Bryce Moore's Blog, page 53

The UMF MakerSpace

I realized yesterday that we opened our MakerSpace with a soft launch last semester, and we haven’t really spread the word much just yet. I could have sworn I blogged about it, but . . . it was a crazy semester. So I was reminded yesterday that people might not know what I’m talking about when I mention a MakerSpace. Allow me to rectify that, at least in terms of what my MakerSpace is.

Basically, it’s a spot on campus, open to the public, where people can come to get access to a variety of higher end creative devices that might be beyond their individual budgets. It costs to use the machines (just like it costs to make photocopies or print), but we’re trying to keep those costs down to a minimum. What sort of equipment do we have?

Ultimaker 3D Printers: These are your typical 3D printing machines. They take plastic filament and print it into pretty much any shape you want. These printers handle water soluble filament, which means you can print supports that will dissolve in water, letting you print some objects that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.Resin Printer: This uses liquid resin to 3D print smaller items with much greater detail. It can take longer, but the end product looks like something you’d buy in the store, as opposed to something that was clearly 3D printed. It’s pretty cool.Vinyl Printer: This will print out stickers, banners, window clings, and more. Basically anything made out of vinyl, which I guess is pretty apparent. Full color, great resolution. You can make really professional looking things with that. Embroidery Machine: Likewise, think about all the things you buy with stitching on them. From personalized merchandise to logos to cartoon characters and more. This will do all of that. It can handle fairly large jobs as well. Tomas used it to personalize a bunch of fleece blankets the cross country team gave out. It can do any color thread you want to load into it, so they sky’s the limit.Laser Cutter: This will cut through or engrave plastic and wood. You can add pictures, make puzzles, carve out shapes, and more. I made some Groundhog Day ornaments with it yesterday.Engraver: This does the same thing as the laser cutter, except it uses a blade instead of a laser, so it’s essentially carving the wood or etching the metal. Still figuring this one out.Poster Printer: Think of a glossy, high quality poster you’d buy in the store. Now make whatever one you want, and have it look however you want. Sticker Printer: This churns out small stickers like you’d find in a kid’s activity book. Not necessarily long lasting, but quick and easy.Jewelry Maker: The MakerSpace club bought this last semester. It makes metal jewelry of some sort, but I haven’t used it yet, and I don’t know how it works. More to come.Mug Maker: Buy a blank coffee mug, and make it into whatever kind of mug you want.Hat Maker: Print onto baseball caps. What a world we live in!

Beyond that, we have computers with the full Adobe suite on them, so you can pretty much do whatever you want to do, if you have the patience to teach yourself how to do it. (Right now I’m working on beefing up my Illustrator chops.)

Basically, we want to be there to let people prototype products and figure out how to do or make whatever they want. We’re not set up to have people run their business out of our place, so it’s not really designed for mass production, but someone could definitely figure out how to go into business with what we have to offer.

Anyway. That’s one of my big projects this semester: getting this all up and running. If you’re local, and any of this sounds interesting, reach out to me and we can talk about what we can do to help you.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Year without a 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.

This has been a strange year for my Groundhog festivities. The house is still very much under construction, with drywall dust and power tools and lumber scattered around the kitchen. Our family room is still bursting with odds and ends from different spots of the house as we wait to be able to put everything away at last. The result of all of that is that none of the groundhog decorations made it up this time around. There just wasn’t any safe place to put them, which was sad.

Add to that the fact that Omicron is still very much present in our community, and that means I wasn’t comfortable hosting my annual soiree, either. (The current plan is to have one later, when COVID has died down some. Maybe March?)

The coup de grace is that Tomas and I are headed into the Makerspace this evening to work, which means that we aren’t even really doing much of a celebration at home, making this year officially the worst year for groundhog festivities that I’ve had since my mission. (And I didn’t do anything for the day when I was on my mission, other than plan for ways to celebrate it properly when I got home.)

I did get up and livestream the ceremony in Punxsutawney, so it wasn’t a complete wash, and maybe I’ll try to make up some sort of sticker or Groundhog Day decoration of some sort at the Makerspace tonight. But it’s still been kind of a downer of a day. Here’s hoping next year works out better.

And in any case, Happy Groundhog Day!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

In Defense of Sleep

When I started attending this intro to psychology class, I’m not sure exactly what I expected. Maybe just a series of classes focused on different studies about why people behave the way they behave. While we’ve touched on that some during these first few weeks, we’ve spent much more time on something I didn’t think for a moment we’d discuss. (Obviously due to my own ignorance)

The brain.

We’ve talked about what parts of the brain affect what kinds of behavior. How the brain is organized. How the structures in it form. And today, we learned all about how it’s affected by sleep.

Sleep is something I often take for granted. Yes, there are times when I have trouble falling asleep or wake up too early in the morning, and when I’m going through those times, I definitely notice the lack of sleep and wish I could change things. But it turns out studies have shown sleep is important for much more than just not feeling tired and grumpy all the time.

Getting just 4 hours of sleep a night makes us learn more slowly and react sluggishly, but it also does more extreme things. It weakens our immune system and makes us more vulnerable to colds. It increases the odds of anxiety and depression. Puts us at higher risk of diabetes. Makes our memory worse, increases our blood pressure, affects our body’s ability to regulate insulin (making us more likely to become diabetic), makes us feel hungrier, and affects our balance.

And despite all these findings, we still somehow persist in this cultural attitude that sleep is a luxury. Something we might think is nice to have, but which we don’t really need if we’re too busy for it. People will brag about how little sleep they get. We have our children start school at an ungodly hour so that they have more time for sports in the afternoons. I suppose I shouldn’t say “we,” since I can’t speak for you, but I certainly know that *I* am often bad at treating my sleep like something I should value.

I do think I’m getting better at it. Right now, I typically go to sleep each night around 11pm. I wake up each morning at 6:30, which means I’m getting 7.5 hours of sleep. That’s generally in the range of how much sleep I should be getting, though anecdotally, I think I function better on about 8.5 per night, so it would probably be worth it for me to make a better effort at going to bed around 10pm instead of 11.

How about you? How much sleep do you get each night, and in light of all this information about the bad effects of sleep deprivation, how likely are you to change that?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Current Writing Weakness

As I’m working on my latest book, I’ve discovered an area that I still need a lot of work on to improve. I’ve got plenty of practice dealing with a limited number of characters, but when it comes to having a whole slew of characters in the same place, I just haven’t done that enough to get any real experience with it.

When you look at my books thus far, they almost never have a huge crowd in a scene at the same time. When they do, that huge crowd is almost dealt with as a single entity. “The crowd,” as opposed to individuals within the crowd.

Some of this is because I’ve always tried to keep things clear in my writing, and it felt like once I got beyond a couple of characters, it got difficult to tell people apart. I’ve seen this happen in other people’s writing, and I didn’t want to have it happen in mine. The correct solution to this isn’t to just avoid writing large groups ever, but rather to get better at the skill in question.

For example, I’m about 10,000 words into my next book. This part is centered around a class bus ride with about 45 people on the bus. I was hitting all the action beats I wanted to in terms of the main character’s experience, but when I got to the end of the 10,000 words and looked back on it, all I really had was the main character on a bus with a bunch of faceless people. Sure, I’d added names to about five of them, but there was almost no personality given to any of them.

I was on a fair number of school bus rides growing up, and I know for a fact that they’re affected somehow by social interactions. People I liked. People who irritated me. People who I avoided. Loud people. Shy people. By having so many faceless people on the bus, it made everything feel much less lived in.

So I’m trying to fix that, but as I do I’m reminded again and again why I’ve avoided doing this for so long. Since I’m starting the book with this bus scene, I’m having to do many different things at the same time. I have to introduce the main character and conflict and setting, but now I also have to shoehorn a host of other established characters at the same time.

Thankfully, I’m not the only person to ever try to do this. I’m rereading The Wheel of Time right now, and it deals with a whole slew of characters. I’ve been looking for the ways Robert Jordan introduces them in a way that feels natural, especially since I never really felt overwhelmed by all those characters when I was reading the books through the first time. (And he has a *lot* of characters.)

So far, it seems he gives a brief overview of a room when a character enters. He establishes who’s there, what they look like, and a brief mention of their personality. Then he makes sure to follow that through by having those people reinforce their description by behaving the way he said they did. This isn’t rocket science, I realize, and it might seem very straightforward to many/most of you. But when you’re trying to keep your word count down while doing all of the above . . .

It can get pretty complex. At least it has to me. Here’s hoping that with some concentrated effort, I can get a hang of it. I really like the concept of this book, but I’m going to need to have a larger cast (simply because so many of them are going to die by the end . . . )

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

When Can You Complain about the Cold?

Living in Maine, I’m fairly used to the cold. By this time, I know how to handle most of it. I dress in layers, and my wardrobe has plenty of thick, warm clothes to keep me toasty. Generally speaking, I’d rather be too cold than too hot. My house is mostly set up for the cold, with plenty of insulation. So the cold doesn’t usually bother me.

With a couple of exceptions.

The first big one is frozen pipes. There are two spots in my house where the pipes can freeze if it gets below zero at night. The first is where the pipes head to the upstairs bathroom. As long as we remember to leave the water dripping at night, that usually isn’t a problem, but if it gets cold enough, they’ll freeze anyway. We hope to fix that when we renovate the bathroom in March. More insulation, and sending the pipes in a different route should take care of it, along with ensuring we have no drafts.

The second place we thought we’d fixed when we renovated the kitchen. The dishwasher line sometimes froze. Even with all the insulation we added, it still froze, but we’ve added some more to stop the drafts, and that seems to have taken care of the issue. (Drafts = frozen pipes. They’re much worse for the pipes than just cold.)

The other issue I have is when it gets extremely cold. For me, that’s in the 15 below or more range. The other morning, it was -22F while I was walking into work. (I park at the far end of campus on purpose: I like to get some forced exercise each day, and it helps to clear my head before and after work.) How cold is -22F? It’s so cold, I realized my forehead was cold.

My forehead is not a part of my body that gets much attention. Usually it’s just there. Sitting around. Doing it’s thing. Covering my skull. It doesn’t complain, and it doesn’t really do anything positive. I take it for granted. So you know things have to be going seriously wrong when suddenly my forehead is putting in notices like, “Excuse me? Could I get a little coverage here?”

So that’s my new bar for “too cold.” I see if my forehead cares about it. If not, then we’re good. If so, then people can complain freely about the temperature.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

What Makes You You?

Psychology today was all about the brain and the way it can influence who we are: our personality, our temperament, our ability to handle pressure, and more. Super fascinating stuff, though once again it made me wonder what makes me who I am. I’ve written about this before when I talked about how much someone’s parenting can account for who they turn out to be. (When you’re a parent, you like to think that much of the way your child behaves is due to you being a good (or bad?) parent. When you’re adult, how often do you think that the actions you take all stem back to how you were raised? I tend to think it’s both more and less often than we might like. (Basically, I think it’s better for me to take the attitude that the good choices I make can at least in part be attributed to good parenting I received growing up, while the mistakes I make are because I need to work on being a better person. In actuality, I’m sure it’s a combination, but better to be humble than to sit back and constantly blame.)

But today raised the question of how much what we do and who we are is due to potential problems in our system. I was reminded of Sidney Rigdon, one of the early leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was an ardent supporter of the church, but he suffered a severe attack one evening when he was tarred and feathered and dragged through the street by his heels, his head bumping along behind him. The next day, he was very different. Delirious. Wanting to kill himself or his wife. While he recovered and continued to lead the church, he never seemed (to me, at least) to be quite the same. He split off from the church when Brigham Young became president.

How much of what Sidney did was due to potential injuries he might have sustained during that attack? We know of many cases in the NFL where the repeated hits to the head cause traumatic brain injury. If you get hit on the head in just the wrong way, can that have some sort of an effect on your personality? What if you were hit on the head when you were a child?

The more I think about it, the more reasons I see to try and treat everyone as compassionately as possible, and to be extra careful deeming yourself to be superior than someone else due to your own ingenuity. The “I did it, so can they” mentality only really works if everyone’s on equal footing, and the more I learn, the more I see how that just isn’t the case.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

How Effective are Zoom Meetings?

As I sat with a few minutes between a flurry of Zoom meetings the other day, I was reflecting on just how far things have come in terms of remote meetings since the pandemic began. Back in the halcyon days of February 2020, I would do just about anything to avoid attending a meeting remotely. I always felt like I got more out of the meeting if I was physically present in the room, and that the meeting got more out of me, as well. I was more of a full participant, while the people on the screen often seemed to fade into the wallpaper. They were there, but rarely consulted.

Of course, now I’ve done so many Zoom meetings, it’s depressing to think about. And after all that experience, I thought back to see if I still have the same opinion of remote meetings as I did before.

I don’t.

These days, I really feel like you can get as much out of a Zoom meeting as you can out of an in-person meeting, if it’s done right. That isn’t to say it’s always done right, of course. Here are the elements I think are vital to have effective Zoom sessions:

A fast internet connection. This is an absolute must. I upgraded my internet as soon as the quarantine began, mainly because I saw all my meetings through some sort of strobe effect. Having a bad picture or (even worse) bad audio makes it so that you can’t hear anything, and no one can hear you. I realize that’s not always possible in Maine. If I didn’t have a solid connection, I would probably drive somewhere I did. A college campus. Public library. Somewhere. Anywhere. I think I’d rather not attend a meeting than attend with a scattered connection.A general group proficiency with the platform. You want everyone participating, and that means people know how to mute (and unmute) themselves easily. It means you have someone in charge of the meeting who also knows how to mute people when the need arises. (Such as, say, when you hear someone flush a toilet in the background . . .) Most of the Zoom meetings I attend these days, I run, so that solves that problem, but it’s still an issue in some of the other ones. (And I really want to have a “mute” button available.)Have a small number of people. You can handle a group up to around 12 without too much of a problem, assuming everyone on the call knows what they’re doing. But even then, you’ll have some people who are participating much more than other. (But let’s be honest: that happens with in-person meetings as well.) Once you get too many people on, it can sometimes turn into this awkward thing where everyone seems to assume someone else will speak. And so you all sit around waiting for someone to speak, and no one does. This isn’t something I’ve seen happen in real world meetings. I will say that if the person running the meeting is up to it, it’s possible to keep things rolling even through those awkward pauses. But it involves literally calling on people to keep the conversation going.Have cameras on. This is another big one. If my camera is off, I’m much more likely to get distracted and do something else in the name of multi-tasking. This means I won’t be nearly as involved in the meeting as I should be. With a camera on, I pay better attention. I also can pick up on visual cues from people as they’re talking. I get that some people’s connection is slow enough that having a picture makes it even worse, but refer to my number one item in those cases.

Other than that, I think most elements are the same in Zoom or in person. Have an agenda. Start on time. End on time. And that comes down to just effective meetings in general. The one area where Zoom is still weak is for building relationships among a group. You can’t have a side conversation in Zoom. You can’t have chit chat with one or two people before or after the meeting. You can’t talk over lunch about non-work things. So building a rapport is much more difficult.

In the end, I think I’d probably do a mixture of Zoom and in-person with a group I intended to work with a lot. Start out in person at least once, and then switch to Zoom every other, or maybe even most of the time. It depends on the group dynamic. I’ve been in a ton of very awkward Zooms, and in lots of ones that were completely natural. Talking one on one to a person over Zoom feels almost like being in the room with them at this point, and I didn’t think I’d ever feel that.

How about you? What’s your current take on remote meetings?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Which Side of History Would You Have Been On?

During my psychology class today, we watched a video (linked below) focused on morality that asked the straightforward question: would you have been a Nazi? It examined the thorny questions of “what is right” at different times in history, particularly when “right” was being defined by the majority in a way that later generations have definitely categorized as “wrong.”

It’s easy to look back at history and assume you would have been one of the “good guys.” Things break down when you try to decide which side of history future generations will look at you and know you were on.

The video rightly points out that people generally don’t do bad things if they know they’re bad. They do bad things because they have found reasons that justify the bad things they’re doing. A person who looks at someone being repressed and decides to take a stand to help that person in many ways is facing the same dilemma as a person who feels it would normally be wrong to do an action, but does it anyway for what they believe is the greater good. (This isn’t to say all people only act for the greater good. Plenty of people act in a way that benefits them the most.

So how do you know if the difficult decisions you’re making are the right ones or the wrong ones? (Hopefully this is making sense. It makes sense in my head, at least.)

A big takeaway I appreciated from the video is that you can look for red flags in the leadership of the various groups. Are they lying? How do they use information? Truth and facts are things that don’t change. They’re true regardless of who’s in power or what someone’s personal opinion is. If a regime is taking those facts and twisting them into lies, that’s a big warning sign. If they’re using those lies as the justification to get other people to do things, that’s even worse.

So one of the best traits to cultivate in yourself, in my opinion, is the ability to constantly reevaluate the choices and beliefs you have to see if you might be wrong. Just because everyone is doing something, or your parents did it, or you’ve always done it, doesn’t make it right, though it’s easy to fall into the habit of continually repeating what’s come before.

If you get into an argument with someone over something, and you realize the side you’re supporting is actually one you no longer support, it’s a sign of strength, not weakness, to admit you were wrong rather than digging in. Often this happens because the information we thought was accurate, turns out to be inaccurate. Just this past week, I got in a minor argument with someone over where Maine stood in relation to the Omicron wave. (Yes, I lead an interesting life. What can I say?) According to all the data I had, we were nowhere near the peak, because all the information I’d seen on positive cases lacked the huge spike that always came when Omicron arrived.

Then I found out that the state has a backlog of over 46,000 positive cases that it had yet to add to those official numbers. The spike was there; you just couldn’t see it yet. I made sure to reach out to the person in question and admit I was wrong. Getting in the habit of doing that with little things makes it easier to do with big things.

It’s also helpful to remember that no group has a monopoly on being right, and the more you buy into someone who says they do, the more you’re setting yourself up for big mistakes. Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Muslims, Americans, Russians–all of them are ultimately right about some things, and all of them are wrong about some things. Blind obedience to any one group is a recipe for failure.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Stop Trying to Ban Books

Maybe it’s because I’m a librarian, but I’ve always had this general feel that there’s a consensus that book burning is a bad thing. At least, I’ve never heard anyone speak favorably of it, and whenever it’s come up in a conversation, it’s been used as an example of What Not To Do. This is likely because it’s fairly intrinsically tied to efforts by the Nazis, and most people still believe Nazis were Not Good.

However, it appears more and more people seem to believe banning books is not only not that bad, but actually pretty good. I’ve been following a number of these efforts across the country, and this article in The Guardian does a good job summing them up. In short, it seems some conservative groups backed by big dollars are taking a methodical approach to trying to get rid of books they’ve decided aren’t appropriate for children or young adults. They’re encouraging parents to take this to school boards across the nation, and many parents are answering the call.

I’d like to think most of these parents aren’t doing it because they have a thing against books, knowledge, and ideas. Rather, they’re doing it because they’ve bought into the scare tactics of these conservative groups, and have decided they need to get rid of these books so they can Protect the Children. (This at the same time hordes of children across the country have smartphones (or friends with smartphones) and thus have access to this little thing called “The Internet,” where they can learn and see and watch just about anything in the world they’d like to.

I assume the difference for these parents (in their minds at least) is that while the internet might be full of all sorts of things they disagree with, they don’t think their children are actively being guided to those things. Having books about sexuality or race in a school library, on the other hand, is setting their children up to have these ideas forced upon them. When I look at the lists of “inappropriate books” these groups have come up with, I start to see red.

The thing about banning books is that it’s a two-edged sword, even if you (for some strange bizarre reason) think it’s a good idea. What if other politically motivated groups got together to do their best to remove all books about Christianity from school libraries, because of separation of church and state? Or books about the founding fathers, because they were slave holders? I guarantee you that anything you think is important and sacrosanct, there’s someone out there who thinks it’s terrible.

I don’t want to ban any books, and neither should you. Efforts like this should send a chill down anyone’s back, if they value freedom and diversity of thought. I really (really) don’t want libraries to become the next political battlefield, with citizens getting into trench warfare around ideologies they think a library is or isn’t promoting. If you’re concerned about what your children might be reading, talk to your children. But the best way to get them to read something is often to tell them they can’t read it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Giving a Series Time to Succeed

It’s a well known fact that I watch a fair bit of television. I like how consumable it is. How you can have a nice concise story told in under an hour, with a beginning, middle, and an end. (Typically.) Any while there are some shows out there that I’ll try for a bit and then just decide they’re not for me, I’m generally pretty forgiving for a show, at least for the first while.

A great television series is really hard to assemble. You have to get enough funding in the first place to get your series off the ground, and then you have to work with the producers (who often don’t share your exact vision) to create it the way you’d like it, and then you need to hope that enough people out there watch it and stay with it to justify a second season.

Ideally, that all works great right from the beginning. But that’s often not the case.

The first season of The Wheel of Time is a great example of this. I watched it, and I generally enjoyed it. Was it perfect? Definitely not. But it was intriguing enough that I’ll stick with it, especially since I know some of the issues I had with it were anything but self-inflicted. The finale felt especially rushed, but when you realize that the show was pitched as having 10 episodes (with a 2 hour premiere), you realize that the creators wanted to take more time with it as well. But The Powers That Be cut it short. Now that it’s been quite successful for Amazon, I’m hopeful the second season has a little more leeway to do what it’s trying to do.

People like to compare it to the already uber-successful Game of Thrones, but they forget that GoT took time to get to where it peaked. (I’m not going to argue about the last two seasons. I enjoyed them, though I felt they were rushed once again, this time apparently by an unfathomable desire by the creators to just finish the show and be done with it.) The show wasn’t nearly as well funded to begin with, and it ended up cutting corner as a result. It’s not like it started off able to show a fully rendered dragon attacking a wagon train, with all the special effects bells and whistles. It earned that by working up to it.

Evaluating the first season of a show by comparing it to a different show you loved might be somewhat useful, but ultimately it’s an unfair comparison. It’s sort of like saying a recent college graduate being told they really ought to get a better job because they aren’t making as much money as a forty year old.

So what would make me decide to give up on a show, and what would make me stick with one? The characters would be a big factor. If they’re relatable or intriguing, that goes a long way. The writing is huge: are the characters making decisions that are consistent with who they are? How is the dialogue? Are there people I can root for? The general conceit of the show is also a big factor. As long as the basic structure of the show is in place and sound, then I’m willing to forgive some fumbling along the way.

It was easier to do that when shows came out once a week, and bingeing wasn’t a thing. Now, it feels like people sometimes demand perfection right from the get go. Some of the shows that I’ve ended up loving, I didn’t love right off. The Wire is an excellent example. It took half the first season for me to really be intrigued, and then I was really turned off by the first few episodes of the second season. But there was enough there to keep me going, and I ended up loving the whole thing.

Right now, I just finished the second season of the Witcher. I’ve had issues with some of what it’s been doing. The timey-wimey-ness of the first season, and the seeming glee in reveling in obscure references and confusing plots are definite problems. But by the end, I felt like it had really found its footing and was some excellent television.

How about you? What makes you stick with (or abandon) a TV show?

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