Posted on May 8, 2023
If You’re Happy and You Know It…
My wife attended an out-of-state wedding this weekend, and I—being the valiant, noble soul that I am—offered to stay home with our little one so she didn’t have to worry about the logistics of bringing an infant cross-country. Away she went, and home we stayed. I thought, how hard can it be? What difference is there between doing this as a partnership versus doing it solo? A few more diapers, a couple more bottles to wash, no biggie.
What a fool I was.
At first, all was well. Ez and I had a good time playing with his stacking cups, crawling over pillows, and reading his Happy and You Know It book. Then we ate some dinner and read his Happy and You Know It book. We finished that first night off with reading his Happy and You Know It book.
It was at that point that I realized I was no longer happy reading this book, and I knew it. I turned to hand the book to my wife to get a break, but alas, the Pacific Ocean proved a gap too wide. I turned back to my child, whose eyes sparkled with fey light as he once again grabbed the book and raised it above his head as if to say with actions what his lips cannot yet form into words: Read the book, Father. Read it and despair.
And so I read. And I read. And I read. While he was Happy and Knew It enough to wag his tail and hop around, my soul cried out for relief. From time to time, I would offer another one of his books, but always to the same result. His face contorted into a grimace of pure disdain, then he would once again place his Happy and You Know It book in my lap. And then, the song would play.
You see, this book has a darker element to it. Graced upon its back cover is a button that, when pressed by the hand of a young child, plays the music of when one is Happy and Knows It. And it played. And played. And Played.
Kaylee was only gone for two days, but time lost all meaning in that short span. Gone were silly constructs like seconds, minutes, or hours. My life became a binary equation—either Ez was Happy and He Knew It, or he was not, and would insist I remedy that situation immediately.
My wife is back now, but even with her help, the book still haunts me. Ethereal creatures wag tails and hop around just out of sight. I hear its tones down the hall, beckoning me back to flip the page once more to see just what one must do when they are Happy and They Know It. Am I happy? Do I know it? I may never know.
Posted on April 24, 2023
It’s All Connected: Scams, Conspiracies, and Belief
In an interview shortly after publishing The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown stated unequivocally that the various secret holy orders contained within were real, that the French monarchy blood line claimed to have been wiped out in the 1000s AD had survived, and that he had the documents to prove it. While those documents did exist, they had been put in France’s Bibliotheque Nationale only a few decades prior by a scam artist hoping to scrape a few bucks off gullible tourists wanting to buy a knighthood. He, in turn, had gotten his inspiration from another grifter looking to drum up business for his combined hotel/restaurant. And even he had pulled from a local urban myth that had grown out of proportion because the truth was far too boring. It’s scams all the way down.
I got this info from an excellent podcast (The Rest Is History) that I highly recommend. While they don’t generally focus on debunking conspiracy theories, I loved this particular episode and how it showed how Dan Brown could be so confident in his assessment of the historical accuracy of his novel. He saw a tidbit of information he thought was neat, did a touch of research to validate his own notions, then pressed forward as though it were all gospel truth. This is not to fault Mr Brown, per se, but to comment on the tendency we all have to get caught up in a good story at the expense of reality.
The problem is that we like connections and patterns. Point A must lead to point Z. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always line up nicely, but instead of shrugging our shoulders and accepting that this world is often a mad place full of inconsistencies, we look to find those tantalizing letters in between—even if they’re not there. These can span from the relatively harmless like thinking Tupac is still alive to the incredibly dangerous like thinking vaccines cause autism (they don’t).
I have no answers or grand point to make here, just a curiosity as to where I’ve made leaps based on incorrect information or faulty assumptions. Even though I avoid social media like the plague, evidence like the trail of scammers that led to the Da Vinci Code’s plot devices prove conspiracies and misinformation don’t require an algorithm to propagate. What closely held beliefs do I have that are rooted in a lie some hotelier made up a hundred years ago because his business needed a boost?
More importantly, how do I tell a story on this blog that will resonate so deeply with someone that hundreds of years from now, an author can look with complete sincerity into a reporter’s eyes and say, yes, I have done the research and I can unequivocally say the descendants of the lost colony of Roanoke have controlled the world’s travel industry for centuries.
And thus, legends are born.
Posted on April 9, 2023
Easter Message ’23
Happy Easter! What a special day this is. For many, it involves egg painting, Easter baskets, and large quantities of sugar. The best part of that is how much of it revolves around doing it with family, a wonderful thing to remember during this season. I fondly look back on memories of doing our annual egg roll at my grandpa’s ranch, where us kids would dig intricate tracks for eggs to roll down complete with ramps and hairpin turns. We’d go until the eggs were shattered wrecks, then go inside for an Easter dinner together.
All wonderful memories, but as I’ve grown older my perspective on the holiday has shifted. As a Christian, Christmas and Easter are the two most significant days of the year, but one of them always seems to overshadow the other. While I recognize and appreciate celebrating the birth of Christ, I’ve come to recognize how His atoning for our sins and resurrection needs to be placed at the forefront of our thoughts.
So this Holy Week, my wife and I spent our time studying and pondering Christ’s final week of His ministry on this earth, from Palm Sunday through Easter itself and His resurrection. We meditated on His teachings, despaired over the cruelty of those who stood against Him, and marveled at His love for us all, even those who sought to take His life. The actions He took that week have eternal ramifications, and I stand amazed at the depths of His caring that He would do so for us.
If you are not a Christian, I hope that you can still find value in His teachings. The world today would be a better place if we favored humility over pride, if we strove to be peacemakers in our lives, and if we loved our neighbors as we love ourselves.
For those of you that are Christian, I hope Easter holds as special a place in your heart as it now does in mine. My thoughts today turn to John 11:25-26:
“Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”
I believe in Christ. He lives, and those words give me a peace that I cherish and hope for all of you to experience as well. Happy Easter!
Posted on March 26, 2023
Terms and Conditions Apply
I took a big step this week and bought a new TV for the first time in ten years. I could talk to how wonderful it is to have in-depth technical reviews of almost any product imaginable available online, or to how the picture quality is so good that it borders on unrealistic. Instead, I want to talk about how I had to agree to terms and conditions. Watching stuff (stuff I own like DVDs) on this TV (which I also own) somehow comes with terms and conditions. These are the end times.
It’s both depressing and appropriate that the word ‘terms’ is often used in line with surrender. That’s what modern terms and conditions imply, after all—you are usually surrendering the rights to your information. The amalgamated advertisement behemoth we’ve created must be fed, and your sweet, sweet data is its life blood. One of the TV reviews I read had as a con that there’s no way to turn off the advertisements on that model of TV, but then went on to say it doesn’t matter since you can’t do that with most of them anyways. It’s funny that the other word in the phrase is conditions, since it appears we’ve surrendered unconditionally.
I know it’s passe to talk about this, but it’s a little odd how collectively we’ve decided on this course of action. Data scientists, journalists, crackpots, and others have shown again and again how algorithms increasingly nudge or direct our lives. The response? Largely shrugs. What do I care if my TV is feeding back everything I do on it to some server if the picture is pretty? Who cares if Amazon can predict my most intimate desires with an 87% accuracy rating if my possum in a peanut shows up with two-day shipping?
We should care, because algorithms are only getting better at predicting human behavior. Right now, it’s just recommending TV shows and marsupial-themed children’s toys. But we should still be concerned over the Cambridge Analytica canary gasping its final breaths years ago. What will the next event be?
In more uplifting news, I have completed the top level editing process for Artificial Threats and will now move into scene identification! I came up with 89 unique issues ranging from critical to minor that need fixing, and figured out how to at least attempt fixing most of them. Breaking out the scenes into identifiable chunks is the next step so I can figure out where to best slot my potential fixes. After that, the real work begins.
Posted on March 13, 2023
I Left My Heart in SpaceX – Starbase
One of the unique parts of life in the military is you never really know what your job will be. Sure, you have your specialty code, but ultimately you are a widget they can and will slot into whatever position they need filled. Case in point, my current day job is as a speechwriter for a four star general even though my background is cyber. As part of my duties, I was fortunate enough to tag along on my boss’s trip to SpaceX’s Texas compound, Starbase. It. Was. Awesome.
Let me back-up. I applied to join the Space Force from the Air Force for three reasons: 1) a greater likelihood to stay on the operational cyber side instead of communication support, 2) better odds with good assignment locations, and 3) because space is freakin’ cool. The weight put towards each reason varies day by day, but when I got to visit Starbase, reason #3 rocketed up to 100%.
While a lot of the conversations were either classified or proprietary, the tour we took of their facilities blew my mind. It’s one thing to read about how SpaceX does business, but it’s another to walk into a half-constructed Starship and have the lead structural engineer explain just how massive the scale of their ambition is. I fanboyed hard, to the point where the engineer giving us the tour started talking to me more than the general because he had me hooked like a fat kid scarfing a tray of cupcakes.
While the Starship factory was fantastic (seriously, so cool), equally awesome was the attitude of the folks walking around with us. You could see how much they cared about the project and why they stick around, even with the 24/7, 365 work life. Not only that, but they way they approach the design and production process is so divergent to how things usually get done at that scale. When they need to fix a problem or figure out a design, they don’t sit around tossing ideas back and forth in meetings and committees for months on end. They get the sheet metal out, fire up the cutting torches, and build something. Once they see what works and what doesn’t, they build something new that iterates on the last version. And then they do it again. And again. And again.
That’s what I loved most about it, the willingness to push something out just to see what happens and the humility to learn from the failures. There’s no boardroom of middle management fighting over failed proposals because they staked their personal reputation on some pipedream. Instead, there’s an engineer telling his people that the last thing he wants to see is an idea in AutoCAD instead of in real life.
SpaceX inspires me, and not for the reason you might think. It’s not the fact they’ve basically rebuilt America’s industrial space power singlehandedly (which is awesome). It’s not that they’ve figured out things most people thought was impossible like reusing rockets (which is also awesome). And it’s not even that they’re continuing to break barriers and take space travel to the next level with the Starship (which is also also awesome). It’s that they are so committed to their dream that they are willing to forsake any sort of pride in order to see it through.
I told my boss that if he didn’t see me on the plane later that afternoon he shouldn’t worry—I’d just be back at Starbase, looking up at the stars with the people working hardest to get us there.
Posted on February 26, 2023
The Bomber Mafia: Morals vs Expediency
Commutes suck. We are blessed with 24 hours in a day, and spending one of them driving back and forth from a place we likely don’t want to be in the first place is a drag. Luckily, there are ways to fill that time. Podcasts have served that role for me, and that has led to dabbling in audiobooks. For those that know me and my reading habits, this is almost blasphemous. But the pull to amuse myself during the soul-crushing slouching from domicile to work and back requires sacrifice. That leads me to The Bomber Mafia, an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Bomber Mafia is two things: designed to be listened to rather than read, and a tale about morals vs expediency in war. It’s also fantastic, so apparently it’s three things. Even if you have no interest in World War Two, the story Gladwell weaves is relatable to anyone who admires larger than life characters. Much of the book centers around two generals in the Army Air Corps, Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay. Hansell was the dreaming high-priest of precision bombing, while LeMay was the grounded realist of 1940s capabilities. Both had their chance to prove their way of thinking, and both left tremendous impacts on the United States Air Force.
While better historians than me have argued over the efficacy of LeMay’s tactics, it’s obvious that Hansell’s were a failure. High-altitutude precision bombing just couldn’t work with 1940s technology. The moral philosophy behind it, however, is timeless. If you can drop a single bomb on a single target and destroy a capability without wiping out the city block around it, that should always be your choice. LeMay saw the city block as a bonus.
I left the book with two thoughts (ok, maybe three). First, that it’s amazing how we as human beings can rationalize away our morality. The Americans started WW2 aghast at British carpet bombing campaigns, then went on to do far worse to Japan and later in the Korean War. It wasn’t an overnight shift, but a gradual one until firebombing civilian targets became the norm. Little choices result in seismic consequences in all our lives, even if death isn’t on the line.
Second, LeMay is one of the most fascinating historical figures I’ve studied. My opinion on him has shifted several times. He is my class exemplar from the Air Force Academy, and I voted for him proudly based on his leadership. Later, I turned to thinking he was a monster as I learned more about the firebombing campaigns against Japan. This has vacilated back and forth over the years as I try to balance the leader with the monster.
The Bomber Mafia doesn’t definitively answer the question, but I don’t think any of us can. The firebombing campaigns were objectively horrendous, but his leadership and brilliant tactical developments of bomber utilization saved thousands of Airmen and likely brought the war to a close sooner than it otherwise would have. How does one measure lives taken against potential lives saved? It’s an impossible task, and one best left to the Lord.
The third thing I took away was a story about LeMay told in the book. LeMay had a tremendous amount of accomplishments throughout his life, enough for a dozen men. Yet the mural he chose to have in his foyer was of the botched Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid in WW2. Planned by Hansell, LeMay was the lead for the diversionary portion designed to draw off German defenders. It didn’t work, and hundreds of Airmen died for no gain. When asked about why he had that displayed, his response was that he had lost a lot of good boys that day.
Those are the words of a leader, not a monster. But just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of doing monstrous things.
Updated on February 19, 2023
The Bottle Gymnastics
Just when I think we’ve hit our parenting stride, Ezran winks and says “hold my milk.” His latest passion? Winning gold at bottle gymnastics.
I sent my wife off on a romantic sunset boat tour yesterday afternoon—romantic both for the scenery and the lack of her husband vomiting profusely off the side of the boat—so it was Ez and me hanging out once again. We approached bedtime much like a marathon runner at the 26-mile mark: tired, chafed, and covered in bodily fluids. But the end was in sight, just a bottle standing between our precious little tornado and blissful sleep.
If you need to know one thing about Ezran, it should be his obsession with food. The boy acts like he’s never eaten before every. single. time. he sees something vaguely approaching edible. This has been a boon for most of his life as it means he’s never had an issue taking a bottle, so feedings have been relatively simple. Ezran has since reconsidered this. Not the food obsession, no, just the serenity a simple bottle feed experience produces in his sleep-deprived parents.
We settled into the usual position and things started easily enough. His mouth gaped open like a carp, I plugged the bottle in, and away we went. I took a deep breath and let it out, easing into what I knew would be five to ten minutes of peace, when the boy in my arms decided he wasn’t done being a carp and tried to fling his body in seven directions at once. I managed to hold on, but in the midst of the chaos the bottle slipped from his lips.
Ezran was displeased.
After silencing the rage-induced shriek with the reinsertion of the bottle into his maw of unending hunger, I tried once more to find that oft sought but seldom grasped tranquility all participants of parenthood crave. This, Ezran decided, was the perfect time to practice his vault. He thrust both heels into me and launched himself like the breaching whale my wife happened to see at roughly the same time. Our son, not recognizing the poetry of the moment, released another screech of frustration that I could not rotate my arm 180 degrees to both keep the bottle in his mouth and maintain a grip on him as he flipped through the air.
This continued for the rest of the feeding, a battle of wills between parent and child that I pray does not foretell too much of what the future holds. Though if he brings back Olympic gold one day, I’ll happily pat myself on the back for training him so well in his youth.
Writing continues apace! I’ve finished my initial triage of major, substantial, and minor issues, coming out to a whopping 95. I’m sure many of those will branch into further issues as I address them, making it a Herculean task as I slay the hydra’s multiplying heads. But address them I shall as that’s the next step in my editing process. It’s good to go from identifying to fixing—easier to feel the forward progress that way.
Posted on February 12, 2023
Rock On, Little One
Parenthood is full of joy, wonder, and horrifying surprises. Often, those three facets get tied together in a neat little package that leaks something obscene out of a corner you thought you had strapped down.
Yesterday, my son and I had some quality bonding time while my wife went out with a friend. I had made it several hours without serious incident and decided I was ready to try and make myself lunch while Ezran was still awake. This was my first mistake. You see, my son is still an infant and delights in finding new and interesting ways to express himself. “Today,” he thought, “I will surpass myself.”
Not knowing the horror literally brewing within my child, I plopped him in his activity center we have dubbed the Chair of Cheer and carted him over to the kitchen. My goal was to continue pushing the boundaries of our new air fryer with some potstickers while Lil’ EZ chilled with an assortment of toys. We had rocked out to classic rock all morning, and AC/DC accompanied my incompetent but passionate air frying efforts.
All was well until a realization left me Thunderstruck—my son has made it eight months and not ONCE had I introduced him to the concept of air guitaring. I tossed the ill-prepared potstickers in the air fryer, cranked the tunes, and caught my son’s attention. Then, I jammed.
This was not casual air guitaring, a few half-hearted strums at waist level with a vague indication of fingering chords. This was no holds barred, leave it all on the table, sweat inducing showmanship. I danced, I spun, and I slid on my knees while raising my air guitar to the awe-inspired heavens as I poured years of mild-shame of never learning the actual guitar into my performance.
Ezran. Was. Thrilled.
My son shrieked with joy and laughter, slamming his hands on the Chair of Cheer not unlike Thor demanding more beverages at his table in Valhalla. His smile radiated a level of wonder that only the very young or the very insane can truly convey. Back in Black roared in the background as his little feet splattered on a growing puddle of sickly yellow liquid.
The presentation of a lifetime came to an abrupt stop. My eyes went from being filled with passion to being filled with horror as I realized just what my son was currently squishing between his toes.
In the midst of his excitement, Ezran had decided to unleash a poop waterfall out his diaper and along his leg, leading to the aforementioned puddle of off-colored excrement he continued to dip his feet into. He looked up at me and smiled with his toothless gums and eyes open just a touch too wide. I looked deep within and beheld only chaos as he slammed both feet into the puddle over and over, spreading his joy in one of the only mediums he understands.
It was at that point the air fryer dinged to let me know it had just turned my potstickers into briquettes. Parenthood, as they say, is always an adventure.
On the writing front, I’ve got a draft title for my debut science fiction novel! Artificial Threat will be the first of three novels in the Artificial trilogy, followed (tentatively) by Artificial Uprising,and Artificial Empire. As my wife and I are fond of saying, good things come in threes, and I like how it keeps one of the story’s primary themes consistent across some nice repetition.
As for progress, I’m still deep in Phase Two of my editing process: Strategic Planning. This is where I look over the reconnaissance from Phase One and identify issues of plot, character, and world building. As I document them, I also triage them into Critical, Substantive, and Minor. As is expected from a 100% Gardener book, I have plenty of weeds to yank. I’m up to sixty-seven issues so far, most of them in the Critical or Substantive categories.
While this would have disheartened me earlier in my writing experience, I’ve come to recognize the need to identify these problems before considering my work complete. I didn’t do that for The Mortal Mercenary, and I wasted far too much time trying to push out a subpar product because of it. I’m also learning a lot about how I write and the craft by doing so, which is always a plus. Once I get all the issues documented, then I will formulate a plan to get after them. The most important step you can take is always the next one!
Posted on February 5, 2023
The Infinite Variabilities of Taste
Taste is a funny concept. You can have good taste or bad, acquired taste or popular. The one thing we all have in common is we each have our own taste, be that for food, media, or people. But one thing we think we have but actually don’t is the ability to force our taste on others. And oh, how that infuriates us.
My wife decided two episodes into Andor that she didn’t like it. I, of course, was aghast. After inhaling the rest of the season, I established it in the upper pantheon of my favorites. So is the proper response to judge and berate her for her obviously poor taste? Of course not—she’s entitled to like and dislike whatever she wants. Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells go in depth on this in a recent podcast/video of their excellently named series, Intentionally Blank. Differences in taste should be celebrated, not judged. Not only do those differences allow for interesting conversations, they help push art in new and interesting directions. Creators can look at the vast array of what’s available, find nothing to their liking, and do something new for others to enjoy. There’s value to that, especially as we look down the barrel of a future with mass-produced content generated by algorithms instead of people.
Next time you see that someone doesn’t like your favorite show or their Netflix queue makes you cock and eyebrow, take a deep breath (through your nose!) and relax. Live and let live, watch and let watch—there’s enough out there for all of us.
On the writing front, I’m making decent progress. I’ve made it through the top level summaries of my main plot arcs with their accompanying subplots, plus character arcs for the most important players. Even though I’m not fixing things yet, I’ve got quite a list of problems to address. Next up will be world building, seeing what physical and cultural pillars my setting has established so far.
The few weeks I’ve been at this make it abundantly clear how valuable breaking up the process is to effective editing. My last novel still suffers from structural issues because I never bothered finding out what they were, choosing instead to focus on the line edits—losing the forest for the leaves on a branch of a tree. While this will take make longer overall, I’ll end up with a far better product at the end. Or it won’t and I’ll just dump the whole manuscript into ChatGPT and have the machine give it a go, because why not?
Updated on February 5, 2023
ChatGPT, So Hot Right Now
“A wise man can get more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”
– Baltasar Gracian
They’ve done it. They went and ruined my writing career before it ever had a chance, and they don’t even care. “They” in this case being the developers of ChatGPT, which depending on your viewpoint is either the first step into a beautiful new age of AI-supported utopia or the vanguard of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For how short it’s been on the scene, it’s amazing how quickly ChatGPT has poked the hornet’s nest.
For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an online tool people can chat with to figure stuff out. Think of it like the next generation of Google, or what you wish Siri was actually like. It’s quite amazing how authentic the machine sounds, and it’s capable of some truly fascinating things. I asked it to give me a literary comparison between Hamlet and Sharknado, and after trying to convince me that comparing the two was idiotic, ChatGPT gave a shockingly decent go at it (common themes between the two are revenge and man vs nature, if you’re curious). The most intriguing part for me is how conversational the whole experience was. I typed my questions like I was chatting with a real person, and the machine responded in kind. This is no customer service bot struggling to understand why you’re upset your package never showed up. ChatGPT covers down on anything shy of politics and war, which it is hard coded against at the moment.
Personally, I don’t think ChatGPT has destroyed anything yet, but you can see where it does from here. A lot of the furor online revolves around people claiming the essay as a school assignment is dead, since students can just plug prompts into ChatGPT and copy the results. After playing with it a bit, I think there’s some validity to this concern. It will take a bit to get there, both in terms of the platform’s capability and students’ awareness of it, but the artificial writing is on the wall.
What concerns me more is whether ChatGPT or something like it can take over writing fiction. Would-be authors have already saturated the market, and algorithms churning out decent products at the speed of silicon might mean the death of small time authors. I was hoping people overreacted to this threat, but then I asked ChatGPT to give me an idea for a political intrigue novel in a fantasy world. In a few seconds, the machine spat out a run-of-the-mill—but infinitely serviceable—storyline involving a young champion of the people leading a rebellion against council of corrupt sorcerers desperately clinging to power. It’s not hard to see how this becomes the norm as new authors realize how hard it is to write and lean on ChatGPT as a crutch. Eventually, that crutch becomes an electric scooter and Wall-E becomes a prophetic metaphor for the world of writing fiction.
In the meantime, I want to keep playing with the tool. Sure, it could mean the death of my hopes as an author, but it’s still fun to see what the computer comes up with. I’ve asked it for book title recommendations, help with developing elevator pitches, and idea generation. I want to see just how far I can take it as I edit my current novel and see what comes out of a blending of capabilities.
As the saying goes, work smarter not harder.
