Erik Wecks's Blog, page 3
April 17, 2015
Star Wars Prognostications….
Turn away now if you don’t like spoilers…
So we now have two trailers for the next Star Wars film. Can I buy tickets, yet? If you haven’t seen them, here you go:
For me the trailers, as well as the Star Wars Rebels television show, have clearly demonstrated that the Star Wars universe is in good hands at Disney. It’s such a relief to feel like someone finally gets it—someone finally understands, which is what makes the following video so hilarious.
On a very small level, that’s exactly what I feel like today.
I’m also a trailer analyzer. Yep, I’m the guy who wants to “figure it all out” before I see the film and then check if my guesses are right. If you want to be surprised, this is you last exit.
Here’s what I think we know based on the two trailers:
1. We get a female jedi/padawan person. I think that’s pretty obvious by Luke’s narrative in the second trailer. It’s his niece.
2. The empire has crumbled. The crashed Star Destroyer seems to indicate that.
3. Rogue Squadron flies again. We know that there are a group of X-wing fighter pilots in the film. We don’t know their role but, I’m going to say that they are Rogue Squadron, which explains the name of the stand alone film in 2017.
4. The new empire has many faces. It seems to me that we are getting a much more complex empire a la The Clone Wars. There are at least two major bad guys. There’s the pilot/dark stormtrooper and the sith. They both wear capes, but I think they are separate because the stormtrooper is holding a blaster not a light saber. (I could be wrong about that.)
5. Although it may appear so in the second trailer, the new empire is not based on Hoth. Since we went back to Tatooine again, it might feel right to think that we must bring balance to the force by putting the Empire on Hoth. The icy location with gun emplacements and storm troopers in number 2 might make one think so, but I’m saying no because we already saw our Sith running around in the snow in the trees in trailer 1. There are no trees on Hoth, so nope, it’s not Hoth. (Too bad.)
6. Not everyone is happy about the rise of the new empire. We have a runner… Somebody is trying to kill a runaway stormtrooper on Tatooine. We see him run in the first trailer—scared look, stormtrooper outfit. We see him get shot at by a tie-fighter in the second.
7. Said stormtrooper is the call to adventure for the Padawan/Jedi girl. We see her reach out to him, and they are running together when the tie fighter shows up. It’s Luke’s story: Something falls from the sky on Tatooine and changes my life forever. With all the things that rain down on the planet how does anyone survive?
8. Somebody is firing one of the new tricked out tie-fighters into the docking bay of the new fangled Star Destroyer. All is not going according to plan on the dark side.
And finally…
9. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a character whose name starts with Darth… He’s admitted to being on set, so we know he has a part. He also has incredibly distinct pronunciation. Listen carefully to the voiceover in the first trailer. That’s Cumberbatch’s voice all tricked out. Since he talks about the force, I’m saying he’s the Sith with a nifty looking new light saber.
So there you go. Can I buy tickets, yet?
We can see how I did in December.
April 11, 2015
A Second Edition Is Now on Amazon!
GET A COPY, TODAY!
When I released How to Manage Your Money When You Don’t Have Any I had no idea that it would mean so much to so many. Over 60,000 families have benefited from my story. I’m grateful that it has helped so many.
It wasn’t long after the release that I realized how much the book would benefit from a strong edit to improve its style and clarity. This winter I finally took the time to get an editor to look things over. Thanks to Kay Moore, the new edition of How to Manage Your Money When You Don’t Have Any is greatly improved. It’s now available on Amazon.
April 6, 2015
So Why Did GeekDad Leave Wired.com?
(To start let me make clear that while I write for GeekDad I did not ask their permission or seek their approval in any way for writing what follows. It is just my opinion and does not represent anyone else at GeekDad in any way.)
So if you haven’t seen it yet, GeekDad’s Editor and Chief, Ken Denmead wrote up a blog post this morning explaining in brief why the blog left its home at wired.com two years ago and struck out on its own. Ken wrote the article to celebrate the resolution of our dispute with Conde Nast over the ownership of the GeekDad name. Now all that’s left is to pay the extortion… er, I mean fees… Conde Nast wants GeekDad to pay in order to retain ownership of a name that Conde Nast had no rights to in the first place. Let’s put it this way, the fees, while ridiculous, were less expensive than the legal fees to prove GeekDad owned its own brand. Sigh…
There’s not much to add except this: Ken did not go into detail about the dispute which led us to leave in the first place. For my readers, I think its worth an explanation why I couldn’t stay at Wired.com.
To start let me be clear, none of the writers at GeekDad had a contract with either Wired or Conde Nast. We were subcontractors for Ken Denmead who had a contract with Wired for content. Ken was asked to sign a contract that stated that Conde Nast first rights of refusal to any media or products that resulted from anything directly posted on GeekDad or anything related to things posted on GeekDad.
This caused a problem for many of us as creators for a couple of reasons. First, none of us were contracted directly with Conde Nast, but if our intellectual property (IP) appeared on GeekDad, Conde Nast now had a claim to it. More problematically, Conde Nast didn’t just claim IP rights to what was written on the site but more importantly to anything related to things written on GeekDad. That’s the part that really got to me and was a clear deal breaker.
What if I wanted to write a book on geeky travel? There had been plenty of articles on GeekDad about such things, although I hadn’t written any. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Conde Nast would demand first rights of refusal for such work. If the book became successful, they could suddenly claim I owed them money.
I would have ended up asking Conde Nast’s permission before I published or created anything remotely related to GeekDad, or down the road if it took off and made money, they might find a way to tie it back into GeekDad and demand a share of my work.
There is no way I would have published my ten part serial story Gravlander on GeekDad. Conde Nast could have then claimed the whole of the Pax Imperium as part of its IP. If that universe had ever taken off, they might have come knocking.
I wasn’t alone in my concerns. Many staff let Ken know that the contract was a non-starter. It was a really ridiculous contract to dangle in front of a bunch or writers who were making at most a symbolic wage for each article. Ken to his credit didn’t like the contract either and decided along with his editorial team to leave and strike out on his own. Now two years later GeekDad finally owns its name, although there is a hefty bill for that. $80,000 to be exact. We would love to have your help to pay it off. There’s a Go Fund Me campaign and a Patreon account.
No matter what, I’m just glad I still get to be a GeekDad.
March 4, 2015
Get A Kevin J. Anderson Book Plus Seven Others at One Price!
So this is completely stupid, I know. My book is sitting in the Tales of Future Past book bundle with Kevin J. Anderson. That’s pretty awesome. Did I mention you can get eight books by great authors like Jason Andrew Bond, Will Hertling, and Michael (Effin) Bunker. It’s pay what you want so you can’t lose, and its only available for the couple of weeks, so get it now.
January 21, 2015
I’m Calling it Now: HoloLens is the Next iPhone
If you’ve read any of my fiction then you know that I believe that the internet will eventually evolve into a fully immersive alternate reality. (I’m certainly not the only one who thinks so.) Well, Microsoft just released a video of a new product that takes huge steps in that direction. I could gush on and on but I won’t. Just watch and prepare to be amazed!
It’s the practical implications and interactivity with the real world that will make this fly. Over on Wired there’s a picture of a father helping a young adult install a sink drain. The child is wearing the HoloLens and the father has drawn which end of the trap attaches to which end of the pipe. If I can be at home and help my kid do repairs in their own home. Yeah that makes the tech practical and applicable to my life. If I can at all afford it, I will be an early adopter.
I believe it. HoloLens is the next PC!
Update: So this video is way better at showing the possibilities than the one I showed above.
Hat tip to Matt Blum at GeekDad for pointing me to the original article on wired.com
November 28, 2014
November 22, 2014
Ursula Le Guin Never Minces Words
Usurla Le Guin has never been known to mince words… not even when she accepts a National Book Foundation Medal for American Letters. There’s not much else to say. Listen and be challenged.
October 9, 2014
Now on Audible! The Far Bank of the Rubicon
The unabridged audio version of The Far Bank of the Rubicon went up on Audible.com today. It’s a great way to experience the book while you’re on the go. Dan Boice did a fantastic job with the narration. You can try a sample here. You can find the link below the cover photo.
September 15, 2014
The Far Bank of the Rubicon Review Contest
Write me an Amazon review and enter my September contest. You could win a custom story or naming rights to a character. Hurry! It’s only a three day contest. (Those of you who’ve already written a review, feel free to enter.)
September 12, 2014
Bullying in the Age of Intraspace…
For a whole host of reasons, I am thinking a lot about bullying right now. To start, when I was a kid, I was bullied. Only now at the age forty has it become clear how much those wounds added up over time. When you are bullied, you create little black boxes in which you hide pain. In the moment the pain seems insurmountable. The unyielding schedule of a school day, doesn’t allow a child to mourn and process what just happened. For me traumas small and large got put aside so that I wasn’t tardy to my next class. For others, pain got numbed in a haze of weed, alcohol, or sex while they skipped class.
Now in middle-age, many of us find that the damaging incongruities created by such hidden pockets of pain demand that we open the boxes and deal with the darkness we left inside. Like volcanoes, they erupt, affecting the present in unintended and harmful ways.
For those of you on the hunt for some useful way to process through that pain, I want to say there is hope. What may have been insurmountable then, need not be insurmountable now, but change will come at a price. To heal, wounds must be forgiven, and compassion must be found for those who hurt us. For me forgiving those who hurt me—including myself—always feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
On the one hand, it feels like I am letting them off the hook, like they are getting away with their crime, and to be truthful, that is exactly what is happening. Forgiveness cancels the debt owed without collecting payment. But let’s face it, there really is no payment that can make up for the lost years anyway. Time is one of the few zero sum games human beings face.
On the other hand, holding on to the debt owed means holding on to the damage done. It inhibits our own freedom. It leaves us limping. When these hidden wounds are touched we erupt, furthering the damage and becoming the bully ourselves. Truly, damned if we do and damned if we don’t…
Until you experience the freedom of true forgiveness. Once you muster the courage to have compassion on your persecutor and see them as a broken and hurting person themselves, suddenly it all changes. Unbearable pain shrinks and the limp diminishes. The insurmountable becomes conquered. The release makes canceling the debt worthwhile. However, not even a hint of the freedom forgiveness brings can be experienced by those still demanding payment to heal wounds which won’t be healed no matter what payment is given. It can’t be experienced before forgiveness is given, and there’s the rub. There’s the sad fact which keeps so many locked up in their own anger, limping and worn out.
However, my own journey isn’t the only reason I am thinking about bullying this morning. There was also my discovery last night of one of my new favorite blog posts, a critique of Weird Al’s “Word Crimes” by Grammar Girl. It’s such a smart piece and so refreshing. Grammer Girl starts by explaining how the Weird Al song makes her want to “quit being Grammar Girl.” After criticizing Weird Al for calling people who struggle with grammar “dumb mouth breathers,” telling them to “get out the gene pool” and “try not to drool,” she says this.
I could easily overlook the lack of subtlety in his grammar lessons. I don’t expect a music video to get into the details, but what I see is that he’s appealing to the base instincts that I’m tired to the bone of seeing: The call to feel superior and to put other people down for writing errors. Prescriptivism sells. Encouraging people to rant against the “morons who can’t spell” sells.
Later, she goes on to say,
When I talk about language errors in songs, like between you and I instead of between you and me, I talk about how we need to give musicians a pass—poetic license— but that teachers must especially hate these songs because they reinforce the opposite of what they are trying to teach. That’s how I feel today. I understand why those of you who don’t deal with language every day the way I do, and don’t see people every day insulting other people about their errors, think this is funny and love the video; but I hope you can understand that for me, it makes my job harder because it makes people think it’s OK to be mean to people about their language errors—to put them down and call them stupid—and that is the opposite of what I try to teach.
It made me think again about how easy it is to build identity and a feeling of faux well being based on a sense of mutual superiority to others. Exclusivity is an easy sell to those who are part of the in group, but in the end, it wrecks all the fun. To maintain their identity, those in the group need to constantly police the borders sniping at those outside. That is a fearful and exhausting task. On the other hand, those outside get constant reminders of their inadequacy.
I was struck once again by how easy it is to fall into such thinking in the age of the internet. Social media and web videos seem custom made for such exclusionary group building. Watch the video of the crazy kid practicing his light saber moves and feel superior. Yet to those targeted by such group identity making, the effects can be devastating.
The irony is this, those who build up their own esteem by comparing themselves to others to feel superior are those who deep down have the little self-esteem of their own. It takes generosity and a true sense of self-worth to be a grammarian who can allow others to fail at grammar and still seek to build them up. Fear and insecurity are the driving forces behind efforts to build yourself up through enforcing and reinforcing your own superiority, no matter how you do so.
The third reason I’m thinking about bullying this morning is because of my upcoming Pax Imperium serial. It’s about Little Jo. If there ever was a kid who would be ripe for bullying it is her. Precocious, isolated and lonely with no defined role to play in the Ghost Fleet. She’s the perfect target. She’s the definition of the out crowd. How will she respond? Will she find the means to forgive and so keep herself free, or will she fall into bitterness and the vain quest for her own moral superiority. I don’t know… It could go either way, but whatever happens, Little Jo has me thinking a lot about bullying this morning.
If you have thoughts on Little Jo and bullying, don’t hesitate to throw them in the comments. What do you think should happen to her? How do you think she would handle it? Let me know.
photo credit: Chesi – Fotos CC via photopin cc
