Jackson Allen's Blog, page 30

Sci-Friday #169 – Tension in Storytelling with Apollo 13

Having said before that art is there to make you feel something, let’s enjoy some tension in storytelling with Apollo 13 for Sci-Friday #169. ICYMI before, Apollo 13 was one of THE biggest 90s space movies and for good reason. Director Ron Howard recreated the story of a ‘successful failure,’ and bringing the movie together in a masterful use of tension where literally nothing happens. Take a look:



All the way down, Apollo 13 creates narrative tension and then holds us there for an hour so we can feel the same frustration and stress the NASA engineers must have felt as they contemplated losing three astronauts to the deep black of space. Those crucial conflicts are allowed to ebb and flow as we see the emergency, but then realize the astronauts are still okay … for the moment, and then we realize the bigger issues like – ‘will they survive one disaster just to fall victim to another?’

Fun fact: the image at the top of this post is Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s brother. Another fun fact is, the capsule at the end of the movie is real. Producers wanted to use CGI to render the splashdown, but Legato adamantly insisted this would not look realistic. Real parachutes were used with a prop capsule tossed out of a helicopter.

What else is happening? Head down on finishing the Mike.Sierra.Echo draft. As of today I’m at 80.6% which means in a few weeks I’ll have a draft out for comments with my Beta Readers. Would you like to be a Beta Reader? Hit me up on Mastodon, I’ll let you know what’s involved.

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive on Star Trek! 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! 

The Matter of Mattering

Even though I’m drafting on Mike.Sierra.Echo like there’s no tomorrow – I want to speak for a moment on the Matter of Mattering. Yes, of course you matter. I matter. Yes, I’m writing like a madman – I want to finish this draft by 12/31! Yet, I don’t want to forget that working on me is important, too. All my background work is helping the writing process move forward – I realized something the other day and I posted it on Mastodon:

Okay, now hold it: Now is not the time to devolve into ‘who hurt you’ discussions or meaningless requests for validation. When you come from a background of trauma and you’re working on healing, you’ll find these little nuggets of sad scattered through your life. Two things you cannot do when you find them:

You can’t skip over them to immediately go ‘problem:solution.’ That fails to show yourself compassion and that is a method of trauma unto itself (“you feel pain – here’s the solution – thanks, I’m cured!”). You can’t spend the rest of your life talking about the nugget of sad. Pain is to be processed, not procured. Suffering is not a personality.

Talking about it, getting better at processing those nuggets, that’s the matter of mattering. If you didn’t learn how to meet your needs in the past, you can either live without those needs (Yay, being a hermit!) or learn how to do so in the future. Yes, you matter, but you must learn the habit of talking about your needs, acknowledging their existence and importance, and meeting them. All of those things are tasks that make up a skillset to be learned.

I’m going to get back to writing now, but wanted to share this. I hope you find it useful in your own personal growth journey.

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

Cool Hacking Stuff – The Darknet Diaries

Let’s sidebar back to some cool hacking stuff for you Mesh fans – listen to the Darknet Diaries. I started yesterday and I’m already enthralled. These stories are EXACTLY the kind of thing that inspired me to write Mesh and it’s happening all right now in real time!

Here’s an example: Remember that scene in Sneakers where Robert Redford, River Phoenix, and Sidney Poitier are hired to rob a bank to test its security? Jason is a guy who does this for a living. You can listen to Jason tell the story of the time he accidentally robbed the wrong bank. It’s a hysterical story and it’s all completely true – it’s a great way to start digging into the weird, wild world of Darknet Diaries:

Listen to The Beirut Bank Job here

Anyone who’s read Inkican knows I’ve catalogued some stories about the importance of computer hacking but it’s not my main focus. Yet, I’ve been a fan of techno-derring-do stories for over thirty years, so I’m glad a podcast like this exists both as inspiration and for entertainment. I’ll keep coming back for more, and if you’re into computer hacking, you should, too.

 

 

Sci-Friday #168 – Throwback Star Wars Fun with ‘Andor 1975’

For this Sci-Friday, enjoy some throwback Star Wars fun with ‘Andor 1975,’ courtesy the Auralnauts. I don’t like everything they do, but this was pretty cool and worth sharing for Sci-Friday. Take a look:



I haven’t said much up to this point about Andor but I’ve watched it (Yay, free Disney+ trials) and it’s the kind of scifi I wish Star Wars was doing 15 years ago. Imagine how much goodwill they could have garnered, focusing on simple non-Skywalker stories instead of rehashing the classics like a bad Eagles tour. But, whatever. As I’ve said before, you can love Star Wars but Star Wars doesn’t love you. We’ve got other stories to tell.

What else is happening? Head down on finishing the Mike.Sierra.Echo draft. As of today I’m at 79.4% which means in a few weeks I’ll have a draft out for comments with my Beta Readers. Would you like to be a Beta Reader? Hit me up on Mastodon, I’ll let you know what’s involved.

Batman’s Eulogy – An Elegy for Kevin Conroy

Well friends, I haven’t talked about Kevin Conroy but you know my feelings on Batman: The Animated Series. What’s the best way to say ‘thank you’ to a guy you never met for a childhood you never had? I don’t know the answer to that, so I purposefully held off on talking about Kevin Conroy. I didn’t feel there was anything I could say that could do my feelings justice. Then came Mark Hamill.

Mark, of course, was the Joker to Kevin’s Batman. He had many more eloquent things to say on the passing of Kevin Conroy, but what better way to celebrate his life than to see Mark perform ‘Batman’s Eulogy’ live on stage? Take a look:

Why was it so hard to lose Conroy? I think this Substack author put it best: “When our childhood heroes die, it reminds us that we too will die. That we are no longer children and in many cases no longer young. Our heroes are those whose attributes we admire because we wish they were our own. As children we must live vicariously through others because we have had no life to speak of, but our childhood imaginings shape who we become, and our heroes offer us templates to follow. When they die, we realise that they are also human with faults and frailties. The illusion is shattered, a hero is just another person. It is doubly sad.”

We miss Kevin Conroy because we’re grateful for him for showing us the way, even if we didn’t quite understand what he was doing at the time. Thank you Kevin, for being the Batman who made me believe in myself. And thank you, Mark Hamill, for being the amazing yin to Conroy’s yang. We’ll never see a combo like that again.

Carl Sagan Agrees With Me: We Are All Connected

Remember when I said ‘we must be connected?‘ It turns out, Carl Sagan agrees with me – we are all connected – you can hear him say so in this new Symphony of Science video. Take a look:

Now, if you’re wondering if the artist behind this video is the same guy who did the Mister Rogers Remixed | Garden of Your Mind video, the answer is yes! John D. Boswell started making viral Youtube videos back in 2009 and now he does it for a living. Fair play to him.

Yes, we’re all connected. I wanted to share this with you now while I’m working on Part II of ‘We Must Be Connected.’ More on that soon.

Write on!

Sage Scifi: We Must Be Connected

Let’s talk about another sage scifi idea you need: we must be connected. Simple, right? Deceptively so, for connection is a survival skill. As a species, our ability to cooperate is a must-have, especially as we contemplate whatever is going to happen next in our late-stage capitalism / boring dystopia. Disconnecting from each other will kill us. Learning how to connect, and re-connect, is why we survive as a species.

So why is it so hard to be connected? Interestingly, I read through Mark Greene’s essays on masculinity, connection, and culture. Modern culture has many connection-killing aspects and although Greene focused on it from a male-centric perspective, it’s important to remember that our need for connection is human. When we aren’t connected, we’re lonely.

What happens next? Well, when loneliness becomes a feature instead of a bug in culture, you get things like violence and aggression – kind of like what’s threaded though modern masculinity. Understanding that, we come to see that the toxic social behaviors within the scifi community aren’t really about science fiction, they’re about something deeper.

Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other

Okay, so why would we care about any of this in the first place? Take a step back – science fiction is the genre of our stories. It’s also a community unto itself. “Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other,” the SSIR says. “They have an individual and collective sense that they can, as part of that community, influence their environments and each other.”

Do we agree on that? That scifi is a community, not just a genre? If so, how does it work, what should it do for us, and what’s our responsibility as community members to contribute to a sense of trust, belonging, and safety?

Looking at the ‘scifi community’ through the lens of a sociologist, some ideas emerge.  Like other communities, science fiction, has a social hierarchy. People like Mark Hamill, or Neil Gaiman? Institutions like the SFWA? They would be dominant members. They have influence, they assert control. Corporations like movie companies, Amazon, and Comic Con have influence too, but that’s a different topic. What about people like us? Well, we’re community members and participants. We have influence and control in so far as people are willing to let us.

Defining the Scifi Community Using Sociology

Scifi as a community follows common sociological ontologies when it comes to how it’s organized. For example, Dual strategies theory states humans increase their status in social hierarchies using two major strategies known as dominance and prestige.

When you look at the collaborative, mutually beneficial, expertise-driven aspects of scifi, you get the sense that our community uses Prestige as a strategy. But then, when you see scifi fans raging on on properties, franchises, or artists – what’s that called? It’s not prestige; it’s dominance.

Let’s talk about dominance as a strategy for social hierarchy. You know what it is, but maybe you’ve never seen it defined. Desire for authority, control, and power? Those are all dominance-based strategies.

We see ‘dominance’ in the use of force, threat, selfish withholding of resources and general intimidation in science fiction. Can you think of some examples? I can. It’s an unhealthy, fallacious, and unsustainable way to go through life. Yet, it continues – toxic fans are prepared to die on those hills. Why? Because they know it’s an effective way to climb the ladder of a social hierarchy.

Scifi community participants who use ‘dominance’ will accomplish one of several things: 1. They will climb higher on the hierarchy and scifi will change to align to their goals. 2. They will climb higher on the hierarchy only to find that there’s no ‘there’ there when it comes to dominating scifi 3. They will be defeated by scifi members who use ‘prestige’ as a community strategy.

How’s That Working Out?

What have we learned – Does scifi align to dominance? No, most of the time people using dominance rise for a while only to realize the truth: Dominance doesn’t drive creativity. When was the last time you saw the angry nerds cancelling Rose Marie Tran get together to fund their own scifi film? Doesn’t happen.

But what happens instead? We’ve seen endless battles between ‘dominance’ and ‘prestige’ – the scifi community participants who don’t want to be dominated or controlled by a loud minority. Want some examples? Here you go. [Link] [Link] 

Fighting those battles has come at a terrible cost. Some connect through competition and dominance, but it disconnects others. Not only that, the world at large sees us competing and disconnecting and checks out: we’ve lost out on precious time to champion new, worthy additions to beloved scifi franchises. We’ve lost out on opportunities to participate in important discussions.

What do we do about it? I get into that more in Part II – stay tuned …

 

Mesh Concept Art – Now Online

Super cool news – some new Mesh concept art is now online! I’ve been working for *hours* on Midjourney to create some new concept art to explain the universe of Mesh.

    

Why does concept art matter? As this artist notes, “ Concept art helps to convey the look, feel and mood of a design idea. It is used to capture and convey the overall design vision of a project before anything goes into production, versus trying to express everything in specific terms at the very beginning of design development … [I]f you’ve ever had a hard time telling someone about one of your wildest creations, you can begin to get an idea of how and when concept art can help. Think about the tough time you’d have explaining your idea of a new world, it’s mood, and even potential story arcs that can take place in it, to your grandmother.”

    

I hope this art helps you understand the universe of Mesh – there is so much here to explore!

Click Here to Visit the Mesh Concept Art Gallery

Sci-Friday #167 – Star Trek: The Next Generation Gag Reel

If all you know about Star Trek: The Next Generation is the episodes, do yourself a favor and watch the gag reel for season two. Making a serious show about space can be pure comedy:

Season Two is where Whoopie “Guinan” Goldberg joined the show as a 23rd-century bar tender. Season Two was also our first look at the Borg, and we learned that Data’s storage capacity is stated as 800 quadrillion bits. In current terms, this equates to 88.818 pebibytes (PiB), or more simply, 100,000 terabytes (TB). For comparison, the entire Netflix library is estimated to be ~100TB.

Other fun facts about that season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The 1988 Writers Guild of America strike caused the season to be shortened to 22 episodes, the lowest amount for any season in the series. Writers including David Gerrold, who wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles” for the original series, came on board and pitched an episode  called “Blood and Fire“, which included two homosexual crew members and an AIDS allegory. Roddenberry cleared the idea, but later his lawyer torpedoed the script. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans later caused Gerrold to ask for his contract not to be renewed.

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive on Star Trek! 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! 

Lo-Fi Meets Sci-Fi

This is both awesome and sharable – lo-fi meets sci-fi in this beautiful 8-hour YouTube clip of rock and AI-generated scifi images. I’m using this while I write Mike.Sierra.Echo. Take a look, and bookmark for future reference:

I hope you’ll forgive my lack of updates – as you can see from the MSE Progress Report, I’m head down on finishing this draft of Mike.Sierra.Echo and getting it out for feedback. I’m also hard at work building my Mastodon platform now that Twitter is dead. That’s kept me from talking in more depth about scifi and other stuff. I hope to get back to that when I’m more settled.

Enjoy the video – it’s quite fascinating. Write on!