Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 48

The April Reboot Check-In That Happened In April

It’s the last day of April, so check me out: I’m doing my reboot check in for April before April is over. Go me!

I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.

So I took a long, hard, serious look at myself, and concluded that some things needed to change.

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

Last year, I decided to hit the reboot button on my life. I’ve checked in about once a month since then, to see how I’m doing, celebrate the victories, and identify where I can do better.

Let’s see how I’m doing after seven months.

Drink less beer – A+

So I decided to cut alcohol out of my life because I was really struggling to get the last three to five pounds of weight to fall off. It took about two months, but it totally worked! I hit my target weight goal, but instead of picking up beer again, I decided to just keep on not drinking. Now, some days I really miss having a beer or ten, or enjoying a nice drop of scotch in the evening, but I think I’ve said this before: what I get in return for giving this up massively outweighs the small sacrifice. I didn’t realize how much more time I have to do things that are not having beer or whatever until I just stopped drinking beer or whatever.

Read More (and Reddit does not count as reading) – A

This month, I’ve been doing a ton of reading, and not only have I been doing a ton of reading, I’ve been getting a ton of inspiration from the reading, which is why I wanted to read more in the first place. I’m mostly reading SF/F short stories (my Lightspeed Magazine subscription is one of the best things I’ve ever bought in my life), and I started the second book in The Expanse series. Last month, I gave myself a B on the curve because I was displeased with the lack of diversity in my reading, but considering how much stuff I have to do every day, I’m actually bending the curve in my favor and taking an A this month.

Write more. – A

I wrote two speeches since I last checked in, a bunch of intros and rules explanations for season four of Tabletop, and I did some development work on this webseries idea I’ve been kicking around for a few months. I really want to write the things that I want to write (that sounds weird but it makes sense in my head), but I’ve been kind of busy writing the things I have to write. But I’m writing, which is what matters.

Watch more movies. – A

I’ve been going through the playlist and the queue and watching, on average, three movies a week. That doesn’t seem like a lot, and it also seems like a lot. Life is weird like that. So I’ve watched some thrillers and some horror films, and Anne and I are working through the unwatched screeners we were sent during awards season. Some of the stuff I’ve watched has been great, like LOVELACE (except Franco, who was horribly miscast) and SPOTLIGHT. Some didn’t quite live up to the promise of the premise (The Child and Citadel), and some other stuff didn’t make enough of an impression on me to mention. The thing that’s been great (and the reason I wanted to do this as part of the reboot) is that I’ve gotten inspiration from everything I’ve watched. I’m getting ideas for camera work, pacing in storytelling, and other intangible things that make me want to write a script and tell a story. Even the movies that aren’t very good have something inspiring in them, and they provide a good counterweight to the ones that are spectacular. The good movies make me want to make something like them, and the bad movies make me feel like anything I do, even my dumb ideas, are worth the effort, because if this thing got made, why not my thing?

Get better sleep. – A

I was going to take this off after last time, because it feels like an easy A, but a lot of people convinced me to keep it on the list. I’m glad they did. Maybe it’s because I’m getting graded, maybe it’s because I think about it, maybe I have no idea why but I needed a third thing on this list, but I still make an effort every night to get in bed whenever I need to, so I can get between 8 and 9 hours of sleep. I’ve gotten into the habit of making good sleep a priority, and that means that if I know I have to get up at 6am for some bullshit reason, I’m going to be in bed by 10 the night before. As part of a reboot, this is successful and important, because in the pre-reboot days (preboot? nah.) I would have just stayed up late doing something I didn’t need to do, usually playing video games, and then felt like shit the entire next day. The whole reason I decided to reboot was because the way I was doing things wasn’t working for me. Not getting enough sleep was a very big part of that, and being committed to quality, restful sleep has made a huge and positive difference in my whole life. It’s something I need to remember, though, and something I need to keep working at, so it stays on the list.

Eat better food. – B

So … I’ve developed a taste for ice cream. It’s not a ton of ice cream, but it’s almost every day. It’s preferable, health and calorie and X-factor -wise to beer, but it’s extra sugar and OMG I LOVE ROCKY ROAD SO MUCH YOU GUYS.

Um. Yes. It’s a thing. On days that I run or do lots of exercise, I feel like it isn’t the biggest deal to have a scoop of ice cream, but it’s becoming a habit and I probably have to address it sooner than later.

As an aside: Nearly everyone I know has commented at some point recently that I look good. I’ve lost weight, I feel happier and generally better, and that’s all the result of this reboot really working the way that I wanted it to work. When I get complimented, I never want to be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m pretty fucking awesome,” so I say what’s mostly true: “Thanks. All I had to do was give up everything I like.” So, like, if my life is generally good, and I’m taking good care of myself, and I’m accomplishing the things that I want to accomplish, one semi-bad habit, like ice cream, isn’t the big of a problem.

Still, I could probably dial it back, and also eat fewer Red Vines (why are Red Vines so good? One answer is that they’re not fucking Twizzlers, which are goddamn disgusting).

Exercise more. – C

This is the real disappointment for me this month. A combination of work and being sick and travel and some moderate Depression flare ups have all come together to keep my running shoes in the closet. I’m doing — well, I wanted to say that I’m doing my best, but I don’t think that’s actually true. I always say that “your best” will vary from day to day, and that it’s important to be kind to yourself when your best on one day isn’t at the same level as whatever your best was on another day when you actually got the thing done … but if I’m being honest with myself, there have been several days this month when I could have said to myself, “yeah, I don’t feel like going out to run, but I’m doing it anyway” or “I’ll just walk, and maybe I’ll run once I’m out, but I am going to get off the couch and go, because it’s something I need to do.” I haven’t been committed, and partially that’s because I did my 5K and that felt like a goal, and in my mind the box was ticked. Exercise and fitness isn’t a thing with one finish line, though, and while it’s important to take days off to recover, something consistent like walking around the block or whatever every day is better (at least for me) than working out hard twice a week. So even grading on the curve, I’m giving myself a C this month. I’d give myself a D, but the travel and being sick was out of my control, so … yep. C.

Okay, let’s total this up and see how I did.

It looks like 26 points out of a possible 28 points. I got that last month, and I feel like I did better this month. This is me making the unimpressed silver medal face, even though I’m giving myself an A- instead of a B+ this time. The lack of commitment to exercise, and the excessive ice cream is really pulling my average down. That’s a bummer, but this is an ongoing process, and now I know where I need to focus on improving for next month.

Tabletop Season 4 Day 4: Dragon Farkle

Did I choose a dice game that’s pretty much entirely about luck? Yes, I did. Am I nuts? Maybe a little bit, yeah. This game is just silly and occasionally stupid, and always fun. Justifying why you lost thousands of soldiers and only scratched the dragon, or why you had a thousand soldiers ready to join your army but then lost all of them seconds later is a big part of why I like this game.

I played with Derek Mio, Neil Grayston, and Brandon Routh.

I wanted to mix up what we usually play on the show, and since we did so many heavier games last year, this is a great way to provide some balance and casual silliness to the lineup. A game like this also helps us learn how to make our own fun when we play, because the dice aren’t always going to do what we want, so if you’re just being competitive or getting super serious about strategy, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Because Dragon Farkle is 100% about luck and being silly, I don’t mind the randomness of the dice. There is just no strategy involved at all, here, so you either accept that and let the dice fall where they may, or you play something else. There are other games that have a lot of strategy in them, or other mechanics that should reward clever thinking, but then they put dice into the mix and if you don’t get lucky, all that strategy and clever thinking is wasted. Games like that are annoying to me, and make me feel disempowered. But Dragon Farkle? You roll the dice, press your luck, make a bunch of dumb noises, and then get on with it.

I shouldn’t like this game, but I have fun every time I play it. Maybe you will, too.

 

Tabletop Season 4 Day 3: Codenames

Photo by Michelle Morrow

Yesterday, we played Codenames for Tabletop.

is something I’d like to see more of: a party game that breaks out of the typical (and at this point overused) “impress the judge” mechanic, while encouraging and facilitating genuine and meaningful communication among the players. Whether you’re new to the hobby, or have a bookshelf filled with epic strategy games, it’s a great addition to any gaming library.

Like Mysterium, it’s a game I had to play for all of one round before I decided it would be perfect for the show, and holy crap did we have fun playing it.

I played with Michelle Morrow, Ashley Esqueda, Travis Willingham, Jackie Kashian, and John Ross Bowie.

Tabletop Season 4 Day 2: Mysterium

So this one time, Dixit and Clue got stuck in an elevator, and … well, Mysterium happened … and I’m really glad that it did. It’s one of those games that plays pretty quickly, and whether I win or lose, I want to play again right away.

This game has been on my list since I first saw it at GenCon last year, because it’s just perfect for our show. Also, the artwork that is such an important part of this game is so beautiful, I’d like to buy a whole lot of it and hang it on my walls in Castle Wheaton.

I played with David Kwong, Laura Bailey, and .

I freaking LOVE this game, and I think the episode we shot today is going to do a great job showing people exactly why. And here’s a super neat not-so-secret: if you own Dixit, you can use your Dixit cards with Mysterium, for an instant expansion.

 

Tabletop Season Four Day One: Fury of Dracula

I’m probably not going to have the time or energy to do this for every day of production, but I do right now, so …

Today, we started production on season four of Tabletop. It feels strange to me, like I’ve been doing it forever, and like I just started it for the very first time. There’s a lot about last season that was a pretty big bummer for me, but all of those things were addressed and corrected in the off season, and if today is any indication, this will be the most fun I’ve had doing a season of the show since the first one.

We made a number of production and personnel changes, but the production change that’s most important to me is that we’re only doing one game a day for most of this season. We’ve always shot two games per day, and it felt like a race against time before we even got into the set to start shooting. A schedule that’s less aggressive means that we can play a couple of bigger, more complex games that take longer, and it also means that when we play a most games, we aren’t racing against the clock to start the next one like we’ve done in the past. I’m hopeful that by the time we get to the last few days of production, I’ll be as happy, focused, relaxed, and satisfied as I am right now, instead of the usual exhaustion and mental numbness.

But today? Today was awesome. I played Fury of Dracula (third edition) with Amy Okuda, Grant Imahara, and Ify Nwadiwe. We had so much fun! It was as intense as you’d want this game to be, and we played enough to probably make two dramatic and entertaining episodes. I know someone’s going to ask what roles we played, but I’m not going to say right now, because reasons.

Fury of Dracula was one of the games that helped make me a Gamer in the 80s, and it’s a game that I would have loved to play on the show. So when Fantasy Flight reprinted it and updated to this new edition, it was one of the first games I put on the list.

If you’re curious about it, and don’t want to wait months to see us play it, I highly recommend the Shut up and Sit Down How To Play video (which I watched myself, while I was learning this edition), because it’s informative and entertaining. For those of you wondering, we played with the advanced rules today.

Also, if you’re into Dracula and RPGs, you may like Dracula Unredacted, which is what happens when Night’s Black Agents and Dracula collide.

Dracula is not a novel. It’s the censored version of Bram Stoker’s after-action report of the failed British Intelligence attempt to recruit a vampire in 1894. Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have restored the deleted sections, inserting annotations and clues left by three generations of MI6 analysts.

I mean, seriously. Even if you’re not going to play it, it’s a hell of an enjoyable read.

And since we’re talking vampires for a moment, some of my very favorite vampire movies, in no particular order:

Near Dark
The Lost Boys
Nosferatu
Fright Night

I’m proud of the work we did today, and hopefully tonight I will actually sleep all night, instead of waking up again and again from panic attacks and nightmares like I have for the last week, while I was stressed as fuck about getting production off the ground, and could only think about the stuff that made me unhappy from last time. It’s good to have something positive and awesome to build on, so my brain will hopefully focus on that now.

Here’s The Game Lineup for Tabletop Season Four

We looked at eleven million games, and playtested ninety-six thousand games, for season four of Tabletop.

The exact order that we’re releasing episodes and the exact timeline for the release isn’t set yet, and it isn’t up to me, but here are the games we’ve settled on for Tabletop Season Four:

Lanterns
Fury of Dracula
Mysterium
Code Names (with six players for maximum funtimes)
FATE Core RPG
Dragon Farkle
Flashpoint
Harbour
Eldritch Horror
Star Realms
Monarch
Star Trek – 5 Year Mission
Champions of Midgard
Steam Park
Tiny Epic Galaxies
Welcome To The Dungeon
Misspent Youth RPG

This season, I wanted to play games that were accessible to families, indie games, more RPGs, and at least one or two games that broke the rules I usually use to choose games. We start filming in a few days, and the season will be released starting in June or July. And because I know it’s going to end up being a FAQ: Titansgrave’s second season is in development right now. We’re aiming to film it in a couple of months, and release it in Autumn.

I hope there’s at least one thing here that you’re looking forward to, and PLAY MORE GAMES!!

Video of my speech to the 2016 USA SEF

Here’s video of my speech to the 2016 USA Science and Engineering Festival.

My speech to the 2016 USA Science and Engineering Festival

On April 17, I was given the great honor and privilege to speak before the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC.

These are my prepared remarks. I mostly stuck to them, and didn’t improvise as much as I usually do, because I was more nervous than usual at this conference. I knew that I had to speak to children, their parents, and their teachers. I hoped that I would inspire them all to keep doing awesome things, and to do more awesome things. I also hoped that some of my remarks would be heard beyond the walls of the conference, because I’m doing my best to make a positive difference in the world.

Please keep in mind that these remarks are written to be read and performed by me, so they are probably not as strong when read as I hope they are when they are heard.

Hello. I’m Wil.

I’m going to speak directly to the kids in the room for a minute. Parents, if you don’t understand what I’m about to say, ask your child later, and I’m sure she’ll clear everything up for you.

On Friday afternoon, I was putting the final touches on this talk, when my friend sent me an article in the New York Times, about a boy named Jordan. Jordan is 11 years-old, and he loves Minecraft.

Not that it matters, but I’m 43 and I also love Minecraft. I terraformed an entire island made of sand into a giant bunch of grassland with a castle on it, and I did it in survival with no cheats.

But, like I said, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Jordan loves Minecraft, and he especially loves building mazes and puzzles to challenge his friends. One of the things he wanted to do was build some traps that would go off randomly when his friends were exploring one of his mazes. In a computer program, we’d use a random number generator function to randomly decide which tile on the floor of a room releases a flood of lava, or causes the walls to start closing in, but in Minecraft, we don’t have that kind of control over things.

Or do we? Jordan thought about it, and realized that if he built a different room with some pressure plates in it, and put a mooshroom in it, it would wander around, occasionally stepping on a pressure plate that activated a redstone circuit, to make randomly different tiles trigger his traps.

Jordan, like the computer hackers of my generation, looked at the tools available to him, saw that they didn’t explicitly do what he wanted them to do, and hacked them so that they did.

Jordan is kind of my hero, you guys, because Jordan used his ingenuity and creativity to solve a problem, when a lot of other people — including me, probably — would have given up. And did I mention that he did this in a game? Because that’s a really important part of why I think Jordan is so awesome: he was having fun, playing a game, and he chose to do something that was kind of like homework to solve a problem.

So the next time you’re frustrated because your math or science homework is challenging, or a test is really hard, think of Jordan, who look at a problem like it was a puzzle, and solved it … because that’s what scientists and engineers do.

And I know that some of you here today are young scientists and engineers, and I know that you’re going to build the world that I will be an old man in, and I think it would be cool if you made it kind of like Minecraft.

Maybe with fewer spiders.

Okay, parents, you can tune back in.

When I was a kid, I was weird and shy, uncoordinated and super awkward. As a result, I spent a lot of time alone with my imagination. I would go to the library, check out as many books as I was allowed to, read them all, and when I was done, let them inspire my imagination to create my own things. And whether I was writing my own story, or drawing something I’d only seen in my imagination, it was science fiction that inspired me the most. In science fiction, anything was possible! A kid my age didn’t have to struggle with math or sports like I did; he’d just have his personal robot do his homework for him, or use his cybernetic implants to predict where the ball was going to be, and let his mechanical legs put him there to catch it. And it was those books — that art, created in many cases decades before I was born — that inspired me to examine and understand the science that powered the fiction. Those stories put me in rocketships, they gave me command of supercomputers, and made me the last kid on Earth, and without being explicitly educational — which to a kid is code for BORING — they sort of tricked me into learning about everything from basic classical physics to principles of organic chemistry, to the engineering feats required to build a Dyson Sphere.

I never did anything professionally with those interests, and eventually chose a career path that took me into the arts, but I got interested in STEM subjects, and I am passionate about STEM education today, because my interest in ART turned STEM into STEAM. To this day I struggle with advanced math, and I understand calculus as much as I understand hieroglyphics (this is embarrassing, considering how fluent I am in emoji), but there are young people in America and around the world right now who are watching Doctor Who or Star Trek or Mister Robot, and discovering that they have an interest in STEM education, because they, too, are inspired by ART.

And it isn’t limited to science fiction! Remember Jordan, from a minute ago? He wanted to build his traps and mazes because he was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies. What’s Jordan going to build when he’s inspired by Apollo 13? Or Moon? Or even Futurama? Something wonderful.

And this is why I believe that ART is an important part of a well-rounded education, not as an alternative to STEM education, but as a fundamental part of it. I want us to start putting ART into STEM, to make STEAM.

You don’t need to be an art historian to know that we fundamentally cannot understand what is really going on in a civilization until we’ve taken a good hard look at the art that it produces. One walk through the Metropolitan or the Smithsonian can tell us just about everything we need to know about where our ancestors were at just about any moment in our history. It is through the art of their time that we can know what their hopes and fears were, and we can look to their speculative fiction to learn how they were trying to understand the world around them. Their artistic creations, and the artists of their time, are just as fundamental to their society and its scientific advances as the scientists who discovered them.

And I believe that we need to remind ourselves and our children that ART and artists are an important part of the machine of discovery and invention.

In the last century, we had television like Star Trek to inspire us to reach out to the stars, and shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits to warn us about what to do when we got there. That ART took its place next to the science and engineering of the atomic age and challenged our parents and grandparents to use the destructive power of the atom carefully, and maybe to even reconsider using it at all.

Right now, a series I love called Black Mirror is holding a smartphone up to our faces to catch our reflection. One episode tells us a story about a woman who misses her fiance so much, she buys a clone of him, powered by an AI that makes it look and sound like he’s still alive … but she soon discovers that there is much more to a person than how they look and sound and feel … and spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well, because the intangible but incredibly important things that made him who he was couldn’t be recreated. He looked like the person she loved, but he wasn’t human. I watched that episode, and while it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for AI and cloning, it reminded me that there is much more to it than the science that will make it possible. And I really want the people who will be clones of me in the future to think about that, too. I want them to pay attention to Black Mirror, movies like Ex-Machina and artists like Banksy. These works caution as well as inspire, and they encourage all of us to discuss the moral and philosophical issues that accompany technological advancement.

Of course, ART doesn’t have to be heavy and intense, and playing a few hours of Warcraft, losing ourselves a novel like Hyperion, or spending an afternoon with a coloring book – is also good brain break that can lead to scientific breakthroughs. My friend Danica McKellar is best known for playing Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, but she’s also the co-author of a mathematical proof named the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem. She tells stories of her and her classmates being so knee deep in the language of mathematics that sometimes they would walk into walls. When you’re trying to figure out a complex engineering or programming problem, sometimes just by switching to a different hemisphere in your brain, you allow yourself room to have a eureka moment. Like Archimedes, taking a bath, playing with his little boats and realizing that what displacement was.

And that Eureka moment brings me to the fact that you don’t need to look very far to see that the A in STEAM is already present within the very core of STEM – there is so much art and beauty inside science. We don’t get people excited about astrophysics by showing them equations. The easiest way to get another human excited about space is to point a telescope at the sky and let them look through it. Math can be complex and confusing, and quite frankly boring and dry … until you start seeing the way mathematics expresses itself in the world around us. The Golden Ratio may be the perfect marriage of art, design, and math. It is everywhere in nature, and once you see it, like the arrow in the FedEx logo, you can’t unsee it in buildings, sculptures, monuments, trees, sand dunes, and ripples in ponds. Not bad for an irrational number!

Oh, and speaking of the Golden Ratio, it’s present in music, too, and music is, at its most fundamental level, a mathematical language.

This doesn’t mean that someone who excels at doing arithmetic in their head is going to be a great musician, or that a great guitar player will magically solve equations with ease. But there’s overlap in the ART and the SCIENCE and when someone is interested in one, they may not even know that the other is right there, waiting for them to do something cool with it, and we have to make sure that they can see it.

And that brings me to something I care deeply and passionately about: general purpose computing and the Internet of Things.

When I was ten or eleven, my parents bought our family a personal computer. It was an Atari 400. It connected to our television, used a membrane keyboard, and was outfitted with 4 kilobytes of RAM. As a simple point of comparison, the document I ended up with when I finished writing this talk was 35 kilobytes. Yes, a single word processing document was nearly nine times larger than the RAM that made our entire computer come to life.

But the thing about that computer is that it would do whatever I told it to do. It was limited only by its memory and how clever I was as a young programmer. There wasn’t a marketing department locking down features so they could sell them to me as in-app purchases. There wasn’t a deliberate crippling of the computer’s inherent capabilities so the manufacturer could sell me additional features, once I paid to have them unlocked. There wasn’t even an Internet to connect to, so the manufacturer couldn’t demand that I connect to a server somewhere to authenticate some DRM scheme.

In other words, we owned that computer, in every sense of the word, and whether I wanted to copy a game program out of a magazine, create my own from scratch, or even play a cartridge-based game like Pac-Man (which was so much better on the 400 than the 2600), it did what I wanted it to do. My imagination was the only thing that limited me, because in those days it was a real challenge for a ten year-old to max out 4K of RAM.

When ten year-old me read a book about UFOs and other mysteries (I was a big fan of a show called In Search Of…),  he decided to write a program that would let anyone fill out a sighting report that the computer would store, to be searchable by anyone else. It was all in my imagination — I knew that UFOs were not flying saucers — but it was still an incredibly fun fantasy to imagine. So I turned on my computer, went straight into BASIC, and spent an afternoon writing my version of a database. I saved it to a cassette tape drive, which lasted until KMET was playing all of Zeppelin IV and I decided that I needed to record it.

But while it lasted, I had created something that combined my imagination and fledgling technical skills, and it was pretty great. I was able to create it, because I did not have a device that was strictly locked down to just be one thing, but a tool that I could use however I wanted.

It was the difference between being able to take a set of LEGO and build what my imagination wanted, versus a set of LEGO that could only be assembled one way, according to the instruction manual.

And this is even more prevalent in hardware than it is in software. While nearly any computer can run multiple programming languages, including Python (which is just as easy to understand as BASIC but easier to use by several orders of magnitude), and open source programs and entire operating systems are freely available, much of the hardware we use to run them, especially tablets and smartphones, isn’t really owned by us. You would expect that when you purchase an iPhone or an iPad, that it’s yours to use how you see fit, right? Sure, that makes logical sense, but it doesn’t survive first contact with the DMCA. It wasn’t even until 2015 that Congress affirmed the public’s right to unlock an iPhone, but it’s still illegal to unlock an iPad. And, once unlocked, Apple is legally allowed to turn your device into a fancy paperweight if it wants to. Not that it really matters, but this is one of many reasons that I choose to use Android devices. I like to tinker with my toys, because the curiosity and love of technological exploration and the quest for knowledge that was sparked in me thirty-five years ago is just as strong today as it was then. If there is even one kid today who wants to unlock her tablet or smartphone so she can learn her way around its OS and do whatever she wants, dev-kit or not, but can’t do it because the laws haven’t caught up to the technology, I have a real big problem with that. Because the worst thing you can tell a curious kid is “No, you aren’t allowed to investigate that part of technology because rights holders have a powerful lobby.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love the technology we all take for granted today. I love being able to read books, get online, play games, take and share pictures, and even make the occasional phone call all on the same device. But we have to make sure that we don’t trade away the freedom of general purpose computing for the convenience of an Internet of Things. We have to make sure that the opportunities afforded to me thirty years ago are preserved and afforded to children today, and children in the future.

Which brings me to funding.

You’re never too young for science – getting children interested in the world around them, and asking them to try and figure out how things work is a fundamentally good idea. Curious children will naturally gravitate towards STEAM subjects. Let’s encourage that and make sure that a child who wants to explore that particular part of our world has everything she needs to get there, and keep learning about and making awesome things when she leaves. This is and will continue to be a challenge. Despite the clear and undeniable benefits of a comprehensive education, including science education, not only to individuals but to our entire society, we have allowed the funding of our schools to become part of the culture wars. This is as disgraceful as it is predictable. When so many of our poorly-named “leaders” deny scientific consensus on everything from climate change to vaccines, a scientifically literate and well-informed populace can be tremendously inconvenient to them and theiir corporate owners. Well … good. Let’s be inconvenient to them. Let’s educate and empower a generation who will be real leaders, and carry our nation into the future.

We all know that it’s possible to fund STEAM education. The money is there, it’s just being spent on other things. Making enough noise and applying enough sustained pressure to change this will not be easy. It will actually be quite hard. But when has America ever shied away from doing things that are hard? Everything worth doing is hard, and President Kennedy said as much when he challenged our nation to go to the moon. Right now, decades later, every single one of us has benefitted in some way from that commitment. Right now, a generation of future scientists can look to MARS and beyond, because nearly fifty years ago, we did whatever it took to go to the moon.

Why aren’t we doing that today? Because it’s hard?

A generation ago, it was inconceivable to think that we would be able to make a phone call from a thing we carried in our pockets, or that making phone calls would be the least interesting thing about it! So when I hear the people who control the funding for public education tell us that it’s just too hard and that as a nation we can’t afford the investment, I have to seriously question their competence and qualifications. There is absolutely no excuse for any teacher or child in America to walk into a classroom and not have the tools and resources they need to create the next generation of scientists, engineers, and makers.

And we don’t have to put particle accelerators or fission reactors into elementary schools (though that would be pretty cool). We can start on a smaller, more basic, but just as inspiring scale. For example, if we make sure that our schools have the money to buy a ton of vinegar and baking soda, I guarantee you we’ll have a bunch of chemical engineers in 20 years who never get tired of the beauty of a fizzy reaction. If we make sure that kids have the computers they need to write software and the internet connections they need to share it, I don’t know what to guarantee you, because I can’t even imagine what they will be doing twenty years from now. I just know that it’s going to be great!

Just last week, President Obama spoke on Equal Pay Day, and he said, “I want young girls and boys to come here, 10, 20, 100 years from now, to know that women fought for equality, it was not just given to them. I want them to come here and be astonished that there was ever a time when women could not vote.  I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when women earned less than men for doing the same work.” I would add to that, that I want them to also be astonished that women were ever discouraged from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, or math.  I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when fully funding public education and providing full and equal access to education — especially science education — was not a national priority.

And we have a responsibility, as the parents, scientists, teachers, engineers, artists, and mathematicians of this moment to make that world, which may seem like speculative fiction now, a reality that future generations takes for granted.

We are going to grow old in that world, you guys, and I for one would like very much for it to be a little less dystopian than Judge Dredd.

One last thing, before I finish. I want to speak directly to any young people who are here, again:  This is your world, we’re just borrowing it for a little bit while you decide what to do with it. We’ve left you a real big mess to clean up, and I’m sorry about that. Believe me, a lot of us tried — and are trying — to make it easier for you, but we haven’t done enough.

So as you get older, and as your knowledge grows, don’t ever stop learning.

Stay curious.

Ask all the questions you can think of, and when the answers confuse or inspire you, ask more questions. If your questions make adults uncomfortable … good. Ask them, and then ask more.

Take things apart, and put them back together. Or take things apart and make new things out of them. Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t do something because it’s too hard. A lot of things we all think are easy were “too hard” until a clever, brave person said, “You know what? I’m going to do it, anyway.”

Kind of like Jordan and his Minecraft traps, right?

You are growing up at a time when technology is advancing so fast, just about anything you can imagine will likely exist in your lifetime, because you’ll be able to create it  … so be careful, and don’t forget to be awesome.

Thanks for listening to me.

 

orbital operations

My friend and mentor, Warren Ellis, is an award-winning writer, and incredible human. I am grateful and incredibly lucky to have him in my life.

Warren’s been writing and sending out this newsletter called Orbital Operations for awhile, and the most recent one had two things in it that I loved so much, I asked for and was granted permission to share them here.

Okay, first up is this amazing page from his comic, KARNAK, which you really want to click to embiggen because it’s beautiful.

And here is the prose that grabbed me by the face and pushed my head into an as-yet-uncharted whorl in a nearby nebula:

I’m walking in New York City, listening to Julian Cope’s ODIN on earbuds.  It’s his seventy-minute vocal drone meditation on Silbury Hill, an artificial mound of ritual purpose in Britain.  Regardless of its scattering of electronic tricks, I always consider ODIN the sound of ancient Britain.  Proto-language, even.  The radiophonic wobbles and glitches, for me, act to reinforce that.  Early British electronic music always came with a powerful dose of haunted history to it, as did British science fiction of the period.  And, of course, Cope is also the author of the magnificent MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, a tower of research and meditation on the megaliths and earthworks of ancient Britain.

It is a strongly unheimlich thing to walk through the artificial canyons of New York while listening to breath-drone that summons stone circles and monuments.  I reach a cross-street.  It is early July.  I look down the street and the sun is setting between the buildings.  I only learn later that this is the Manhattanhenge phenomenon, where, twice a year, the sunset aligns directly with the city’s street grid.

The ancient world roars in my ears as red light crawls between the megaliths of New York towards me.

I’m sitting in drought-ridden Los Angeles, where they’re not good at history.  Up the other end of Sunset, a water pipe that hasn’t been touched since 1921 has burst open, spitting out several million gallons of water, and everyone’s acting like a fossil reared up out of the ground and bit the town.  1921 is deep history in some parts, out here.  I gave a talk in Hollywood last year, where I explained to a hundred people crammed into a century-old avocado grove barn that, five thousand years back, this whole area was called Yaa, and it was the biggest population centre in California even then.  They were both disbelieving and distracted, because the host had previously informed them that parts of this ancient structure were likely to collapse in on them if they breathed on it hard enough.  Out here, history is dangerous, and wants to come and get you.

I am warming my bones at a hotel that seems to be exclusively occupied by British rock session musicians over sixty, and Penn Jillette.  The whole place smells of better days long gone, when famous actors were fucking each other in the apartments and famous rock stars were pissing in the courtyard pool.  All the staff have the same slightly tired, slightly mournful smile.  I like it here.  I am on my balcony, which clings to its louche past with the provision of an ashtray, an increasingly alien object in this town, and I am reading THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth.  It’s possible that I am just a little homesick for the green and the grey of England, but Kingsnorth’s main claim to recent fame, The Dark Mountain Project, has been coming up in conversation with friends again lately, so I thought I’d try his novel out.

The thrust of Dark Mountain, if I can be unfairly blunt to Kingsnorth and his collaborators, holds that we are all environmentally doomed, so we may as well get good at it.  We may as well adjust, and sit on the floor and tell each other sad stories of being doomed.  Some see this as giving up.  Kingsnorth himself is a retired environmental activist.  The tenets of Dark Mountain, however, are that this is a completely reasonable response – not a retreat, but an acceptance and an attempt to actively parse our new circumstance.

THE WAKE is a story of the green and the grey of England, of doom, and one man’s nihilist response, couched as a reclamation of lost territories but coloured by delusion.  It’s a historical novel, but it’s tempting, too tempting, to read it as Kingsnorth testing some things out on himself, like Philip K Dick working out his own beliefs and experiences in the Exegesis he began in Orange County, thirty-five miles from me as I read THE WAKE on Sunset Boulevard.

In THE WAKE, set after the invasion of England by William The Bastard and the imposition of Norman law, one man begins a resistance campaign against the occupation.  It’s a fictional exploration of a little-known corner of British history, that there were actual insurgencies against the Normans.  But it’s not quite Robin Hood.  Buccmaster, the man, is far from a saint, and he’s having visions.  He is a man of the old gods.  He is English history, coming to get the invaders of the new.

The whole thing is written in a constructed language, what Kingsnorth calls a “shadow tongue.”  It’s Old English, but the sentences are configured in the manner of Modern English.  It takes some work to get into, but once you find the rhythm, the contexts become clear, and I only had to google a few words to obtain complete clarity.  It is, in that sense, a modern book – one that needs a network connection to fully decode.  I don’t recommend reading it on your Kindle on a plane, because you might end up muttering “what the fuck is a fugol” too loudly and making the flight attendants look at you funny.

Constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are networked culture.  Linguists found the early internet conducive to such experiments, and you can still find a few websites that collate conlangs.  My favourite is Brithenig, invented by the New Zealand writer Andrew Smith, which imagines what might have happened if Latin had colonized Old Celtic in Britain.  A Brythonic-Roman fusion that would have replaced Old English.  Al alternate world.  Deep history as science fiction.  Proto-languages.

To render the visionary experiences that are at the heart of British culture in this strange alternate language is to amplify their strangeness.  Sunset falls on the pool in the courtyard henge, staining it red. The ancient world roars in my ears, there on a balcony over the floodplains of Yaa, and the breath-drone of it threatens to bring the walls down, and history rears up out of the dirt to get me.

Warren’s newsletter is free and easy. He publishes it every Sunday, and you can sign up at Orbital Operations dot Com.

The March Reboot Check-In That Happened In April

I had this epiphany at the beginning of September: This thing that I’m doing? This series of choices I make every day? It isn’t working. I don’t like the way I feel, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the things I’m doing. Things need to change.

So I took a long, hard, serious look at myself, and concluded that some things needed to change.

Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.

It’s been about six months since I decided to hit the reboot button on my life. I’ve checked in about once a month since then, to see how I’m doing, celebrate the victories, and identify where I can do better.

Let’s see how I’m doing.

Drink less beer.

I stopped drinking entirely in January, in an effort to get the last bit of weight I’ve been carrying around to fall off. I’m still about a pound away from the target, but not drinking has been incredibly helpful in getting me this close. It’s not just the alcohol, it turns out, as much as it’s the lifestyle that goes with having a drink or three almost every day. Cutting that out of my life has given me more free time, helped me sleep better, eliminated bad late night snacking habits, and pretty much improved all areas of my life. Occasionally, I miss a beer or a nice cocktail, but I honestly feel like I’m giving up something very small and getting something really great in return. I don’t know if I’ll keep this up forever, but I don’t really miss it enough for it to feel like a big sacrifice.

I’m giving myself another A+ on this one.

Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).

It’s important to me that I read, because it inspires my imagination and keeps my mind sharp (per the Tyrion Lannister quote we all see online with great regularity). I’ve been making time almost every day to read, and I’ve enjoyed some fantastic stuff, recently. The March issue of Lightspeed Magazine is great, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 did not have a single weak story in it. I’ve been devouring magazines, too. WIRED has been uneven, but this current issue has some good stuff in it. The new non-nude Playboy is fucking FANTASTIC, and I’ve loved both issues so far.

I’m going to give myself a B, this month, because I grade on a curve. Not only is my reading not as diverse as I wanted it to be last time I checked in, I haven’t read as much as I want to read. I need to commit to and finish a novel, which has been kind of tough because I’ve been enjoying the short fiction so much.

Write more.

But the volume of short fiction I’ve been reading has really helped my writing. I’ve been doing this thing were I look at a picture from one of the Tumblrs I follow, and then I write a little flash fiction based on how the image inspires me. I’ve also written a short story that I probably won’t publish, but still needed to write, a speech for Miami University, a bunch of crap on my blog and my dumb Tumblr thing, and several ideas on my whiteboard for stories, books, short films and even a webseries.

I’m giving myself an A this month, because I finished a thing I needed to write so I could finish the thing I had to write so I could start the thing I want to write.

Watch more movies.

I spent about 40 bucks at Fry’s recently, and ended up with a few collections of cult and B movies. I think I ended up with like 50 different things. I’ve been watching them, but not just sitting there being amused and entertained by how terrible they are. I’ve been really watching them, to learn how these people took very little money and turned it into 75 to 90 minutes of story. I’m picking up on the way these things are paced on the page, as well as photography and editing techniques that I think I’ll be able to apply to one of the ideas I mentioned above. I’ve also been working through some great Science Fiction, including a fucking BRILLIANT movie called Space Station 76, an uneven but thought-provoking thing called The Sound of My Voice, and the 2012 Dredd film, starring Karl Urban.

Anne and I have been watching some incredible TV, too, including the new season of The Americans and Vinyl (which I hope maintains its course, in spite of Terrence Winter leaving the show).

On the curve, though, I am not doing as well as I’d like. Part of that is because I worked a lot as an actor last month, part of that is because I spent more time writing and creating than consuming. If I met with myself in my office, I’d probably be able to convince myself to give me an A, but I know I can do better and I want to push myself to do the best I can do, so I get a B.

Get better sleep.

I get another A+ on this one, and I think I’m going to take it off the list because it’s become an easy A every month. I’ve made this commitment and I’ve kept it for six months. I make sure that, even if I want to stay up and goof off or whatever, I go to bed early enough to get at least 8 hours, unless some work-related thing makes it impossible. I’m watching my caffeine and sugar intake. If I’m tired at 9pm, I go to bed at 9pm, instead of powering through until midnight for some dumb reason. The bottom line is: I’ve made getting quality rest a priority in my life, and this part of my reboot is an unqualified success.

Eat better food.

This was put on my list because I didn’t think of food as fuel and nutrition, and I needed to do that. I’m getting older, my body doesn’t put itself back together as quickly and thoroughly as it once did, and the food I put into it is pretty important. Because I already had a reasonably good diet (way better than the average American diet), there wasn’t much for me to do here, but I found that not eating crappy snacks late in the day or at night, starting my day with good quality protein, and tracking my macronutrients every day has been extremely helpful.

Now, all of this sounds like I should get an A, but I actually am going to give myself a C+, because I was on location a lot, and had to just eat carb-rich food that was available to me, because I didn’t plan ahead and take better stuff. I’ve also been on planes so much, I’ve been eating airplane salt I mean, airplane food, more than I would like. I’ve also developed a little bit of a sweet tooth for ice cream, and I’ve been having a scoop or two of rocky road almost every day. I’m still within my nutrient and caloric goals, but over time the sugar adds up and I should probably not do that. I can do better.

Exercise more.

I want the A+ so much on this one! I ran my first true, timed 5K (33:22) and I was super proud of it … but because I was on location in Toronto where it was around freezing every day (and I was working 14 hours a day on average), and because I was super sick for almost 10 days, I had nearly 3 weeks of minimal activity, with two weeks of zero running. I walked my dogs a few times, I walked myself a few times, but I didn’t do anything consistently, and consistency is a big part of this grade.

Putting this on the curve, and accepting what was entirely out of my control, I’m going to give myself a B+. Again, I’d probably talk myself into an A, but I do better when I hold myself to high standards.

Okay, let’s total this up and see how my average is this month….

22 out of 28 points, and I’m going to give myself an extra half point for each +, which brings me up to 26 out of 28 for a GPA of 3.7ish.

I have no idea if this is the way real teachers score things, and I feel like half a point for each + is a little too generous. Maybe I should be closer to 3.5 than I ended.

So, this is very good, a solid B+/A-, with some room for improvement (and that room really motivates me. I’m going to rock a 4.0 on this eventually).

I feel good about all of this. I feel happier than I did when I started, I feel stronger, healthier, fitter, happier, more productive.