Updated on August 21, 2022
The Mortal Mercenary – Teaser
Writing my first novel was both a fantastic and sobering experience. On one hand, I accomplished a lifelong goal and told what I think is a fun story. On the other, I realized after I had “finished” just how rough the product was and how much fine tuning it would need to be palatable. Thus, it sits in the trunk for now as I try to take lessons learned from writing it onto my next project.
One of the areas I know it needs work is the intro. I wrote an entire prologue that has nothing to do with the story writ large and needs to be cut. That said, I absolutely loved this bit and don’t want it to wither away. So here it is in all its glory! I hope you enjoy it.
I took a deep breath, adjusted my polo shirt, and prepared to do battle with forces that had preyed on humanity since before our recorded history.
“Cucumber water, sir?” I asked.
The robed fellow sitting in the plush chair in front of me didn’t bother to look up from his tablet as he raised his hand. I took a glass from the tray I carried and placed it in his upraised palm, making sure the glass was the one with three slices floating in it. He took it without a word of thanks, dismissing me with a flick of his other hand as he continued reading.
I made my way towards the employees only area of the high-end spa, dropping the mandatory cheer from my aching jaw as soon as I pushed through the swinging doors. I checked my watch—according to the schedule Jeeves had lifted off their server, my target’s appointment was in four minutes. Plenty of time to tie up the last loose end before execution. I took a clipboard off one of the nearby desks and stepped through another door.
“Three down to the left,” I said to myself, counting doors along the back hallway attached to the VIP treatment suites. I came to a stop in front of it, confirming the name on the attached whiteboard before going inside.
A man dressed in the same spa uniform as me stopped putting new sheets on the massage table and glanced in my direction. “Who are you?” he asked.
“New hire,” I said, holding up the clipboard. “The boss said I’m supposed to take Mr. LeYensa’s servicing today.”
“That can’t be right,” the employee said, “I’ve been Tomas’s masseuse for over a year.”
I shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you. Take it up with the boss if you feel like it.”
“Let me see that clipboard,” he said, coming around the table. I handed it over and stepped slightly behind him.
“Wait,” he said, his confusion deepening. “This is the potluck sign-up sheet. What are you playing at—”
Whatever else he had to say got cut off as I reached up and put him in a chokehold. He flailed his arms and tried to break my grip, but the hold was tight. I hummed to myself and counted out the seconds, slowly bringing him down as I hit ten. By twenty seconds, he was completely limp and laid out on the floor. I eased off the choke—no one was paying me for him, after all, and clean-up on mortals is always messy. He started coming back around as blood rushed back to his head, but a drop of wyrm venom on his lips settled him back down. I dragged him into the corner room’s tanning bed and tossed an extra sheet over him to keep him hidden. He’d wake up in an hour with a splitting headache and no idea what had happened the past day or so.
Another check of the watch showed I had sixty seconds to go. I finished draping the sheets over the massage table, dimmed the lights, and stepped out the front entrance to greet Tomas.
“Right over here, sir,” the receptionist said, pointing Tomas down the customer hallway towards me before returning to her desk. I plastered the mandatory cheer back on my face and greeted him, noting that for someone supposedly seen by the same man for a year, he didn’t seem to recognize a stranger in his normal masseuse’s place. I suppose we all look alike to his type.
Once we both entered, I closed the door and coughed to cover the sound of flipping the lock.
“The usual,” Tomas said, starting to strip off his robe. He made it halfway out before he hesitated. He shook his head once, then twice, before reaching out to steady himself on the table. I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, watching as his symptoms worsened. His eyes jerked around the room, eventually coming to rest on me just as his legs buckled beneath him.
“What…is happening…to me…” he muttered, fighting against his numbing tongue.
“Nothing too extreme,” I said. “Just a sedative I slipped into your water.”
“You…?” he said, squinting to try to bring me into focus. “I will…rip your heart…out.” He bared his teeth, showing me two fangs extending downward where a human would have incisors. To his credit, he did manage to make it to his feet and take a stumbling step towards me before face planting on the teakwood floor.
“Normally, you would,” I agreed, making my way over and squatting in front of his still open eyes as his breath labored in short gasps. “But then, normally a sedative wouldn’t have this effect on a vampire. That’s why I laced it with holy water. Gives it a nice kick.”
Tomas tried to snarl, but it came out as a wet gurgle instead.
“Don’t worry, you won’t notice a thing when you go unconscious in a minute or so. But before you do, I have to read something to you.” I pulled out my phone and gave him a what-can-you-do grin. “Part of the contract. I’m sure you understand.” His eyes widened as he pieced together what must be happening, but the sedative had spread too far for him to do anything else. “Tomas LeYensa, the Los Angeles coven finds you guilty of theft, blood corruption, and sedition. Let death take you from your eternal life.” I put the phone away and gestured to myself. “I’m here for that second part.”
Fury filled Tomas’s eyes before they creaked shut like a struggling garage door. I gave it another minute to be sure, then stood and nudged him with a toe. His limp body didn’t react, so I started whistling and bent down to put him into a fireman’s carry. I hit the chorus as we reached the tanning bed. “Dirty deeds…” I sang off-key, dumping the vampire onto the bed. “Done. Dirt. Cheap.” I dropped the lid and plugged in the machine before putting a minute on the timer and hitting the start button. I tapped out the next verse of the song on the lid as the scent of brimstone filled the room, periodically checking through the gap to make sure Tomas was getting an even coat.
The timer dinged, and I lifted the lid up to see a vampire-shaped ash pile pouring out of Tomas’s spa robe. I picked up the robe and carried it over to the trashcan, emptying out what was left of the vampire before snapping the robe a few times to clear off the rest. Then I scooped out the ash from the tanning bed and dumped it as well, making sure there was no trace left. That done, I grabbed the unconscious masseuse and propped him up in one of the room’s chairs like he had been napping, before grabbing the trash bag with Tomas’s ashes and heading for the door.
My name is Zeke Hunter, and I’m the Mortal Mercenary. From the arcane to the profane, I take care of any of your supernatural needs for the right price. Vampires vanquished, ghouls garroted, and specters spaced or your money back—minus expenses, of course. But the most important thing you need to know about me is this:
I love my job.
Posted on July 31, 2022
Individualism versus Community
As an American, I was raised on a steady diet of individualism and what it brings to the world. At the same time, my upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints highlighted how community can and does benefit everyone involved. Unfortunately, these two forces exist in opposition. Where is the line drawn between them? More specifically, at what point do the costs of individualism outweigh its benefits?
As with most dichotomies, both sides carry unique pros and cons. Individualism is often associated with creativity, a push for change or growth, and a certain vibrancy hard to find elsewhere. On the other hand, community brings stability and security, along with the comfort of belonging. I’d hazard a guess that we all agree both sets of qualities are worth pursuing. That said, both sides of this equation also have their darker elements. When individualism is taken to the extreme, you get the Unabomber. Community taken to the extreme means a Jonestown. The sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle
Finding that balance is a never-ending assessment carried out within a community. I stress that it is the community that must decide on its accepted level of individualism. After all. the community owns the ultimate power over the individual with the threat of ostracism. This creates an interesting balancing of scales, because the individual can threaten the whole structure of the community through a single action. That particular equation generally goes one way—an individual can have an outsize negative impact far easier than a positive one. Mass shooters, suicide bombers, and the who guy who poisoned random pill bottles can change things far more dramatically for a community than a single positive action.
The battle between individualism and community boils down to two facts. The long term favors the community because of its stability and its ability to drive out individuals that threaten the status quo beyond accepted levels. Short-term favors the individual, whose actions can sometimes cause enough disruption to rock a community and force change that might otherwise not occur. If the action is destructive enough, the community might fracture along fault lines or newly discovered tribal loyalty. The community’s ability to resist this depends on its resiliency, which I think stems from its tolerance of individualism within its structure. A community willing to accept the eccentrics and oddballs within its circle is one more ready to ride out seismic change brought about by the same individuals.
What is the point of this diatribe? It’s me trying to understand potential solutions to the excessive polarization that my country faces today. I have no studies or evidence beyond my own observations from which to draw conclusions, but I feel that the rampant individualism at the heart of most Americans was always destined to end this way. The increased Balkanization of American community driven by extremists on the fringe threatens the stability that community should offer its citizenry. As that overarching community gets torn into smaller and smaller pieces, what security it once offered is sacrificed on the altar of individualism.
America needs a reset of its community. This goes beyond Republican versus Democrat, minority versus white, or any other arbitrary difference we might assign to fellow Americans. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s the willingness to go out of one’s way to help a neighbor. It’s the willingness to take joy in another success, even at the expense of one’s own. It’s the desire to see a more inclusive “us” instead of focusing hostility on a “them”.
Let’s strive for a world where it’s easier to have the word “we” on our lips instead of “I”.
Posted on July 18, 2022
Cybersecurity and the Infinite Game
Cyberspace. The infinite game. Sounds like a pitch meeting for the next Tron meeting. Alas, it’s just another ham-fisted attempt to glean Sec+ CEUs via blogpost. Today’s stretched metaphor will crib from Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game and the concept of, well, infinite games.
Let’s start with defining a finite game. This is the easiest to grasp as it comes up all the time in our lives. In it, you have defined roles of who is playing, what the rules are for the players, and what the end state looks like. Chess is an example of a finite game: two players, pieces can only move in prescribed ways to agreed upon effects, and the game ends either when one side checkmates the other or a stalemate is reached where no checkmate is possible. Easy peasy.
Infinite games, however, throw all that out the window. They have no set number of players. In fact, players coming and going as resources and will allow is a major part of what makes something an infinite game, so the number you play against today might be different than the number tomorrow. The rules are also in flux, as anyone—you included—has the ability to toss expectations out the window and flex to something new. Most importantly, an infinite game has no end set. There is no “winning” an infinite game, just the effort to keep playing as long as possible.
Running a business is an example of this. No one “wins” at business. You can have a good year and rake in some profits, but topping arbitrary metrics in no way makes you the best and forces other players to cede the field to you. The game continues as long as the company can operate, until eventually it can’t. But even at that point, the game goes on with whatever players remain until the cows come home.
Now let’s translate this to cybersecurity. Players shift, rules vary depending on the day, and just like in business, no one can win. You can go an entire year with zero breaches, but that gains you exactly nothing when it comes to the next attempt to crack your network. What does this mean for cybersecurity professionals? You have to view your efforts through an infinite lens if you have any hope of succeeding.
Another example. Say that you are considering educating your workforce on social engineering. A finite game solution might involve genning up a briefing, providing it to everyone in the organization, then chalking it up as a win with no need for future efforts. You’ve accomplished all the metrics, after all! Every player has been briefed, the rules are clear in that everyone had to attend and possibly pass a knowledge check to verify they paid attention, and you assess your victory if no one clicks on a suspicious link.
Cybersecurity (and organizational reality), however, do not fall in such clean lines. You have no guarantee that the organizational members you briefed today are the same as the ones who are a part of your team tomorrow, and you have zero control over what tactics and techniques adversaries may use trying to trick them. Rules mean less than nothing to a creative threat, and there’s every chance that threat can come from inside your organization. And finally, there can never be a victory in cybersecurity because there’s always another attack on the horizon.
Maintaining an infinite mindset is difficult. Our minds crave patterns, and a finite game provides those for us. By its nature, an infinite game forces us to look beyond the simple solution and accept that we do not have the level of control we’d hope for. But its in viewing that infinite horizon that a cybersecurity professional can protect his or her network for another day, which is as close to victory as we can hope to get.
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.
