Posted on July 4, 2022
The Art of Cybersecurity
Many moons ago, I had the onerous task of taking a Security+ certification test. I passed by the skin of my teeth and have dreaded the thought of taking it again. Luckily for me, there are ways to validate your continued work in the cybersecurity field to extend how long your certification lasts. Unluckily for you, one of those measures is via writing a blog post on some topic related to cybersecurity.
What will follow is the first of several Wanderings on all things cyber—with a twist. I will find and increasingly stretch bizarre metaphors to fit various cybersecurity and cyber warfare concepts in the hope that the Lords of Certification grace me with their Continuing Education Units so I don’t have to endure the gauntlet of that test again. So without further adueu, I present for your consideration cybersecurity as told by a man who proceeded it by roughly 2500 years—Sun Tzu.
I’d wager a decent percentage of the world has at least heard the term “the Art of War”, and a sizable chunk of that likely knows it references a book. These days, you’re more likely to hear it referenced in a board room by some suit instead of on a battlefield. And just like those overpaid consultants or motivational speakers, I will crib some of his ancient wisdom on strategy and force those round pegs into cyber-shaped holes. Let’s begin!
*Note: there are as many translations of Sun Tzu as there are ways to trick people into giving you their email passwords. The ones I’m using meet the general intent, but likely lack some of the finesse the author initially intended*
Quote #1: The general who wins the battle makes many calculations before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few.
When considering cybersecurity, one must always acknowledge that every day brings a shifting battlefield with no guarantee of safety. The Internet is a dangerous place, rife with hostile and malicious actors that earn their keep by ruining yours. Worse yet, there are legions of automated tools out there that constantly troll through systems connected to the Internet, just waiting for some known vulnerability to exploit. Why would you ever approach such a situation blind?
Preparation is key to success in cybersecurity. In this, the attacker almost always has the advantage. To exploit a system, all the attacker needs is one vulnerability to leverage, while the defender must consistently prove effective day after unending day. Not only that, but the attacker has decades worth of exploits and vulnerabilities to lean on, any one of which going unpatched leaves the virtual gates unlocked. Recognizing this means the defender knows they are in for a grind, and must come prepared accordingly. Researching various malware defense software (or companies, depending on the scale you operate at), purchasing trustworthy equipment secure from supply interdiction efforts, training yourself and employees on how to identify social engineering attempts—all of these are key to a defenders successful preparation.
Quote #2: The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.
The need for preparation from Quote #1 stems from the certainty that the adversary will come for your network. You may be a Fortune 500 company, a local business catering to potato sculpture enthusiasts, or just a blogger screaming into the void, but you are all equal in this: you are a target. If your cybersecurity stance consists of hoping that they’ll pass you over, I wish you luck when the next NotPetya rolls through your system like a rampaging horde of Huns.
Acknowledging that you are a target shifts the conversation from “will I be attacked” to “how will I mitigate an attack?” Notice I did not say prevent—nothing can do that, unfortunately. One of the sureties of modern cybersecurity is that with enough time and effort, any system can be breached. What you do to react to that, however, makes all the difference in the world. You’ll notice that companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon rarely make the news for data breaches compared to some other companies. That’s because they know they’re huge targets, and they resource their cybersecurity sections accordingly. They still have network breaches, but they have prepared enough to account for them and react.
Quote #3: If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in.
Knowing you’re a target is one thing; knowing why is something else entirely. That knowledge helps you determine who might be after it, and knowing that helps you ascertain what sort of resources they can bring to bear against you. Your off-brand pun based food blog is not likely to draw the attention of Russian intelligence services quite like a company with Department of Defense contracts, so the level of resources to pour into cybersecurity will differ dramatically. Don’t sell yourself short though, I’m sure someone out there wants your secret family recipe.
The flip side of this is knowing yourself, and by that I mean your network. If you don’t have a functional understanding of what you’re operating on, you’re not in a good position to defend it. Imagine a king of olden times knowing an enemy is laying siege to his castle, but he hasn’t the foggiest idea where his city walls are or the men who are supposed to defend them. Failing to understand your network means you’ll never be able to apply your resources effectively, either to proactive defense or efficient response.
Sun Tzu may have lived thousands of years ago, but his wisdom has proven timeless in war and a myriad of other fields he never could have imagined. Cybersecurity is just one more area we can apply his lessons to, and a network warrior like yourself would do well to consider them. Wax on, wax off, my friends.
Posted on June 20, 2022
A New Journey
I write this with my newborn son sleeping just a few feet away, grunting in that way newborns do to charm their way into our hearts. I look at him and think of all the possibilities ahead of him. What will he do with his life? What ideals will he cherish? What songs will he sing? What will his journey look like?
The world today is in churn. While statistically speaking, it’s safer today than it has been in most of human history, it seems a precarious peace. Record breaking heat waves and supercharged natural disasters signal the onset of human induced climate change. War launched at the whims of a dictator rages in Ukraine. An attempted insurrection nearly succeeded in the halls of American government. Where will his place be in all of this?
I wish I could tell by looking at his peaceful form, hands twitching as his body learns how to control those crucial tools. Will those hands turn towards good or ill? Will he be the man others look to for aid and comfort, or the one they fear when they see his shadow darken their path? Will he grin as he wipes the sweat from his brow, knowing the value of effort put towards a good cause?
I have little say in what his journey looks like. Yes, what my wife and I do during his childhood will have a tremendous impact on his development, but we cannot–and should not–suborn his agency, his ability to choose for himself. We can merely point in a direction we think leads to happiness and wellbeing and hope it is such. It is up to him to make those choices, to choose the paths his journey will take. As the great Dr Seuss once wrote, “Oh the places you’ll go!”
He’s starting to fuss, our little one. Let’s see what it is he’s thinking.
Posted on June 5, 2022
Pitfalls of Pride: Failures in Leadership
The most recent mass shooting at an American elementary school is rivaled in its horror only by how the words “most recent” will likely be used again. I am not going to delve too deeply into this topic, especially since The Onion has gotten the point across better than I could since 2014. What I want to discuss is what I think is the root cause of this tragedy and others like it—pride. One Wandering is not enough to cover the myriad of ways pride can damage our lives and our society, so I will focus on one particular aspect of it today: pride leads to inevitable failures in leadership.
First, a primer. I believe that pride is at the root of many of the world’s issues, but how I view it may not mesh with your understanding of the word. Consider a spectrum with perfectly humble on the apex, and loathsomely prideful at its nadir. Every action we take falls somewhere along that spectrum, and the farther we fall towards the bottom, the more likely we are to inflict misery on others and ourselves.
An example: you are a parent whose child plays in a youth basketball league. Your child plays a fantastic game and the team sees him or her as the main reason for victory. The humble response would be to congratulate your child and their team on their excellent performance earned through their hard work, plus recognizing the value of their coach and the other parents who helped. The prideful response would be to beat your own chest on how it was all because of how you raised the child so they could do such a wonderful thing, and that the rest of the kids on the team are garbage compared to your prodigy. An extreme example, but one that shows how many options there could be between the two edges.
The important facet to recognize is that the lower one gets on that spectrum in one’s actions, the less likely one is willing to look beyond oneself for answers or input. This is the core of what I want to cover regarding pride and leadership. When a person or organization allows pride to take precedence over humility, they cause an inevitable decline in forward progress due to stagnation of thought and action.
Pride is inherently backward leaning instead of forward looking. A person or organization that tries to take pride in accomplishments not yet achieved is delusional, not prideful. Looking back on past deeds, however, provides a temptation that cloaks itself in self-satisfying logic. If what came before brought us to this point, then obviously more of that should accomplish more of this. A leader can take this assessment one step further: if I made that decision and got positive results on multiple occasions, then I am always right and don’t require further input. Input from external sources then becomes a threat to both the leader and what he or she has achieved, because it challenges both a perceived sense of superiority and threatens to supplant the status quo. Eventually, maintaining the status quo becomes more important than anything else and forward progress halts.
The primary reason why the status quo rarely results in a positive trend over time is that the world is not static. Technology, societal norms, the environment, and a host of other important features to human existence constantly change in subtle and complex ways. Think of how transportation has changed over the past century, from the Model T to the SpaceX Dragon capsule, or how in the past thirty years landlines have all but died in favor of ubiquitous IP enabled telecommunications via cellphones and Zoom calls. How many organizations collapsed because they could not adapt quickly enough to those changes? How many individuals lost their fortunes for the same reason? Fighting change has never worked out for the defender in the long term.
As the shock and dismay over the Uvalde school shooting fade, so too does the likelihood of action. I hope that our leaders recognize a status quo where active shooter drills are more common than fire drills with elementary school children is an abomination. I hope they are humble enough to overcome their pride and toadying to a minority of harsh voices with big checkbooks.
Mostly, I hope that I am wrong about what I think will happen—nothing.
Posted on May 23, 2022
The Secrets of Dumbledore and Storytelling via Mashed Potatoes
This Wandering contains spoilers for the movie The Secrets of Dumbledore.
Much like cooking, storytelling is more art than science. There are some universal basics like plot, character, and setting, but each storyteller can mix ingredients in new ways that please or excite the palate. In the Secrets of Dumbledore movie, the storytelling team took an order for three baked potatoes, then chose to burn them beyond recognition before mashing them into a pulp and throwing the resulting mass against the wall in the hopes something might stick. Unfortunately, not much did.
Potato one in this increasingly stretched metaphor: multiple character and plot arcs with little to no development. Despite how describing one such issue naturally leads into another, I’ll try and limit myself to the highlights. First, awkward Tiger King for magical creatures has no purpose beyond acquiring a deer with whiskers and shoving it in his suitcase. We are led to believe at the end of the last movie that Tiger King will be integral to whatever plan Dumbledore has to defeat Wizard Hitler, but in the end, his nameless assistant ends up being far more useful. Perhaps this whole movie is a subtle dig on how big name professionals are useless without their secretaries. In the first seven hours of the movie, Tiger King and his team accomplish exactly two things that have any relevance to the climax, and he wasn’t there for either of them.
Second—and most grating to me—is the utter insignificance of Tiger King’s brother, Overhyped Mall Cop. Earlier movies establish him as a war hero and one of the world’s preeminent dark wizard hunters, along with his strained relationship with Tiger King. These are spicy and savory ingredients to play with! The skills someone would need to thrive on a wizard battlefield or to investigate magical criminal activity would be perfect in a back alley war against Wizard Hitler’s rise, but instead we get…nothing. Mall Cop is captured twice (saved by Tiger King’s scorpion-crab dance and a suitcase of multiplying pastries, respectively), fails to achieve anything against Wizard Hitler, and adds no salient input towards the plot or other character arcs. Which is a shame, because an arc where the two brothers can learn to appreciate each other’s skills and perspectives could have added so much depth to both of their otherwise shallow characters.
I won’t continue to harp on this point, but here’s the lightning round of other examples that still come to mind two weeks later: repressed love assistant; Wizard Hitler’s appeaser-in-chief; Wizard Hitler’s deer blood visions; wizard international voting processes in a pre-digital world; the double agent who only succeeded in letting Wizard Hitler erase his memories of his sister; references to fantastic beasts and the finding thereof. The list is virtually endless.
The second potato: lack of carryover from previous movies. The previous movie had its own dripping, soggy mess to clean up from where it was thrown against a wall, but it did leave a few specific lines for the follow-on movie to pick up. Secrets of Dumbledore chooses to ignore the majority of these in favor of creating new and impressively pointless items to focus on instead. Awkward love story between Tiger King and Long Distance Girlfriend developed over two movies? Slap a picture on his suitcase and call it a day. Literal ball of teenage angst recruited and primed by Wizard Hitler to kill Dumbledore (again over two movies)? Two-minutes of conversation will clear all that up. Basing the entire prequel series around Magical Beasts? Here’s your mustachioed deer—it lives in a suitcase and glows twice.
The counterpart to a lack of carryover is what did make the transition that arguably should not have. Tiger King has been mostly irrelevant since the first movie, as the need for beasts of a fantastic nature became a dangling appendage for McGuffin production. While his awkwardness provides some much-needed levity, cut him and focus on someone with more depth. This can be easily accomplished by cutting the whole theme of magical creatures since the storytellers have already done so in all but the technical sense. You could safely lose Token Muggle as well, since the only reason he comes along is because why not? Each story arc from the previous movies should have been forced to validate the purpose of its existence on pain of liquidation.
Finally, potato the third: Dumbledore’s lack of secrets. You would think with a title like, I don’t know, The Secrets of Dumbledore, the titular secret keeper would have some doozies to share. As far as I can tell from the roughly thirteen-hour movie, the only secret Dumbledore reveals apart from a suitcase shell game is what a terrible person he is. After Embodiment of Teenage Angst tries to kill him, Dumbledore spends roughly thirty seconds patting him on the head. He says the only authority figure that’s ever shown Teenage Angst attention is a liar, admits to being an actual relative, then abandons him in a puddle on a dreary Berlin street with exactly zero answers or closure. On the other hand, his treatment of Harry now makes more sense.
Yet Dumbledore has further abuse for the poor child! Towards the supposed climax, Teenage Angst has a moment where he truly needs emotional support. When his birth father—Dumbledore’s brother—tries to go to him, Dumbledore stops him because why not let that wound fester a bit more if it provides a mild inconvenience for Wizard Hitler? But all of this is washed away when the magic deer bows to Dumbledore and reveals to the whole wizarding world that he is pure of heart. I take a small solace in how the deer then goes on to bow to some random politician the audience knows nothing about, which allows me to assume it bows based on whether or not someone has snacks in their pocket or something instead.
Side note: how could the storytellers not have the goodness detecting deer bow to the Token Muggle? They spend the whole movie talking up how he’s a righteous man that always does the right thing, a man whose heart is full and loyal, and then put him right there in prime deer-bowing range. He is the one person that can completely invalidate Wizard Hitler’s platform of “Muggles Bad” if the magical deer bows to him, and they do nothing with it. Obviously, the nameless politician was a better choice.
This particular Wandering only scratched the surface of my disdain for the movie, and I admit some of it draws from a frustration of squandered nostalgic potential. But as my wife and I discussed on the way back from seeing it, it does have two pluses. First, the special effects were fun. Whoever worked the CGI for the movie deserves a round of applause, because they made a bunch of neat effects that helped distract from everything else. Second, a bad movie is better than an alright movie. Let me explain.
When you finish watching an alright movie, you shrug your shoulders and then move on with your life, never thinking about it again. When you leave a bad movie, however, you get to eviscerate it with whoever agrees with you on it. Often the enjoyment from that can trump whatever you’d get from watching an alright movie, and sometimes even a good one! So far all your flaws, Secrets of Dumbledore, thank you for the ammunition.
Posted on May 8, 2022
Office Productivity Hack #1: The Woodpecker
I know why you’re here. You have spent the last month neck deep in tasks and can barely keep up. Your boss can’t be trusted to manage your workflow any better than a moderately well trained raccoon. There are at least seven different mediums you receive information through, and the last office productivity blog you read suggested a dozen different hacks to organize them. What is a hard charging, always hustling, starter-upper, entrepreneur-savant to do? I have one word for you: Woodpeckers.
No, I am not trying to sell you the latest Silicon Valley wünder-startup—all talk and no product. This is the real deal: a 7-10 inch feather totin’ head bangin’ Picidae with a license to drill, baby, drill. Why bother inventing something new or taking a hard look at why you use a chaotic flood of inputs to distract from your lack of direction when Mother Nature has the answer for you? She has Failed Fast/Learned Fast for billions of years to deliver the perfect tool right to your doorstep.
Did I say doorstep? I meant forehead. That’s where your personalized Woodpecker will soon roost in its effort to keep your office productivity on track, synergized, and disruptive. Here’s how it works: all of your current communication systems will funnel into a central Feed called the Trough. Instead of a dozen different notifications spread across your phone, smart watch, computer, tablet, and—horror amongst horrors—human interaction, your new Trough funnels them all right into your bandwidth gullet via the Woodpecker. Each time your system of systems needs your attention, a small Feed Bug drops from a convenient storage container resting over your head. Your Woodpecker then strikes your forehead to eat the bug with the power of a college dropout with an idea, determination, and $90 million in venture capital funding. Instant feedback for instant results!
I can see your concern—how can we be sure that your Woodpecker does not miss a notification? No need to worry, friend, we’ve thought it all through so you don’t have to. We have ethically and organically sourced our Feed Bugs from the best bioengineering firms in the business. Each Feed Bug contains little to no nutritional value, so even though your Woodpecker will constantly hit the Feed, it will never find actual satisfaction. Instead, it will exist in a state of perpetual anxiety as it awaits the next Feed Bug, allowing you to relax in the knowledge that nothing will slip by its manic state!
Where the Woodpecker truly shines, though, is in its user interface. Let me take you on a journey. Imagine you’re in a meeting, laptop open in front of you with your email in one window and your Teams chat in another. You’ve got your phone under the desk to ping someone back on Slack and your smart watch open to a text message when you realize someone at the meeting has tried asking you a question for at least a minute with no response. Disaster!
Now imagine a world with a Woodpecker safely strapped to your face. You are responding to the first three notifications simultaneously when your coworker attempts to ask a question. Your Trough recognizes your coworker’s question through artificial intelligence, machine learning, an Ouija board, and paradigm shifting proprietary software, then releases a Feed Bug. Driven to the brink of madness by overstimulation, your Woodpecker jabs its beak into your forehead with a force of up to 1,400 G’s. You gaze up from your three devices through a growing stream of blood and piggyback off whatever your coworker said last. Crisis averted!
Office productivity hacks are no joke. Through the careful alignment of impactful systems, you can keep your productivity in lockstep with a structural pivot towards greater leverage in the work place. When you can move the needle past the line in the sand and keep every task on your radar while thinking out of the box, you are ready to foot stomp the closest alligator to the boat and slap the table. Now go forth and be productive!
Posted on April 24, 2022
The Addictive Nature of False Productivity
I appreciate putting in the minimum effort required for a given situation. Some high-minded busybodies might call such a thing laziness, and I take offense to that. They’re right, but I’m still offended. My preferences, however, have allowed me to discover something. I know why as organizations grow, meetings explode exponentially. There is an addictive nature to false productivity, and meetings provide the purest hit of it.
What is false productivity and why is it addictive? False productivity is achieving a sense of progress without actually moving anywhere. Have you reworked the same plan of action five times without accomplishing step one? Congratulations, you are a purveyor of the finest sort of false productivity! One finds this in any sort of endeavor. The lifter who constantly changes his routine and never builds muscle is kin to the manager who rewrites her mission statement every quarter.
This behavior scratches an itch deep inside us all—full emotional payoff with minimal effort. I love painting with problematically broad brushes, so I feel comfortable saying every human being knows the satisfaction that comes with accomplishing something. The only difference in climbing Everest versus not throat punching an obnoxious customer is scale, but the reward is the same: our brains release some sweet, sweet dopamine. We ride that natural high with a conquered task under one foot as our voice raises to the sky shouting “Who’s next?!” Obviously, we crave more of this.
Thus, the issue. Like any addiction, the body adjusts to the stimulus. We need more input to get the same output. A kid gets a rush the first time he climbs a ten-foot artificial rock wall, and a few years later he’s free soloing El Cap. The thing is, accomplishing tasks gets hard. It takes effort some of us would much rather put towards reading books or daydreaming about throat punching customers. To further complicate it, you know deep down that your laziness should not be rewarded by any hormonal cocktail. What is a lazy person to do?
Enter the useless meeting. I make a distinction between a productive working group (PWG) and a useless meeting (UM). The PWG has a clear agenda leading to a tangible product at its conclusion that will advance one or more organizational goals. Unless you are an expert at skating, avoid these at all costs (more on that later). UMs, however, accomplish nothing apart from the appearance of productivity. One emerges from an UM with a false feeling of progress and all the accompanying dopamine, but having spent no actual effort. This is the dream for the lazy person willing to grab it.
As organizations grow, so too do their UMs. Why is this? If we consider the axiom that only 10% of personnel provide the majority of value to be even remotely accurate, that leaves a lot of time to fill for the 90% who don’t accomplish much. Enter the UM. Nothing gives the appearance of productivity more than a schedule chock full of them. If anyone tries to question a lazy person on what they actually do, there is no better defense than to take an aggrieved stance while pointing towards a day full of meetings. “I have to attend so many meetings, I can barely get anything done!” one can say with a straight face. Amazingly, all but the most discerning of managers readily accept this excuse (likely because they, too, are lazy).
Lazy people should worm themselves into as many UMs as possible—maximum returns for little to no effort. It can be difficult to do so, as many guard these opportunities like dragons crouching over their hoards. The last thing any UM host wants is for a 10 percenter to show up and announce that the meeting is useless. Doing so disrupts the communal hallucination lazy people need to guarantee the dopamine hit, and thus is a threat. This is why as organizations grow, the meetings taking place within it grow at a rate beyond that of the organization itself. Few organizations put up safeguards against UMs, so all it takes is a group of like-minded lazy people to set up in a conference room and talk in circles on a routine basis.
Now, I mentioned earlier that only the most advanced skaters should attempt to join a PWG. The trick is to find a way into the PWG without accepting a defined role. You are wallpaper, noticed but never commented on unless looking awful or emitting an odd odor. No one expects anything of you, but by being a part of it, you share in the outcome. This is the Elysium: the satisfaction of real results with no effort. Think back to any group project you ever had to work on in school. The one kid that did nothing but still got the high grade earned by the others’ hard work? That is your spirit animal.
The risk here cannot be overstated. By attending a PWG, the peril of actual work hovers over you like the Sword of Damocles. Make the wrong productive comment and you will find yourself with a list of due outs faster than you can fake a bout of food poisoning. Provide nothing, though, and the high performers running the PWG will sniff you out and banish you, the equivalent of a dealer cutting you off. For once you have tasted those highs, you can never go back to a steady diet of UMs.
It has never been easier to be a lazy person. In olden times, laziness meant death by starvation because your fields remained fallow. The modern knowledge work environment oozes opportunities to skate, as offloading the real work onto actual producers still results in a group grade that management thinks of as organizational success. Ride that wave, my friend. Ride it until artificial intelligence replaces us all and forces us back into subsistence farming while the 10 percenters rule the world.
Updated on April 10, 2022
To Finish, or Not to Finish
I have experienced something new—turning off a Pixar movie halfway through. My wife and I tried watching Turning Red recently, but only made it to the halfway point before looking at each other and deciding we were wasting our time. This is a first for me. Pixar has been a stalwart ally for many years, with not a flop to their name. Granted, the critic reviews (which I had to check after to see if they validated my opinion) were glowing overall (dang it), but it didn’t work for me. That gives me two trains of thought: why didn’t this one land, and what drives us to finish a piece of media or not?
First, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. As I mentioned in my previous post, I forgo the right to critique the movie as the director intended it to be since I did not watch the whole thing. Maybe it turns around in the second half and makes up for the nail on a chalkboard level of obnoxiousness in the first half. I doubt it, but maybe. What I can say, however, is that artists must tread a fine line on giving their characters flaws. Too little and the audience doesn’t see satisfying character development, too much and the audience dislikes them so much that any development doesn’t matter.
That latter issue is where the main character suffered. Every time she opened her mouth, I hated her just a little bit more. I could see the story’s destination and her arc, but by that point it didn’t matter—even if she became a non-obnoxious person by the end (doubtful), I was never going to forgive her for making my teeth grind earlier on. Her friends further exasperated that—two-dimensional caricatures who with their every action created some dark alchemical formula to drive me into a completely unjustified rage. Again, maybe they developed into something more by the end of the movie. Also again, I hated them enough halfway through that it no longer mattered. As my wife noted to me later, my face throughout the part we watched said, “Please, take me out back and kill me now.”
Now that I, a grown adult, have spent far too much time wailing and gnashing my teeth over a children’s movie, I want to explore why electing to leave media unfinished interests me. This is leaving aside turning something off for inappropriate content. I view that as a separate issue compared to continuing off an assessment of quality; morality based instead of off taste preferences.
I am relatively new to the maturity levels it takes to give up on a story partway through. For the bulk of my life, I have been of the opinion that if I started a book/movie/game/etc, I was honor bound to finish it. Many an abysmal story passed through my eyes and ears because of this, and I shudder to think of the hours wasted hate-reading/viewing something I did not want to continue. That, I think, is where the interesting bit lies.
All of life is an equation that filters down to a simple number—24. We each of us have exactly 24 hours in a day to do what we will, no more, no less. As Arnold Bennett wrote over a century ago, those 24 hours are what we have to “spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of [our] immortal souls.” One should always view the consumption of media through this lens. Our purse of time trickles out second by second regardless of what we desire. Does spending it on media we are not enjoying and have no expectation of enjoying should we continue make sense? Of course not. That is merely an application of the sunk cost fallacy, sating our pride at the expense of time irrevocably lost to us.
Have enough respect for yourself and your time to say no, and your life will be all the better. I hope that you learned that lesson long before I did.
If you haven’t read “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett, I cannot recommend it enough. You can find a copy of it here.
Also, you may have noticed some new artwork gracing the site. That comes courtesy of my incredibly talented cousin Chelsea Ward and her shop Sketchy Notions! If you want to check out more of her work, visit her page at sketchynotions.com.
Updated on April 10, 2022
Trilogies, Artist Intent, and Why You’re Wrong
There are few things worth starting a fight over. Attacks on my family or my person, the unjustified and non-consensual forcing of one’s will over another, and moral wrongs are the prime examples. To that list, I now add another. I will fight anyone that says you can watch the movies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—and it pains me to even write this—solo without the accompanying films in proper order. I am willing to throw blows over this.
Why do I care about this? What possible reason could a grown adult have for hyperbolic gesturing on the internet about instigating violence over movie watching preferences? Simple. It’s the principle, you see. The story told in The Lord of the Rings may be broken into three movies, but that’s only because the average movie goer lacks the commitment and vision to sit in a theater for twelve hours straight. One cannot simply hop into LotR halfway through the journey. To do so is to destroy the greatest power of Tolkien’s work—character development.
As with most spanning epics, LotR covers its story through a wide range of characters. Each of them receives some sort of arc that spans across all three movies, not just one. Jumping straight to The Return of the King means you see Pippin accepting responsibility with open eyes and displaying admirable amounts of courage, but without the framework provided in the first two movies showing just how big those steps are for him. Likewise, you cannot understand the depths of Gollum’s madness and betrayals without seeing his internal conflict displayed in The Two Towers. And most importantly, you don’t see the depth of Sam’s friendship to Frodo unless you watch—as Sam watches—the agonizing breakdown of all that Frodo is as he bears the burden of the One Ring alone. Watching only one or two of the movies disrupts the tapestry each character weaves for themselves and amongst each other. With a story as good as Tolkien’s, that is a crime.
This ties to the real reason for this Wandering: artist intent. Tolkien originally intended LotR to be one novel, but his publisher made him break it into three for easier digestion. Thus, in the mind of the creator of Middle Earth, there is no distinction between each novel aside from a rough page count. So, too, follows the movie. Each one is self-contained only to the extent that it satisfies movie executives. That intent translates to needing to have all three movies seen in concurrent order to experience the full story as Peter Jackson envisioned it. So what is the issue with a viewer choosing to go out of order? Violation of artist intent.
Tangent time. I listened to a podcast with Brandon Sanderson recently that touched on this subject. He and his friend discussed whether Sanderson would watch a show with a prodigious amount of obscene material. Sanderson leaned towards no, but was also not willing to consider watching an edited version that removed the offensive material. He thought doing so violated the artist’s vision for the show, and as an artist himself chose to defend the show creators’ intent.
There is a middle ground here. Consumers of media have every right to enjoy that media in the way they see fit. However, doing so in a manner separate from what the artist or creator intends means the consumer forgoes the right to critique the media in its entirety. If someone chooses to cut out a quarter of a show’s material because it’s inappropriate, how can they give an accurate assessment of that show compared the full version? It doesn’t seem like a stretch to make that logical leap, just like someone who reads the Wiki plot summary of a book isn’t taken seriously as a reviewer of the piece as a whole.
My opinion is that the vast majority of inappropriate portions to shows are only there because of weird Hollywood perception that show needs sex to be “edgy” and “modern”, but I acknowledge that they occasionally have plot points involved. Rarely. When I cut that stuff out, I recognize that I am watching a version of the media the creator did not envision, one they may not necessarily agree with. Others who want to watch the whole thing, therefore, should take my thoughts on a show with a large grain of salt.
So if someone wants to argue about the right way to watch the LotR trilogy, I will keep my clenched fists at my side. You are entitled to your own opinion on how to watch the movies. You’re wrong if it isn’t all three extended versions back-to-back-to-back in a single session, but you can still think it.
Updated on April 10, 2022
Ukraine, Russia, and the Armchair Battalions
It’s an odd feeling, living in a stretch of time you know will get a paragraph in future history textbooks. With an equal measure of lies and tanks, Russia invaded its neighbor Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It is an unjustified, unprovoked, naked power grab of the sort Europe thought they left behind decades ago. But I don’t plan on talking about that, at least not directly. I want to focus on the Armchair Battalions.
Let me first lay out a bit of my resume. I have a bachelor’s in military strategic studies, a master’s in international relations, and have spent the past nine years in the military—four of those stationed in Germany, looking east towards Russia. All that said, I have no idea what Putin is going to do next. So when I see folks lining up to offer their insight on what will obviously happen, it amuses and frustrates me in equal measure. I have dubbed these newfound experts the Armchair Battalions, and they serve with misplaced confidence and ferocity on the front lines of the Internet.
The Armchair Battalions are a varied lot, and their focus tends to shift with the topics of the day. A coworker recently commented that his friends on social media have gone from thinking themselves epidemiologist experts to geopolitical savants overnight as the Russian invasion kicked COVID out of the media spotlight. This is par for the course. There is no cause too unknown for the Armchair Battalions not to have a rock-solid opinion on. And when those opinions are proved wrong? Not to worry! They can fire and maneuver with tremendous speed. Observe how they went from being sure Russia wouldn’t invade, to being sure Russia would flatten Ukraine in a matter of days, to being sure that Ukraine would win the war. Throw in some old pictures and misidentified video game footage as evidence, and any point can become a hill to die on.
Where does my frustration with this behavior really lie, though? People are entitled to their opinions, what does it matter if they blast them out online? It would be hypocritical to the extreme for me to have a blog doing just that if I didn’t allow for it from others. No, I think the frustration stems from two areas. First is a personal pet peeve: hindsight bias.
The Armchair Battalions now say it was obvious Russia would invade. They say that knowing the result and looking backward, filling in the evidence gaps with whatever information fits the narrative. Hindsight bias is deluding yourself that the answer was always obvious, even before the event took place. But if that were so, then there would have been nigh-universal acknowledgement of the event ahead of time. Just glance at the news from the week before Russia invaded and you’ll see plenty of intelligent people convinced Russia would never invade. This is just pride talking, wanting to convince ourselves we are cleverer than we are and using a paint-by-numbers approach with past events to do it.
The second reason it frustrates me is more personal and esoteric. Seeing the Armchair Battalions at work annoys me. Why? In this case, because I feel that I have a justified level of expertise with the subject. Ahh, you say, so you’re upset people are listening to those other voices but not to you. Yes, I can’t overlook that point. There’s only one man to have ever fully overcome his own pride and fully subsume himself in humility, and I assure you it’s not me. But digging deeper, there’s another level below that. Maybe no one listens to me because I don’t have anything worth saying. That is a hard pill to swallow.
As I think on it, though, another potential shows up. Maybe it’s not that I don’t have anything meaningful to say. Maybe it’s the fact that life is far too complicated for us to sit down and say “this is how it is.” I could accept the Armchair Battalions if they approached their battles with that in mind. We should all strive to understand important events that shape our world, as we are all crew on the same rock hurtling through the cosmos. It’s when they armor themselves in pride that things go sideways. An unwillingness to consider other viewpoints and recognize personal mistakes hurts us all, individually and as communities and peoples.
Next time you find yourself laying out some point for those you perceive as the ignorant masses, take a second to pause. Think about how much expertise you actually have on the subject matter. Did you just skim the headlines of a few articles and call it good, or have you done the intense, intellectual work to really dig out an issue? Are you making grand, sweeping gestures that paint the whole scenario with a paint roller the size of your ego, or are you considering each stroke carefully, choosing the right brush for the context?
Even in this Wandering, I’m sure I’ve made numerous errors on each of those fronts. This stuff is hard, and it should be! If you just repeat someone else’s opinion with the hopes of looking intelligent or getting attention, you are the human equivalent of a parrot looking for a treat. Gaining worthwhile opinions requires a level of effort beyond regurgitation. Critical thinking gets tossed around so often it’s almost a useless buzz word, but it still gets the point across. Put the time in to think deep about topics you care about, or you’ll just be another conscript in the Armchair Battalions.
If you are looking for ways to help Ukraine beyond keeping yourself better informed, consider donating to the Red Cross, the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund, or writing your local elected representative asking them to sponsor legislation to support Ukraine.
Updated on April 10, 2022
Americans and Responsibility
Max Brooks fascinates me. A best-selling author of works like World War Z, he also speaks to organizations about preparing for future crisis response actions and maintains dual fellowships at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Modern War Institute at West Point. Basically, he’s who I want to be when I grow up. Brooks recently did a podcast interview with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History, another favorite of mine. In a discussion on asymmetrical warfare, Brooks said the following: “Americans have a lot of freedoms, but freedom from responsibility is not one of them.”
In one sentence, Brooks provided a unifying theme to my disparate thoughts on America’s current course. That may be why he is the famous author/speaker/fellow while I pay someone else for the privilege of hosting a blog talking about Abraham Lincoln’s favorite lift. Responsibility threads through our lives, and the amount of it depends on the context of our environment. America, for all its flaws, is still a democracy. Democracies require their citizens to shoulder a portion of the burden of governance. I believe what we see today is the result of Americans abdicating that responsibility.
A note before we begin. It is not my intent to turn this into a political roast. I have taken a personal stance while serving in the military to remain apolitical—my oath is to the Constitution, and through that whoever happens to be giving legal orders from the White House. While actions taken by the predominant political parties will factor into this argument, they are a symptom and not a cause. I speak primarily about the average American citizen, and I stand as one of them.
The abdication of responsibility falls into three areas. First, the failure of accountability (also broken down into three parts). The great check of democracies is the voter. Your elected leaders spent more time soaking in hot tubs than passing laws? Send them packing in the next election, and good riddance. But in practice, how often does that happen? The issue is never my representative, it’s those other ones over there. My guy or gal has their act together and deserves my continued support. Yet if the country’s confidence in Congress hovers at a cool 10-20%, we can’t all be right about our representative’s competence. This is accountability breakdown #1: I am never wrong. The blame can always be shifted to an “other,” be it an opposing candidate, party, or just someone I don’t like. Accountability, however, starts with the self. If I cannot police my own feelings and actions, how can I expect to do so externally?
Accountability breakdown #2 stems naturally from #1. Just as we fail to police ourselves, we fail to hold the tribes we subscribe to accountable. Political parties are the glaring example. Left or Right, doesn’t matter—both sides are quite content to throw feces at each other in what passes for political discourse today. Again, this is shifting blame instead of owning up to a responsibility to accountability. Anytime a voter has checked a box because it had an R or a D next to it with no further thought on the matter, they have abdicated their responsibility to be an informed citizen. If enough citizens do that for long enough, the entire system collapses.
The third accountability breakdown is what happens when external accountability (e.g. the voter) vanishes. Since the parties have entrenched themselves enough to have little need to hold themselves accountable to their voters, they have no need to hold themselves accountable to fair governance. Thus we see practices like gerrymandering—conscious, data-driven efforts to subvert the will of the voters in favor of one party or another. A party accountable to all of the people it purports to represent—not just those within its party—would never tolerate that practice. They would instead find the humility to accept what informed voters decide and adjust their platform accordingly. A party that has abandoned accountability in pursuit of power, however, will weaponize processes like gerrymandering.
Accountability is a core responsibility for American citizens, but accountable to what? Answers like the Constitution or to each other are well and good, but I crave ill-defined, ethereal concepts. Let’s go with vision. It should shock no one that the American government operates on a two-to-four year cycle based around its elections. It is almost impossible to think long term because the next election is never far away, and heaven forbid anything positive from your reign happen during your opponent’s time at the wheel. This is the result of giving up a responsibility towards maintaining a unified vision of the future.
“Unified!” you scoff. “There is nothing that those [insert pejorative slur about opposing tribe here] and I agree on!” Of course not, fair reader. Your hallowed halls are safe from the rampaging barbarians. I am sure none of them believes in wanting a better world for their children, or that people dealing with starvation in the wealthiest nation in the world offends every moral sensibility, or that it is better to be led by honorable men and women than corrupt ones. Ah, I see you lowering your pitchfork and torch.
This is where the abdication of vision leads—when we no longer focus on a common vision all would enjoy, it becomes far too easy for the aforementioned feces throwing. Will all sides agree on the method by which to reach that future? Not a chance. Nor should they! Evidence consistently points towards diversity in thought resulting in better outcomes. I want bold new policies tempered by restraint, just as I want the stalwart practices of old periodically reviewed to see what is safe to jettison. But having those targets helps us look up from the mud to see that mythical city on a hill. It may always be just out of reach, but every step towards it is one taken away from the morass.
Our third abdication of responsibility is often the most difficult to address—listening. People can be shamed into accountability or inspired to hold to a vision. Unfortunately, no silver bullet exists for encouraging a society of individualists to listen to one another. It is disheartening to see tribal statistics like parents’ unwillingness to have their children marry a member of the opposite political party skyrocket. It signifies the deeper concern that those parents have a) decided the other side has no worth, and b) will do their best to pass along those beliefs to their close relations.
“It’s not my fault!” I hear people cry out. “If only they would just listen to me, we could fix this!” What makes us so convinced that the amorphous “they” is always the one that needs to change? Perhaps this goes back to our first abdication of responsibility, that of accountability. Or perhaps it’s even simpler—everyone has issues, and no one has lived someone else’s life.
It’s easy for a struggling white person to think that affirmative action or reparations are ridiculous concepts. After all, they are overwhelmed too. Why should someone else get an additional boost, how is that fair? But if that person listened to what some of those others are saying, they might hear stories about how people have to change their given names on resumes so they don’t get discarded based off that alone. They might hear about the devastation of having an unarmed family member shot by the police during a routine traffic stop. They might hear how terrifying it can be to turn on the news and see a mob of people with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us” in a country theoretically founded on freedom and justice for all.
That sword cuts both ways. An urbanite might look at their fellow citizens living in rural America and raise their nose in disgust at such ignorant viewpoints. But if they listened, they would hear the frustration and rage that comes from having a way of life stripped away bit by bit. Jobs get sent overseas and generations of politicians promise to bring them back but never deliver. Concepts of their self-image they hold dear like religion and family values are mocked on stage and in media. Above all, they hear over and over from fellow citizens who should be on their side how uneducated they are and that they are to blame for all the country’s woes. How else should they react, if not with anger?
A responsibility to listen is demanding. It requires us to put ourselves aside for a moment and open our minds. In a frantic world that demands every second of your attention, you must choose to pause on behalf of another. How easy to step away from that, to focus on yourself instead. How easy from there to turn your back. How easy from there to point the finger in faux-righteousness. And from there, we arrive here.
All of these abdicated responsibilities—accountability, vision, and listening—should be familiar. They are the responsibilities of a functional adult, and isn’t that what democracy demands of us? It is a government for those who wish to be treated as adults, capable individuals who desire to be a part of the system and have their voice heard. Like it or not, that comes with responsibility. And what label do we slap on someone who refuses their responsibilities? The other side of the equation—acting like a child.
There is an option for those who prefer to live as a child. Just as democracies require their citizens to behave as adults, authoritarian systems demand childlike obedience. They remove those responsibilities from citizens in exchange for that obedience, and punish any aberration with the same authority a parent has over a child, unbound by any law save that which they apply to themselves. This system has its temptations. Responsibility is hard. How many of us would love to have someone with all the answers tell us what to do? Can I reasonably expect a single parent of three working two jobs to put in the time to research which candidates from local to federal best represent his or her interests?
That is a question each of us must answer for ourselves. I look to the modern examples of authoritarianism and see horror lurking behind a thin façade of order. Ethnic concentration camps in China, assassination of Russian opposition members, brutal crackdowns of Iranian police on protestors. And while we think these things to be distant threats with no bearing on our lives, it does not start at that level. It starts with an abdication of responsibilities that seems too hard at the time. Maybe we should militarize our police, even if that risks violent escalation against peaceful protests. Maybe we should just listen to whatever our chosen political tribe says, even if that means supporting those who post videos depicting graphic violence against their political opponents. Maybe we should ignore the socioeconomic forces dividing citizens, even if that drives everyone into us versus them camps.
Or maybe we can rise to the challenge. Taking on a responsibility should not be easy, nor should it be done without care and thought. But the wonderful thing about living in a community of people willing to take on those responsibilities is that they do so together. They share that burden across many shoulders. They hold each other accountable when an individual falters. They remind each other of their common vision when someone looks down instead of up. And above all, they make the hard decision to listen when all they want to do is talk.
