Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 3

WTF is Transmedia? 2022 Edition

Long, long ago, when this blog and the earth were both new, one of the primary activities of any gathering of transmedia-adjacent people was coming up with new definitions of "transmedia." This was back when you could come across such people at conferences and in various online groups, which communities have slowly gone quiet over time, though of course new ones have popped up in their place.

…With all new keywords. Because "transmedia" isn't the right one anymore, at least not for me and the alternate reality game scene where I cut my teeth. So let's talk nomenclature, yet again.

On the surface, this debate could always be read as lot of hot air and pedantry, but they had a very serious purpose. All of us were trying to find our affinity groups, other creators working in the same space as us. And we were looking out for our eligibility for funding, awards and professional associations; using the right keywords could mean access to bigger, better opportunities. Being definitionally excluded would mean being locked out of the same.

Transmedia was the hot word of the day, so we who originated in the ARG community went to the mat to be included in it, and included in its rising tide. This, we thought, could be the umbrella term we needed to legitimize our work in the eyes of the entertainment industry.

The consensus definition eventually settled at transmedia storytelling being:

1) Multiple media

2) Each making a unique contribution

2) To a single narrative

It seemed like a broad enough umbrella to shelter both spiderweb and sequential narratives, as I called them; both the MCU and its intricately woven narratives, and other, more ephemeral stories embedded in the real world or online.

But it was always a bit uneasy, because there is a fundamental tension at the heart of it: a corporate conglomerate's franchise universe and scrappy real-world puzzle hunts are wholly different beasts with different audiences and best practices. The same tools and paradigms for one don't extend to the other in terms of business models, funding sources, and skills needed to implement them successfully.

And there were all sorts of weird outliers, anyway, things that felt relevant to my work, anyway, but probably weren't technically transmedia by that definition. Or conversely, things that technically were transmedia but didn't have much in common with… well, with anything I was doing.

If a story is told over multiple Twitter accounts, does that count as "multiple media"? That certainly felt more like stuff-I-make than the Star Wars Universe ever did. What about a documentary with supplementary photos on a website? Or what about an escape room? What about a novel that continues a story begun in a series of previously published short stories? Is it different if the characters have email addresses and write you back? What if there's a staged play? What if that's participatory theater?

It's a great, simple definition, but it never was a perfect fit. The mismatch had some real-world consequences, too, in the end. If someone wants to start laying down the framework for the next massive narrative universe, my particular hard-won skills from the ARG mines aren't the most important ones to have, even if I did write a book with "transmedia" right there in the title.

And that's why we kept talking about it. Why I'm still over here talking about it.

Other Rejected Names

At this point we could ask, why not just stick with the plain old "alternate reality game"? That was never really big enough to describe the spaces we were working in, linguistically speaking. —Now don't get me wrong. I love me an ARG. I wish I could make more of them all the time. It's arguably my very favorite storytelling format! (Despite the deep and inherent ethical dilemmas that come along with it these days, sigh.)

But it was never quite all-inclusive enough to be the umbrella term that covers "cool stuff on the internet and/or in the real world that sort of feels like the stuff I'm making or want to make." ARG as it is used and understood fundamentally implies a bunch of things that aren't always a part of the kinds of projects I, at least, considered cousins. An ARG is real-time. An ARG is played by a community. An ARG has puzzles. An ARG is interactive. An ARG takes place mostly online.

Lots of ARGs are missing a couple of these, but it felt to me like some of the amazing, creative projects with the vibes I was looking for could easily miss… well, all of them, and still be called by the yet-unknown word looking for. So ARG was out.

We've also tried on a lot of other descriptors over the years, but all of them fell short of the one true term. "Digital," for example, doesn't leave room for theater-based experiences, LARPs, tangible story boxes, or escape rooms. And "digital storytelling" would inevitably include straight-up video games, another massive industry that, just like franchise entertainment, doesn't have a lot of overlap with ARGs.

Another early contender was "interactive." That easily separates out franchise entertainment, definitely! But it does still run into the problem of distinguishing from regular ol' video games, especially because "interactive fiction" is usually taken to mean text adventure-style video games.

Even more troubling is the hard fact that not all ARG players interact. The silent majority participate only as spectators. It's easy to envision projects that create the kinds of feelings/experiences/vibes an ARG does without ever allowing any interaction whatsoever beyond whatever is required to consume the story. And if that's enough, the definition falls down anyway; by that standard, you could call a book interactive because you have to turn the pages.

Finally, over these many years there's been some traction around "experiential," and "experience design." That one falls short because frankly it is too easily diluted to mean anything at all, just as has happened with the word "story." Just watching one movie is inarguably an experience. Participating in a marathon or a protest are experiences. Walking into a store is an experience! And often a highly designed experience, as well. So that wasn't a great fit, really, though I tried hard to run with it for a while, since it seemed like the closest thing we'd yet come across.

Ugh, why is it so hard to find a concrete description for "cool story stuff that seems sort of like the stuff I make but is also sometimes very different in other ways."

A New Player Has Entered the Game

And now we arrive at today. The new hotness in town the last few years is "immersive," and I think, I think, I truly believe that we finally have the word we were looking for the whole time.

Immerse is a word with a meaning: to completely engulf in something. Immersive storytelling, therefore, engulfs you in the story.

Years ago, Sean Stacey coined the phrase "This Is Not A Game" to describe the kayfabe of an ARG. The story always behaves as if it thinks it's real. "This Is Not A Story" is a little unwieldy to keep, but that shows that even from the beginning, we had a sort of feeling about what was important about these things we were making and playing. One of our most notable companies was called "Fourth Wall," for crying out loud.

An ARG, an escape room, a VR app, a phone- or Zoom-based theater performance, a story told in wiki edits or emails and texts. A website found from a poster in a movie. A collection of postcards and photos that tell you a mystery story. All of these take fragments of a story world and drag them through the fourth wall. This was the commonality all along. This was what I was looking for: stories that, in the telling, become real.

It doesn't feel too big or too small. It doesn't feel uncomfortable, like we're wedging dissimilar things together; finally, finally, we have terminology that fits.

It's about time.

WTF is transmedia? 2022 Edition

Long, long ago, when this blog and the earth were both new, one of the primary activities of any gathering of transmedia-adjacent people was coming up with new definitions of "transmedia." This was back when you could come across such people at conferences and in various online groups, which communities have slowly gone quiet over time, though of course new ones have popped up in their place.

…With all new keywords. Because "transmedia" isn't the right one anymore, at least not for me and the alternate reality game scene where I cut my teeth. So let's talk nomenclature, yet again.

On the surface, this debate could always be read as lot of hot air and pedantry, but they had a very serious purpose. All of us were trying to find our affinity groups, other creators working in the same space as us. And we were looking out for our eligibility for funding, awards and professional associations; using the right keywords could mean access to bigger, better opportunities. Being definitionally excluded would mean being locked out of the same.

Transmedia was the hot word of the day, so we who originated in the ARG community went to the mat to be included in it, and included in its rising tide. This, we thought, could be the umbrella term we needed to legitimize our work in the eyes of the entertainment industry.

The consensus definition eventually settled at transmedia storytelling being:

1) Multiple media

2) Each making a unique contribution

2) To a single narrative

It seemed like a broad enough umbrella to shelter both spiderweb and sequential narratives, as I called them; both the MCU and its intricately woven narratives, and other, more ephemeral stories embedded in the real world or online.

But it was always a bit uneasy, because there is a fundamental tension at the heart of it: a corporate conglomerate's franchise universe and scrappy real-world puzzle hunts are wholly different beasts with different audiences and best practices. The same tools and paradigms for one don't extend to the other in terms of business models, funding sources, and skills needed to implement them successfully.

And there were all sorts of weird outliers, anyway, things that felt relevant to my work, anyway, but probably weren't technically transmedia by that definition. Or conversely, things that technically were transmedia but didn't have much in common with… well, with anything I was doing.

If a story is told over multiple Twitter accounts, does that count as "multiple media"? That certainly felt more like stuff-I-make than the Star Wars Universe ever did. What about a documentary with supplementary photos on a website? Or what about an escape room? What about a novel that continues a story begun in a series of previously published short stories? Is it different if the characters have email addresses and write you back? What if there's a staged play? What if that's participatory theater?

It's a great, simple definition, but it never was a perfect fit. The mismatch had some real-world consequences, too, in the end. If someone wants to start laying down the framework for the next massive narrative universe, my particular hard-won skills from the ARG mines aren't the most important ones to have, even if I did write a book with "transmedia" right there in the title.

And that's why we kept talking about it. Why I'm still over here talking about it.

Other Rejected Names

At this point we could ask, why not just stick with the plain old "alternate reality game"? That was never really big enough to describe the spaces we were working in, linguistically speaking. —Now don't get me wrong. I love me an ARG. I wish I could make more of them all the time. It's arguably my very favorite storytelling format! (Despite the deep and inherent ethical dilemmas that come along with it these days, sigh.)

But it was never quite all-inclusive enough to be the umbrella term that covers "cool stuff on the internet and/or in the real world that sort of feels like the stuff I'm making or want to make." ARG as it is used and understood fundamentally implies a bunch of things that aren't always a part of the kinds of projects I, at least, considered cousins. An ARG is real-time. An ARG is played by a community. An ARG has puzzles. An ARG is interactive. An ARG takes place mostly online.

Lots of ARGs are missing a couple of these, but it felt to me like some of the amazing, creative projects with the vibes I was looking for could easily miss… well, all of them, and still be called by the yet-unknown word looking for. So ARG was out.

We've also tried on a lot of other descriptors over the years, but all of them fell short of the one true term. "Digital," for example, doesn't leave room for theater-based experiences, LARPs, tangible story boxes, or escape rooms. And "digital storytelling" would inevitably include straight-up video games, another massive industry that, just like franchise entertainment, doesn't have a lot of overlap with ARGs.

Another early contender was "interactive." That easily separates out franchise entertainment, definitely! But it does still run into the problem of distinguishing from regular ol' video games, especially because "interactive fiction" is usually taken to mean text adventure-style video games.

Even more troubling is the hard fact that not all ARG players interact. The silent majority participate only as spectators. It's easy to envision projects that create the kinds of feelings/experiences/vibes an ARG does without ever allowing any interaction whatsoever beyond whatever is required to consume the story. And if that's enough, the definition falls down anyway; by that standard, you could call a book interactive because you have to turn the pages.

Finally, over these many years there's been some traction around "experiential," and "experience design." That one falls short because frankly it is too easily diluted to mean anything at all, just as has happened with the word "story." Just watching one movie is inarguably an experience. Participating in a marathon or a protest are experiences. Walking into a store is an experience! And often a highly designed experience, as well. So that wasn't a great fit, really, though I tried hard to run with it for a while, since it seemed like the closest thing we'd yet come across.

Ugh, why is it so hard to find a concrete description for "cool story stuff that seems sort of like the stuff I make but is also sometimes very different in other ways."

A New Player Has Entered the Game

And now we arrive at today. The new hotness in town the last few years is "immersive," and I think, I think, I truly believe that we finally have the word we were looking for the whole time.

Immerse is a word with a meaning: to completely engulf in something. Immersive storytelling, therefore, engulfs you in the story.

Years ago, Sean Stacey coined the phrase "This Is Not A Game" to describe the kayfabe of an ARG. The story always behaves as if it thinks it's real. "This Is Not A Story" is a little unwieldy to keep, but that shows that even from the beginning, we had a sort of feeling about what was important about these things we were making and playing. One of our most notable companies was called "Fourth Wall," for crying out loud.

An ARGm an escape room, a VR app, a phone- or Zoom-based theater performance, a story told in wiki edits or emails and texts. A website found from a poster in a movie. A collection of postcards and photos that tell you a mystery story. All of these take fragments of a story world and drag them through the fourth wall. This was the commonality all along. This was what I was looking for: stories that, in the telling, become real.

It doesn't feel too big or too small. It doesn't feel uncomfortable, like we're wedging dissimilar things together; finally, finally, we have terminology that fits.

It's about time.

An Old-School Writing Argument

Let's do something we haven't done in an age and a half! Let's talk about writing.

A friend called my attention to a bit of writing discourse that happened a few days ago, to wit this tweet by Tade Thompson:

And then a Medium post in response by Adam Roberts.

I mostly agree with the original Tweet (and I'll be circling back to it in a while) except for the "Cold War politics" thing, like, yeah the Iowa Writer's Workshop was funded by the CIA, but that doesn't mean that the style of writing it lionized is inherently imperialistic or pro-capitalist.

More to the point, though, yes! Sometimes you DO in fact need to actually tell your readership something so they'll have enough context to understand other things that you might be showing them later on. Especially, especially in genre fiction. I'm reflecting here on the ARG design truism I learned from Elan Lee oh so many years ago: If you want the players to know something, tell it to them. It is OK and fine to do that! It's just a different creative choice, and it is just as valid. We're not all trying to do the same thing, and we shouldn't anyway.

And I say this as someone who wildly prefers "showing," not because it's objectively better, but because it gives you a higher-bandwidth way of conveying information. If I say "she arrived in a very expensive car," that's a very small amount of information, but if I say "she drove up in the salsa-red F-150 her daddy bought her," you know a LOT more: she's attention-seeking enough to want a red car, she comes from a family with money, and she might have some right-leaning political tendencies or live in a rural area.

Meanwhile if you read Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, there are fucktons of telling, and it's fine and even great, because the spare, straight language is absolutely a critical piece of the art of what you are being told and how you are being told it.

Variety is the spice of life, yeah?

BOOKS ARE NOT TOO COMFORTABLE THESE DAYS

One of the things Roberts suggests is that books these days, especially in science fiction, are simply too comfortable and easy to read, and that is bad. Ugh I hate that kind of elitist bullshit hand-wringing. (Sorry, Mr. Roberts, nothing personal.) Look, we only consider the Western canon of books "difficult" because culture and language have evolved, and reading them is an act of cultural archaeology.

Shakespeare was a writer of the people! He did not set out to make high and difficult art, he wrote so many goddamn dick jokes. So many.  We just don't notice them all nowadays, because see above: cultural archaeology.

Indeed, the things that we consider "good writing" at all are a matter of fashion and taste, and can and have changed over time. We value concise writing now. But in the mid-1800s, a complex sentence and repetition were fashionable, possibly because readers read differently. There were fewer books, more often reread. Complex language gave readers something to sink into and spend time with, where modern readers want to get in and out because we have so many other things to read next.

That doesn't mean that writing like that was better. It doesn't mean that writing populist and comfortable works can't also address deep, moving themes of what it is to be human. I'd put the Futurama episode Jurassic Bark on the table against any number of works of "serious" literature to see which one makes you feel something more deeply.

A BIT OF A TANGENT

When the subject comes around to "difficult books," I become uneasy. The one that springs to mind for me is Too Like the Lightning, with which I did not have a good or rewarding reading experience. (Again, nothing personal, Ms. Palmer.)

In fact I bounced very early because I felt like I was being intentionally excluded from basic facts that would allow me to get my bearings in the world rather than — this is a key point here —  feeling like I was witnessing an artful unfolding of mysteries. It's been a long time, but the particular example I remember is this: the book was extremely oblique about the fact that the wealthy family in the beginning were magnates of some sort of global automated Uber network.

No narrative purpose is served by being coy about that fact in particular. It is difficult solely for the sake of difficulty. And so I felt like I as the reader was not being dealt with in good faith; even that I was being subjected to some sort of test of whether I was worthy of the book. I do not like the feeling that the author (not an unreliable narrator, the author) is intentionally excluding me.

Many, many people in my sphere have talked a lot about how rich and deep and complicated that series is, with overtones that mean admitting in public that it was not for me feels precisely like I am saying "I am a dumb and unsophisticated girl who was simply not good enough for this book." I suppose the fairest way to say this is, it was written for a very specific audience that I am not a part of.

It's great that books like that exist, truly, to each reader the book of their heart. And yet I am very, very uncomfortable with appreciation or enjoyment of that kind of work being used as a shibboleth for a reader's personal intellectual value. It shouldn't feel dangerous to say you didn't like a book, but here we are.

LIFE IS HARD ENOUGH ON ITS OWN

Roberts also advises seeking out creative constraints, to which I say, what, no. I do agree that writing is like going to the gym in that the more you do the more you can do, but it is equally valid to try to do more complex and sprawling things as you grow in skill and power, rather than limiting yourself to working inside a smaller box.

And it is ALSO valid to keep writing the same kinds of stories that you love writing, because art is good and valuable no matter what it is you're trying to express, and the idea that harder art is "better" is bullshit, see above. It's just a different thing, for a different audience. Both! Are! Worthy!

And many, many writers are already working in constrained-enough boxes without seeking out artificial limitations of technique. For BIPOC writers, for disabled writers, those with family troubles or in abusive situations or other whole-life stressors, whatever words you can get out are the ones you should be writing. Your style is you, your voice is you, use the words that you have.

GAMES ARE GETTING EASIER, NOT HARDER

These points are nothing compared to how much I disagree with his points about games. No, games are not becoming harder, no, gamers do not overall prefer more difficult experiences, and look, the industry backs me up on this.

High difficulty in games is an artifact of early technical limitations wherein they were trying to make you feel like you got the most bang for your buck while reusing resources as much as possible to save extremely limited storage space for the game's code. Making you do the same stuff over and over again was just thrift.

In the original arcade culture, difficulty was at an all-time high because game sessions meant more money. If Pac-Man were easier they would have made a lot less quarters. …But if it were harder nobody would've wanted to even try. For twitch-style games like that, even today, fine-tuning difficulty is about finding a level where a typical person can get into a flow state and stay there for at least a little while, and feel like they could probably stay there a little longer the next time.

Claiming that a game is better because it's hard is absolutely going against the way the entire industry is going right now. The example he uses, though, is BioShock, which is a different kind of beast entirely: a narrative game. These past few decades have seen huge growth in narrative-based games, which are actively cutting away difficulty with accessibility modes that turn down combat difficulty, give you more health, give you more time, even outright story modes where all of the challenging bits are either less challenging or not at all challenging. Some of them don't even have "difficulty" as a concept; the so-called walking simulators. Because people who want to play a game for its story are not generally the ones interested in having something to beat!               

Long-time readers will already know about the famous essay by Dr. Richard Bartle about the four kinds of players in a multi-player online game, roughly translated as: achievers, explorers, socializers, and trolls. Modern narrative game players fall into very similar categories. Not all of these are interested in something that is HARD, and the business is keenly aware of this. Hard loses you market share. It should be an option, not a default, and these days, it increasingly is.

I am absolutely on board with games being an amazing art form. (I mean, duh, of course I am, it’s like, a big part of my whole thing.) The thing that makes games art and makes great narrative games great art isn't "they can be hard." It’s so much more complicated than that. In my mind, one of the main reason is that you can evoke emotional responses based on the player's agency (they can feel guilty because they're responsible for X other character dying, they can be proud because they solved a neat puzzle) and you can't generally access those emotions from flat, non-interactive media.

And the possibilities of environmental storytelling above and beyond "read all of these diaries these people left around" is incredible and so far only barely tapped. Portal and Portal 2 in particular did some AMAZING things with that, and eg. Obra Dina, which is, to bring this back full circle, the whole-game game version of showing and not telling. But it’s a key part of the mood and artful execution even in such narrative-simple, mainstream games like Breath of the Wild, where the ruins of the world speak of an age gone by that you can just barely piece together to understand what's been lost.

Artfulness doesn't come from the difficulty. (Unless you’re trying to evoke the feeling of frustration for creative purposes.) The meaning doesn't come from difficulty. It's great to seek those things out if you want, and it's great to make that kind of work if you like! Just don't go around acting like those modes of creation are objectively better.

Art speaks to different people differently. Artists work in a myriad of ways. That’s fine! And anytime someone claims you should be doing something differently, you’re free to take it or leave it. Maybe they’ll help you get closer to your own vision. But maybe your art just isn’t for them.

An Old-School Writing Argument

Let's do something we haven't done in an age and a half! Let's talk about writing.

A friend called my attention to a bit of writing discourse that happened a few days ago, to wit this tweet by Tade Thompson:

And then a Medium post in response by Adam Roberts.

I mostly agree with the original Tweet (and I'll be circling back to it in a while) except for the "Cold War politics" thing, like, yeah the Iowa Writer's Workshop was funded by the CIA, but that doesn't mean that the style of writing it lionized is inherently imperialistic or pro-capitalist.

More to the point, though, yes! Sometimes you DO in fact need to actually tell your readership something so they'll have enough context to understand other things that you might be showing them later on. Especially, especially in genre fiction. I'm reflecting here on the ARG design truism I learned from Elan Lee oh so many years ago: If you want the players to know something, tell it to them. It is OK and fine to do that! It's just a different creative choice, and it is just as valid. We're not all trying to do the same thing, and we shouldn't anyway.

And I say this as someone who wildly prefers "showing," not because it's objectively better, but because it gives you a higher-bandwidth way of conveying information. If I say "she arrived in a very expensive car," that's a very small amount of information, but if I say "she drove up in the salsa-red F-150 her daddy bought her," you know a LOT more: she's attention-seeking enough to want a red car, she comes from a family with money, and she might have some right-leaning political tendencies or live in a rural area.

Meanwhile if you read Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, there are fucktons of telling, and it's fine and even great, because the spare, straight language is absolutely a critical piece of the art of what you are being told and how you are being told it.

Variety is the spice of life, yeah?

Books Are Not Too Comfortable These Days

One of the things Roberts suggests is that books these days, especially in science fiction, are simply too comfortable and easy to read, and that is bad. Ugh I hate that kind of elitist bullshit hand-wringing. (Sorry, Mr. Roberts, nothing personal.) Look, we only consider the Western canon of books "difficult" because culture and language have evolved, and reading them is an act of cultural archaeology.

Shakespeare was a writer of the people! He did not set out to make high and difficult art, he wrote so many goddamn dick jokes. So many.  We just don't notice them all nowadays, because see above: cultural archaeology.

Indeed, the things that we consider "good writing" at all are a matter of fashion and taste, and can and have changed over time. We value concise writing now. But in the mid-1800s, a complex sentence and repetition were fashionable, possibly because readers read differently. There were fewer books, more often reread. Complex language gave readers something to sink into and spend time with, where modern readers want to get in and out because we have so many other things to read next.

That doesn't mean that writing like that was better. It doesn't mean that writing populist and comfortable works can't also address deep, moving themes of what it is to be human. I'd put the Futurama episode Jurassic Bark on the table against any number of works of "serious" literature to see which one makes you feel something more deeply.

A Bit of a Tangent

When the subject comes around to "difficult books," I become uneasy. The one that springs to mind for me is Too Like the Lightning, with which I did not have a good or rewarding reading experience. (Again, nothing personal, Ms. Palmer.)

In fact I bounced very early because I felt like I was being intentionally excluded from basic facts that would allow me to get my bearings in the world rather than — this is a key point here —  feeling like I was witnessing an artful unfolding of mysteries. It's been a long time, but the particular example I remember is this: the book was extremely oblique about the fact that the wealthy family in the beginning were magnates of some sort of global automated Uber network.

No narrative purpose is served by being coy about that fact in particular. It is difficult solely for the sake of difficulty. And so I felt like I as the reader was not being dealt with in good faith; even that I was being subjected to some sort of test of whether I was worthy of the book. I do not like the feeling that the author (not an unreliable narrator, the author) is intentionally excluding me.

Many, many people in my sphere have talked a lot about how rich and deep and complicated that series is, with overtones that mean admitting in public that it was not for me feels precisely like I am saying "I am a dumb and unsophisticated girl who was simply not good enough for this book." I suppose the fairest way to say this is, it was written for a very specific audience that I am not a part of.

It's great that books like that exist, truly, to each reader the book of their heart. And yet I am very, very uncomfortable with appreciation or enjoyment of that kind of work being used as a shibboleth for a reader's personal intellectual value. It shouldn't feel dangerous to say you didn't like a book, but here we are.

Life is Hard Enough On Its Own

Roberts also advises seeking out creative constraints, to which I say, what, no. I do agree that writing is like going to the gym in that the more you do the more you can do, but it is equally valid to try to do more complex and sprawling things as you grow in skill and power, rather than limiting yourself to working inside a smaller box.

And it is ALSO valid to keep writing the same kinds of stories that you love writing, because art is good and valuable no matter what it is you're trying to express, and the idea that harder art is "better" is bullshit, see above. It's just a different thing, for a different audience. Both! Are! Worthy!

And many, many writers are already working in constrained-enough boxes without seeking out artificial limitations of technique. For BIPOC writers, for disabled writers, those with family troubles or in abusive situations or other whole-life stressors, whatever words you can get out are the ones you should be writing. Your style is you, your voice is you, use the words that you have.

Games Are Getting Easier, Not Harder

These points are nothing compared to how much I disagree with his points about games. No, games are not becoming harder, no, gamers do not overall prefer more difficult experiences, and look, the industry backs me up on this.

High difficulty in games is an artifact of early technical limitations wherein they were trying to make you feel like you got the most bang for your buck while reusing resources as much as possible to save extremely limited storage space for the game's code. Making you do the same stuff over and over again was just thrift.

In the original arcade culture, difficulty was at an all-time high because game sessions meant more money. If Pac-Man were easier they would have made a lot less quarters. …But if it were harder nobody would've wanted to even try. For twitch-style games like that, even today, fine-tuning difficulty is about finding a level where a typical person can get into a flow state and stay there for at least a little while, and feel like they could probably stay there a little longer the next time.

Claiming that a game is better because it's hard is absolutely going against the way the entire industry is going right now. The example he uses, though, is BioShock, which is a different kind of beast entirely: a narrative game. These past few decades have seen huge growth in narrative-based games, which are actively cutting away difficulty with accessibility modes that turn down combat difficulty, give you more health, give you more time, even outright story modes where all of the challenging bits are either less challenging or not at all challenging. Some of them don't even have "difficulty" as a concept; the so-called walking simulators. Because people who want to play a game for its story are not generally the ones interested in having something to beat!               

Long-time readers will already know about the famous essay by Dr. Richard Bartle about the four kinds of players in a multi-player online game, roughly translated as: achievers, explorers, socializers, and trolls. Modern narrative game players fall into very similar categories. Not all of these are interested in something that is HARD, and the business is keenly aware of this. Hard loses you market share. It should be an option, not a default, and these days, it increasingly is.

I am absolutely on board with games being an amazing art form. (I mean, duh, of course I am, it’s like, a big part of my whole thing.) The thing that makes games art and makes great narrative games great art isn't "they can be hard." It’s so much more complicated than that. In my mind, one of the main reason is that you can evoke emotional responses based on the player's agency (they can feel guilty because they're responsible for X other character dying, they can be proud because they solved a neat puzzle) and you can't generally access those emotions from flat, non-interactive media.

And the possibilities of environmental storytelling above and beyond "read all of these diaries these people left around" is incredible and so far only barely tapped. Portal and Portal 2 in particular did some AMAZING things with that, and eg. Obra Dina, which is, to bring this back full circle, the whole-game game version of showing and not telling. But it’s a key part of the mood and artful execution even in such narrative-simple, mainstream games like Breath of the Wild, where the ruins of the world speak of an age gone by that you can just barely piece together to understand what's been lost.

Artfulness doesn't come from the difficulty. (Unless you’re trying to evoke the feeling of frustration for creative purposes.) The meaning doesn't come from difficulty. It's great to seek those things out if you want, and it's great to make that kind of work if you like! Just don't go around acting like those modes of creation are objectively better.

Art speaks to different people differently. Artists work in a myriad of ways. That’s fine! And anytime someone claims you should be doing something differently, you’re free to take it or leave it. Maybe they’ll help you get closer to your own vision. But maybe your art just isn’t for them.

The Roswell Conspiracy

This is part 3 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1 , and part 2 .

There are two things that are absolutely, objectively true about Roswell: one, it’s the inciting incident for all of modern ufology, and two, there was definitely, undeniably a government cover-up about what happened there. (But maybe not the one you think.)

For those of you who have been away from mainstream media since 1947, here are the basic facts: Something or other definitely crashed in a rancher’s field outside of Roswell, New Mexico. On July 8 of that year, the Roswell Army Air Field issued an actual factual press release that said that that a “flying disk” had crashed, and that the Army had recovered the wreckage. Mere hours later, the press office reversed course and said that it was not, in fact, a flying disk of extraterrestrial origins, but was instead a weather balloon.

This is where accounts of what happened begin to diverge dramatically.

Roswell has left a massive imprint on American mythology, and there’s an intricate history of what happened afterward including witness accounts and whispered theories spanning decades. In this version of events, the first story was the truth, before a massive coverup and lie was deployed. There an extraterrestrial craft that crashed at Roswell (or maybe two.) The findings included the bodies of two alien beings, or three, or maybe five, and maybe one that was alive. The US government took possession of all materials remaining at Roswell. Later, the materials were given to defense contractors to reverse engineer — probably Lockheed-Martin. And the alien in government captivity was perhaps combative or perhaps compliant, and ultimately passed away after only a few years despite everything our best doctors tried to help.

This, so goes the theory, is the reason for our massive technological boom over the last seventy years: we learned it from someone else, where “it” is anything from fiberoptics to semiconductors.

You can read earnest but unsubstantiated accounts of this timeline that are nothing short of a secret history of the world. The CIA was founded only months later in response to this new threat. Eisenhower met with aliens to sign a treaty at Camp David; the Cold War was a charade to cover up for Russians and Americans working together, secretly from alien surveillance; humans went with aliens to Zeta Reticuli, or there’s an alien and human base hidden somewhere in Alaska, or there are several kinds of aliens, including an evil shapeshifting race of lizard-people, and we allied with the wrong ones.

If you trace these conspiracy theories all the way to their conclusions, it eventually sounds a lot like Scientology, or like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or like QAnon. Once you believe one unbelievable thing, the others get easier to swallow, I suppose.

I am here today to tell you that Roswell was definitely a conspiracy. Indeed, the U.S. government itself has said that what happened at Roswell was a coverup. The thing they were covering up? Project Mogul, a secret project that tested weather weather balloons equipped with microphones could detect Soviet nuclear tests. The bodies found were probably test dummies (…and never mind that test dummies weren’t used until 1953. Or that the first published mention of bodies at Roswell wasn’t until 1980.)

There’s a 250-page report released by the Federal government in 1994 investigating Roswell in depth, and describing how Mogul was covered up. I guess it’s a boring coverup, but a coverup all the same.

OK BUT… WHY?

Why would an Army officer have announced that they’d found a flying saucer in the first place, only to backtrack hours later? One theory — and this is a fun one! — is that this was a psy-op to psych Russia into thinking we might be in contact with aliens to freak them out! And that that is the point of a lot of UFO stuff to this day! Except now we’re trying to freak out China.

Here’s a more grounded take: the 1940s were a UFO-obsessed time, and hundreds of sightings were reported every month. Some were even photographed! …Though an awful lot of those photos were later proven to be hubcaps or pie plates thrown into the air.

Given that zeitgeist, it’s not impossible that even a military officer might leap to conclusions. Though officers associated with the Roswell incident had been on the radio in the days before the crash expressing skepticism that flying saucers were real, in response to a wave of a few dozen sightings in the area.

A teletype from the FBI files released on that infamous July Day perhaps splits the difference between the disk and balloon theories, describing the craft recovered as a hexagonal flying disk suspended from a balloon.

The huge complication is that there are mountains of statements and evidence that something more than a weather balloon, something more than a microphone, was found in the pastures of New Mexico in 1947. There are people who were there and say so. It’s just a question of whether to believe them.

There are deathbed confessions; there are stories that changed or expanded over time. These people who were definitely there describe the smell of the alien bodies, the strangeness of the materials in the craft of the wreckage. A mortician claims to have taken calls from the base about obtaining a large number of child-sized coffins. But many of these statements are third-hand, or only recorded decades after the events in question.

Further, a lot of these witnesses later went on to make a living off of their sighting — by, for example, operating a for-profit UFO museum — and I hate to tell you this, but people will do a lot of shady things for money. If you’d like a more charitable interpretation, though, I’d like to point out that if you did have that kind of experience, you might make it the focus of your whole life, too.

It’s a damn shame there’s no way to go back in time and get more concrete, contemporaneous evidence of who was thinking what and when on that day. —Or… is there?

THE RAMEY MEMO

Friends, allow me to introduce you to RoswellProof.com. While it does contain summaries of witness statements and FOIA documents, this site primarily focuses on one piece of photographic evidence: that famous shot of Brigadier General Roger Ramey holding up the remnant of, yes, a weather balloon. There’s a piece of paper in his hand. And in one of the shots, you can almost read the writing.

Almost.

Ufologists have spent a lot of time trying to blow that shot up and read that memo. Per consensus on RoswellProof.com, one tentative interpretation goes something like this:

0)   FWAAF ACKNOWLEDGES THAT A "DISK" IS NEXT NEW FIND WEST OF

1)   THE CORDON. AT LOCATION WAS A WRECK NEAR OPERATION AT THE

2)   "RANCH" AND THE VICTIMS OF THE WRECK YOU FORWARDED TO THE

3)   ??TEAM AT FORT WORTH, TEX.

4)   AVIATORS IN THE "DISC" THEY WILL SHIP FOR A1-8TH ARMYAMU,

5)   BY B29-ST OR C47. WRIGHT AF ASSESS AIRFOIL AT ROSWELL. ASSURE

6)   THAT CIC/TEAM SAID THIS MISSTATE MEANING OF STORY AND THINK

 7)   LATE TODAY NEXT SENT OUT PR OF WEATHER BALLOONS WOULD TAKE/WORK

Some lines in the source material include multiple possible interpretations; there’s color coding in the original RTF this is derived from. But WHOA, right?!? This is a hell of a smoking gun. That makes things so much more clear-cut!

Except for that damn pareidolia again. When you blow up the memo, it’s a bunch of blurry blobs, and some of them look a lot like specific letters, and some of them don’t. People are great at pattern-matching, and people are superb at completing words with missing letters, or sentences with missing words. But all of the people trying to decipher this memo expect it to have something to do with aliens, so they’re going to see aliens.

Fortunately, someone has done some actual science on this memo. Their method was to give people the image to decipher under three circumstances. In one, they told the subjects the memo was about the Roswell incident. Another group was told it was about atomic bomb testing. A third was told nothing at all.

The result is fascinating, in the most inconclusive way possible. There are some key phrases that all of the groups found consistently. They are: Fort Worth, TX; story; and… weather balloons.

Yep. One way or another, it seems like the memo is about weather balloons. Which puts us right back to where we started, trying to decide who you’re going to believe: a bunch of UFO researchers, or the Federal government.

See you next time, when we get to talk about Skinny Bob! Here’s a sneak preview.

The Roswell Conspiracy

This is part 3 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1 , and part 2 .

There are two things that are absolutely, objectively true about Roswell: one, it’s the inciting incident for all of modern ufology, and two, there was definitely, undeniably a government cover-up about what happened there. (But maybe not the one you think.)

For those of you who have been away from mainstream media since 1947, here are the basic facts: Something or other definitely crashed in a rancher’s field outside of Roswell, New Mexico. On July 8 of that year, the Roswell Army Air Field issued an actual factual press release that said that that a “flying disk” had crashed, and that the Army had recovered the wreckage. Mere hours later, the press office reversed course and said that it was not, in fact, a flying disk of extraterrestrial origins, but was instead a weather balloon.

This is where accounts of what happened begin to diverge dramatically.

Roswell has left a massive imprint on American mythology, and there’s an intricate history of what happened afterward including witness accounts and whispered theories spanning decades. In this version of events, the first story was the truth, before a massive coverup and lie was deployed. There an extraterrestrial craft that crashed at Roswell (or maybe two.) The findings included the bodies of two alien beings, or three, or maybe five, and maybe one that was alive. The US government took possession of all materials remaining at Roswell. Later, the materials were given to defense contractors to reverse engineer — probably Lockheed-Martin. And the alien in government captivity was perhaps combative or perhaps compliant, and ultimately passed away after only a few years despite everything our best doctors tried to help.

This, so goes the theory, is the reason for our massive technological boom over the last seventy years: we learned it from someone else, where “it” is anything from fiberoptics to semiconductors.

You can read earnest but unsubstantiated accounts of this timeline that are nothing short of a secret history of the world. The CIA was founded only months later in response to this new threat. Eisenhower met with aliens to sign a treaty at Camp David; the Cold War was a charade to cover up for Russians and Americans working together, secretly from alien surveillance; humans went with aliens to Zeta Reticuli, or there’s an alien and human base hidden somewhere in Alaska, or there are several kinds of aliens, including an evil shapeshifting race of lizard-people, and we allied with the wrong ones.

If you trace these conspiracy theories all the way to their conclusions, it eventually sounds a lot like Scientology, or like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or like QAnon. Once you believe one unbelievable thing, the others get easier to swallow, I suppose.

I am here today to tell you that Roswell was definitely a conspiracy. Indeed, the U.S. government itself has said that what happened at Roswell was a coverup. The thing they were covering up? Project Mogul, a secret project that tested weather weather balloons equipped with microphones could detect Soviet nuclear tests. The bodies found were probably test dummies (…and never mind that test dummies weren’t used until 1953. Or that the first published mention of bodies at Roswell wasn’t until 1980.)

There’s a 250-page report released by the Federal government in 1994 investigating Roswell in depth, and describing how Mogul was covered up. I guess it’s a boring coverup, but a coverup all the same.

OK but… why?

Why would an Army officer have announced that they’d found a flying saucer in the first place, only to backtrack hours later? One theory — and this is a fun one! — is that this was a psy-op to psych Russia into thinking we might be in contact with aliens to freak them out! And that that is the point of a lot of UFO stuff to this day! Except now we’re trying to freak out China.

Here’s a more grounded take: the 1940s were a UFO-obsessed time, and hundreds of sightings were reported every month. Some were even photographed! …Though an awful lot of those photos were later proven to be hubcaps or pie plates thrown into the air.

Given that zeitgeist, it’s not impossible that even a military officer might leap to conclusions. Though officers associated with the Roswell incident had been on the radio in the days before the crash expressing skepticism that flying saucers were real, in response to a wave of a few dozen sightings in the area.

A teletype from the FBI files released on that infamous July Day perhaps splits the difference between the disk and balloon theories, describing the craft recovered as a hexagonal flying disk suspended from a balloon.

The huge complication is that there are mountains of statements and evidence that something more than a weather balloon, something more than a microphone, was found in the pastures of New Mexico in 1947. There are people who were there and say so. It’s just a question of whether to believe them.

There are deathbed confessions; there are stories that changed or expanded over time. These people who were definitely there describe the smell of the alien bodies, the strangeness of the materials in the craft of the wreckage. A mortician claims to have taken calls from the base about obtaining a large number of child-sized coffins. But many of these statements are third-hand, or only recorded decades after the events in question.

Further, a lot of these witnesses later went on to make a living off of their sighting — by, for example, operating a for-profit UFO museum — and I hate to tell you this, but people will do a lot of shady things for money. If you’d like a more charitable interpretation, though, I’d like to point out that if you did have that kind of experience, you might make it the focus of your whole life, too.

It’s a damn shame there’s no way to go back in time and get more concrete, contemporaneous evidence of who was thinking what and when on that day. —Or… is there?

The Ramey Memo

Friends, allow me to introduce you to RoswellProof.com. While it does contain summaries of witness statements and FOIA documents, this site primarily focuses on one piece of photographic evidence: that famous shot of Brigadier General Roger Ramey holding up the remnant of, yes, a weather balloon. There’s a piece of paper in his hand. And in one of the shots, you can almost read the writing.

Almost.

Ufologists have spent a lot of time trying to blow that shot up and read that memo. Per consensus on RoswellProof.com, one tentative interpretation goes something like this:

0)   FWAAF ACKNOWLEDGES THAT A "DISK" IS NEXT NEW FIND WEST OF

1)   THE CORDON. AT LOCATION WAS A WRECK NEAR OPERATION AT THE

2)   "RANCH" AND THE VICTIMS OF THE WRECK YOU FORWARDED TO THE

3)   ??TEAM AT FORT WORTH, TEX.

4)   AVIATORS IN THE "DISC" THEY WILL SHIP FOR A1-8TH ARMYAMU,

5)   BY B29-ST OR C47. WRIGHT AF ASSESS AIRFOIL AT ROSWELL. ASSURE

6)   THAT CIC/TEAM SAID THIS MISSTATE MEANING OF STORY AND THINK

 7)   LATE TODAY NEXT SENT OUT PR OF WEATHER BALLOONS WOULD TAKE/WORK

Some lines in the source material include multiple possible interpretations; there’s color coding in the original RTF this is derived from. But WHOA, right?!? This is a hell of a smoking gun. That makes things so much more clear-cut!

Except for that damn pareidolia again. When you blow up the memo, it’s a bunch of blurry blobs, and some of them look a lot like specific letters, and some of them don’t. People are great at pattern-matching, and people are superb at completing words with missing letters, or sentences with missing words. But all of the people trying to decipher this memo expect it to have something to do with aliens, so they’re going to see aliens.

Fortunately, someone has done some actual science on this memo. Their method was to give people the image to decipher under three circumstances. In one, they told the subjects the memo was about the Roswell incident. Another group was told it was about atomic bomb testing. A third was told nothing at all.

The result is fascinating, in the most inconclusive way possible. There are some key phrases that all of the groups found consistently. They are: Fort Worth, TX; story; and… weather balloons.

Yep. One way or another, it seems like the memo is about weather balloons. Which puts us right back to where we started, trying to decide who you’re going to believe: a bunch of UFO researchers, or the Federal government.

See you next time, when we get to talk about Skinny Bob! Here’s a sneak preview.

An Elegy for Twitter

So yeah, billionaire edgelord Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now he’s in the process of wrecking his new toy. The rumors coming out of Twitter are wild right now, and remind me of the heyday of Trump breaking news: Elon had fired Trust & Safety! He’s fired the legal team! He’s going to make verified users pay $5/month, or $20/month, and maybe everyone can get verified, and the team has to do it in one week or else they’re fired!

That’s not even going into his stated intentions to free the platform of limitations on hate speech and misinformation, and his disturbingly pro-Russia, let’s-go-fascism attitudes of the last few months. Oh, sure, he’s told advertisers Twitter absolutely will not turn into a toxic hellscape! But as the joke goes, “My ‘Twitter won’t turn into a hellscape’ t-shirt is raising questions already answered by my t-shirt.” GM’s already pulled all of their advertising. It’s going to snowball.

There’s a little bit of schadenfreude going on, knowing that this puerile manbaby is about to burn billions of dollars of value over an open pit, and that he just might take down Tesla with it, since he’s tied their valuation together by leveraging his Twitter buyout with Tesla stock. Elon is going to learn a bunch of costly lessons the hardest way he can, and many of them boil down to, as Nilay Patel wrote, “the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.”

Mosty, though, I’m just real sad.

Twitter has been very good to me these many years. I got on fairly early, found a modest platform, and made connections that turned into business deals and friendships and ideas that will blossom in my mind for decades to come. It’s shaped me as an artist and as a person. And it’s given me a reach I don’t think I could ever have found anywhere else.

It seems like it’s time to walk away from Twitter. And yet — it’s hard to walk away from that reach when it feels like I’ll be putting a bullet in my own career. When stupid Nazi-infested, racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, toxic Twitter is the biggest, easiest, most productive way that readers and clients and creative colleagues can find me. It’s going to be more and more awful! There’s really no question! But… where do you go? And how do you find people there?

I already use Twitter vastly less than I once did. A lot of the more-personal stuff I used to Tweet about has hidden away in private Slacks. But now it seems like, even if I don’t choose to leave on my own this very minute, the days of its utility are numbered. Frankly, if the plan to fire 75% of staff is accurate, I doubt the site will even be stable enough to use by the end of the year — maybe not even the end of the week.

I’m trying a whole bunch of things and seeing what sticks. One is this: I’ve recommitted to my blog. I’m in the process of a redesign for the first time in like… seven years. I’m also trying to Tumblr, which I honestly never had the hang of to begin with. I’ve signed up on WT.social and found it impenetrable; I’ve asked to be added to Bluesky’s beta list.

And I’m starting up a private Slack for people who think they might want to hang out with people like me, and people who like me? You can join it if you want. You might be the first person there besides me! Feel free to invite your friends! (As long as they’re not Nazis, and I reserve the right to moderate and banhammer with caprice and speed because it’s my party and I’ll… you know.)

Will any of this be more than crickets in a month? Who knows! But it’s time to throw some stuff at the wall, because even if I don’t walk away on my own, the clock is ticking on Twitter. And we all need to be prepared for the moment its time runs out.

EDIT: An addendum — I didn’t include Mastodon in my list of places because the last time I tried it, it wasn’t really active, but omg it is hopping now, arguably more interesting than Twitter is now? So yeah, find me on Mastodon, too!

An Elegy for Twitter

So yeah, billionaire edgelord Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now he’s in the process of wrecking his new toy. The rumors coming out of Twitter are wild right now, and remind me of the heyday of Trump breaking news: Elon had fired Trust & Safety! He’s fired the legal team! He’s going to make verified users pay $5/month, or $20/month, and maybe everyone can get verified, and the team has to do it in one week or else they’re fired!

That’s not even going into his stated intentions to free the platform of limitations on hate speech and misinformation, and his disturbingly pro-Russia, let’s-go-fascism attitudes of the last few months. Oh, sure, he’s told advertisers Twitter absolutely will not turn into a toxic hellscape! But as the joke goes, “My ‘Twitter won’t turn into a hellscape’ t-shirt is raising questions already answered by my t-shirt.” GM’s already pulled all of their advertising. It’s going to snowball.

There’s a little bit of schadenfreude going on, knowing that this puerile manbaby is about to burn billions of dollars of value over an open pit, and that he just might take down Tesla with it, since he’s tied their valuation together by leveraging his Twitter buyout with Tesla stock. Elon is going to learn a bunch of costly lessons the hardest way he can, and many of them boil down to, as Nilay Patel wrote, “the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.”

Mostly, though, I’m just real sad.

Twitter has been very good to me these many years. I got on fairly early, found a modest platform, and made connections that turned into business deals and friendships and ideas that will blossom in my mind for decades to come. It’s shaped me as an artist and as a person. And it’s given me a reach I don’t think I could ever have found anywhere else.

It seems like it’s time to walk away from Twitter. And yet — it’s hard to walk away from that reach when it feels like I’ll be putting a bullet in my own career. When stupid Nazi-infested, racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, toxic Twitter is the biggest, easiest, most productive way that readers and clients and creative colleagues can find me. It’s going to be more and more awful! There’s really no question! But… where do you go? And how do you find people there?

I already use Twitter vastly less than I once did. A lot of the more-personal stuff I used to Tweet about has hidden away in private Slacks. But now it seems like, even if I don’t choose to leave on my own this very minute, the days of its utility are numbered. Frankly, if the plan to fire 75% of staff is accurate, I doubt the site will even be stable enough to use by the end of the year — maybe not even the end of the week.

I’m trying a whole bunch of things and seeing what sticks. One is this: I’ve recommitted to my blog. I’m in the process of a redesign for the first time in like… seven years. I’m also trying to Tumblr, which I honestly never had the hang of to begin with. I’ve signed up on WT.social and found it impenetrable; I’ve asked to be added to Bluesky’s beta list.

And I’m starting up a private Slack for people who think they might want to hang out with people like me, and people who like me? You can join it if you want. You might be the first person there besides me! Feel free to invite your friends! (As long as they’re not Nazis, and I reserve the right to moderate and banhammer with caprice and speed because it’s my party and I’ll… you know.)

Will any of this be more than crickets in a month? Who knows! But it’s time to throw some stuff at the wall, because even if I don’t walk away on my own, the clock is ticking on Twitter. And we all need to be prepared for the moment its time runs out.

EDIT: An addendum — I didn’t include Mastodon in my list of places because the last time I tried it, it wasn’t really active, but omg it is hopping now, arguably more interesting than Twitter is now? So yeah, find me on Mastodon, too!

Pyramids, Pareidola, and the Press

This is part 2 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1.

Let’s talk ancient aliens. Von Daniken notwithstanding, there’s a pretty big body of historical imagery and lore that somehave interpreted as evidence that aliens once walked among us, perhaps as gods. One of the things they point to most commonly is ancient megalithic structures, like Stonehenge, the moai of Rapanui, and of course Egypt’s pyramids.

The mystery of the pyramids is why people think there’s a mystery

For the most part, the idea that ancient human beings couldn’t possibly have built these structures is racism, except against people who lives thousands of years ago. (Or more accurately, racism, and also against people who lived thousands of years ago!) Really, though, we modern humans with our cushy lives simply find it difficult to grasp the sheer volume of effort that people were once willing to apply to such projects.

It’s like a card trick. It looks like magic because it’s so hard to envision someone practicing shuffling cards for so long and with such dedication that they can control and remember precisely where every card is at every moment. Most of us don’t have that kind of dedication toward anything. But once, people were indeed willing to scour stones to a precise surface that fits together free of gaps, and work in teams of hundreds pulling tons of stone across endless miles of desert.

In the case of the pyramids, specifically, the idea that they were built by aliens also goes against a tremendous body of easily-found contrary evidence. To believe that the pyramids were engineered and built with alien help, you have to ignore the clear progression of structures leading up to the pyramid. First the mastabas gave way to step-sided structures, culminating in Sneferu’s smooth-sided bent pyramid, where the ancients fucked up the angle and had to change course midway through. Finally after much trial and error, the pyramids we think of when we hear “pyramid.” The Valley of Kings is an exhibit showing us the evolution of Egyptian tomb engineering.

Not only that, like every great empire, the ancient Egyptians freakin’ loved them some bookkeeping. Bureaucracy is the backbone of every great nation. We have records showing where the stone was quarried, how many men a foreman had working for him, attendance records, how much beer the workers went through. Not to mention the graffiti left inside by the workers themselves!

It was not aliens. It was us. Humans are amazing!

Pareidolia, our favorite word

OK so the pyramids were definitely not ancient aliens, fine. But what about all the other evidence? Carvings of UFOs and aliens on Mayan temple walls? All those stories about gods descending from the heavens? That’s got to be rooted in fact somewhere, right?

Yes and no.

These are just such Mayan images.. That sure does look like a UFO, doesn’t it? The shape? The flames? The little alien inside the first one? Incontrovertible! Except for one thing.

We invariably interpret the imagery of the ancients through the lens of the modern. And that means that sometimes, when we look at an image from a long time ago, our modern context steers us horribly wrong. There’s a fascinating phenomenon where people in old photographs look like they’re texting. Here’s a painting from 1850 or so of a girl who looks like she’s texting, but it’s a prayer book. Here’s a guy from 1911. Here’s Lieutenant Sulu texting. (Thanks, Sumana!) Time traveling jokes aside, I bet if George Takei had a smartphone on the set of Star Trek, we’d have heard something about it.

OK, except for two things. These particular images of the Mayan UFO carvings? It’s probably all fake, anyway. In my searching around for a good primary source talking about them, I couldn’t find an origin to these photos. Not a single reference to exactly where it was found, who found it, who has it now, nothing. As much as I love it, I’ve been forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist, or have been egregiously misrepresented. But hey, if you know better, let me know!

This isn’t as fun as I was hoping, Andrea

OK, OK, that’s enough of saying it’s not aliens. Because what if it looks like a spaceship, and it flies in the air, and the people of the time definitely say that was what was happening, and it wasn’t just, say, Ye Olde Time Kite Festival or a fever dream that some painter decided to capture?

I present you the 1561 Nuremberg “celestial phenomenon.”

In 1561, a broadsheet run by Hans Glaser printed this page describing a “sky battle” over the German town of Nuremberg. According to Glaser, the sky was crowded with rods and globes fighting in the sky. Similar reports were made in 1554 and in 1566 over Basel, Switzerland. So we have imagery of stuff flying that sure doesn’t look like birds or clouds, long before man was airborne, and people of the time reporting that some weird, scary stuff was going down and they couldn’t explain it, either.

It’s a shame they didn’t have phones to text us with after all. It would’ve been great if they could’ve snapped a few photos.

Stay tuned for next time, when we fast-forward to the birth of the modern UFO conspiracy movement: Roswell New Mexico. I can’t wait!

Living, despite covid

The pandemic is over. President Biden said it and everything, and I agree. No, really, I do: covid is endemic now. We've hit the point of equilibrium, so this is how it is and how it will be. Coronavirus will never be gone from this day forward. So now what?

Well, now you have a philosophic question ahead of you. If this is how it's going to be, probably for the rest of your life, then how will you choose to live?

This is a deeply personal decision and I hasten to tell you that there is no right or wrong answer. Only you can decide what your risk tolerance is. I know people who won't eat in a restaurant, work exclusively at home, and/or who wear P100 masks when around other people in all contexts. I know people who live just like it's the halcyon times of July 2019, before any such concerns existed.

A lot of us are caught in the middle, feeling pressure to be more and less cautious from all sides. The thing is, these are both equally valid ways to live. But I urge you to focus on the most important word here: live.

How did we get here?

Early in the pandemic, we locked down hard, the way New York State told us to. We didn't go to brick-and-mortar stores, we ordered delivery from formerly sit-down restaurants, we worked and schooled at home. Our mental health tanked and we tried to take comfort in that abstract satisfaction derived from doing the right, moral thing.

The purpose of this was to hopefully shut down the spread of "the novel coronavirus" and maybe stop it from being… well, what it is now. That didn't work, so the next-best hope was that lockdown could buy us time to research and deploy vaccines.

That happened, fortunately. We got vaccines quicker than anyone even expected! It was great! But now a lot of people won't take the vaccines, and anyway covid still keeps hitting the world in endless ripples, giving us roughly three waves a year. Us and SARS-COV-2 are at an impasse.

So, again: now what?

You're gonna die

Look, something is going to kill you, sooner or later. This is going to happen no matter how perfectly you protect from covid. Something that doesn't kill you might disable you. There is no escaping this fact. And you don't know when or how.

There is no such thing as a zero-risk life. Control over mortality is an illusion, no matter how desperately we reach for it.

But what we can do is balance the quality of our time against the risks we're taking. We can make sure the life we have is well-used, that it's full of the things that we want to take from and give to the world.

Now is the time to return to those things that make your life worth living. Do live concerts make your soul sing? Then go. Group exercise classes keep you sane? Do it. You live for trying new foods in new restaurants? Knock yourself out. This is your one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver put it. Don't waste it.

This is even more poignant for those of us who are older, for whom the allotted years may be short to begin with. If this might be the last birthday you ever have anyway, don't you want to celebrate? And for those of us who are raising children, for whom the windows of wonder and discovery are small.

And what about masks? Look, the good and ethical thing is to keep wearing masks whenever you're around other people. But the good and ethical thing is also to donate to charity, to abhor single-use products and plastic destined for the landfill, to volunteer for worthy organizations and foster troubled teens and surrendered pets with health problems and—

People aren't perfect, especially when the alternative is physical and social discomfort. (Fun fact! Nobody can hear a word I say when I'm wearing a mask.) You should do these things. A lot of people don't and won't. I won't judge you.

What’s your choice?

Do I personally wear a mask? Yeah. …Sometimes. I'll wear a mask in a closed, crowded environment where I'll be for a while (an airplane, a movie theater.) Or a doctor's office. I'll wear one to temple for the high holy days, but maybe not for a regular Friday night shabbat.

But I'll also eat at a restaurant or go to the mall without them. I'll go to a gathering at a friend's house, the gym, the dentist. I'll to to Disney World! I'm vaccinated, and these are risks I've decided are worth my while to take.

But you have to measure these risks for yourself. If you're wondering if you should take a trip, or go back to a beloved hobby, ask yourself if you'd feel your life was well-lived if you never did that thing again. Because your life is ticking away anyhow, and you're not getting that time back.

Oh and, friends, get your fall booster as soon as you're eligible. That's now for most people 12 and up, but you should wait around three months after you've been infected with covid to prolong your protection.

And then… go live your life.