Bryce Moore's Blog, page 20

Exercising in VR, and More Thoughts on the Future

I wrote a while ago that I was toying with the idea of getting an Apple Vision Pro. In the end, I decided to pass, simply because it was just so expensive. (Though to be honest, reading some of the reviews and experiences people are having with it, I’m still bummed I don’t have one. It’s right up my alley.)

Thinking about it as much as I had, however, made me turn back to my Quest 2, which I’ve had for the last while, but hadn’t used recently. The main problem I had with it is that I would get motion sick when I used it for too long a time. With the latest VR developments, however, I’m more and more convinced this is going to be a standard in the future, and from what I read, if you get acclimated to VR, that motion sickness goes away.

It made sense, therefore, that I should try and see if I could get used to VR sooner rather than later. If it’s something I need to get used to sooner or later, I might as well go for sooner.

So I’ve been using the Quest some more the last week, and it does feel like the nausea is subsiding some. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of, actually, is exercising. That might sound kind of strange, and it certainly feels strange to think of how stupid I probably look with the thing on while I’m exercising in an otherwise empty room, but the good news is that it doesn’t feel stupid at all while I’ve got the headset on, and I’m good at ignoring the “I feel stupid” instinct when I need to.

You would think that just swinging your arms around wouldn’t do much in terms of exercise, and if I were in really good shape, you’d probably be right. But I’m not in great shape, so it does much more for me than I thought it would. Not just playing Beat Saber for a half hour. I bought an actual exercise “game” (Les Mills), and it has you do a lot of moving around, punching, and crouching. Enough that just doing it for ten minutes left me pretty winded. (This is a good sign that I should be exercising more, I think.) The best thing going for it is that it doesn’t feel like exercise, and other than the VR headset, I don’t need any more equipment.

So far, I’ve done a half hour each day for the last week. That’s a pretty good start, for me, and makes me think I might have a chance of actually sticking with it some. (How to get Bryce to consistently exercise more: make it easy, make it fun, and make him think that it’s getting him ready for The Future.)

I know there are some who think I’m really out there on this train of thought, but I think we’re hitting a tipping point to VR/AR right now, and when it does tip, it’ll tip very quickly. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if five years from now people wearing headsets is a much more normalized thing. The big hangups right now are price (and that will come down as economies of scale kick in) and the inability of people to really interact in VR/AR easily. Even with the Apple Vision Pro, it’s not like you and another rich, AVP-owning friend could get together and hang out in the same room, looking at the same AR things one or the other of you stick up in the room.

However, picture this: you put up several cameras in a room. Enough so that all angles of the room are more or less covered. Everyone in the room is wearing an AR headset, and you’re on the other side of the world, also wearing one, in a room with the same camera set up. You could see and interact with other people in that room, and they could see and interact with you as if you were right there. The only thing you wouldn’t be able to do would be to share any physical objects. No touching. But if you had a set up where you had some sort of way to “walk” while you’re not moving, you’d be able to walk around the room, as well. (And this technology is also coming.)

In fact, the technology is almost out there that would make it so you could do this very thing, today. It would just be expensive. But the days of having physical space be one of the big things that keeps us apart are numbered, in my book.

It’s an exciting time to be alive.

How to Celebrate Groundhog Day

Well, it’s Groundhog Day. Again. And that must mean we’re up here at Gobbler’s Knob waiting for the forecast from the world’s most-famous groundhog weatherman, Punxsutawney Phil, who’s just about to tell us how much more winter we can expect.

Not really, of course. That’s just what Phil Connors says in the movie, and Punxsutawney Phil already made his prediction this morning (early spring). But what you really want to know is “how do I properly celebrate such a fantastic holiday?” (And also, “Why isn’t it a national holiday already?” But some questions just don’t have answers, regardless of how spot on they are.)

Speaking as someone who’s celebrated the day every year for the past . . . 23 years (give or take), I think I can give some authoritative answers.

Step one: Wake up and watch the livestream of Phil making his prediction. (We’re assuming here you’re not able to actually make a pilgrimage yourself, since it’s not a national holiday yet.) Nothing is more groundhoggy than being up at 7am to watch top hat wearing members of the Inner Circle gather to worship a rat. Well, unless you’d rather sleep in and skip the livestream. That’s a very groundhoggy thing to do, too. Just look at Phil when they take him out each year. You just know he’d rather be sleeping. One way or another, you definitely should wake up at some point on Groundhog Day. That’s an essential part to celebrating, because if you don’t wake up, something has gone horribly wrong.

Step two: Spend the day spreading groundhog cheer to everyone you meet. Greet them all with a warm smile and a comment about early springs and long winters. Maybe even bring some treats to share. Groundhogs love treats. Then again, groundhogs also want people to get lost and leave them alone, so you can also just go around all day being a curmudgeon and ignoring everyone else. Either way, you’ll be 100% in the spirit of this most joyous of days.

Step three: Make sure your house is decorated to the gills with groundhog-themed things. Brown streamers. Brown balloons. Stuffed animal groundhogs. Signs that say “Don’t Mess With Me, Pork Chop.” I mean, every serious groundhog aficionado has all of these things, right? (Or is it just me?) Regardless, if you take the holiday seriously, you need them too. Except if you decide that you don’t need them, because what sort of a crazy groundhog would go around decorating their home when they could just chillax and . . . not? So refusing to put up decorations is also perfectly acceptable.

Step four: Have a Groundhog Day party. Invite 50 or more people, ideally way more people than you’ve ever invited to a Christmas party at your house. Have them all bring groundhog-themed treats. (Yes, this means you’ll have some who inevitably bring groundhog meatballs each year, but that’s just part of the wonder of the festivities.) Have them all participate in Groundhog Games of Skill, which can consist of drawing groundhogs with your eyes closed (or with your feet), answering groundhog quizzes, making groundhogs out of potatoes, or anything else. (Fact: the best way to get more people to celebrate Groundhog Day is to persuade them that they should come to your party. And fact #2: they almost definitely won’t have anything better to do on February 2nd. (Especially now that they’ve moved the Super Bowl to the following weekend, obviously out of respect for this age-old marmot tradition.)) Then again, you can also celebrate by yourself, or with just a few friends. Groundhogs aren’t exactly party animals, you know.

Step five: Watch the movie at the end of the day. You must do this every. single. year. Unless you’d rather not. I have yet to see a single groundhog watching the movie with me, and I’ve seen the film over 25 times.

What does this all boil down to? It boils down to the fact that Groundhog Day is the best day of the year, because there’s no wrong way to do it. It’s an excuse to do whatever you want. You can even ignore the day completely, if you so choose. No one’s going to yell at you for forgetting the spirit of the season. There will be no culture wars if you choose to wish someone a Happy Whistlepig Day, instead. I guarantee no one’s going to be crestfallen if you forget to get them a present.

So whatever you’re doing today, or however you’re celebrating (or not celebrating), I hope you have a wonderful day.

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.“

Happy Groundhog Day, woodchuck chuckers!

Board Game Review: Decrypto

One of the new games we got for Christmas this year is Decrypto. It’s a game that is excellent for parties, though it’s kind of difficult to explain just what’s happens in it. Basically, imagine something like Codenames, where you’re divided onto two teams, and each team is trying to give clues to get their team to guess certain words. The twist in Decrypto is that your opponents are trying to guess your words at the same time, so you need to be careful just how you phrase your clues.

To be a bit more specific, you’re presented with four different words, each of them numbered (1, 2, 3, and 4). Each round, you are tasked with getting your team to guess a three digit code (142 or 213 or 324, etc.) You do this by giving them three different clues, each one corresponding to the secret words that your team all knows (but which the other team does not). In other words, your whole team knows that Dog is #1, Celery is #2, Castle is #3, and Sewer is #4. So if your three digit code is 421, you might say “Mutant, Crispy, and Spot” as your clues. Your team looks at the clues and deduces which words each one goes with. Mutant is like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so “sewer.” Crispy is “celery,” and Spot is “dog.”

Your opponents hear the four clues, but they don’t know the secret words. They can guess which numbers you were trying to refer to, however. This gets easier the longer the game goes on, because it lasts for 8 rounds, and you never change those four secret words. So the more clues you give to them, the more your opponents can begin to narrow down what each word (or at least what concept) is matched with each number. (If you’ve given the clues “spot, walk, bingo, and fetch” over the course of four rounds, they’re probably going to figure out they’re all referring to “dog,” or at least something in that vein.)

While all this is going on, your opponents are doing the same thing as you, with their own secret words. So you take turns giving clues and guessing the code, back and forth. The game ends when one team cracks the opponents’ code twice, or when one team fails to give the correct code based on their team’s clues. (In other words, you need to make the clues specific enough so your team can guess the right words, but not so specific the other team can guess them, too.)

It all ends up being a whole lot of deductive fun. Better yet, you can still chat and have a good visit while you’re playing, because you’re writing down all the clues each time, so you can refer back to your notes when you’re trying to come up with the codes. The games don’t drag, I’ve enjoyed games from start to finish.

So if you’re looking for a great party game that pretty much anyone can play, regardless of how many people you’ve got or what ages you’re dealing with, then look no farther. Highly recommended.

Continued Political Disgust

When I was in grade school, the beauty of the American government, as presented to me, lay in the fact that it consisted of three separate but equal branches. The Legislative Branch made the law, the Executive Branch enforced the law, and the Judicial Branch interpreted the law. It all made a lot of sense to me, and in theory, it still does.

But what does it look like in practice these days?

Well, the Legislative Branch basically doesn’t do a whole ton, because it’s made up of people who can’t agree on anything enough to make any significant changes. So instead of actually making laws that make sense for today, the Democrats (at the moment) rely on the President to make executive actions that somehow sidestep the whole process, and the Republicans (for now) rely on the Supreme Court to tell everyone that actually what the Republicans want in the first place just so happens to be what the law said all along.

Am I oversimplifying? Maybe a bit. But that certainly seems to be the reasoning given for why so many things continue to be broken in our country. (And don’t get me started on lobbyists, who somehow get paid to tell Congress what to do, and Congress is somehow gullible enough to listen to whoever sends the most lobbyists?) Whether it’s gun control or health care or any other big issue, nothing seems to change, year after year.

So why am I belly-aching about it today? Well, primarily because of how irritated I am about the way we’re suddenly splitting hairs over what an “insurrection” means, and what it means to take part in one. The Constitution clearly states:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.“

So the questions in court about how this applies to Trump apparently boil down to “Is the President an officer of the United States?” and “Did Trump participate in an insurrection?” There’s a good overview of the answers to these questions in the New York Times, but basically, the first answer seems pretty cut and dried. Elsewhere in the Constitution, it says “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” How can you be removed from office if you’re not an officer?

I can’t believe we’re even having this come up as a question.

As for “did he participate?”, it seems to me the biggest actions he took on January 6th (and the days leading up to it) were, first, to rile people up, and then second, to do and say nothing while the attack on the capitol took place. Did his speech before the insurrection rile people up? Undoubtedly. You just have to watch it to see the riling taking place. But at the same time, Trump never overtly said, “Go down and break into the Capitol and stop this from happening.” So we’re supposed to pretend that he innocently played no part in the instigation of the insurrection.

Fine. Let’s assume for the moment that he didn’t. But it also took him over three hours to respond to the rioters and tell them to stop. If you’re going to argue he never intended the crowd to get violent, then why in the world wouldn’t he do whatever he could to stop the crowd once they had become violent? He had made an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and yet he did nothing to follow through on that oath.

Let’s say the Constitution was a person, and I’ve sworn to defend them. If I see someone trying to beat that person to death in public, and I watch them do it for three hours before saying, “Gee, maybe you should stop that,” have I upheld my oath? You can’t make the argument that Trump had no way to try to stop them. He was the most vocal President we’ve ever had, continually peppering out messages on Twitter.

However, people make the argument that the Senate had the chance to convict Trump of insurrection, but couldn’t get the 2/3rds majority vote to do so. It was 57 votes for guilty, and 43 not guilty. Except 29 of those not guilty votes said their primary reason for voting that way was because Trump wasn’t the President anymore, and impeachment was only to apply to current Presidents.

(I need to write a book where a lame duck President goes on a blatant crime spree, knowing that the only people who can convict him of crimes are Senators, and the Senators won’t convict him because by the time he goes to trial, he won’t be President anymore. We’ve found the loophole, everybody!)

In the end, it really seems like nothing matters in politics anymore, so long as you can find some sort of reason (it doesn’t have to be a good one) to justify your actions. Some reason for why the thing you want to happen politically just so happens to be the thing that’s legal and right. And there’s no one out there to stop you from doing it.

I’m dreading–dreading–the upcoming election season. 2020 was so, so awful in so many ways, and the election was a big factor in that. In the wake of all that’s happened since, I’m worried a repeat will be worse.

Do I love Biden as President? Not really. I don’t actively dislike him, but I also don’t think he’s done a particularly noteworthy job. But it seems the Republicans are going to put Trump forward as their nominee again, and my feelings toward him have never changed. I am very concerned what a second Trump term would look like and what it might do to our country. I suppose I just have to hope there’s a lot of other people out there like me. Not Biden supporters, but 100% ready to get out and vote for him, just to keep Trump from coming back.

The Illusion of Time

I was reminded yesterday yet again of just how bad I am at figuring out how long ago something happened. I was talking to a coworker who, in my mind, has been working with me perhaps half the time I’ve been at my job. In my head, they came on “a while” after I started, and so that works out to about 8 years ago, give or take. When I asked them how long they’d really been here, I discovered I was a bit off.

They’d been here for 14.5 years.

I think a large part of that wonkiness has to do with the way time seems to go slower at the beginning of an experience than at the end. I see this all the time. The first half of a vacation can feel like you’ve got all the time in the world. The second half feels like you blinked and it disappeared. Or just look at a week. Monday and Tuesday? They take a long time. Friday? Typically much faster.

Don’t even get me started on how hard it is for me to figure out how long ago something’s happened now that the pandemic shutdown is in the mix of that time frame. That started almost four years ago already, which is really hard for me to believe.

Am I leading this discussion somewhere important today? Not really. It’s more just an observation, coupled with finding it interesting that I pay so much attention to time, and yet in the end it can seem to matter so little. I’m very big on being punctual. I like to get places as quickly as possible. I think my theory is that if I pay attention to the small things where time is concerned, then the large things will sort themselves out.

Sometimes, however, I wonder if I wouldn’t be better served just not stressing quite so much about it. (Though I’m not sure it’s in me to be able to do that.) I remember on my mission talking with people from Sierra Leone, and being really frustrated with how rarely they actually showed up on time for appointments. “What would you do if you told a friend you’d meet him for a movie at noon, and he didn’t show up until three hours later?” I asked.

They’d shrug. “I’d assume something came up and my friend had to take care of it.”

“And if you were already gone by the time they actually showed?” I asked.

“Then they’d figure out the same thing.”

At the time, that just caused my brain to short circuit. It didn’t make any sense to me at all. Looking back on it, however . . . I’m not nearly as sure of myself. I like to break time down into seconds and minutes and hours, but every now and then, I remember that all of that is generally just a construct.

I’m not trying to say time should just be tossed out the window. Then again, I’m not trying to say it shouldn’t be. Just that . . . perhaps my insistence on thinking I can somehow stay on top of it all the time might be doing me more harm than good. Something I’m definitely thinking about (in my spare time).

I came across this video while nosing around on the internet about the concept, and it resonated with me. Maybe it will for you, too.

Television Review: All the Light We Cannot See

I’d heard good things about the mini-series, All the Light We Cannot See, that went up on Netflix a while ago. I read the book back in 2016, which I enjoyed (gave it an 8/10), though honestly I couldn’t remember much of it other than that it was set in World War II. After watching it, my memories of the book didn’t exactly come flooding back, so I can’t evaluate it as a good or bad adaptation, though I can say I only gave it a 7.5/10, so that would seem to imply I thought the book was better. (Also, there’s the fact that the book won the Pulitzer and the Carnegie and was shortlisted for the National Book Award . . .)

The show isn’t bad by any stretch. It follows two different main characters, a blind young French woman, and a young German soldier. They have no connection to each other, except for the fact that both of them listened to the same radio show when they were children. The war intruded into both of their lives, and they ultimately ended up in the same city at the same time.

The production values are high. The acting is solid. The plot is fine. So why didn’t I rate it higher? I think it was because it didn’t grip me in any tangible way. I enjoyed watching it, but I didn’t exactly feel an overwhelming desire to find out what happened next. Perhaps the plot had something to do with this, now that I think about it. Or not the plot, but rather the way the plot was presented. The characters were certainly in danger multiple times, but at no point did I really feel like they would actually be killed. It just didn’t feel like that sort of a show, if that makes sense. I’m not saying the characters don’t die (and I’m not saying they do), but without that constant tension, the show just lacked the oomph it needed to get to the next level.

Of course, the problem with a 7.5/10 score isn’t that I didn’t like the show. Rather, it’s that I’m not going to tell people they need to see it. “Perfectly serviceable, enjoyable experience” isn’t exactly something that makes someone read a review and decide they’re going to run out and watch the thing. So should you? Well, if you like World War II dramas that are well produced and contained within four episodes, then sure. I think you’d watch this and have a good time. But if you’re not in that target audience, the recommendation becomes less urgent.

Revisiting the Lord of the Rings Books: Fellowship of the Ring

After the Lord of the Rings movie marathon this break, I realized it’s been a long (long) time since I last read the books. I’ve read the Hobbit not too long ago, but back in the day I used to read LOTR every year or so. I don’t think I’ve done that in at least 20 years. I’ve started reading the books aloud with Daniela, but that fizzled around the time Frodo got to the Barrow Downs. (So . . . pretty soon.)

No time like the present to fix that oversight, however. I launched back into the books, not really sure what it would be like. I’ve seen the movies so many times in the last two decades that I didn’t know if they’d drown out the novels at this point. Honestly, I couldn’t even remember 100% of what exactly was from the books and what had been changed from the adaptation.

I’ve finished Fellowship now, and I still really enjoyed it. It’s a much more sprawling book than the movie, and slower paced. Actually, the thing that impressed me most is how good an example it is of adapting needing changes in order to be successful. In the book, there are years that go by at times with not a whole lot happening. Frodo takes his sweet time getting on the road. They laze around Rivendell for a while. Even in Lothlorien, they spend an extra month or so, just resting up.

If Jackson had kept true to that to the movies, I think it would have killed the tension. Actually, there’s not much in the way of immediate tension and danger for whole swathes of pages. Jackson inserted Saruman creating the Uruk Hai. He moved the climactic battle with the Fellowship and those Uruk Hai from Two Towers up to Fellowship, allowing there to be something like a climax to the movie. In the film, the Fellowship constantly feels in danger. Even if they’re not being chased at the moment, there’s this ticking time bomb of them needing to get Frodo to Mt. Doom. That drives the whole plot forward.

In the book? We’ve got time to sing about different things, and to think about different things, and to debate to our heart’s content. That’s not necessarily better or worse, it’s just different, but it’s something that works for a novel and wouldn’t work at all for a 2.5 hour movie. (Or at least, definitely not for the movie Jackson wanted to make.)

I hadn’t realized Boromir’s death was in the Two Towers, instead. It was also fun to see the efforts Jackson and Co. went to weave bits and pieces of the book into surprising places, having some characters speak lines that were delivered at different times, or by different people. How they managed to get more direct humor and action out of the text, simply by portraying what was actually there.

Was it a fast read? Not particularly. In fact, I’ve got to read something short now to make up for lost time so that I can keep on my goal of a book a week. But I’ll definitely be reading the final two books, and I look forward to the opportunity. Fantasy’s come a long way since Tolkien, and his style is much slower paced that most of what I read in the genre these days. World building, on the other hand . . . I have yet to see anyone beat him at that, and I doubt I ever will.

Joining International Thriller Writers (and a General Writing-as-a-Career Update)

Yesterday I came across a new (to me) writers organization: ITW (International Thriller Writers). I’m already a member of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) and SCBWI (Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators), having joined both soon after I first became traditionally published. I pay my dues each year to keep current on membership, but I honestly hadn’t thought much about it since I first signed up.

So it might seem like a no-brainer that I should have taken the time to see if there were other organizations more tailored to the genre I’m currently writing in, but I fit my writing in at the edges of my life (though it’s slowly but surely taking a more central position). I’m usually happy that I’ve had enough time to get my 1,000 words done and stay on track with my different deadlines. For the first long while, I also didn’t really make enough money through writing for me to take it much more seriously than as an advanced hobby. That’s steadily changing now, as I said, and a conversation with my agent yesterday brought much of that into focus.

As a librarian, I’m a longtime advocate for the power of networking. I’m well connected across the state, and I’ve done what I can to contribute back to the field and help librarians as a whole. I go to conferences as often as I can, and while I might not be the guy down at the bar getting to know every stranger’s name, I also rub elbows with a fairly wide range of people when I’m there. I know just how useful those connections can prove to be.

But as an author, I haven’t really treated the career in the same way. Conferences were something I’d do if I had time and I had someplace fun I wanted to go. (Well, unless my publisher was paying for the trip, in which case I’d willingly go just about anywhere.) I caught myself asking my agent, “Just why exactly would I want to go to these conferences, anyway?” and as he was answering, I heard him saying exactly the same things I say to other librarians when they ask why they should go to a conference.

It was enough of a kick in the pants to get me thinking again, and see what other conferences I might want to consider attending. Boskone is in Boston every year, but it’s also almost always around Daniela’s birthday, which was enough of an obstacle for me to just kind of not even think about it. There’s Worldcon, that bounces all over the world from year to year, and several other potentials. ThrillerFest was a new one to me, but it seemed like a natural fit. (I write thrillers now. The connection isn’t hard to make.) It’s also just down in NYC, which is a place I like to go to regularly anyway. Ideally, I’d be on programming at whatever conference I attended, just to get the most out of it.

Plenty of others, too. Lots of options of dates and locations.

Which is all a very long way of saying when I looked into ThrillerFest, I saw you had to be a member of ITW to present, and when I looked into becoming a member, I discovered that it was free(!) and I already qualified. This is a far cry from when I was first applying to SFWA, and it felt like I had to make a case for my qualifications. For ITW, I filled out the online form, pointed them to my books, and today I got the acceptance letter. (Every now and then I have an experience that reminds me I’m doing well as an author, or at least well for me. When they asked how many copies of my books had sold, I put in 100,000, and then immediately questioned if that could really be right. Some back-of-the-napkin math confirmed that, though when I took a bit more time to do it today, I’m pretty sure the number is actually above 150,000. Almost everyone I know and interact with views me as a librarian. It’s rare that I put on my author hat, so seeing that figure . . . Yeah. Good feeling. And a confirmation that my agent was right, and I should probably be taking all this more seriously. I’ve come a long way from being an aspiring author back in the day.)

In any case, I’m official now, and I’m looking at heading to some more author conferences. If I could do 2-3 a year, I think that would be about all I can handle, or at least, all I want to handle for now. And that’s all the time I’ve got for an update today.

Adventures with Eye Emergencies

It’s not everyday you call your eye doctor up with a question and they ask you to come in right that second. And yet, right before Christmas, that’s exactly what happened to me. I was lying in bed the night before, with the lights all off, and I could see this white light in an arc at the edge of vision in my right eye. Definitely not anything normal, though it only appeared when I moved my eye. I made a note to myself to call in the morning. When I did, they told me to come. Now.

Luckily it was during my break, so I was able to go right away. (A fair bit concerned at that point, as well.) When I arrived, they took a look at my eye and (thankfully) said things were looking okay.

Apparently, when you get old, sometimes the vitreous fluid in your eye separates from the back of your eyeball. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the words “vitreous fluid” on the blog before.) When that happens, more fluid typically comes in to take its place, but some of the time, as it separates, it can take some of the retina with it (or even make your retina detach completely). Since this is what you use to actually see, that’s officially a Bad Thing. If you don’t get it looked at right away, then you can have permanent vision loss.

I’ve just been to my third appointment with the eye doctor around this issue, and thankfully things are still looking fine. But I wanted to pass the information on to all of you people in case any of you end up having a similar issue. Apparently the big things to watch out for are flashes like I had, an increase in the number of floaters in your eye, loss of peripheral vision, having everything look like you’re staring through a curtain, or just completely losing vision. (I think that last one’s kind of a no-brainer.)

The good news is that if they catch it in time, it’s supposedly a fairly easy fix, but time is of the essence.

So there you go. A helpful PSA for you that I hope you never need to put to use.

On Depictions of Nazis

How’s that for a title for you? Eye-catching, I suppose. Denisa and I are watching All the Light We Cannot See right now on Netflix, and while we were in the middle of an episode, it suddenly occurred to me that Nazis are almost always presented as very evil people in media. I know that’s not exactly the observation of the year or anything. I mean, who doesn’t know that? If you want to show someone’s really evil, make them a Nazi in full World War II regalia, and have them shout in German for good measure. So you’re now asking yourself why this deserves an entire blog post.

Here’s the thing (and please don’t take this the wrong way): I think we do ourselves a disservice when Nazis are consistently portrayed this way, despite the fact that I have no idea how to properly portray them. I mean, even with all the decades of “Nazis = Evil” portrayals we’ve had since the end of the war, you still get troglodytes who go out and think Nazis are somehow someone they want to emulate. So lightening that treatment of them isn’t exactly going to do wonders for our world.

Except, in addition to portraying all Nazis as bad, movies generally portray the German people during that time as either Nazis or people who hate Nazism and did everything they could to fight against it, often dying in the process. There’s not a real lot of “regular Germans” shown.

Perhaps some of this is due to the fact that this is Hollywood, and so of course they’re going to gravitate to the extremes. But I think this consistent portrayal makes it too easy to think of Germans that time as either/or. In turn, this makes it very hard for many people to relate to Germans of the time, despite the fact that (news alert) the majority of people in the past were much the same as the majority of people today, regardless of where they lived or what their political regime looked like.

In the last election before the Nazis consolidated power and turned Germany into a dictatorship, guess how many people voted for Hitler.

37%

(If you want some very well done research and discussion, click that link and see the full article.)

About a third of the German people were for Nazis. Some of the Germans were against him, of course, but the key to Hitler’s rise to power is that not enough of Germans were against him enough for it to matter. A whole bunch of them just sort of went along with what was happening, just like people today go along with what’s happening.

I remember when I was on my mission in Weimar, Germany, talking to some of the older generation. This was back in the late 90s, so if someone had been in their 20s during WWII, they were in their 70s then. Buchenwald, a concentration camp, was just over the hill from the main city of Weimar. People told me that they all knew what was going on in Buchenwald, or at least knew enough to strongly suspect, regardless of how much the propaganda machine tried to control it. The city was downwind from the concentration camp, about 7km away. When the ovens were going, people told me you could smell them. (I’ll leave it at that.)

Germans are lovely people. I love the country and still feel a strong connection to it from my two years living among the people there. I knew plenty of 60, 70, and 80 year olds. Guess what? They weren’t evil. They also weren’t saints. They were just normal people, the same as you see here in the US. They were people who went along with what was happening in their country, because it was easier than doing anything about it. Because they weren’t being directly impacted, or because they believed the lies they were being told by all the news organizations in their country. They were just normal people.

So when we only see evil, sadistic, bloodthirsty Nazis in media, it’s just too easy for all of us to wipe our brows in relief, because we’re clearly not anything like them. We’re shown that they’re different. That people who would do what they did are different. And for some of the people in power, that was definitely the case. But for the majority of Germans?

Nope.

And in many ways, that’s much (much) more alarming than any bloodthirsty, whip-wielding, German-shrieking Nazi on the silver screen ever could be.