworld Saga and if it will see redistribution and the short answer is 'yes'. The long answer, unfortunately, is 'yes...in a while'. Crossworld has been released twice. And the entire Saga was rewritten as a serial. But both versions were aborted short of their finale because of industry and professional evolutions. My current publisher is quite interested in seeing the Crossworld Saga back in print, and I am too, but it's a story I first wrote in 2001 and have largely worked on almost continuously since then. It's been developing over more than a decade and, quite simply, I'm not eager to go back to the starting point yet again. This will be the third time I've restarted the Saga, and the fourth time I've rewritten Crossworld and it's just a task that I don't take lightly. But it will see print. I just want to get a few books down first before I start tilting at that particular windmill.

The publication of the serials remains a big unknown. Writing the Teach The Sky Continuity online constituted a massive undertaking and transferring that to the printed realm is no small task. I doubt the entire franchise will see print, but what doesn't see print will be re-released on here (TeachTheSky.com) as the story unfolds.

It's a very exciting time right now, professionally and artistically. I owe a lot of these opportunities to my publisher and their team whom have given me a chance to return to the print world. There are a lot of exciting projects in the works, with still more waiting in the wings. I hope you're going to enjoy them!

It was brought to my attention over the weekend that Tiger Woods has steadily been one of the most hated athletes in the country", the result of his highly publicized philandering and infidelity in years past. No problem, I understand.

What I don't understand is that four slots down on that list is Michael Vick, who pled guilty to brutally executing dogs in the process of running a dog-fighting ring. I don't understand how these two charges are even remotely equitable, and the killing of an innumerable number of dogs is the more-forgivable of the two besmirchings of these men's character.

I can understand people taking a dim view of infidelity, especially in a marriage that involves children. I know some might debate it even being called a crime, but that's a personal and ethical matter for debate. What isn't up for debate is the lives of dozens of animals being viciously and painfully exterminated because they were poor performers in a vicious underground pitfighting ring. These two things are not the same. These two crimes are not even on the same scale. I'm sure the former Mrs. Woods was hurt by her husband's actions; I'm not even beginning to question that. But infidelity and mistrust are a far, far cry from the murder of animals.

Even if you aren't the most staunch animal-rights activist, you must see the inherent cruelty in what Vick was doing for a protracted period. And if you can honestly tell me you believe the death of dozens of dogs is less serious and more forgivable than marital indiscretion, then you do not have a heart.

I was truly stunned to learn that the stigma of Wood's cheating lingers to this day, while the reaction to Vick's animal cruelty is 'Are we still talking about that?'. These two crimes are not even remotely similar and to cast them as such, or Wood's infidelity as the worse of the two, is simply beyond reasoning.

Long-time readers probably know that I'm a wrestling fan. And every wrestling fan knows yesterday was Wrestlemania, the Super Bowl for the professional wrestling world. And the main event at the 'Grandest Stage of Them All' was a championship match between John Cena and The Rock. Both big-name characters, both icons of their business, this was their second meeting and was poised to be the stuff of legend.

But surrounding their meeting were the rumors that John Cena was going to pull what in the wrestling world is known as a 'heel turn'. This parlance means he was going to go from a good guy (a face) to a bad guy (a heel). Cena has been the goodie-goodie of the WWE for close to a decade now and such a turn would have been industry-shaking (much like Hulk Hogan's turn in the 1990s).
Many fans - John Cena detractors and proponents alike - called for such a turn. They felt his boy scout persona had run its course and it was time for him to take on a darker, edgier, meaner character that would be more in-keeping with a villain. In Cena's early days, he had been a heel but since he began his first steps towards his ascent to the top of the industry, he's been an incorruptible good guy. And it is my opinion that shouldn't change.

Sometime around the 1980s, the dark and edgy characters seemed to come to the forefront. In comic books, it was the arrival of the seminal works 'the Dark Knight Returns' and 'Watchmen' which vaulted comic books not only out of childish fare and into the adult world (with the gritty realities and very mature themes injected into these fantasy tales) but they would also serve as the harbingers of comics' mainstream acceptance today.
In video games, it was probably the mid-90s when the Sega Genesis would go on the offensive against the more family-friendly Nintendo/Super Nintendo with more brazen advertising and more mature games at their forefront (the equivalent to letting their PG-13 titles do the talking against Nintendo's G and PG titles). This would be further acerbated when Sony's Playstation would enter the field and would aim their marketing squarely at 20-somethings and largely ignore the kids' market entirely. And they did this by emphasizing darker, more mature, and more morally ambiguous stories.
Films have likewise embraced this approach. The James Bond franchise, once about world-saving and high adventure, has for the last three movies been based on themes of betrayal and paranoia. The famed Dark Knight Trilogy by Christopher Nolan, one of the most successful comic book film franchises of all time, worked so hard to embrace it's gritty crime aesthetic that two of the three films avoided even having the name 'Batman' in the title. One of the most successful adventure franchises of the past decade - Pirates of the Caribbean - places pirates as not only the protagonists but as iconic heroes fighting against tyranny.
Even animation has moved in this direction. While other factors were at play, no doubt, the romantic interest in Disney's most recent fairy tale 'Tangled' is a thief and a liar, which is far removed from the tradition of princes and knights.

Please don't mistake me, I'm not asserting that darker tales are bad. Quite the opposite. They're wonderful. Watchmen and DKR helped deflate the egos of the pomp and silliness of comics and added some literary credibility. Nirvana broke the rock world with a much-needed dose of reality, and NWA would do the same with the music world as a whole.
But not every title and franchise benefits from that grit and edge. Not every movie needs to be realistic and ugly. Not every character needs to have a dark side.

It's for this reason that John Cena shouldn't make a heel turn. Because some characters need to remain idealistically - maybe even excessively - good. Every time they've tried to darken up Superman, fans have never embraced it. Superman remains an unapologetic boy scout. And Cena serves that same role in the WWE, in professional wrestling.

A heel turn can do wonders for a performer, no doubt, as well as for a story and for an entire company. I am not opposed to well-done heel turns at all. But not every wrestler needs one, and Cena definitely doesn't. Wrestling is a surreal, escapist fantasy. And if there's one thing our fantasies should always have room for, it's a true-and-through white-hatted good guy.

I really don't like April Fool's Day.

It's not (entirely) that I'm a curmudgeony old man who doesn't like fun. I do (or I tell myself that when I'm playing two-player video games by myself, just so I can rib my imaginary friend Steve about how badly I beat him). My problem with AFD is that the execution of a prank is a very delicate thing, one that requires care and forethought and that is something that doesn't really happen too often.

There seem to be two types of April Fool's Day jokes: the really mundane and boring jokes that are wastes of time. These are usually jokes that everybody sees coming and they're as harmless as they are bland. This is usually the realm of the cheap joke-store gags like joy buzzers, whoopie cushions, or Rick Rolling.

A lot of the pranks you see online are this way. Joking posts on Facebook (especially of the psuedo-ironic variety), flagrantly false news reports, and other such phenomena can be fun (I loved CNN reporting on the potential African zombie outbreak half a dozen years ago...back when CNN had actual reporters, but that's another issue). The problem with them is that they're predictable, to the point of becoming disruptive. It's gotten to the point that we expect these false reports, so ANY report that comes out today we treat with suspicion. So every news story needs to be fact-checked and double-cross-examined. It turns into just a waste of time.

The other, thankfully somewhat less common, prank is more elaborate but also more disruptive and potentially even hurtful. See, the problem with pranks is that they can cross the line from fooling around into bullying and even being harmful. A bucket of water over the doorway is fun to some, but it sucks for the person who gets splashed and then has no clean clothes to wear around the office. What's worse is if his/her cell phone gets splashed and is ruined. A 'harmless prank' has now just cost this person some (potentially serious) cash. That's not funny, nor is it in 'good fun'.

A prank is largely about lying to people. And while in the right context and executed the right way, they an be hysterical, they are the sorts of things that require forethought and consideration. Granted, a good prank is about taking somebody down a peg, but just a single peg. You aren't trying to humiliate them (or, you shouldn't be).

And that's why I don't like April Fool's Day. You're either wasting everybody's time, or you bullying somebody. There are exceptions, sure, that can be fun. But the rest of the time, it's a day that's disruptive at its best and mean-spirited at its worst.



On the other hand, all that Easter Candy is on sale...

As many of you may know, I am an appreciator of animation; both cartoons and animated series. I'll discuss the difference in a future post, perhaps, but today I wanted to mention a trend I've noticed.

I've been watching a lot of 80s cartoons recently, and not the mainstays like Transformers and GI Joe. I've just finished up Starcom and I'm starting into Visionaries. From there, I've got half a dozen series planned. But I can already tell a major difference between these shows (and their siblings of the era) and modern cartoons.

I've been introduced in the last year or so to Ben10 and a few other shows. I have yet to look at modern remakes like the new Thundercats series (I tried watching the new Voltron series and, while I hope I just tuned into the single worst episode of the series, I found it unwatchable after even five minutes). But what I've been noticing is how different the shows are from their 80s predecessors. This is hardly a surprise, but I've spent some time trying to hammer down just what is so different.

We seem to have roughly six to seven eras of shows we're dealing with, each era being approximately 5 years in length. We've got the post-cable deregulation/non-quite-Japanimation invasion (Transformers, GI Joe, MASK, Visionaries, Starcom, others) and then we have what I am momentarily calling the post-Transformers the Movie era. This is the last few years of the 80s and maybe the first year or two of the 90s. Transformers and GI Joe are probably the best examples of this because it is with these shows that you see such a clear change in the nature and writing of the show (compare season 1 of Transformers to season 3; compare episode 10 of GI Joe to episode 100; they're almost totally different shows).
After that, you get into the 90s which I am currently calling the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Knock-off era, where cast size dropped. You went from the, what?, 200 members of GI Joe to the team of 4-5 core characters. Superheroic powers began to replace more reality-based limitations. But then, probably around 1996, you saw the second-wave Japanese invasion. Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors led this charge and it affected the shows around them.
And then you get into the 2000s, which may or may not be able to break up into two distinctive eras of television (probably divided between either the Adult Swim/Toonami influence or Avatar: Last Airbender). And then you have the current era; the 2010s.

It's interesting to juxtapose something like Ben10 (especially the most recent incarnation, Ben10 Omniverse) with a show like Visionaries. Art-style, cast, music, world-building, everything's so very different. The fact that the shows are separated by almost 30 years doesn't begin to explain why they are structurally so different.


Much like comparing Judas Priest to Godsmack, the evolution of art is always a fun thing to witness, especially when it's the art styles within the same genre and medium.

A tweet can start a war, make no mistake.

Since I follow anime anthropologist and geek-academia god Charles Dunbar (and boy, you really should be too), I saw his retweet of the postulate by @TheifofHearts that "Game of Thrones is a mature fantasy, not because of the sex and violence. God of War is not a mature fantasy even if it features those."
This sparked a discussion between the living embodiment of geek knowledge and myself, about that. Specifically, I asserted the opposite was true: God of War is the more-mature fantasy than Game of Thrones.

Before we begin, let's make sure we're all on the same page about what we're talking about. Game of Thrones is a television series based off the Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R R Martin. The story revolves around political intrigue over supreme command of the lands of Westeros and Essos, while also confronting the invasion of winter and all the evils that come with it.
God of War is a video game series very loosely based off Greek mythology and follows a Spartan Warrior who is repeatedly tricked and betrayed, and subsequently seeks revenge for the skullduggery.

So, both stories are fantasy series that contain rather egregious amounts of violence and sex/nudity. So why is one story 'more mature' than the other?

Now, key to this discussion is the vernacular which we should iron out, and specifically what 'mature' means and does not mean. For the purposes of this discussion, we will be distinguishing between adult and mature. This is a critical distinction to be made, like 'dangerous' versus 'harmful'. The two terms can be used interchangeably, but in this context (or at least the context of this essay), we're going to define 'adult' as 'excessive'. An adult film is one geared towards hyperemphasizing some element. Not merely sex (though that is often where the term 'adult film' is applied); an adult topic or substance is looking to take something out of proportion, whether for analysis or consideration (like satire and metaphor) or just to get overloaded by it. An adult product is meant, in essence, for those looking to damage themselves because they are extravagent and extraordinary over the regular world.
Mature, on the other hand, is at the heart of this discussion. Maturity is about confronting one's own reality. It is, in essence, 'concerning real-world constructs'. The difference between a show meant for children and a show meant for adults is how much of the real world and it's consequences are presented. It is the evolved and higher sensibilities that come from experience and knowledge/wisdom. It is about facing reality directly.

It is my assertion that what passes for maturity in Game of Thrones is a veil of civility, primarily based around a status quo that is to be as closely maintained as possible while still allowing for advantageous advancement of a select few characters. It is quiet machinations and careful subtlety. It's maneuver others to achieve goals.
But a byproduct of this is that these characters also don't, well, do anything. By insessantly relying on civility and the veil of reason, the various characters and even whole states in Game of Thrones don't handle their affairs; they lead others to handle matters, to the point where a vast network of favors and movements occur to facilitate the generation of more favors and more debts. And what was begun as a social contract turns into a web of deceit and constant deception, to the point where most every character is committed to getting as much for themselves as possible while trying to avoid getting one's hands dirty and to make sure blame always fall elsewhere.

It is upon this view that I believe God of War to be more mature than Game of Thrones because, simply, the titular character Kratos handles his business himself. He doesn't look to make backroom alliances so that someone else can deal with a problem, he does it. He confronts reality.
When you think of a child in trouble, what do you imagine? Odds are, it's of that child crying to someone else (maybe a parent) to deal with a problem that they cannot. It is the reliance on an external force to make problems go away. And that is just about all that goes on in Game of Thrones. Incessant politicking to avoid getting one's hands dirty. And that isn't a depiction of maturity; it's childishness.
To handle one's affairs honestly and directly, and with minimal input and aid from others, is the essence of maturity. To be able to do for yourself. Few scenes in Game of Thrones depict this, and it is upon this construct that God of War is built.

Both series are excessive and exaggerated, and are at their heart escapist fantasies, but God of War is honest in one thing: Kratos handles his own problems directly. Game of Thrones is almost a nonstop litany of backstabbing and conniving to have as many others do as much for you as you can manage, while doing as little as possible yourself. That is not an adult; this is a selfish child who is expending his energy to convince others to solve his problem for him.