I’m with my family for the holidays. It’s been a refreshing and recharging trip so far, mostly just me and my partner in my childhood home with my parents occasionally checking in with us at they go about their daily lives, preparing for the big events of Christmas. My sister and her family descend upon the house this afternoon, bringing a whirlwind of excited activity, barely retrained delight, exuberant emotion, and probably a tantrum or two. That’s life. That’s my family.
I know not everybody has a family like mine. I know the experience of gathering around the tree on Christmas morning in matching pajamas and watching children tear away bright paper from new toys isn’t something everyone gets. A lot of people have families who aren’t this in touch, who don’t have this connection. Some people barely talk to their families at all. Others wish they didn’t have parents. Still others wish their parents were still with us.
For me, I wish this house was big enough for me to invite everyone who may be alone or who might feel isolated this year, and have them join in this atmosphere, if they’d feel comfortable doing so.
I long ago swore that I would do two things when it comes to my family: I would not take their love, generosity, or honesty for granted, and I would do my utmost to share the gifts they continue to give me with those around me. Considering how my family continues to support me, I think I’ve got that first part pretty much nailed. As for the other… let’s just say there are times in my past when I wish I’d been better at listening, being receptive, and taking a moment to pause and reflect before choosing my response, rather than simply reacting.
At my last family reunion, I saw a lot of small humans reacting rather than responding. Upon reflection, it seems that there are some folks who never really grew out of that impulse. It took me quite a while to get to a point where I can do that semi-regularly, and I still have my share of mistakes and knee-jerk reactions. Hell, at times I wonder if a tweet I send out or a blog entry I post is too much, or goes too far, or needed to be worded better, if sent at all.
Family, at least my family, understands that. They’re good at holding space for me. They see me and all I could be, rather than what I’ve failed to be. They’re patient with me, as the parents in my family I’ve seen are patient with their children. I’ve been forced to grow up a lot in the past year. When the people I’d chose to be part of my family turned on me, I had to grow up even more. And my blood family was there for me, behind me and loving me, every step of the way.
I’ve spun up a new project, since I’m still stymied in my attempt to write a YA fantasy novel with a female protagonist that doesn’t entirely suck. I’m something of a perfectionist, to the point that I am extremely hard on myself when I do not live up to my own standards. I need more test readers but am hesitant to have my worst fears confirmed: that I am too male and out-of-touch to get this important job done.
So I’m keeping that on the shelf while I try my hand at something new, different, and downright scary, but in a different way.
To do the research I need to complete this new work, I turn to the Internet. And getting lost down rabbit holes of character analyses and Star Trek essays, I was struck with a realization.
Considering what it is and can become, it’s easy to forget what the Internet was intended to be in the first place, and still is if you use it a certain way.
From it’s inception, the Internet’s purpose is a repository of data and knowledge. Try as you might, you can’t burn down the Internet. At this point, the data is so wide-spread, so diverse, and so cataloged that to destroy it and the knowledge it contains is a fool’s errand. You can’t accidentally touch of a conflagration in the Rare Webpages Section; there will be no Library of Alexandria repeat here. And thank the stars for that — so much knowledge was lost in that time, and in some circles, we’re still reeling from the losses. (Personal aside: so much of the Work I am doing away from screens and data streams may remain unfinished because there is simply a lack of resources upon which I can rely.)
Moreso than it was when I first encountered it, the Internet is extensively cataloged and searchable. There are multiple engines to do so — perhaps foolishly, I still rely upon Google to do my fetching, among other things. A few cursory searches brought me a plethora of resources for my projects, old and new, and also linked me to undiscovered essays, new treatises, and authors whose voices resonate with my own, individuals with whom I’d love to sit down, away from the constant barrage of distractions, and just have an eye-to-eye chat about our art, the world, and what’s to come.
In the meantime, I follow them on social media, and hope they’ll follow me back.
This turns my thoughts to social media, and how the Internet becomes sorely abused.
Instead of using it for data and enlightenment, so many individuals choose to use the Internet as sounding boards, echo chambers, and podiums to espouse their personal points of view as if they’re gospel. I’ve been guilty of this, myself — on more than one occasion, I’ve pontificated on our political climate from my perspective and bemoaned the nature of my illness. I’ve shown how hard I am on myself, and how I’ve abused myself; this in turn has given others implicit permission to use and abuse me.
Beyond my personal traumatic experiences, so many people use the Internet as forums to spew bile and hatred upon those just struggling to survive. They twist and mold the world as they see it to shove their supposed superiority and righteous indignation into the faces of the populace, like thunderbolts raining down from Olympus. It sickens me to see so much arrogant presumption, so much faux righteousness, so many smug miscarriages of justice. I just want to grab people by their collective collars, shake them until their eyes wobble (not to be violent but to get their damn attention), and say “NO, YOU ARE BEING MYOPIC, YOU DO NOT GET TO PICK AND CHOOSE WHAT THE FACTS ARE.”
It’s people who shit on fundamentalists who pick and choose parts of holy writ that support their viewpoints, then turn around and pick and choose the narratives that support their viewpoints, that truly piss me off.
The truth is a complex, multi-faceted thing. Like perfection, it is something deeply desired, but we can only chase after the truth; catching it is a monumental task. We have to be honest with ourselves and the role we play in constructing our narratives, and imagine the other perspectives that confirm that narrative, or run counter to it. Sticking to the facts is difficult when the facts may reveal parts of ourselves that we don’t like — our human frailties, our capacity for making bad decisions, our actions that hurt one another.
When we see one another as people with hearts and minds, rather than things made of straw and bad wiring, it becomes much harder to push one another out of the light and into the shadows, to shove those who deserve love, support, and trust into an oubliette to the cheers of enablers and potential lovers.
The Internet can be the biggest enabler of all.
For months I stayed away from the Internet, both loathing what people used it to do to me and fearing what I might say or do in response. But allowing fear and self-loathing to keep me in the dark was not only unhealthy for my own sake but succumbing to the will of the zeitgeist, kowtowing to people who pretend to be rebels but represent a new establishment. We only tolerate what we feel we deserve; we serve as screens for others to project upon us only as long as we allow it. And I finally got to a place where I dropped the curtain on the screen I was (and perhaps still am) and decided it was past time to re-define my Persona and unearth my true Self. And the Internet helped me do that.
The Internet is, at once, a potent tool and a potentially deadly weapon. It’s all in how one chooses to use it. How will you use the Internet today? How will you leverage its articles, the discussions that take place, your presence and impact in social media? Will you build one another up, to stand against those who refuse to do the same? Or will you tear one another down so you can push your Persona to new heights? The power to both help and harm is at your very fingertips. I hope you choose wisely.
Thursdays are for talking tech.
(N.B. I was in flight on Tuesday so I’m telling a bit of my story, here, in case you couldn’t tell.)
“Girls don’t belong in games/movies!” This is the cry of “men’s rights activists” who point to things like Rogue One and female gamers & game journalists (Susan Arendt, IRL Jasmine, etc).
“What about Sarah Kerrigan?”
I suspect I’d mostly get blank stares. Maybe a bit of drool.
Here’s the background: Sarah Kerrigan is a major character in StarCraft and its sequel. StarCraft is a massively popular real-time strategy game that is played professionally as a multi-player contest & sport. Its single-player campaigns, while maybe not having the best writing, is still full of affecting moments — the rise of Arcturus Mengsk, the sacrifice of Tassadar, etc — but I would argue that the growth and arc of Kerrigan’s story is the beating heart of the narrative, though I admittedly haven’t played the last chapter, Legacy of the Void, yet. It’s a bit beyond my means at present.
I’m going to run down Kerrigan’s story for those of you who don’t know, and proceed to my point after.
Spoiler
StarCraft depicts a large-scale conflict between three races: the Terrans (that’s us), the psionic and aloof Protoss, and the swarming, ever-evolving Zerg. Sarah Kerrigan is a Terran operative, a “Ghost” (read: psychic sniper assassin) who joins you early in the Terran campaign alongside rough’n’tumble backwater space cowboy Jim Raynor. They don’t get along at first — Jimmy’s initial thoughts are about how hot Kerrigan is, and she immediately reacts with revulsion and rightly scolds Raynor for a lack of professionalism. But, through the course of fighting for survival as the Protoss and Zerg clash with the Terrans in the middle, they grow to admire, respect, and appreciate one another.
Their partnership, both professional and romantic, was short-lived. In a callous act of sacrificing his resources for convenience and advancement, master manipulator and all-around bastard Arcturus Mengsk left Kerrigan to die as her position was overrun by the Zerg forces Mengsk himself had attracted to a Terran world to better secure his political position. Disgusted, Raynor left Mengsk’s service, and looked for Kerrigan, only for her to emerge some time later as a new weapon in the Zerg’s arsenal, the fearsome and deadly ‘Queen of Blades’.
Empowered by Zerg evolutionary strains and determined to unlock her own full potential, Kerrigan proceeded to align both her former Terran comrades and several Protoss factions against the Zerg Overmind who’d had a hand (or, rather, tentacle) in creating her. Her plan succeeded, and she thanked her erstwhile allies by betraying them. Some of these allies were Protoss warriors Jim had come to trust as friends; when they were killed, he swore he’d avenge their deaths, and be the one to kill Sarah. Laughing off the threat, Kerrigan wiped the floor with what was left of the Terran forces and retreated to her own corner of the sector.
After the so-called Brood War that’d seen Kerrigan triumphant, she began to hear whispers of impending doom. To arm herself and her Swarm to face it, she invaded Terran space to find more powerful weapons. Raynor set off to oppose the Zerg invasion, seemingly still driven by his vendetta and supported by an old friend from his previous life. Things got complicated when a Protoss warrior, one of the few Raynor knew from the Brood War who hadn’t been killed, told him that Kerrigan needed to live to fight what was coming. The Terrans used the very weapon Kerrigan had sought to claim to rob her of her Zerg enhancements and leave her vulnerable. Conflicted, Raynor decided to save Kerrigan’s life at this moment, choosing to give her a chance for redemption rather than letting his friend shoot her.
Kerrigan was held for experimentation, with Raynor keeping an eye on her, and her memories as both Mengsk’s assassin and the Queen of Blades haunted her and made her question her morals and sanity. While previously Kerrigan’s ambitions had been aimed towards conquest and victory for her Swarm, her restored humanity narrowed her focus to revenge on Mengsk. The facility were she was being held was attacked by Mengsk’s forces, and in their escape, Kerrigan and Raynor were separated. While Kerrigan was able to escape, Raynor was reported to be killed, much to Mengsk’s delight. Consumed by her need for revenge, Kerrigan turns to the Zerg, returning to the Swarm to regain her former power.
Kerrigan returns to the homeworld of the Zerg and seeks her own path to evolve along instead of having it imposed upon her. In doing so, she comes to understand the Zerg on a far more fundamental level, and in doing so, not only guides it to great success, but forges it into a far more powerful force than it was before. With a renewed Swarm and her powers and memory finally under her control, Kerrigan tears across the sector towards Mengsk. Along the way, she finds Raynor alive, but her rebirth as the new Queen of Blades puts an incredible chasm between them; Jim can’t let go of everything she did as the Queen of Blades, and as much as she wants to repair that breach, since she was not the creature she was before, Jim can’t bring himself to meet her halfway. He can’t kill her, either, but joins her to kill Mengsk.
Having joined forces, Mengsk’s defenses folded under the assault of Raynor and Kerrigan. They work together to bring down the tyrant, Kerrigan saying Mengsk had “made [them] all into monsters” before blowing him up Scanners-style. With their nemesis dead, Kerrigan leaves to turn her attention back to the doom that had brought her back in the first place, leaving a conflicted and emotional Raynor in her wake, looking up at where the woman he loved (and perhaps still does) disappears.
This isn’t the end of the story, but it’s all I know, since I’m avoiding spoilers for Legacy of the Void.
The essence of Kerrigan’s story, to me, is that after getting betrayed and turned into something awful, she took control of her own destiny. She seized control of a massive, powerful alien force, just because she could. When she caught wind of something bigger coming to destroy everything, she set out to stand up to it, no matter what it cost. And after everything that happened to her, she decided to recreate her power on her own terms in order to either rescue a dude important to her or avenge herself on the bastard who’d betrayed her in the first place. To me, that speaks of self-actualization, independence, and empowerment.
I can see some counterpoints to this perspective, but the fact remains that she is a major character who becomes a protagonist in a major sci-fi gaming franchise, and yet, insecure man-kids haven’t brought her up as an example of something that doesn’t belong in their games. So is it because she’s not as prominent as the leads in Rogue One or The Force Awakens, or is it because they felt some sort of satisfaction in what happened to her when she was disempowered? I’m not sure; it’s a headspace I have a lot of trouble getting into.
I’m just going to toss this out for potential discussion. What do you think of Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, as a character? Is she a positive or negative influence on female empowerment in science fiction? And does Legacy of the Void go on sale regularly, so I can finish the story and also get some awesome, shiny Protoss action? Let me know!
Getting to a point where I can post here on even a semi-regular basis has been a very long road. Even before my most recent traumas, just a few months ago, I was climbing my way back to a place of relative stability from the rock bottom I’d hit last year. My focus has been sporadic, my productivity inconsistent, my motivation coming and going along with the swings of my mood. I’ve questioned my actions, doubted my sanity, and struggled to hold onto things like joy and hope.
But I’m getting better.
“That’s all everyone wants for you,” someone told me a few months ago. “We want you to get better.” I feel that they’re one of the few people who meant it. A bunch of folks paid lip service to the idea of Josh getting better; in retrospect, more than a few of them saying “We want you to get better” really meant “we want you to get lost.” Especially if the anonymous, threatening messages I got were any indication.
For a while, I was incredibly concerned about how I was being perceived and, moreover, why individuals I continued to try and imagine complexly refused to extend me the same courtesy. Instead of holding space for me and trying to understand me, I was demonized and made out to be, if not as bad as, worse than Donald Trump. “A broken stair,” said one individual. “A monster,” said an anonymous message. These aren’t people who want me to get better. These aren’t people who care about me. This was a feeding frenzy of drama. This was a mob of perverts for failure. This was gaslighting, plain and simple.
So I’m getting better.
While it was unnecessary for me to get raked over the coals in this abusive manner, the aftermath of this brutal annihilation of my Persona, as well as my social life, meant I had all the more bandwidth and capacity to step up my game in what I have come to embrace as “the Work.” Like all of us, I am a work in progress. In retrospect, a good portion of that work leading up to the gaslighting was half-done or, like the accusations of the mob, built on sand. So, I scrapped it. I started over, diving into new areas of research and growth, to get better.
In doing so, I’ve realized three things.
1. The perception of others is secondary to my perception of my Self.
2. Representing my Self as authentically as possible is the best foundation for my Persona.
3. The more I try to unearth my honest Self, the more the insecure and false will rail against me.
Even now, writing this out, part of me worries that it comes across as pretentious; you, reading this, may think I have my head up my ass. But I have worked very hard to be introspective without putting my head up my ass to look within. And I won’t stop now.
For years, I made a decent living in a dayjob writing code for an ad agency back east.
Well, I say “writing code”, but that was only part of my job. I also had to do some fine-tuning of visual design elements and animations, which unfortunately is not one of my strengths. It’s a skill I’m interested in developing, to be sure, but at the moment, my focus is swatting up on programming skills. Between practicing meditation and mindfulness to combat bipolar symptoms, and investigating the neuroscience of plasticity to increase focus on and pleasure in writing, I’m teaching myself new languages and getting familiar with IDEs.
It’s been a busy time, despite any evidence to the contrary.
The thing is, many of the fundamentals of programming extend beyond the constraints of a single language. This is especially evident when it comes to object-oriented languages. My work experience back east was dominated by my skills in ActionScript, a “kissing cousin” of JavaScript. In working on an example of use and understanding of such a language (based on this book), it’s becoming more and more apparent that a good portion of my strengths in this area of productivity is in the fundamentals of good programming, with specifics able to be ironed out with practice and research.
It can be easy to focus on getting a job done as quickly as possible, as completely as possible, and move quickly onto the next assignment, project, or client. That, however, is not long-term thinking. One of the strengths of object-oriented programming is the ability to build your code in such a way that it is easy to maintain, extend, and revise the resulting functionality. It’s caused me no small amount of consternation to open a project and find a tangle of old code, clearly written in haste or before a new version of the language was available, and take precious time to sift through the lines to find where maintenance needs to take place. Often when bringing up these problems, the response has been “just fix it”, instead of giving the code an overhaul to make future revisions and maintenance easier and faster, and thus more profitable. I still believe that it’s possible to get a positive, long-term return on investment from taking time to make and keep code structures current, rather than ignoring obsolete and inefficient programming in the name of short-term expediency.
I’m talking mostly about higher-level stuff, rather than the nitty-gritty of the languages I’m studying. I’m working on taking more time to learn the Unity IDE and the inherent C# language within, as well as preparing to teach myself Python. It’s a lot to take in, but if I am to be an asset to a future employer, I want to ensure I have a good arsenal of tools to bring to the table. It’s one of the many ways I’m rebuilding myself from the ground up.
