Jackson Allen's Blog, page 24

-= Vacation Notice – Summer 2023 =-

Yes, folks – writers take breaks, too. Gonna take a week off of socials/internet and re-charge. It’s a beautiful summer out there, and I don’t want to miss it. Hope you take the time to do the same.

Sci-Friday #188 – Scifi Visuals – ‘Wayward Gods’ Movie

For this Sci-Friday, sit back and watch a scifi short movie with striking visuals – ‘Wayward Gods.’ In a futuristic cyberpunk Thailand, a lone warrior must battle both his own karma, and the forces of evil, without using violence. Happy Friday, we made it! 🙂

What’s the deal with this four-minute short? According to the website: ‘The giant MECHA-YAKSHA construction project was initiated by the NAGA CORPORATION who had taken over most of the Asian continent during their reincarnation one-hundred years earlier. Their plan is to use the MECHA-YAKSHA to contain and control the spirit of the legendary demon, RAHU— the massive god who swallows the moon during every eclipse. Once the MECHA-YAKSHA is completed, it will be used to dominate all the territories of heaven and earth.’ You can learn more at WaywardGods. 

In storytelling terms – the filmmaker asked ‘What if we combined Eastern spirituality with cyberpunk and rock music?’ Interesting combination. I’ll skip the comments on spiritual topics – visually, Wayward Gods is stunning. Nate Pantumsinchai has been making movies since 2008 with ‘Lullabye Before I Wake.’ Then he made Haruka and Auroras (2014). His experience and talent have only gotten better with time. Wayward Gods is worth a look if you’re keen to see the next generation of visual filmmaking before Disney snaps it up.I hope you enjoyed this moment of scifi special effects! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Notes on my ‘Ideal Reader’

I ran across an article about John Steinbeck and am writing these notes on my ‘ideal reader.’ You know, just in case you’re wondering “who is supposed to be reading Jackson’s work?” Steinbeck gave the following advice to Robert Wallsten, a young man who was “experiencing a kind of stage fright about actually starting to write a biographical work.”

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

Yes, authors from John Steinbeck to Stephen King are famous for telling you that you should know who your reader is – what makes them tick, what do they care about – if you’re going to write successfully for them. I’m in full agreement of this philosophy, but who is my ‘ideal reader?’

Middle grade fiction isn’t just for kids in the middle-grades. Many adults eat up middle grade and for good reason. WritersDigest reports they ‘found authors telling complex character stories with situations that, while literally relating to children, were not difficult for me to draw parallels to in and around my own life as an adult.’

But never mind that now – who is my ideal reader? I decided to ask ChatGPT: Here is what it said in response:

Your ideal reader for middle-grade sci-fi would typically be children between the ages of 8 and 12. This age group is often referred to as “tweens” or “middle graders” and represents a significant portion of the target audience for books in this genre.

Here are some characteristics and preferences of your ideal reader:

Age: Your ideal reader falls within the middle-grade range, typically between 8 and 12 years old. They are transitioning from early chapter books to more complex narratives. Reading Level: Your ideal reader is likely an independent reader, comfortable with longer texts and capable of understanding more advanced vocabulary. However, it’s important to keep the language accessible and avoid overly complex concepts. Interest in Science Fiction: Your ideal reader is enthusiastic about science fiction and enjoys exploring futuristic or speculative concepts. They are intrigued by technology, space exploration, aliens, robots, and other imaginative elements commonly found in sci-fi stories. Adventure and Exploration: Middle-grade readers are often drawn to stories with exciting adventures and a sense of discovery. They enjoy following characters who embark on thrilling quests, explore new worlds, or encounter intriguing mysteries. Relatable Protagonists: Your ideal reader is more likely to connect with main characters who are around their age or slightly older. They want protagonists who face relatable challenges, overcome obstacles, and grow throughout the story. Engaging and Fast-Paced Plot: Middle-grade readers appreciate stories with a strong narrative drive, filled with suspense, action, and unexpected twists. They are eager to be captivated by a compelling plot that keeps them turning the pages. Themes of Friendship and Self-Discovery: Middle-grade readers often resonate with themes related to friendship, self-discovery, and personal growth. They enjoy seeing characters navigate social dynamics, learn important life lessons, and develop their own identities. Age-Appropriate Content: As a middle-grade author, it’s essential to ensure that the content of your story is suitable for your target audience. Avoid explicit or overly mature themes, and present any challenges or conflicts in a way that is appropriate for younger readers.

Remember, while these characteristics can help you understand your ideal reader, every child is unique, and there is a wide range of reading preferences within the middle-grade category. Tailor your writing to engage and captivate this age group, but also trust your own creative instincts and unique voice as an author.

Huh. Lot to take in, there. I’ve read, and re-read this list over and over again. ChatGPT’s feedback is interesting, but … something’s missing. Am I the only one who sees it? I did some more Google-fu and came up with this quote:

Afoma Umesi: My favorite thing about middle grade literature is how hopeful it is. It is very unassuming. I mean, it’s supposedly books for kids, but it can cover a wide range of emotions and a wide range of topics as well. Literally anything you can think about happening in real life is touched in middle grade literature. There are middle grade books about a variety of topics, whether you’re thinking about addiction, domestic violence, travel, death, and grief. And then there are also feel-good books as well, sibling relationships, everything. It covers all of this.

This is helpful but ultimately it’s a data point of data points. My ideal reader will fall somewhere in that Venn diagram of the eight items … but who are they? What’s going on in their lives? What makes them happy? What makes them sad? What drives them to turn the page? We’re getting closer to the answer, but we’re not there yet.

I’mma break this up into a two-parter – stay tuned for more details.

Please be patient …

I’ve held off on posting anything this week for two reasons:

Kbin/m/scifi has had my attention, posting new content and helping the community to growI’m working on Mike.Sierra.Echo – please note the updated progress bar on the right.

I appreciate your patience – looking forward to telling you all about it when I’m done.

Reddit Blackout Notes and /m/scifi

Here are some notes on the Reddit Blackout and a new home for sci-fi fans on Kbin: https://kbin.social/m/scifi. As of this writing, there are 1700+ members and the Kbin magazine exists to give people a new home for science fiction in the wake of Reddit’s Blackout.

But wait, why is all this necessary? Are you creating a new home for Inkican social media engagement? I’ve given a lot of thought to these questions and this blog post helps explain that /m/scifi exists as a public-spirited, philanthropic exercise in human-centered digital conversations. Where Reddit has attempted to be that place for the past ten or twelve years, recent corporate decisions have led to what other journalists call – I will clean up the term for our younger readers: ‘En-poop-ification’: when an online platform becomes more monetized and less user-oriented the longer it lasts.

Actions this year by Reddit have pushed it much farther down the path of ‘less user-oriented.’ Worse, public statements and private actions by the company leave nothing to doubt when it comes to their intentions. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit, wrote in a recent AMA.

So What?

You might be asking: what’s wrong with that? Aren’t companies in the business to make money? The answer to that question is, yes – of course they are. But let’s understand that Reddit has spent over a decade enjoying its status as a world-leading platform while kicking the ‘we’ll figure out how to monetize later’ can down the road. Along the way, some important social questions have arrived and Reddit is still failing to show leadership in this matter. Let me explain:

Those that say Reddit ‘will continue on’ aren’t looking at the situation through the lens of history. At its core, ‘Reddit is a rare social product that has seemed to become more relevant over time, as a growing user base comes to appreciate its distinctive, human-centered approach to digital conversations.’ A digital third place, built on mutually-shared beliefs and principals of digital altruism – Reddit existed to Give People Voices – aiming to create a safe space for all viewpoints.

So that’s what Reddit is supposed to do as a ‘platform.’ What about Reddit as a ‘company?’ Sadly, boardroom shenanigans have pursued Reddit throughout its entire lifecycle. Reddit lost the public-spirited people like Aaron Swartz, and gained trolls, hate groups, and the soap opera that was the Ellen Pao debacle. As Will Durant said: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.’

Seeds of Destruction Already in Place

Those public statements and private actions by the company I mentioned earlier? They aren’t there to make Reddit a more human-centered place. Monetizing API use won’t increase Reddit’s stature as a ‘a safe space for all viewpoints.’ Like when managers decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle, “the concerns about the O-rings that ultimately led to the explosion were buried in a vast sea of thousands of other decisions … leading up to the ill-fated launch.”

Risks don’t rely on your perspective for existence. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” as Philip K. Dick famously said. This recent Reddit move to monetize APIs creates major cracks in its foundations of digital altruism and human-centered behavior. As I said last year with Twitter: “Twitter has every chance to prove to us that it can be a safe, responsible place for us to interact with our readers if they want to. In the meantime, it’s getting too weird around here. I’m mustering at the life boat station now, in case we must abandon ship.”

Mastodon has been a good home for me, post-Twitter. Kbin seems like it might be, too based on the past couple of weeks. The main thing to remember is that the network is more important than the node. Networks ‘exist because we contribute to them. They are where our best ideas can spread and have impact … It follows that what we can do as part of a network, as part of a collective, is far more impactful than what we can do all by ourselves.’

If you’re interested in a Reddit alternative for scifi-based discussions – please feel welcomed to join us at https://kbin.social/m/scifi!

Sci-Friday #187 – Jurassic Park Animatronics

Congrats – we made it through the week – let’s use Sci-Friday #187 to discuss the magical world of Jurassic Park animatronics. Of course, Jurassic Park is known mostly for its innovative CGI. Yet, CGI only makes up six minutes of the movie’s two-hour running time. What were many of the other dazzling special effects? None other than old-fashioned film-making and animatronics. Take a behind-the-scenes look at the animatronics of Jurassic Park and then let’s break down what they contributed to the final product of the movie.



According to Wikipedia, many of the animatronic and practical effects were either happy accidents or natural by-products of the cast’s creativity. For instance, shooting the T-Rex scenes “proved frustrating because when water soaked the foam rubber skin of the animatronic dinosaur, it caused the T. rex to shake and quiver from the extra weight when the foam absorbed it. This forced Stan Winston’s crew to dry the model with shammys between takes.”

But wait, it gets better! “Malcolm distracting the dinosaur with a flare was included at Jeff Goldblum’s suggestion. He felt a heroic action was better than going by the script, where like Gennaro, Malcolm was scared and ran away.The ripples in the glass of water caused by the T. rex‘s footsteps were inspired by Spielberg listening to Earth, Wind and Fire in his car, and the vibrations the bass rhythm caused. Lantieri was unsure how to create the shot until the night before filming when he put a glass of water on a guitar he was playing, which achieved the concentric circles in the water Spielberg wanted. The next morning, guitar strings were put inside the car and a man on the floor plucked them to achieve the effect.”

One of the things that stands out to me after 25+ years is how Jurassic Park illustrates the beauty of storytelling and film-making. The cast and crew of Jurassic Park weren’t content to ‘fix it in post,’ or ‘wash away the problems with a money hose.’ No, they used their brains, their experience, and their creativity to make the impossible look possible. Their use of practical effects and CGI were heartfelt, authentic, and contained a sense of creativity integrity that still holds up almost thirty years later.

I hope you enjoyed this moment of scifi special effects! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Notes from Eugene – 06/06/2023

Banging on my door woke me up at 4:23am on a Monday morning. “Get out here, the hot water heater’s exploded!”

I jump out of bed, shivering as I step into cheap sneakers – fifty-four degrees according to the window thermometer. Steam rose from the soupy ground outside the utility room, water draining from a broken seam in the Eisenhower-era water heater, equal parts of dryer lint and mud. Grunting, I reach for the water cutoff valve handle behind the heater and burn myself getting it shut.

“Not much else I can do. You’ll need a plumber for this one.”

“Do I look like I can afford an emergency plumber call?”

I shrug in the glare of our blue motion-sensor lights. Dawn was still an hour away. RoseMarie and I share a weird relationship made up of commerce and hostility, tempered by neighborly necessity. Our shared camaraderie comes out being the friends you make in a lifeboat, kinship because you can’t afford to kill each other.

She’s still on edge and I know why – it’s been a rough month for RoseMarie. Two car-breakins outside her front door. Marauding racoons laid waste to our garbage cans – meaning we need to keep them padlocked shut at night. Then there was serving an ex-tenant with a restraining order when he threatened lethal violence over the matter of a damage deposit. These are the things you learn to live with when renting property in Eugene.

Property crime, broken infrastructure are nothing out of the ordinary in 2023. Good deeds drowning in an ocean of well-intentioned bad choices. We’re all hunkered down in our dank little dens – fingers crossed that the good arrives soon, and the bad doesn’t get too bad. Violence and chaos are only a phone call or a rusty water pipe away.

RoseMarie finds a plumber willing to come out for less than the price of a down-payment on a new Kia Sorrento. Good thing too, because my landlord’s eye started to twitch, fingers rubbing that thousand-day chip she kept in the pocket of her faded blue housecoat. I could hear the EPD dispatcher now, over the scanner – ‘large white female in pajamas screaming in the middle of the street – possible 5150 – ascertain the problem.’

Back upstairs, comfort the traumatized cats who don’t differentiate between ‘inconvenience’ and ‘problem’ when it comes to people banging on the door. Nervous shedders. Start the coffee early -practice gratitude for the simple pleasures in among the gruesome distress.

Then I sat down at my keyboard and began to write.

Scifi Retrofuturism – VerticalVille

Fans of scifi retrofuturism will be excited to see this recovered piece – Verticalville – that I’m happy to post for the first time. Verticalville is an obscure art piece, as near as I can tell unknown to the Internet. Let’s enjoy the art and take a deep dive on what is known about this piece.

Verticalville was stuck in the back of my mind every time I talked about retrofuturism. I remembered it from a disused textbook on somebody’s shelf from 30+ years ago – an old picture in an old book. Evocative, yet simple – the picture sucked me into a story about living life in an 1895 arcology, a proto-Mortal Engines habitat and what that might feel like. I forgot about the picture for years, but I never forgot about how it made me feel.

Flash forward to five years ago – I remembered Verticalville and decided I’d like to have it for a computer wallpaper. Surely it was on the Internet somewhere, I said to myself. Off to Google for a fun little detective project. Hours and hours later, I was no closer to finding this original picture than the Verticalville puzzle based on this picture. Where in the Sam Hill is Verticalville, I kept asking. Years passed by, more Google-fu searches, still nothing to be found.

Eventually, I remembered the name of the textbook and started checking local libraries. No one had a copy – it’d been out of print for years. I eventually found one online and scraped together some nickels and dimes to purchase it. As soon as the UPS guy delivered, I cracked it open and checked the back: Verticalville in all of it’s glory – see below:

To this day, I’m still unclear where the picture comes from. Here’s what the description says: “A comic-weekly artist of 1895, inspired by the development of the skyscraper, has sketched a nightmarish version of the super-building of the future. Hydraulic and electric elevators were one factor – steel girder frames were another – in winging offices and apartments toward the skies. The City now had its focus, the cluster of towering business structures. A poet wrote: “All cities are mad, but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”

The artist signature says ‘Hamilton’ (visible in the picture above – lower left). Other than that, we’re still not sure where the picture comes from.

But this is something I’m happy to share with all of you! Verticalville is a powerful piece of retrofuturism and I’m glad I can put it out there for the world to enjoy.

Sci-Friday #186 – William Gibson – Origin of Cyberspace

For this Sci-Friday, let’s enjoy an interview with William Gibson and the origin of the ‘cyberspace’ term. Take a look at what he says, and then we’ll double-click into some other details.

So did William Gibson invent the word ‘cyberspace?’ Not necessarily. According to Wikipedia, the term “cyberspace” first appeared in the visual arts in the late 1960s, when Danish artist Susanne Ussing (1940-1998) and her partner architect Carsten Hoff (b. 1934) constituted themselves as Atelier Cyberspace. However, the term ‘cyberpunk’ *does* come from Gibson, among other artists as we discussed in Sci-Friday #184.

Interestingly, if you look up the Wiki article on cyberspace, you get a stack of other articles related to cyborgs: Bionics, Biomimicry, Biomedical engineering, Brain–computer interface, and Cybernetics to name a few.

These discussions about cyberspace and cyberpunk are part of what is known as ‘semiotics,’ the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Given that every cultural phenomenon may be studied as communication, it’s always valuable to understand what you’re part of and what that communicates about you.

I hope you enjoyed this moment of scifi semiotics! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Wil Wheaton and the Wesley Haters

If you think you could live with being a scorned scifi character, look at Wil Wheaton and the Wesley Haters. Wil Wheaton does an insightful deep-dive into the character of Wesley on WilWheaton.Net – take a look:

“Wesley’s dream has come true, and he can’t even celebrate it. Yeah, he’s a full ensign, a Starfleet officer … but he’s a kid who has never been to the academy and learned what being a Starfleet officer means, how to behave and exist around other Starfleet officers who have also gone through everything it takes to get a posting on the federation’s flagship. He is wearing the uniform without having gained the experience that he needs to fill it. He doesn’t know that Picard and the Traveler did this. He just knows that, now, he has to show up and prove that he actually does deserve it.

And this kid has never been in a place where it’s safe and okay to make mistakes and learn from them. And he knows that. At fifteen. It’s a lot. Now this kid has to carry around with him not just the responsibility that comes with the chair and the rank, but he also has to exist on the Enterprise where he passes people in the corridors, sees people in the canteen, waits in line to use the transporter with all these other officers who have never met him, and DEEPLY resent him for something he didn’t do. Wesley feels that resentment every single time, and it hurts”

So that’s a bit of interesting insight – Wesley knew you hated him the whole time. He knew it. Feel better now? He knew you disliked him, but he showed up every day and did his job. That takes guts. Sand, as they say in old cowboy stories.

You may not want to admit it, but Wil Wheaton just taught the Wesley Haters an important lesson. Sometimes all you can do sometimes is keep going. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how many times they tell you to shut up. Just keep going. Also, earning your stripes and earning your place are two different things. You may have earned your place, but you still need to earn your stripes. Keep that in mind the next time you pile onto a ‘scifi hate thread.’

Yes, we can learn a lot from Wil Wheaton and the Wesley Haters – come to think of it, that’d be a great name for my new indo-punk scifi parody satire band. Just think of the Star Trek-based songs you could do:

I Was a Teenage HelmsmanWe Built This StarshipMoney For Nothing (‘Cause We’re Secular Humanists)The Final (Self-Destruct) CountdownNuthin’ but a ‘Q’ ThingParanoid Android (Featuring Data!)

Thank you Wil, for your valuable insight. Really appreciate everything you’ve become as a human and as an actor.

Write on!