For those of you who read every word in a sentence, you might already know the subject matter that has triggered this post - the first draft of my soft sci-fi novel, codenamed G.J., is indeed complete. I wrote the last lines last Tuesday, March 31, 2026. My personal life then got very busy with preparations for Easter and a family visit, so I haven’t had much time to reflect as I’d like on what exactly that means in a way that would be enjoyable to read, so we’ll just hit the hard numbers, wax poetic about next steps, and get out of here. Let’s start.

Let’s Distract Ourselves with Some Numbers

It would be rude to just drop a graph on you, so here’s a brief bit of introduction before the graphic is so rudely shoved into your face. Alright, we’ve done this bit before, let’s get to it. 

Part three took a little more to wrap up than I thought. ~36,000 words went into setting up and then unraveling the end of this book and as it stands, the ending feels sort of abrupt even given that. I’ll be the first to admit, I struggle with endings. They are the hardest part for me by far. Beginnings are much, much easier since you can always write more to help them out, but endings are where the writing stops. If I were a betting man, I’d put money on me spending the most time in the revision just on getting the ending right.

This puts the total word count for the book around 94k, which is the most I’ve ever written for a singular purpose before. 

And that’s kind of neat, right? 

Let’s hit you with some weird counts.

Number of times I used the word “the:” 7177 
Number of times the letter “e” occurred: 46246 
Number of times “said” occurred: 57
Number of times “says” occurs: 347 

This is fun, right? You’re enjoying this? I don’t know what to do now, so let’s get to the next bit:

What Now, Idiot?

Well, what comes next is what makes me feel so panicky, because now begins the hard part. Revision. Rewriting. Cleaning everything up so that it all makes sense and feels engineered while remaining seemingly effortless. I’m not sure how or when, but the next step will be to go through line by line and readdress it all. 

For some writers, this involves printing out the work. It might just be that’s what this writer does as well in this instance. Printing things out shifts the part of the brain that glosses over what it already knows. Removing the screen between me and the work is also a shift in what area of the brain is active. It’ll also make the thing feel real in a way that sometimes screens obfuscate. Printing out over 340 pages of a story might make the dizzy feeling go away.

Or it might make it worse. Either way, we go into revision now and make the work better. Make the work complete. Whole. Right now, it’s a complete thing but the complete thing is held together by a lack of sleep and a fervent desperation to reach the end of something. That end has been reached, so now we can start again with fresh eyes. Take the beast piece by piece and ensure the pieces belong to the same beast. 

That sort of thing. It’ll be a bit more nebulous as far as tracking progress goes, but I’ll be sure to keep you updated in the meantime. Between you and me, I will also be putting this work aside for at least a month to let the memories of writing it fade a bit. The philosophy behind this is that upon next I lay my weary eyes on it, they will be more akin to a reader than that of the writer of the piece and that sort of distance will provide some much needed perspective to identify areas hat do not work as well. I’m not sure why this last sentence is written like that, but it is, and thus we move on. Revision is for the novel, not for the blog post about the novel. 

Thanks

I wish to give anyone and everyone who has read even just a second or even just a word of this blog a thanks for reading. If you’ve let me know that you’ve read, thank you too. If you haven’t and wish to remain in the shadows, that’s cool, but know that I thank you. 

But really, just knowing that someone is out there reading even just the silly stuff I write is a huge motivation and a big reason why this book, that I wrote, exists at all. 

I’ll keep writing if you keep reading. That’s kind of how this works. So, thank you for reading. 

I’ll try not to let you down.

Or something. 

—

Post Script: The very bad first version of this post opened the following way:

It feels weird to be writing this on what felt like a random Tuesday in March, but today is the day that I finished the first draft of my soft sci-fi novel, codenamed G.J. 

Yes, the first draft of the book is done. I am no longer carrying around plot points in my head for G.J. It feels dizzy. I feel dizzy. It hasn’t sunk in yet that the draft is done, but maybe if I type it a few more times, I’ll start to get it.

The draft is done. 

I have a first draft of a novel. 

I wrote a novel. 

Maybe one of these will stick in my brain sometime soon, but right now? All I feel is panic.

Anyway, here comes the heading.

Graph Time

Yeah, we’re going straight to the progress graph. The crux of these types of articles coming straight to you. It’s here, right now. 

Part 3 is shaping up to be quite more of a beast than I thought it would. Right now, I’m still at a building point of all the dominoes that are gonna fall before the end and we’re almost even with all of the action of Part 2. At this rate, we’re probably going to be damn near close to 100,000 words, which isn’t really a problem but it does strike me as a concern for the pacing of this final bit. 

Long story short, I probably need to cut a good bit of what’s going on in Part 3 and part of that is on me for taking so long between actively writing. 

But hey, look, we expanded the graph to go all the way to 100,000 and that’s pretty neat. Also, on that 100,000 maximum mark, it turns out the word count is a little more flexible when it comes to science fiction and fantasy novels. They get some extra bit of leeway when it comes to a hard word count. Now, there does seem to be a tendency for non-established writers to be expected to follow more of a shorter count than say, Brandon Sanderson, so we’re doing our best not to go over into the realm of excess. 

It is still fascinating to me the amount of progress I’ve gotten done despite my mental health being somewhat lacking for creative works lately. If you recall, our original graph looked like this:

Remember when we were worried about hitting 40,000 words? And also how wrong we were about novel lengths? 

That graph was from last September and here we are, a good 70,000+ words later. 

Anyway, what’s new?

Uh Oh, More Graphs?

Uh, yeah. So something strange happened to me that hasn’t happened in a while and there’s a new fiction project bouncing around the ole noggin. It happened when I was driving, a particular phrase got stuck in my head and I built a quasi-story outline out from there and before I knew it, I was writing a different story that wasn’t my main novel. This one feels like it’ll be short at least, so there’s that, but here’s a little look behind the curtain at what our fiction projects graph would look like with this new data in mind.

Yeah, a tiny baby of a story that’s just sort of coming into its own. The fun part about short stories is they can be sort of any length, as long as it’s around 5000 or so. Online publications tend to like shorter lengths, traditional doesn’t mind unless it’s like 20,000. Don’t do that. 

O.D.i.S.i.t.P. is a quasi-sci-fi story but more in the vein of literary fiction than anything else. It’ll be a tonally different piece from G.J. and probably fit more in with the collection that is D.o.L.G., but it’s unwritten as of yet, so all of this remains to be seen. Insert a joke about speculating on speculative fiction here. Okay, I’m not going to do that. 

In a way, it’s exciting to have a new story in the rotation. In other ways, it is extremely frustrating to be spending any more time not working on the novel. Because I really want that draft done so I can put it aside for a bit and let my head do anything else. 

Current Obstacles

The main difficulty standing in my way as of now is my own brain. The third act of this novel hasn’t been as smooth as the other two Parts and that’s sort of bringing the whole psyche down. Advice I’ve read suggests to jump around at this point and then work backward to connect the separate parts, but the problem is there’s nowhere really left to jump besides the next bit. 

When you’re so close to the end, you sort of run out of runway. 

The other big obstacle in my life is Mewgenics. For those unfamiliar, Ed McMillen (The Binding of Isaac) has released a new video game that is completely dominating my waking life. It’s a turn-based strategy game (my genre of choice), with rougelike elements (my second favorite genre) involving breeding cats to go to war for you (almost a homerun, I don’t have any feelings about cats, but two out of three ain’t bad). Runs consist of beating battle after battle through different maps with branching routes and at first I thought it was manageable, but each success has revealed yet another map that must be conquered. 

So, those two things coupled with life and the everyday struggles of raising a young one are sort of stepping on the neck of my creative endeavors as of now. 

If we can somehow get past these, we’ll be golden. I’m not going to keep you here longer than necessary, so this’ll be the end of the update. 

If you feel so inclined to remind me to finish my book, please feel free to reach out on instagram. My handle is beararmsandfire for reasons I won’t get into here. Maybe one day I’ll tell that story. Anyway, go forth and conquer. 

Or something.

—

Television is one of my great daily comforts, or well, it used to be when I had time to watch it on a regular basis (i.e., before the birth of my daughter). We’ve switched eating in front of the television to eating as a family, which is great and ensures that our little one is able to get the nutrients she needs to grow up healthy and strong. I am missing out on a lot of premium television, however.

In the scant hours I do have to watch television, I find myself exhausted. Whether it be from the deluge of mind-freaking (sorry Criss Angel) news on a daily basis or yet another personal problem cropping up to stop my creative flow in its tracks (sorry writing projects), it is hard to invest the time and energy into consuming a new television show. Instead, I find myself falling back into shows I’ve already watched and letting the familiarity wash over me while my brain takes a respite, however brief it might be. 

I’ve not been one in the past to rely on a “comfort” show, but here I am watching the first season of The Pitt for a third time, wondering, how did I get here? 

Shows, Revisited

This isn’t to say I have never rewatched a show before; I’m not suggesting that in the slightest. There are a few shows that I have experienced in my life that have left such a lasting impression that call me to reexperience them in their fullness on a semi-occasional basis. Scrubs and Bojack Horseman are two drama-adjacent comedies that I find myself rewatching from time to time. The sketch comedy ventures of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson and Aunty Donna’s Big Ole House of Fun are also two quick watches that I revisit. 

However, these are more subjects of study than they are pleasurable mind-numbing treatments. I love studying these shows to figure out how they tick or how to replicate some of the more powerful feelings they provoke. I’m more watchmaker than watchlooker, if you catch my drift.

Dissecting why something works can be a fun exercise in learning the tools of the trade, but it is energy hungry work and doesn’t suit the sort of parameters one might describe as a Comfort Show. 

The Office is one such often cited comfort show, a sitcom based in an office with off the wall characters who start out relatable, but ultimately end up versions of themselves who very few would tolerate in the workplace. I’ve heard of people who rewatch other sitcoms like Friends for those who grew up in the 90’s or in my dad’s case Seinfeld, to the point where he can more recite the episode than watch it. 

Then we have the genre of television that is almost engineered to be a rewatchable show that brings the viewer comfort. Not in the form of mind-numbing or sheer enjoyability, but in the form of always providing an answer to the problems encountered during its runtime. Comfort in the form of there always being a solution. Comfort in the form of a reality where things always work out in the end. 

I speak, of course, of the procedural drama.

Drama, Procedural’d 

Medical procedurals, crime procedurals, law procedurals, it matters not. All of these genres operate in the same fashion. A problem is introduced in the cold open that leads to the introduction of our long established protagonists. Those protagonists bring in their episodic issues that are explored in-between the solving of the major problem, which is complicated and twisted throughout the middle. All of which leads up to a nice packaged solution that brings the case to a close while furthering the interpersonal dramas of the cast involved in solving the case. Every single episode (minus pilots, sweeps week, and finales, which all build on an ever-growing arc of a story that may or may not be the real focus of the show) plays out in this manner.. 

Entries in this category are your classic Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, NYPD Blue, any of the 9-1-1 shows, etc., and they are all various levels of success in their related genre or sub-genre as evident by their many, many, many seasons. 

The appeal is very easy to understand. Humans love puzzles. Our brains are wired to try to solve puzzles. Puzzle solving is also very energy intensive, however, but the feeling of solving a puzzle can be easily triggered through these shows. Somewhere down the line, the creators of these shows and stories figured out that by presenting a mystery, showing how one might solve said mystery, and the unraveling of the mystery by some other party can trigger the same feelings of having solved the mystery oneself. Agatha Christie made a living in this manner. Arthur C. Doyle did as well. It’s no wonder that some of the earliest examples of serialized works just so happen to be mystery novels. There’s something in the puzzle of it all. 

These works also have an appeal in that they contain the answer to the mysteries they pose. Unlike real life, the answer exists and is worked out given that the work is published. Dangling a mystery in front of an audience is not the difficult part. Providing the answer is, especially if the answer is satisfying and doesn’t raise further questions. 

This stands in the face of real life where the daily puzzles and mysteries we face have no prewritten answer for us to discover at the end of the episode. Sudden illnesses, murders, and other such topics explored in these shows can sometimes just happen for no reason at all, which is rather unsatisfying. 

According to Project Cold Case, an organization involved advocating for families involved in unsolved crimes, from 1965 to 2023 there were 1,031,942 homicides in the United States of America. 685,669 of those homicides were solved meaning there is a 66.44% clearance rate for murder in the U.S. during this time period. So for a shocking 34.56% of families related to homicide victims, there still is no answer long after their “episode,” that is the period when the crime immediately impacted their life much as it would in a television show, ended.

On the other hand, it can be very hard to find answers in the medical field. People sometimes bounce from specialist to specialist trying to nail down what exactly is wrong with them. There are conditions out there that medical experts still dispute and argue over to this day with Chronic Lyme Disease being just one I can name off the top of my head. “Leaky Gut Syndrome” is another, and beyond that, various slices of the population in certain demographics struggle with getting medical professionals to take their pain seriously enough to nail down a diagnosis. 

While there are no official statistics for how many people die from conditions that are only diagnosed posthumously, the John Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence estimates that approximately 795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled each year due to diagnostic errors from a study conducted in 2023. For these people, there might have been the feeling of finally having an answer, but it was the wrong one, and the wrong answer can be just as unsatisfying as the correct one. 

Real life doesn’t quite measure up to procedural television when it comes to a satisfying ending and of course it doesn’t. The continuation of real life does not hinge upon audience ratings. Our experiences being satisfactory does not necessitate its ending. To put it simply, life goes on. Television shows don’t always. 

House, M.D.’d

To get personal for a minute, in April of 2024, my sister suffered from a stroke and from complications of the treatment of that stroke suffered a double bowel rupture that landed her in the hospital for 41 days. She has since made a full recovery and is back to living a normal life, but for the rest of that year and most of 2025, my family lived in a state of not having the answers. We still, in fact, do not have the answers as to what exactly went wrong. 

During this time, I found myself wishing for some larger than life character to swoop in and provide us with the solace that comes with knowledge. Not in a “is everything going to be okay,” way, but in a “this caused the stroke, and we can treat it by doing this” way. This hunger for answers led me down the road of seeking out solace from false prophets: fake television doctors. 

And one such doctor provided some very much needed solace in the form of continuously providing answers to the most difficult medical cases of his day. That doctor is none other than Dr. Gregory House of the show House, M.D., a Sherlockian archetype hobbled by his personal addictions to fight his demons while wisecracking and insulting his way to the answers to the case-of-the-week every time. (Save for the few times that he does, in fact, not find the answer, as the show liked to do from time to time). 

For those who have not watched House, M.D., it is a revelation to the medical procedural drama in that the cases are not always the focus. Experimental at times in style and substance with medical problems and solutions that rival even the most outlandish fantasies of medical writing, House, M.D. is a procedural on its own level of quality. And for moments when you are in the darkest modes of thinking, House can provide you with the hope that somewhere out there is a cranky drug addict doctor who might just have all the answers. 

I rewatched all 117 episodes of the eight seasons of the show over the course of 2025. There was solace there. And my sister got better. I’d like to think these things are related, but to suggest so would be magical thinking and verge on being delusional, so I won’t. 

Point is, I get the allure of a medical procedural. I get the allure of seeking out media that always provides an answer. It is a drug unlike anything else. A dark genie that promises everything while delivering nothing. And in that way, I think procedural dramas can be very, very damaging to one’s psyche and warp one’s sense of reality. If all you consume is media where the answers are found every time, you start to think that’s how the world works and from the statistics I quoted in the earlier section, it’s simply not. 

Pitt, The’d 

Enter The Pitt. My new comfort show, apparently. The Pitt is a quasi-medical procedural in that one season is a single shift at an emergency room of a hospital. Every episode is the subsequent hour of that shift. A single hour may have several different cases presented and solved in a satisfying, real-to-life pacing. Oh, did I say solved? That’s a misspeak. Cause they don’t always solve the case. Sometimes, the person just dies and the diagnosis comes posthumously. There’s always an answer, but it’s not always in time. Sometimes, the answer is simply “it was their time.”

The Pitt has become my comfort show not because of the cases and the procedures to those solutions. It’s not about how satisfying the solutions are. It’s become my comfort show because of the characters, how these doctors and nurses never stop trying to provide health care to their charges. There’s some fun dialogue and playful exchanges peppered here and there, but the real draw of the show for me is the unrelenting pacing of everything. 

I’m not going to spoil the first season of the show and I’ll ask you not to spoil the second season currently airing, as I’m waiting for the whole season to be out so I can devour it all at once before inevitably rewatching it. That makes discussing it vis a vis the purpose of this article a bit difficult, but I think the most satisfying thing about the show for me is that there isn’t always an answer. It’s more lifelike in that regard and given the structure and nature of how the show creators are telling this story through the lens of a single shift, there are questions we will never get the answer to as the next season will be somewhere in the future to nurture character growth and present new problems.

I very much enjoy that the show does not coddle me in that regard, unlike a House, M.D., for instance. The media we consume, the words we read, the words we say and use, all of it shapes how we perceive the world and I think it’s important to challenge that perception from time to time to foster growth. 

The Pitt challenged my perception of medical procedurals being “soft” on critical thinking by dulling the world through always providing an easy to digest answer by the end of the episode and gave me a glimpse of what it’s like to work in an emergency room. The show, through events that happen later in the season, promoted a huge push for people to donate blood.

We need more media that provokes real world change and challenges people’s perceptions of the world. For now, I’ll find comfort in this one new show that does that for me while keeping an eye out for the next one. 

Or something.

To put it briefly, the start of 2026 has not been too kind to my overall mental state. National and global events have taken a toll, sure, but privately there have been a few events that have bludgeoned my dumb little head like a ton of emotionally charged bricks. 

For one, I lost my godfather earlier this month after a brief but intense bout with cancer. He tied, taking the cancer with him in the heroic way that people fighting cancer do. Anyone who has ever died of cancer technically didn’t “lose their battle,” cause the cancer goes with them - that’s a tie. Norm McDonald taught me that.

Add on that we cannot go one day without an aneurysm inducing headline and the writing environment is a bit tainted as of late. It doesn’t help that I spent the entire holiday time on a little break that has proven hard to kickstart out of. 

But there is progress, yes. The work will continue. Here’s where we stand.

G.J. Gets an Epilogue

A few months ago, my soft sci-fi novel skewed at young adults got an epilogue. It had been bouncing around my head for a few days, so I officially jumped ahead and penned it so I could focus on the scenes I was writing. 

This, folks, is groundbreaking news for little ole me, because now I know where we’re heading. I mean, I always sort of knew and have known as outlined in the plot of the novel, but now I know for sure that’s where we’ll end up because it’s written down. Now all I have to do is ensure we get there and we’re golden. 

I think I’ve talked about it before, but I typically don’t outline my stories, at least not in any physical sense. Sure, my head is constantly swirling the same scant scenes and facts for the next bit or the bit after that, but I find that the writing helps solidify where the plot goes more than trying to see it all beforehand. 

This is kind of the first time I’ve been able to write with a destination in mind, and it’s refreshing. I have a lot to get through, but at least I know where I’ll leave you, would-be-reader, when it’s all said and done. 

There’s an end in sight and I know what it looks like, so it’ll be easier to know when I’ve arrived. That being said, we’re looking through a telescope or something, cause we have a long ways to go.

Return of Our Graph

I’ll spare you and only show one graph this time around, since there’s only progress on one project. I did jot down the beginning of a new thing on an airplane around Thanksgiving, but it’ll be sitting on the backburner until I’m stuck again. 

Here’s where we stand with G.J.:

A total of 69627 words and Part 3 is nearly half-way done. Our baby tiny Epilogue weighs just under 800 words, and that’s good. It doesn’t need to be any longer than that. 

I needed to see this, in a way, because to be honest I’ve been getting a bit panicky with how Part 3 is going. At times it feels as though I need to speed up the pacing of it, and I probably will in a revision, but seeing that there’s roughly 13,000 or so words left to put it on par with the other two parts feels good in a way. I’m not shortchanging the ending. 

To rip the curtain off the rod, I’m about to approach the midpoint of Part 3 that will accelerate us toward the end, I hope, and this little spotcheck is serving the purpose of letting me see visually what can be so hard to see in the Google Doc file. 

I’ve heard of writers who print out their work so they can physically see the shape of their story and I guess this is my numbers-based, environment-friendly version of doing that. So, that’s kind of neat.

So we’re on our way to the home stretch. I have most of what will happen next plotted out in my head and all that remains is putting fingers to keys to ink it down, as it were.

What Now?

Well, I guess I need to get to work and finish the first draft of this novel so I can start rewriting it to make it seem like it was good from the get go. Disgraced writer and alleged sex-pest Neil Gaiman once said in response to how to write a novel, and I paraphrase, “First, write down everything that happens in the novel. Then, rewrite to make it seem like you knew what you were doing all along.” If that’s not right, I’m not about to double check the words of an alleged sex-pest, so…

But that’s the plan - write down everything that happens in the story, then rewrite it so it seems like I knew what I was doing. 

As to what happens after that? Who knows, but this space will return to a land of Word Reviews, Airplane Thoughts, and the odd article about a video game I’m currently playing. So, a return to form with a dash of book updates every now and then. 

All the while working on my mental state. Hopefully for the better. 

Oh and find a better way to end my articles.

Or something. 

This time around, we’re going to take a bent that many people have probably griped about in their days traveling through airports, the food. Yes, the food. When one thinks of a liminal space, one thinks of the physical, traversable places designed for human transportation between thresholds, but we’ll be tapping into the second definition for our exploration of food, that being something that occupies a position at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, as put forth by Oxford languages. 

Cause there’s one thing that airport food is not and that is anywhere close to where it stands outside of the confines of an airport. 

A Look into Airport Restaurants

As I booked an evening flight as to preserve my precious accrued PTO, I naturally have worried about this airport experience for the entire length of my day. If you’ve ever read one of those memes concerning when someone has a 3:00 pm appointment so they can’t get anything done in their day, I am one of those people who find such notions relatable. It may just be the specific flavor of anxiety that I possess, but I cannot relax until I have gone over most or all of the details of my plans at least twice.

This lead me to look up the restaurants located at my local airport, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, a place I have spent many hours in and am very familiar with - however, this particular time I am flying Southwest instead of American, and that would mean spending time on the opposite side of the airport than I am accustomed to. 

Hence, the looking up of restaurants and looking at menus and planning out my evening spent waiting for an 8:20 flight that boards at 7:50 with designs to arrive two hours before the boarding time because I received a text at 4:18 suggesting I do so. 

One of the results of the search ABIA Airport Restaurants brought me to a reddit thread of the Austin subreddit asking for recommendations for someone who has to eat at the airport and buried underneath the many snarky replies suggestion that they do not do that was a nugget of knowledge that I had never considered before. One such user, who will go unnamed, put forth the potential factoid that airport restaurants have no connection to their parent restaurants and that the name and menu are licensed out to a contractor company for use in the airport. The company in question, it turns out, is called a concessions contractor company and is a third party entity willing to submit to all sorts of regulations involved with operating out of an airport that a normal restaurant doesn’t want to deal with. 

Here’s a link to a page that the city of Austin has created to explain the intricacies of such a relationship that allows us to enjoy subpar food at opulent prices, aka, the concept this article is all about, basically. Why don’t you read over it while I take another sip of my $14 local Austin beer. Don’t want to read it? Fine, I’ll summarize a few points here - I just wanted a reason to mention the price of the beer I’m drinking and that it’s local to Austin.

Basically, all retail and food shops found in airports are run by third party concessions contract companies who license the name, products, and menus of certain establishments to ensure there are opportunities to shop and eat in airports. The contracts go as far as the name and the menu offerings, but do not touch on certain aspects like the cooking of the food, sourcing of ingredients, or even quality of service. So while the restaurant you order a burger from might have the name Burger King, it’s technically not a Burger King, just a restaurant that has licensed the name and products of a Burger King. 

In the case of Austin, there are not many chain offerings found in the concourse as ABIA is one of the first local-first airports, meaning 85% of their retail and food offerings are focused on local Austin establishments. According to Contract Management Specialist Cassandra Thomas in that link I posted earlier, “Our passengers love to come into the airport and see the same iconic brands they have seen on the street side. They get to be immersed in the Austin vibe by enjoying the quality of the food along with live music playing.”

Which, I can agree with to a point - the Austin airport does feel very Austin, in a corporate, washed down way that still makes it stand out from other airports. There were actually two live bands I walked past to get to this quiet nook to write this post, which is actually another stage that’s not being used right now. 

But this whole mess with contracts and third party companies, that’s where the meat of the matter is for our liminal exploration is, if you can excuse the weak food-based pun. 

Fried Imitation Reality

You have no idea, but I just moved between sections from my quiet secluded corner in front of that unused stage to the gate for my flight. Why did I do this? For one, I couldn’t hear any of the concourse-wide announcements and swore I kept hearing my last name every time someone said checkpoint. And for two, so that I could be positioned to look at a particular eating establishment that just so happens to be across from my gate tonight. 

Let me introduce you to Hut’s Hamburgers, a place I tried to eat at but had to pass up due to there being no express or to-go options (and I refuse to get tied down to a sit-down restaurant in an airport do my immense fear of missing a flight (and wasting the purchase cost of an airline ticket)). 

For those of you who do not know, Hut’s Hamburgers is a local Austin mainstay for greasy, delicious, hamburgers at a fair price. Or, well, I should say Hut’s Hamburgers was a local Austin mainstay, since the only physical location outside of the airport closed in October of 2019. 

Established in 1939 on South Congress, one of the main thoroughfares of Downtown Austin, before moving 30 years later to its last known location on 6th Street, the late night party spot of Austin, Hut’s Hamburgers was a favorite spot for anyone seeking one of the best burgers of the city. The reason for closing was found to not be a landlord dispute for increasing rent, as became increasingly more common in the years subsequent its closing, but rather the owners wanting to move in a different direction, as Nadia Chaudhury writes in the linked article. 

But, sitting across from me in this very concourse, is a ghost, a memory of that erstwhile eating establishment. Hut’s Hamburgers lives on through the zombie that wears its skin on the other side of TSA security and will remain in this location until 2029 at the earliest, as all concession contracts for ABIA run 10 years. 

Yeah, the same year that the main location closed down was also the same year that saw the Hut’s Hamburgers in the airport open up, an almost non-equivalent exchange as there is nothing in the kitchen resembling the original designs and vision for the restaurant outside of the literal types of ingredients (ground beef, etc.). 

Enter liminality. Enter a state of being between two thresholds. The Hut’s Hamburgers that I’m writing about exists in a state of in-between - it is neither the original nor is it its own thing, cursed to live in the echo of the licensing of a dead restaurant. The result is something hollow, something that has become all but endemic for the city of Austin at large - corporatization of something unique for the sake of celebrating what makes Austin special while at the same time losing that special quality due to over-corporatization. 

In a way, it’s a bit ironic. While Hut’s Hamburgers did not close for reasons similar to that of so many unique Austin eateries closing down, that is absurd rent increases as a disguise for selling the property off to make room for more condos, it is being kept alive (somewhat) through a corporate policy that mandates concessions contracts be good for 10 years. In other words, Hut’s Hamburgers Airport Edition has rent control while so many other restaurants have closed facing rent increases aimed at forcing the owners to close so the property can be sold. 

I’m not saying that rent controlling restaurant leases is the move, but I’m also not not saying that, so. 

The point is, through a contract agreement, the name Hut’s Hamburgers limps along, even if it’s just in the form of an airport restaurant. Now I can’t speak to the quality of the food there, but if the grilled chicken sandwich I just ate from a certain Noble Sandwiches is anything to go by, I can’t imagine the food is all that great. And on that note:

Attack of the Dead Restaurants

Another restaurant that I have frequented many times at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport is a chicken place by the name of Flyrite. My spouse and I even turned it into somewhat of an in-joke saying you didn’t Fly Right if you didn’t get Flyrite (and if anyone working for whoever is running that restaurant wants to buy that off me, I can be reached at hshepardwords@gmail.com). Flyrite is a curious case because prior to my realization that most of their physical locations had closed, I only had the opportunity to eat at this airport version.

The airport version, which is still in operation to this day, is terrible. 

The restaurant version of Flyrite (as depicted on this architect website) is closed. 

However, what is available to me are countless reviews of the restaurant insisting that the quality had continued to dip and dip; that it is mercy that the place closed down. 

And here I am with a memory of really liking the food, but no outlet with which to verify that the food was as good as I’m remembering. If I want the La Croix version, I can try the airport Flyrite, but run the risk of having an expensive, terrible time while being trapped in the confines of an airport and I’d much rather have an expensive, mediocre time instead. 

This isn’t what I mean by attack, by the way, not by a longshot. The real attack is found in the repeated adjective in that last paragraph - the expense of these mediocre to terrible facsimiles of actual, honest-go-good great places (objectable) to eat. 

Here, have a picture of the actual meal I ate across from that abandoned stage.

Good ahead. Look at it. A chicken sandwich and some fries. (Beer is exempt from this scenario). Take a guess at how much this very simple meal set me back. 

Got your guesses in? Placed your bet on poly-market or whatever? Good. It was $25.00. $25.00 for a frozen grilled chicken patty and some fresh (and very tasty) fries. Now, let me take a look at what that same chicken sandwich costs at the brick-and-mortar establishment located a–oh wait, it’s permanently closed. 

Yet another dead restaurant roused from its grave to serve out an airport contract in the form of presenting what Austin is really like to those traveling to, through, or out of it. Luckily, the internet has provided a glimpse into what the “real” restaurant might charge for prices at an indeterminable date. According to this uploaded menu, the chicken sandwich I bought would have cost $8.46 and the fries…wouldn’t exist. 

The last known location for Noble Sandwich company closed in September of 2019. I never had a chance to try the actual food and experience the vision of the people who worked hard to make it special, but for $25.00 I can be disappointed in an airport across from an empty, barren stage.

The Austin Airport is a graveyard, it turns out, for restaurants pretending to be alive while each one of them is stuck in a state of limbo, not being quite alive nor dead through the sheer force of will of an contract with a third party concessions company that has no bearings on what each place actually meant to the city of Austin at large. 

De-boarding at the Final Destination

One of the draws of liminality and liminal spaces is the eeriness that one feels while exploring them. There is something uncanny about an abandoned space designed for people. A place designed for people sans people cannot help but feel haunted by the intent of the space - even when no one is on the playground, we feel those who must have played there, else why does the playground exist? 

Where the internet comes in and invents liminal-inspired horror experiences is the crossover of that feeling and the idea that something not human designed the human-intended space. A nonhuman creator of a human space cannot know the reasons behind such designs, just the elements that are found in them - so stairs lead to nowhere, doors open to nothing, hallways echo into other hallways without terminal ends. 

The same sentiment can be felt through the necromancy of restaurants existing long past their physical locations. The design wasn’t human; it’s only through the magic of corporate contract-making that these places even still exist, even if in name only. And that’s just plain eerie. These places shouldn’t exist; they no longer represent the city as they once did as the city has all but ensured that they can’t exist through an ever increasing need to develop high-income condos downtown. 

And to add insult, where the liminal-feeling ends, they charge at least double the price for half or less of the quality at rates that would force the establishments they masquerade as to close. 

This may just be a problem of the human-designed liminal space for human occupants. There’s too much bottomline and operational costs to factor in. I’ve never seen an overpriced chicken sandwich in The Backrooms. No one charges me an admittance fee for Pools. We thought all along that the true horror of these spaces was the thought of a non-human designer creating a trap for humans by mimicking the appearance of reality, but maybe the true horror is that these experiences are designed without profit in mind. And maybe the horrified are investors.

Or something. 

I have often thought of this particular stretch of time as the annual Void, where expectations are nonexistent, ambitions are nowhere to be found, and the only agenda item is to simply exist without the preconceived notions of survival. The Void is a retreat. The Void is safe. The Void is necessary to recharge for a completely new year of bullshit. Let us all embrace the Void. 

That is what I wanted to write two weeks ago. Here I am, a full week into 2026, typing it now because beyond all of the benefits of the Void, it is also seductively dangerous, and is threatening to swallow me whole. 

Objects at Rest

The effects of inertia on bodies of matter have been well-studied, so I won’t bore you with an extensive metaphor - I’m the body of matter and I have been at rest. The slippery sides of that annual Void have gripped me and slipped me down into the soft comforts of an empty head that feels no need of expressing itself with words. 

I’ll put it plainly, I have enjoyed my time in the void. Now, for some of that time, I was without the means to write one of these blogs or work on any writing projects in the usual manner as I was away from any type of keyboard not found on my phone. So for that time, I will propose, I am excused. This was, by and large, by design. Breaks are good and encouraged. We must all spend some time of the year possessing a body at rest. 

For another portion of this time spent away from any such keyboard not found on my phone, I was suffering from an aggressive and intense allergy attack on my sinuses that filled my head with cotton and snot and tissues and frustration and a whole heap of a lack of being able to breathe through my nose (which I love doing). I will also excuse myself for this time as I accomplished next to nothing other than voiding my sinuses of mucus and mixing up medications and wondering why the sudafed I’ve been taking hasn’t been working (spoiler: it was Mucinex). 

All of this is well and good and even the people in my life cut me slack during this portion of the Void. However, then the New Year rolled in. I watched it happen myself, I was there. Yet, the portion of my brain that had been besieged by allergies and resting in the Void did not awake. I’ve been slumbering a week past the expiration date. 

It’s only now, in this week into the new year, that I am wondering where that drive from last year has gone, what’s stopping me from getting back into gear, so to speak. And for that, we need to turn to an extensive metaphor in the form of a physics explanation that I’ve already said we weren’t going to do. 

Cutting to the quick, a body at rest has the tendency to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. Okay, wow, we couldn’t avoid it. However, however, I think something interesting is happening in the case of my staying in the void. You see, for most of 2025, I stayed away from getting too “in the weeds” with current goings-on. For better or worse, and with full awareness, I began avoiding news cycles and updates with the birth of my daughter. This coincided with a well-documented change in my priorities as my daughter is now the most important aspect of my life, so that made burying my head in the sand somewhat easy. 

Enter the Void. Enter nothingness. Enter my daughter and I chilling in bed all morning because I’m feeling sick and there’s nothing to do besides look at my phone. Ah ha, ah ha, I hear you, me, we have a contingency for this. We read books on our phone, so when we find ourselves looking at news stories for too long, we can pivot back into the next book in The Expanse series so as not to continue the rotting of our brains. But hey, me, we didn’t do that, did we? No, we couldn’t concentrate on the complex space physics of that series because our brains were full of mush, so we just looked at reddit the whole time. 

And that’s carried over, is what I’m here to tell you, and now I know far too much about Venezuelan Oil. I know about Somali daycare scams and Tim Walz not seeking reelection. I am far too aware of the completely horrendous murder that’s happened in Minneapolis of a 37-year-old mother by the name of Renee Nicole Good who was gunned down by ICE. I’m too plugged into the rhetoric to be ignorant of how the right-winged media is trying to spin the story and I’m so, so, sad. 

These are outside forces acting upon my body but the effect isn’t working as intended. I want to stay at rest. In the Void. Retreat into the nonthinking, non-responsive part of my brain and just stay in those slippery walls. The Void is where these things don’t happen. 

Avoiding the Void

I’ll continue to be honest here, I’m having difficulty getting started this year since it seems as though the only thing that’s changed is the number at the end of the date. There’s some magical thinking that takes place at the end of each year. Next year will be different. This year was bad, but the next might be good. Everything’s going to change at midnight of New Year’s Eve. For a child, this is somewhat true. Each new year experienced brings with it a wealth of new opportunities and changes.

We try to keep that feeling alive as an adult, but there’s fewer and fewer milestones to process automatically with the passing of a year. Also, when you’re aware and plugged in, it doesn’t take too long for something to happen that drags the magic right out of you.

The news stories I mentioned in the previous section all happened within a week of each other in 2026 and it’s only the 8th. Clearly, we’re in for another tough year of global and national events happening that are divisive, upsetting, and just plain wrong. There’s a fatigue setting in that needs to be fought, but the sweet nothingness of the Void is threatening to drag us down into silent compliance. 

So how do we avoid the Void? How do we climb those slippery walls and make sure we’re getting things done and staying informed and fighting the good fight? These are good questions. I’m not sure I even have an answer to the problem at large, but much like how corporations have suggested we fight climate change by lowering our carbon footprint, I’ll suggest the same strategy. It starts in the home! 

Now, I’m sort of against resolutions in that I don’t think a general, sweeping goal made at the beginning of the year sets one up for the follow-through needed to make sure it comes true and isn’t derailed by the lack of specific steps necessary to accomplish said resolution. Instead, I set manageable goals with specific steps that lead to a realistic outcome. (The previous sentence is dripping with SMART-flavored sarcasm). 

Goals for 2026:

• Write More

Kind of self-explanatory and a continuation of a goal I set for myself in 2025. Before last year, my writing frequency and amount both were rapidly approaching zero. Then, I started this blog some time in March and found myself writing (almost) every day. I want to keep that trajectory going, something that I did not do in the Void, as the benefits have been really good for my mental health and aspirations to publish a novel sometime in my lifetime. Speaking of…

• Finish the First Draft of G.J., my Soft Sci-Fi Novel

Sometime in 2026, the first draft of this novel will be complete. I’m hesitant to set a true time-bound goal for this, as deadlines and me don’t work well. But yes, the first draft of this novel I’ve been focusing on since last year will wrap up sometime in a way that is both exciting and frightening. Since, once the first draft is done, that means…

• Revise and Polish G.J. until it is Publish-Ready

The true hard work begins. I am not a good revisionist. It’s something that I desperately need to work on. As they say, writing is rewriting. Most of the good stuff comes from revision. As much work as it is to write the first draft, I feel like it’s twice or more work to make it actually good. So once the first draft is done, the second draft begins, and we make sure all of the parts are working to benefit the whole. 

• Keep Working on Other Projects

I’ve let my focus rest on a singular project for now, but there’s more things I should be working on writing-wise. A sentence struck me while I was in an airport and I spent half a flight composing a little story on my phone. That was refreshing, being unburdened from staying true to some previous 200 pages for the first time in a while. I don’t think the exercise has legs, so to speak, but it was enjoyable and made a long travel day a bit shorter, so that was nice. It was also nice to know that my fiction writing motivation isn’t 100% tied up in the novel. So it’d be nice to get back to writing things other than the novel, you know? 

• Some Sort of Activism

It’s getting all too clear that America is heading in an ugly direction. As much as I’d like to bury my head in the sand again and just work on my little writing projects, that doesn’t help anyone except myself. I don’t know what this looks like, and I don’t have specific steps or goals here, but staying on the sidelines of facism isn’t an option.

• Write More Fun Blog Articles

I miss word reviews. I’m going to write more fun, dumb articles. My goal is to have at least one fun article a month that isn’t a progress update. I’m hoping the Write More goal will play into this and we can have fun content again. If you like this kind of content, then stay tuned. Watch this space. Etc. 

So that’s the plan to avoid the Void. Write more. Accomplish things. Revise. Perhaps get published, but right now optimism feels far away. It doesn’t feel realistic to list that as a goal, but there’s a small bit of hope behind the sentiment. Either way, we gotta do something.

Objects in Motion

A lesson that I continue learning over the course of my brief bit of time on this Earth is that my thoughts and opinions of the world are not universal. One of the flaws of my youth was the pig-headed thinking that if I came to a conclusion about something, that must mean that others have arrived at the same conclusion. Somehow, I thought my thinking was universal thinking - that others who were as smart or smarter than me had come to the same conclusions as me and that anyone who hadn’t either wasn’t smart or hadn’t ever thought about it. This is an extremely stupid way to think that the world works.

My worldview has changed, naturally, as I expanded my world from the tiny little swamp town I grew up in and learned that people can have different opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how our world works. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that there is no universal experience, but that’s an idea for another time. 

From time to time, however, I am made aware that one of my previously held notions of how the world works that was formed under this very erroneous thinking still persists today. One such of these notions is that everyone believes, understands, and has embraced The Void, that stretch of time between Christmas and New Years where no one is expected to do anything and we can all rest and eat way too many sugary treats. 

But that’s not the case for a lot of people in the world. For one, anyone who works a service job doesn’t automatically get that period of time off. Doctors have to work that stretch of time. It’s not a gimmie, and not everyone subscribes to the notion that it’s a time for rest. Heck, my daughter had absolutely zero motivation to let us sleep in at all, since she’s seven months old and only knows when she hasn’t been fed in a timely manner. 

All of this to say, the objects in motion that aim to control everything in our lives, who have been working for decades to keep us at rest, have never rested.

The Void is slippery by design. It wants to trap us there. And the people trying to grab every bit of authoritarian power want us there. Religion is opiate to the masses. Bread and circuses. The Void is just an extension of those types of distraction. Authoritarians want their populace to be asleep, lulled into compliance through silence. 

So in 2026, let’s do stuff. Let’s be active. Let’s not be silent. It’s time to fight back in the ways we can. To be clear, I’m not advocating for any sort of violence; there are ways to fight back without actual fighting and that’s what we should be doing. Climb out of the Void and fight like some sort of Eldritch horror - that’s the kind of energy I’m dragging into the rest of 2026. Let my many unblinking eyes remain open and a screech of justice escape from my gaping maw. 

Or something. Happy new year.  

The presence of Snoopy should have told me otherwise. 

However, since marrying into a very Thanksgiving family, it has become somewhat of a time-honored tradition to watch the parade and comment on how we don’t know any of the music groups and catch a few Broadway show performances while the house of 25-30 people slowly wakes up to the smell of Thanksgiving dinner being prepared in the kitchen. 

That sentence was too long. Point is, I have become reacquainted with this cultural touchpoint of mainstream interests and advertisements in recent years. For the most part, the parade is relatively harmless - a reminder of the franchises your child might be interested in as a slight nudge that there’s toys, games, merchandise that can be purchased as a Christmas gift this holiday season. Your child’s favorite cultural moments have fallen victim to commodification in the form of these balloons in this ancient symbol of the capitalization of culture.

But lurking under the surface of the sheer logistics of the parade is something more sinister, something that made me feel a sheer sense of dread. It’s something that is probably obvious to a lot of people, but as I’ve been mostly distracted lately with a newborn, it struck me as something akin to black magic. There was a Labubu float. And a K-Pop Demon Hunters balloon. And boy, oh boy, does it seem like everything is moving too fast these days.

A Case Study in Commodification

What do I mean by commodification? Well, I’m not using “commodity” to mean coffee or copper. To break it down a bit, a commodity is typically a raw material that can be bought, sold, or processed into a product. These are your base elements of commerce - those which can be transformed into profits by the act of selling. 

A cultural commodity, then, is the process of turning art into merchandise, to put not too fine a point on it. We can observe, at times, the speed of which art is transformed into commodity, the rate at which expression morphs into sales and profits. 

A fun example of this occurred not too recently in the wild west region of original streaming content. For the most part, there is not a lot of official merchandise tied to original streaming content for various reasons. For one, merchandising tends to be very expensive and requires way more logistics to reach a target audience than pushing the “Publish” button. 

One such case that I insist should be studied is Disney’s bungling of the Baby Yoda launch via their original streaming show The Mandalorian. When The Mandalorian first launched in November of 2019, no one quite knew how the show was going to perform. Star Wars in general was in a bit of a tricky place with the new trilogy producing mixed reviews from critics and fans alike. Projects in the franchise were being green-lit and then quietly disappearing, but Disney+ needed new content and Jon Favereau had an idea for a show set in the Star Wars franchise and so here we were.

The reveal that the precious cargo that our titular Mandalorian was sent to retrieve was that of one baby Yoda, a name that had such cultural sticking power that it seemed like even with the official reveal of the name (it’s Grogu), would stick in our cultural consciousness (it didn’t, we all got on board with Grogu and that should be studied too). The curious bit that’s worth mentioning is that this bit of plot for this original streaming content show got to be 100% a shocking reveal to audiences. No one saw it coming (or if they did, it was not widely spread), and I can point to but one reason for that: the show had no relevant merchandise at launch. 

Normally, merchandise is released in anticipation of a movie or show to drum up hype in a younger audience. Frequently, toy-tie-ins to movies feature plot points or details that make sense once you’ve seen the film. Disney is one of the largest toy-tie-in manufacturers in the world with their branded line of special products related to their many, many franchises. Star Wars alone is very well known for its merchandising with the famous tidbit that George Lucas negotiated for the merchandising rights for the franchise and proceeded to make absolute bank through very savvy marketing and release after release of toys and merchandise. 

All of which is to say, if Disney had anticipated what a hold that the reveal of Baby Grogu would have on our cultural consciousness, they would have 1000% had related merchandise available before, during, and after the initial release of The Mandalorian and the curious thing of it all is they 100% did not. 

The fun part is, we then get to see how long it takes a company as big as Disney to get the merchandise wheels turning. We get to see in real time the rate at which art becomes a commodity - turning the reveal of Baby Yoda into buy-able products. 

The Constant C - The Rate of Commodification

Baby Yoda was revealed in November of 2019, right before the holidays and some of the biggest pushes for toys, merchandise, etc., for all the good boys and girls. A quick surface-level google search reveals that one of the biggest questions of this time period was a simple, “Why no Baby Yoda?”

An article from Business Insider dives a little deeper to find that while you could preorder a Baby Yoda Funko Pop, the most base and entry level form of cultural commodification, they would not arrive until spring of the following year. This would put the rate of commodification at the most basic level at about 3 months or 1 quarter with a more robust offering following some time later. Not bad and leagues faster than the franchise’s original rate of commodification at 1 year. 

Baby Yoda merch would go on to dominate the New York Toy fair in February 2020 with preorders available for various products set to launch later that year, with one such product, a life-sized figure of Baby Yoda, launching in the fall. More developed toys, more complicated than a Funk Pop or a plush, take more time, and Disney had kept this secret very much under wraps, so everyone was starting from scratch. So, our timetable is a little more obscure, but it can be averaged out that the rate of commodification is somewhere around 1 quarter for base level merchandise, and 2 quarters or half a year until we hit a saturation point. 

3 to 6 months, I think, is a fair compromise. I’m not really out to land on hard numbers, anyway. 

So our Constant C in this case is a not-so-constant 3 to 6 months and we can expect cultural hits that operate similarly to this Baby Yoda to fall along the same sort of path.

However! There is something MUCH MORE relevant to our rate of commodification and my experience this past Thanksgiving and that is the fact that Baby Yoda was not just commodified into merchandise and toys. No, Baby Yoda received one of the highest honors of a cultural commodity. This green young thing was turned into a balloon for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

While we can reasonably say that it takes 3 to 6 months to reach a commodity saturation point as demonstrated by Baby Yoda, we do have hard, real numbers to nail down the rate at which a cultural commodity becomes inducted into the Hall of Fame via a spot as a balloon in the ever important parade. And in this case, it took over two years. 

Grogu made their debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2021. Two full years (and a couple days) after the first reveal in 2019. 

Typically, it takes a while to be inducted into this parade. Pokemon, a popular video game series that I literally cannot shut up about, made its MTDP debut in 2001, three years after the game’s and anime’s U.S. release in 1998. Similarly, Diary of a Wimpy Kid received a balloon three years after the book series’ debut in 2007. It took Dora, from Dora the Explorer, five years to receive a balloon after her series premiere in 2000. 

Now, I do understand that the parade is first and foremost an advertising opportunity and not a celebration of brands and franchises that have “made it” in any sense, but I think it’s interesting to note that even in the case of some of the most popular characters and entries in their field, it takes a few years for them to appear in this venue. 

Faster than the Speed of Commodification 

Which is why it was so dang jarring to me to see not just a Labubu float but also a K-Pop Demon Hunters balloon featured in this year’s parade, since both of those cultural touch points debuted in this very year. It’s baffling to me. How. How are they moving so fast?

K-Pop Demon Hunters made its splashy, flashy, and catchy debut on Netflix in August of this year, a mere three months before their debut in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Labubu’s on the other hand debuted just [checks notes] 10 years ago! Wait. 10 years ago? That…that can’t be right. 

Oh. It is. Huh. Labubus were featured in Kasing Lung’s book The Monsters, debuting in 2015 and partnering with How2Work to produce figurines the same year. The toys would then go on to gain further recognition in 2019, when Pop Mart took over the figurine contract. So why are they so popular now? Okay. Well. I am keeping this part in even though it flies in the face of the point of my article to demonstrate that sometimes we learn things and our ears start bleeding and our eyes roll back into our skulls and Labubu’s have always been here and will always be here and we must give into the Labubu’s demands. 

Ahem.

Let’s get back to the part that’s actually relevant. K-Pop Demon Hunters had a full on balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade only three months after its debut on Netflix. Time to do some digging. In the case of Grogu, it took two full years for the little guy to show up; how was the blue tiger cat thing from K-Pop Demon Hunters able to be included so quickly? 

When we do our research on the fly, we learn things fast: Did you know that the blue tiger’s name is Derpy Tiger? And there was actually another relevant balloon in the form of Sussie Magpie, which was apparently in front of Derpy Tiger, but on the ground.

There’s not many other details publicly available. The balloons were sponsored by Netflix and Sony Pictures, of course, and there was a tie-in performance by the singing vocal artists of the Huntrix group, which is to be expected, but there’s not much details about when the balloons were ordered.  

By all accounts, K-Pop Demon Hunters was a surprise hit, so there’s little room to believe that Netflix and Sony Pictures would have had the foresight to order this balloon ahead of its debut in August. The film’s multiple theatrical runs, including sing-a-long versions and a Halloween flavored reprise, also suggest that this film’s success was not anticipated. 

The only conclusion left, really, is that the commodification rate has increased exponentially. The speed for art debut to product commodification is growing closer to instantaneous. Soon, we’ll be pushed to buy during the experience and art will be rendered to mere advertisement. 

To corroborate this, we can do a cursory glance at all of the K-Pop Demon Hunter merchandise available to purchase this holiday season, as no doubt, Netflix and Sony Pictures would be capitalizing on the franchise’s popularity with a toy line. 

What’s that? There are no toys available to purchase? Well, okay. Toys take a while to produce, sure, but certainly there are shirts, accessories, and other such merchandising opportunities, right? Ah, yes, here’s the Netflix official gift guide for the 2025 holiday season. Certainly this will be chock full of availabl–what’s that? It’s mostly pre-orders beyond a couple of shirts at Hot Topic? One of the advertised items is the Spirit Halloween costume? 

Huh. 

Wait, but that would mea–

Henry Was Wrong and Everything’s Fine

Commodification isn’t rapidly speeding up to the point where art and commodification of said art is happening instantaneously. I was influenced by the presence of a balloon in a parade, which does seem rather quick. I suppose time will tell whether or not the K-Pop Demon Hunter balloons will stand the test of time. I don’t fault Netflix or Sony Pictures for trying to keep their property in the cultural consciousness long enough for their merchandise to come to fruition. It seems we are in another Baby Yoda situation. The Mandalorian had subsequent seasons to keep the interest going, so we’ll have to see if the announced sequel landing in 2029 can do the same for this franchise. Animation takes a long time. 

I suppose this article is a good example of letting one’s feelings drive their conclusions. It felt as though two properties released mere months ago were on the verge of becoming current-day cultural cornerstones when in fact, one property has been around for a decade and the other is just getting started in terms of its cultural staying power. In a way, having a balloon in the parade will be a good yearly reminder of the upcoming sequel as well as being able to die in new merchandise launches that are taking upwards of a year to come to fruition anyway. 

I never had a problem with the performance done during the parade by the singing vocal artists of the Huntrix group. If anything, I welcomed it because the songs are catchy and the movie is quite good and having something present-day relevant in this stuffy parade is a fresh breath of air considering I’ll probably not get the chance to see any of the Broadway shows who also had performances. 

I set out to do a bit that the speed of commodification was nearing the speed of light (the constant C), and as a result, I’ve been thoroughly put into my place by a healthy dose of reality. I suppose I should be thankful for that.

This might suggest that the update is scheduled to come out around the time of Thanksgiving, but here it is on November 21st, a little under a week away. I wonder what that means. 

Well, let’s find out and dive deep into what’s going on with these writing projects. 

Reflections on NaNoWriMo

In the previous update, I set out to accomplish NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, by promising to finish at least Part 2 of my novel in progress G.J. I then immediately had a week’s long bout of stomach issues that robbed me of my patience and focus for everything, writing included. In short, we lost a week of November. 

With this in mind, I secretly amended the goal of hitting the 50,000 word count that is the spirit of NaNoWriMo to just finishing Part 2 and writing an update where I tell everyone I have finished Part 2 and am in the process of composing Part 3. I mean, I also started this in the last update, but secretly, secretly I was going to try to hit 50,000 words and impress everyone (especially myself).

Best laid plans of mice and men are often ruined by stomach issues. I don’t know about you, but when my stomach’s on the fritz, I cannot concentrate worth anything. I’m not even sure what I did that week. It’s just lost time. 

This is just a preamble bit so that the next bit, where I go into detail about the progress made, hits harder.

Reflections on Progress

Having lost a week to body problems, I want to say I dug in deep to try to still hit our goals and make everyone happy (and love me). I want to say that, I really do, but the truth of the matter is that no deep digging needed to happen. More so and more so, this novel has been way more easily breezily than lemon squeezily. 

I’m not trying to undermine my efforts or appear more humble either. The words are just pouring out of me at a pace that I am wholly unfamiliar with. It could be because every waking second of free time is spent thinking out the next bit so that each time I sit down to write, I’m literally just transposing thought to word. It could be that I have become a bore in terms of in-person conversation because I’d rather be thinking about what’s going to happen next in the novel to the detriment of all the parties and friends found at said parties who find themselves trapped talking to me. 

Those are certainly possibilities. 

Anyway, here’s the updated graph of progress for each of the “current” works in my stable.

I put current in quotes because I’m still just working on G.J. None of the other bars have moved even a little, don’t waste your time looking at them. But you can see that we are climbing closer and closer to 60,000 words in G.J. and that’s just a Good Job all arou–I’m not going to stop making this joke until the title is revealed or changed. 

Of course, I am leading you to asking, well yeah the overview graph is all well and good but we can’t see the numbers, Henry, and we are only hungry for the numbers. Stop waxing poetic about how you only work on piece. We know that. We know you. 

Well fine, then, hypothetical argumentative people I have built up in my brain and am now defensive against, let’s get to the numerical breakdown of G.J. by its parts. 

Part 2 is finished. That’s why this update is hitting a week earlier than I planned. Yeah, it’s…mind boggling, but I wrapped up Part 2 a few hours ago and still had some juice in the tank, so we’re writing a progress update. It’s…what? Who thought we’d get this far? Certainly not me. 

And there’s a further update in that Part 3 is already 1400 words in. Pulling the curtain back a bit, I jumped right into Part 3 after wrapping up Part 2 without so much as taking a break. 

I’d say we’re rapidly approaching the end of this book, but each time I finish one of these Parts, the task ahead feels so much more daunting than simply “just continuing to write.” But that’s what’s going to take in the end. It just feels like a new obstacle in the path, but the solution is the same. The only way out is through. 

So there we have it. 28461 words. Part 2 in the book, so to speak. Revisions to come, of course, but the bones are there. Now what?

Reflections on Reflections

Writing these progress updates is a bit bittersweet. On the one hand, there’s progress each time in a way that surprises even me, the person doing the writing. On the other, the fact that I’m writing an update rather than an article about something I find interesting leaves me with regret.

I want to write dumb, fun, and super focused articles for you again, but the sum total of my writing energies and efforts are taken up with this novel lately. It’s a good thing, sure, but it’s kind of funny that I started this blog back in March with the intention to write every day and only publish the good stuff and now I’m writing every day(ish) and publishing nothing. 

In a way, it’s been a huge success. In other ways, it’s been an objective failure since the only real content is “Hey, I’ve been writing but I can’t show you.” Maybe I’ll try to rectify that soon. We are heading into what has been historically for me the least productive time of the year. One of the few saving graces of leaving the world of academia behind is that there’s nothing really going on at this time of year. No big lead up into finals or grading papers. There’s just the cosmic and eldritch horror of The Holidays looming on the horizon, threatening to gobble up all of the productive energies for the promise of a break, finally. 

Maybe some of that time can be spent on some dumb fun, and super focused articles. I haven’t written a word review in months and those are some of the most fun I have with writing. 

We’ll just have to see what the future holds. 

Reflections on Conclusions

Endings are hard. Bye!  

Ahem, anyway, it’s been more than two weeks without a blog article of some kind, so that means an update post is required. And look at that, it’s got a name. The Milestone Update. I wonder what that could be hinting at? I can only imagine. 

Now, for a full behind-the-curtain view, I am writing this update on a Monday and usually I write these at the end of the week once the writing is done, so we can say that the cart is before the horse, folks. It’ll be up to me to make some of the claims in this post happen and in a let’s-just-burn-the-curtain-why-do-we-even-have-it sort of way, I’ll let y’all know if I was successful in making those claims happen.

[Editor burning the curtain because we don’t need it any more here, let’s just say that the milestone was hit the very next day.]

But I ramble, let’s just get to the update.

Part 1 - The Part with the First Graph

It’s impolite to just drop a graph on people, so here’s a bit of a preamble beforehand. Okay, now let’s get to the graph.

Yeah, here’s the milestone. We’re crossing into bare minimum territory with our favorite work in progress G.J. Let’s have a Good Job for G–Oh we did this joke last time, sorry. 

It’s kind of exciting in a way. This is the most progress I’ve had on actually completing a novel. That being said, it’s becoming kind of a curse. Any time I feel good about how much progress there’s been, I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m not currently working on it. There’s also been a few moments when I’ve commented on writing and I’m speaking from a perspective that I have finished it, which is almost as dangerous as meth. 

Never can I feel as though the work is finished. That just leads to not working on the work. 

To that end, this isn’t the only graph we’re getting!

Part 2 - The Part Where I Get Very Pedantic

There is something that needs to be said and I’m the only one who can say it. I’m sure people have been thinking it ever since I first announced that we’re tracking progress by word count, but here it is in plaintext.

Word count does not denote quality writing. I know, it’s a bummer. It would be so nice to get to the end of the process of telling the story of G.J. and just be done. Send it out, call it a day, get published, etc. But the truth of the matter is that the end of the writing phase will begin a vigorous and laborious rewriting phase that becomes less and less tangible in how we are able to measure progress. 

I wanted to acknowledge this now before we return to caring about how many words are in a thing in a moment because it’s important to me that I know that you know that I know this. 

So before anyone tries to rain on my parade and tell me that just because something is long doesn’t mean it’s good, buddy, I’m beating you to the punch and hitting myself in the face with that fact before you can even make a fist. To quote one of the great works of art from my childhood, “Don’t hit me; I’ll hit me” (Hey Arnold!, “24 Hours to Live”). 

Okay, let’s get to the next bit.

Part 3 - The Part with the Second Graph

Since we’ve just been seeing the same graph, I thought I’d break down G.J.’s progress a bit further so we can really see what’s going on within the confines of that earlier data. 

For a bit of context, I am writing G.J. linearly. G.J. is broken up into three distinct parts, each part representing a major setting that our protagonist is experiencing. For the sake of mystery, these parts will be referred to as Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. With that understood, let’s take a look at the stuff of dreams as Shakespeare wrote - the word counts of each part. 

We can see that part 1, ⅓ of the total story content for this novel, is at 27,600 words (rounding to make the number look better). My aim for each of these parts is that they will be pretty equal in content, putting a loose target goal of around 75,000 words for the total, which is well within the 40,000 to 100,000 range. 

We can see the part that I am currently working through  is at 11,050, so I’m about nearly halfway through that part’s story content. Google Docs is trying to get me to amend that previous sentence to read “about halfway,” but the math doesn’t check out, so I won’t.

All while the total is nearing that ever so fun to hit but ultimately meaningless to the story I’m telling bare minimum of 40,000 words. It’ll be nice to hit that milestone, but ultimately, the story continues until it’s done and this story is going to be a three parter. 

It’s fun to look at these numbers. It’s daunting to think about what I have left to write, but it is neat to see how much progress there is and how deep into G.J. I’ve gotten in a relatively short time. I mean, where were we a few weeks ago when I posted my first update? When was that?

September 5th? And we had just over 9000 words then? Crazy. Absolutely crazy to think about. 

But here, as we near the end of October, there’s much more to consider.

Part 4 - R.I.P. NaNoWriMo

So, uh, I’m just finding out that National Novel Writing Month was a nonprofit organization that disbanded in April of this year. Apparently they faced both financial troubles as well as some pretty lax child safety protocols for their online community. Bummer.

Regardless, back when I was more terminally online and plugged into the writing community, I would see frequent posts for National Novel Writing Month and would feel guilty I wasn’t participating. Briefly, the aim for the month of November was to write a 50,000 word novel. I’m not sure why this merited a nonprofit organization or even what they did; I thought it was just a sort of online challenge like the ice bucket thing or no shave November or whatever.

So, I’m gonna try it. 50,000 words in November might not fit my exact goals for G.J., and in fact, that might be too lofty a goal for my meek 1500 words every other day sort of pace, but we’re going to try to complete at least Part 2 of G.J. by the end of November. Stay tuned for progress updates or blogs that I write to stave off having to give a progress update in the coming month. 

Part 5 - The Part Where This Ends

So, that’s where we stand. Again, I hope for this to be a milestone update, so I’ll work on crossing that 40,000 barrier in the time between finishing this article and posting it on Friday. Wish me luck, I guess, or well don’t because the results will be posted and it’ll all be over already. [WE DID IT, THANKS FOR THE LUCK]

But then, do wish me luck for the upcoming Novel Writing Month endeavor where I’ll aim to be hopefully well into Part 3 of G.J. And if it doesn’t happen, there’s always more time. I’m not on a deadline or anything.

They say you have your entire life to write your first novel. I’m hoping to finish a bit before that, but we’ll see how it all shakes out. For now, thanks for reading. Hopefully this was entertaining. Sorry if it wasn’t. And I’ll see you in a post in the future sometime. 

Buggy Basics

Hollow Knight is a 2017 classic Metroidvania with souls-like elements developed and published by indie dev Team Cherry. If you didn’t understand some or most of those words, don’t worry. We’re about to break them down.

Metroidvania is an ill-named genre of video game that contains several similar elements across titles. The name is derived from Nintendo’s Metroid series and Capcom’s Castlevania series, as these two pioneered the format.

Large, sprawling 2-D maps with side scrolling elements are the hallmark of this genre, topped with that good ole feeling of progression as upgrades include new abilities to traverse the map alongside the standard power progression of “I can defeat enemies faster now.” The mark of a good Metroidvania seems to be no less than a few handful of moments where the player simply has no idea where they’re supposed to go next and rather than tell the player, one is encouraged to explore what one can with the abilities at hand. 

Hollow Knight adds in the distinction of also being a “souls-like,” another genre whose name is solely derived from individual titles with specific gameplay elements. In this case, it’s the From Software -Souls games, a la Demon Souls, Dark Souls (I, II, and III), Blood Borne, and Elden Ring, to name the primary entries. There are of course tons of other examples not made by From Software, but they pioneered the genre. 

Souls-likes are known to possess a higher degree of difficulty, some form of currency that is earned from defeating enemies, endlessly respawning enemies triggered by some sort of resting mechanic (often called “bonefires”), and the loss of aforementioned currency upon player death that can be retrieved on the next life (dropping one’s “souls”). 

Hollow Knight, at first glance, borrows all of these elements in its own way. You earn Geos from defeating enemies or hitting geo-filled rocks that can be used to buy upgrades for your character or maps of the area to help you traverse. These geos are lost upon player death and can be retrieved by defeating your “regret,” a shadow version of the protagonist. Enemies do respawn, but it’s not as much triggered by resting on one of the many benches in the game as it is that Metroidvanias often feature respawning enemies. And at first glance, or so I thought, the game does possess a degree of bonecrushing, soul-smashing difficulty.

The odd thing is that on my second time through this game without ever having beaten it before, I am having such an easy go of this difficult game. Has the game gotten easier? Am I just a better gamer than I was before? Who knows! 

Story and Setting

Another element of the “souls-like” genre is a deliberately vague and withholding form of storytelling that relies on item descriptions and the scant interactions with Non Playable Characters (NPCs) scattered throughout a sparsely populated world in decline. Having not done much research at all, here is the story in brief. 

A vast kingdom by the name of Hollownest is in decline after some sort of blight has befallen its populace. This blight drives the bug population of this once powerful kingdom mad resulting in blindly attacking anyone not affected by the blight or mindlessly carrying out the duties they had before the blight befell the kingdom. 

We, the player, play as a traveling bug who is visiting this kingdom for reasons unbeknown to the player (as of yet, at least) and stumble upon a different traveling bug by the name of Hornet who puts the protagonist on the path to opening the door of the Temple of the Black Egg and confronting the blight head on, as it is no doubt some sort of Eldritch entity. 

That’s sort of what I can piece together in the brief hours I have played it (current run is at around 7 hours having just collected the Crystal Heart ability that allows you to cross vast chasms, etc.). 

Where Hollow Knight really shines for me is in its settings. There’s something to be said about a dark, lonely environment to be explored set to a beautiful piano score. Most of my 7 hours of play has just been jumping and backtracking through the same areas as I frantically try to find a direction where I can actually make progress, but I find myself not becoming upset due to the privilege of spending more time in this beautifully hand-rendered (check on that**) world. 

**Editor’s Note: Okay, yes, Hollow Knight is fully hand drawn and animated.

From the onset of the game, it seems as though we’ll be exploring caves and forests for the most part, but then you find yourself crossing what seems like a bug-made bridge. This leads us to a large bug-made gate that requires a special seal to gain entrance. On the other side, we see our first glimpse of the fallen kingdom - spires of metal buildings drenched in perpetuity by an ever falling rain. The City of Tears, it is called, is the moment for me when Hollow Knight transcended a bonecrushingly difficult game that one would play for bragging rights and little else into a true beautiful work of interactive art. Just moving through an empty, waterlogged city where the beauty of the kingdom that was and has been lost is a physical pain that can be felt by the viewer. People lived here. People built this. And now they’re all mindlessly controlled by the blight and will remain forever under its control unless we as the protagonist do something about it. 

Hollow Knight is a story of redemption - not for oneself, but for a kingdom and its people who have fallen victim to the choices of those who reign over them. I assume, I really have no idea what’s going on, but that’s the vibe I’m picking up. 

Gameplay

Alright, the game’s pretty and the story is vaguely moving, but is the game fun? That’s all that matters, after all. We’re gamers, buddy, not scholars. We aren’t here to learn stuff about stuff, just let me smash bad guys to dust already!

The gameplay of Hollow Knight can be broken up into two distinct categories: exploration and boss fights. Exploring the world relies on collecting upgrades that allow you to wall jump to higher climbs, dash across gaps, and collect resources that expand your life or souls-meter for spells. Along the way, you’ll run into helpful NPCs who sell charms with powerful abilities to augment your powers further or strengthen your ever important Nail, your sword and main avenue for dealing with enemies. 

Occasionally throughout your exploration, you will walk into a room just to have the exits blocked by barriers and a big bug thing drops from the ceiling revealing a name. Such are the boss fights in Hollow Knight.

Boss fights in Hollow Knight are a game of patience. There are no health bars to mark progress. One can count the hits if one likes, but there is very little indication if the next hit will be the final hit and this encourages a slower-paced fight. Rushing in with thoughts of delivering the final blow can often spell your end instead. 

I think this is the biggest difference in my play style when it comes to Hollow Knight on my second-round through. Frankly, I’ve played more games in this genre than on my first time through, namely Elden Ring. Sinking 273.8 hours into 100%ing Elden Ring has taught me a thing or two about waiting for an opening, choosing to heal over dealing damage, and staying alive as long as possible since being alive is very much required for dealing damage. All of these skills are necessary for success in Hollow Knight and I think the slow-paced exploration feeds into this notion of taking one’s time and being patient during the boss fights. 

This is not to say that your enemies will be doing the same. No, if anything, the bosses of Hollow Knight are hyper aggressive and leave very little room for catching your breath mid-fight. 

A turning point happened when I was playing last night while exploring the area of the City of Tears known as the Soul Sanctum. All the while exploring this area, I had a feeling of dread creeping through me because I remembered having a difficult time with the area’s boss, the Soul Master, during my first play through of the game. More specifically, I had such a hard time against this area’s boss during that first play through that I quit playing the game for a length of time due to how difficult it was and how little progress I was seemingly making during the fight. 

Last night, I sighed when I saw myself getting closer to the rain, as much of the Soul Sanctum happens within the confines of bookcases and wizardly accoutrement with the boss fight happening in the rain just outside of the study. But, fearless as I am knowing that there is a bench nearby where I’ll respawn, I headed into that rainy arena and to my surprise beat the Soul Master on the first try without breaking too much of a sweat. 

A boss that had literally impeded my progress in a previous time in my life was nothing to me now. In a way that’s hard to encapsulate, I have progressed as a person in some intangible way (at least when it comes to video games, I’m not claiming I’ve reached enlightenment or anything). It’s a weird feeling. 

Retrospective in Progress

A part of me really likes calling the pieces that I write about video games “retrospectives.” Fun fact, everything written in the overarching category of nonfiction is a retrospective very much like all pictures are pictures of the past. I can’t very well write something about the present. I type too slow for that. 

Point is, I am not done with Hollow Knight yet. For one, I haven’t beaten it and on the other hand, it feels like one of those games that will stick with me even once I’ve earned the bad ending because I didn’t speak to Sly enough times to unlock a better ending. Or however the end game mechanics work. 

Hollow Knight is something special, a work of immersive and interactive art made by a passionate team with clearly high standards whose work should be celebrated. I can’t wait to play the sequel. Just after I figure out where to go next now that I have the Crystal Heart. 

It seems as though my energies as of late have been successfully directed toward the fruitful endeavor of writing on one of my big projects that we just talked about a few weeks ago. Which is great. Like, it’s been really, really great. 

I’ve also been the most tired I’ve ever been these past few weeks and am spending the bulk of my evenings in a brain dead state that has not gone unnoticed in my home life. There are trade offs to everything. 

Speaking of tradeoffs, we’re about to pen a whole new contract between me and you and you and me (well, that’s just the same thing but reversed), so let’s get into it.

Deal No. 1 

So, Deal No. 1 is pretty simple. If I do not update the blog for two weeks straight, I owe y’all a progress update. It’s that easy. Either I write a fresh, new, not at all exhausted topic article for the blog and really put my whole [refrains from ending the next word in -ussy] brain into it or I provide a fresh, new update on what I have been working on as of late. 

The goal of this deal is straightforward. Either I’m working on stuff that might one day see the light of day in the form of publication and thus can be shared with everyone in the English reading world (at first) or I’m working on some good ole mega bite-sized content that you’ve grown to expect from Recursive Thoughts, the name of this blog. 

Either way, I’m writing. It’s just a delayed gratification versus showing how little or how lot-le I’ve been pouring energy into one of the bigger projects. 

I intend to make good on this deal immediately later on in this very article. In fact, let’s get that out of the way.

Work-in-Progress Update No. 2

I’m calling this Update No. 2 because Update No. 1 happened in the previous article. You get it. We can number them along the way and keep track of how long it takes for me to finish something. It’s motivating! (Hopefully). 

This graph that you are about to see will look a little different from the previous one in only one regard because there’s only one project I’ve been working on kind of nonstop whenever I have down time (this is rare, there is no down time with a newborn). That being said, let’s look at our progress:

Whoa! Look at G.J. Can we get a Good Job for G.J.? Yeah, so, G.J. jumped up bigly times thanks to a focused outpouring of effort to keep the writing machine going in a way that has felt almost but not quite effortless. I mean, it’s not effortless and let’s circle back to me being the most tired I’ve ever been as of late - it’s actually quite effortful - but the weird part is that it feels effortless.

I think I’ve reached a weird balance of brain dead/engaged where there’s not much room for that little critical voice in my head to interject and convince me to stop working. Now the only boundary that stops me from working is literally falling asleep at the keyboard or hitting a time limit, say like, 5 p.m. Wow, what a random time boundary to hit. 

But to put this into numbers that we can all appreciate, G.J. went from a barely 2.5 chapter baby at 9,900 words (rounding for clean numbers) to a much older but still young child of 5.5 chapters at 22,000 words (again, rounding).

That’s, uh, that’s pretty good if I ask myself (and I did, the answer is this article). 

Going Forward No. 3

Yeah, there’s not like, more deals or anything. I’m truly just counting. 

So here’s where that leaves us. Either you get a blog post or a progress update, but either way there will be something new on this blog every two weeks at a maximum. If I am somehow feeling more with it, the content will flow much more frequently than that, but speaking truth to power, I’ll need to get like another full hour of sleep a night to get to the level where I am churning out both semi-well written if not just entertaining articles as well as the fictional explorational adventures of the protagonist of G.J. 

I’m only human. And this human wakes up in the middle of the night on a nightly basis to feed his daughter a big ole bottle of milk so she’s not hungry and can fall back to sleep again. Which only sometimes leaves this human awake in the middle of the night unable to fall back asleep again himself, which is just sort of part of it. We move on, we move on. 

But that’s the new deal. I hope you find it fair because, well, it’s non-negotiable. Unless… But no… that would require some sort of… monetary… support… 

I could never. Really. 

Unless…

You’d be into it? What am I saying, of course not. With times as hard as they are and the economy and the historical stagnation of wages over the decades across the world, I could never in good faith ask for that sort of thing and I won’t ever do that.

Unless…

Nah.

Anyway, that’s the rub. I’ll keep you posted either with content or hopefully more just-as-impressive updates. If the update isn’t as impressive as this one, there’ll probably be a blog post instead. We gotta get the numbers up. These are rookie numbers. Wolf of Wallstreet, you get it (I’ve never seen it).  

“I said hey, what’s going on?”

Hey there, readers. Welcome to a post I’ve been toying around with in my head for about two weeks now. I’m both excited and remiss to have to write it, so we’ll see how it comes out, but basically I want to cover why the blog seems to be slowing down as of late. It’s a good news, bad news situation, so let’s just rip off some bandaids so we can apply some more bandaids.

The good news is that well, gosh darnit, I’m writing again. Like really writing again. In the past two weeks, I’ve written more than the past few months combined, not counting this blog. So in a way, one of the main aims of the blog has been somewhat achieved. Writing those silly little articles has jumpstarted the writing muscle in me and I’m turning it back toward my fiction for the first time in forever. 

The bad news is that well, gosh darnit, I’m writing again. Like really writing again. And that sort of means having to prioritize where I put my energy. Unfortunately, it’s bad news Recursive Thoughts, as I’d rather put what little spare energy in my day toward what fulfills me and right now, that’s the fiction. 

If we followed the metaphor, I just applied a bunch of bandaids only to rip them all off again, so I apologize, let’s get to putting some more bandaids back on. 

What I want to do is somewhat silly. I want to give you all progress reports of what I’m writing. To do that, we need to quantify some things, and that feels both daunting and maybe helpful? You’ll get it as soon as we start, but to outline it in brief, we’re going to discuss the little writing projects I am currently working on (all of them), where they are now, and where they are in the grand scheme of being “done.” I’ll be using initials for their names so as not to give up the game, but I’ll describe what they are as far as form and genre. 

That’s the aim, anyway, we’ll see if I’m too discouraged by hard numbers to follow through. 

Works in Progress

Let’s do this as a good ole bulleted list. I love a good bulleted list. It makes me feel so organized. And it’s like a numbered list without the pressure of having to play favorites! 

Projects:

• G.J. - A Soft Sci-Fi Adventure Novel

• A.F. - A Soft Horror Adventure Novel

• D.o.L.G. - A Short Story Collection of All the Works I Did in College

• N.O.K.W.Y.D. - A Poetry Chapbook Inspired by My Real Life Job

• A Criminal’s Predestined Boulder - A Collection of all the Poetry I Did in College

I gave you the full title of that last one because it’s a stand-in title for a project that hasn’t really gone anywhere in years, but I do so love the name.

So, these are the works in progress that I am currently undertaking. Why so many projects? Wouldn’t it be easier to complete some of them if there were fewer of them? Well, dear reader, I guess. I’m not really sure. I haven’t really ever completed anything other than a short story and those are, well, short. 

Something I’ve done my entire life, though, has been to avoid writer’s block. I do this, in theory, by never actually stopping the writing. I simply jump to another project, reread up to where I left off, and keep going. If you hit a wall in one project, you pivot to the next and so on until the writing starts again. This blog is an extension of that theory. 

I know some people swear by this method and perhaps this may benefit me as well, but so far into this whole getting back into writing thing, I’ve been mainlining one project in particular and that’s the first one on that list, G.J. I’ve been thinking about it nonstop. It’s been refreshing, if not a little distracting to my homelife where I have a newborn daughter who needs looking after and a wife who needs to be relieved from looking after said daughter. 

I would love to tell you more about them, but there’s a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to writing and talking about the projects you are writing instead of writing the dang projects. I don’t want to be one of those people who is always talking about their projects instead of finishing them (yet, here I am writing about my projects instead of writing them). 

Measuring Progress

So, how are we going to measure progress anyway? Isn’t a novel sort of in progress until it’s done with no real markers as to how done it is? I don’t know. Again, I’ve never finished a novel. The closest I’ve gotten is one of those aforementioned projects above (it’s A.F., but also, it’s not). 

Well, what we’re going to do here is outline a little basic methodology of each project’s form, be it novel, collection, etc., to measure the progress of how much exists versus how much needs to exist to be considered “done” by the publishing world. 

And I mean a very basic methodology. The most basic methodology. The same sort of methodology we used in our college essays. Yes, exactly. We’re going to use a word count! 

Yeah, it’s arbitrary for sure, but I’m hoping that seeing how much I have versus how much I have to go to be considered a full length [insert form here] will help motivate me to keep going in the long run. So we’re going to use math. How many words (or pages in the case of poetry) do I have compared to the number of words/pages I would need in the eyes of the publishing industry. 

The funny thing about writing is that there are like standards to meet to be considered for entry into the published version of the art form. Like, the industry version of the art form. I’m sure most art forms are like this to some degree, though. 

Anyway, here’s the basic sort of definition of each of my project’s forms as outlined by the powers that be:

• Novel: Over 40,000 words (Usually between 70,000 and 100,000).

• Short Story Collection: 40,000 - 60,000 words (or 120-250 pages).

• Poetry Chapbook: 20 to 49 pages.

• Poetry Collection: 48-120 pages.

For the sake of charting progress, I will be using the lower end of the ranges provided here to chart our progress to meet the bare minimum, just like we all did in college, baby. 

I guess there’s no more stalling. We have our parameters. All that’s left is for me to go into my Folder in my Google Drive called “Writings” and check the word count of each of these files, then make some sort of graphical representation of the progress of each file. Like, I know what to do, it’s just the doing of it and seeing the vastness of where I am compared to where I need to be is daunting. Give me a second to collect myself.

A Second to Collect Myself

Did you know that when you “Count sheep” to fall asleep, you can think of a category with a lot of members and then try to name as many members in that category as you possibly can instead of visualizing sheep and counting them? It’s true! The goal is to distract the brain by filling it with a menial task that is too mundane to allow for disruptive thoughts that may keep you awake. If sheep don’t do it for ya, trying to name all of the SNL cast members from over the years just might. 

The more you know! 

Okay, Okay, Here’s the Progress Bars

For the sake of legibility, we’ve had to separate the fiction from the poetry, so let’s take a look first at our fiction progress below.

Yeah, see, this is what I was afraid of, sort of, kinda. Look, 40,000 words is a ton of words. You can write to the natural conclusion of something and think, “Oh boy, wow, this is like a novella length,” just to find out you’ve sort of just excluded yourself out of short story range and into the vast wasteland of nothingness between short story and novella. Also, no one wants your novella. (Novellas are like 20,000 words minimum). 

But I digress, let’s break this down. We’re about 25% of the way to the bare minimum with G.J., which isn’t surprising since this is a relatively new work that I’ve just sort of started to wrap my head around in that it has chapters. This 25% to the bare minimum? Yeah, that’s about two chapters. So, I’m not really fretting the progress there (yet).

A.F., that chapterless beast, is a mess of needing to rewrite and rewrite and is sort of only half of the story that I want to tell. It’s sitting somewhere in the 40% range, but that beast is going to be tamed some other time. Rewriting is the hardest part of writing, don’t let anyone tell you differently. Also, I may need to restructure it because right now it’s structured as one long short story, sort of, and it could probably use some more room to breathe.

Then we have D.o.L.G., the short story collection. I was surprised to see we’re over the minimum here, but then I checked and well, the last story in that collection is the first chapter of G.J., so we might be cheating a bit. Also, the first chapter of G.J. was rewritten recently and doesn’t quite fit the structure of a short story any more, so that word count’s a little bunk. Needless to say, exciting that all I need to do is revise each story until I’m happy with them and maybe find a replacement for that last story? We’ll see. 

Now let’s look at the poetry. 

Yeah, poetry is nebulous as heck. I don’t even have a project file for that second project, so I have no page count for you. Also, poetry is just weird. I don’t know how to measure the progress of it because it’s just a bunch of snapshots of individual ideas worded pretty and put next to each other in a book. That’s a gross reduction, but you get it.

I think progress with these poetry projects aren’t really a thing to be measured by page count. It’s nice to know that my chapbook is at least a good length, but I’m not at all happy with the poems in that collection. They all need a rewrite probably, so while it’s good to know we are there lengthwise, the quality is nowhere near finished. But hey, like the soldiers enlisted in the paramilitary organization known as “G.I. Joe” used to say, knowing is half the battle. The other half of the battle is no doubt lobbying for government contracts.

In Progress

So, this is where we stand. Maybe in a few months, I can update these charts with new page and word counts and show some real progress. Boy, that would be fun. If there was progress. And we got closer to our goals. Man, can you imagine? I can’t. And maybe I won’t have to because I’ll just do it, I don’t know. 

There are a few other stray projects here and there like a few individual short stories that may or not be part of the collection that need to be rewritten and revised. Typically, when I get hung up with novel writing, I jump into something shorter with less bulk behind it and that’s either poetry or a short story (or this blog! hi!). 

And that’s why the blog writing has sort of crawled to a slow pace in the recent weeks. That and it was my birthday last weekend and I didn’t feel like doing anything other than eating cake and hanging out with my daughter. 

Anyway, hope to update you all in the future with some progress made. If nothing else, this got me through some jitters of perhaps reaching the end of the second chapter of G.J. with writing energy to spare but needing more time to think things through before committing fingers to keys. 

Stay safe out there and have a good summer! 

-Henry, written at 4:43 p.m. on a Thursday

I don’t sign these. What am I doing?

We’ll dive a bit more into the history of the types to give some background, but the main focus for why we’re here today is to talk about favorites. When it comes to Pokemon, there are many different species to choose from. 1025, to be exact as of the writing of this sentence. So it can be a little overwhelming when it comes to choosing who is going to form your party.

A good place to start, besides design, move set, and overall vibes, is a Pokemon’s type as that will influence the Rock, Paper, Scissors-esque strategy that comes from using said Pokemon to battle. Strategically, a Pokemon with fewer weaknesses will stand a better chance of securing a knockout without being knocked out in return.

This is why my favorite typing, Poison/Dark, only has one weakness and it is the best of the types hands down. I will be accepting requests to fight about this. Let’s begin. 

A Brief History of Everything (Related to Types)

So, you’re unfamiliar with the types of Pokemon that exist and you want a quick rundown of all the different types that exist up until the present day. Well boy, do I have some good news cause we’re about to get into that right now. For any Pokemon Masters out there, feel free to scroll down to the next section, cause this is about to get very basic. 

Every Pokemon has a type. Types give a Pokemon a basic identity in the battle mechanics featured heavily in these Pokemon video games. Some types have advantages over other types. Other types are weaker to different types. And so on.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take a look at the starter Pokemon in the first game Red, Blue, and Green (depending on region). When a young boy (or girl) turns 10, they receive their first Pokemon partner. In the Kanto region, they are offered a choice of the fire type Charmander, the water type Squirtle, or the grass (and poison) type Bulbasaur.

This triangle of types has been the mainstay standard through the various generations of Pokemon games because they teach the importance of super effective moves that type advantage benefits you as a Pokemon trainer. Fire is strong against Grass. Grass is strong against Water. Water is strong against Fire. This weakness triangle is the basic building blocks for a lot of the strategy in Pokemon battles, but it gets way, way more involved. 

Let’s take a look at the basic type advantage chart. This is one of many resources available to would be Pokemon Masters, so if the graphic stylings of this chart don’t gel with you, there’s many others to choose from.

Note that in addition to certain types being weak to others, types can also be resistant to others as well, giving them a defensive advantage instead of an offensive one. Understanding type matchups and knowing a Pokemon’s type can make the difference between glorious victory or crushing defeat. A type with no weaknesses would be very able to defeat any type that doesn’t resist it, resulting in the winning strategy being the same every single battle. 

Steel and Dark type Pokemon were first introduced in the 2nd generation games, Gold and Silver, to curb the absolute beasts that Psychic types had evolved into during the course of the first generation of games due to the fact that Psychic types had no real weaknesses or resistances. Due to a programming bug and a lack of actual moves, the proposed weaknesses of Bug types and Ghost types did not fill in the niche of Psychic type defeater that they were supposed to. 

Most bug type moves in those games were generally very weak or limited to Pokemon that also had a weakness to Psychic types by sharing a Poison type. The same went for the Ghost type Pokemon, of which there were three, and all of them also Poison type, thus sharing the same weakness to Psychic types.

The resulting imbalance created a need to create new types to stop the overpopulation of Psychic types on the fledging competitive scene, thus we got a new complete immunity in Dark types and new resistance in Steel types. 

A similar move was made in the fifth generation of Pokemon games, X and Y, with the introduction of the Fairy type to curb the overpopulation of Dragon types in the competitive scene, a very strong type that only had two weaknesses in the form of the very brittle Ice type and other fellow Dragon types (thus necessitating having Dragon types on your team to defeat other Dragon types). 

My favorite type in general is still Dragon types to this day, despite their now glaring weakness in being completely ineffectual against the Fairy type with their same type moves. 

Finding a Favorite Niche

Alright, now that we understand and know everything there is to know about types and their history, let’s discuss the interesting thing about Pokemon types. A large population of Pokemon have a dual type, meaning they are a combination of two types, like Bulbasaur that we alluded to earlier. When two types meet in a single mon, they share their weaknesses and their resistances, which can create some rather fun qualities. 

Let’s take any of the Pokemon that share the typing Flying/Electric like Emolga, Zapdos, Pom Pom Style Oricorio, Thundurus, and the Kilowatteral family. Normally, the Electric type has only one weakness in the Ground type. Pairing an Electric type with the Flying type, however, makes it immune to these sorts of attacks while introducing a weakness to Ice type and Rock type attacks. 

Is the trade off worth it? That’s debatable. Ground type attacks are some of the most common attacks in the competitive scene thanks to the Power and Accuracy of moves like Earthquake that are just insurmountable when it comes to knocking out your opponent. However, it’s novel that the introduction of a secondary type can change the way a type is played - you’re actively encouraged to switch an Electric/Flying type into a Ground type Pokemon since it would be immune in the case of a Ground type move being used, granting you a free switch-in. 

These are the kinds of interactions that scratch a certain itch in the min-maxing portion of my very distracted brain. Optimizing weaknesses and strengths is just sort of a passion of mine. 

Let’s take a look at another very fun combination of types in the Hiusian Zoroark line introduced in the Pokemon Legends: Arceus game. Normally, Zoroark is a Dark type pokemon that is weak to Fighting and  Bug types. However, due to something in the ancient Hiusi region, Zororak becomes a Ghost/Normal type, completely shedding its weakness to Fighting by gaining an immunity to it while also avoiding one of the only weaknesses that the Ghost type has by being immune to Ghost attacks thanks to the Normal type secondary. 

Truly, this is a masterpiece of a niche, especially paired with an ability that keeps your opponent guessing. For anyone unfamiliar, the first time in a battle you send out a Zoroark, it will take the form of one of the other Pokemon in your party. Align your party well and you can take the appearance of a Pokemon weak to Fighting type moves and have your opponent scratching their head when the move is completely ineffective. 

I love situations like these, where Pokemon gaining a different typing completely changes the way you consider that mon’s role in a team thanks to the new opportunities afford it. 

Running a Muk

So, Dark/Poison. I alluded to this being my favorite type and not without good reason, since it kind of is. Now, the Dark/Poison type isn’t exactly new to Pokemon. Generation 4’s Diamond and Pearl introduced two lines with this typing in the Skuntank line and the Drapion line, but for whatever reason I never really used either of them.

It wasn’t under the sixth generation game Sun and Moon and the introduction to Alolan form Pokemon that I was even intrigued by the possibility of using a Dark/Poison type. It all began with his smile. His stupid, irresistible smile. 

Meet Alolan Grimer and Alolan Muk, two Dark/Poison types that resemble a puddle of spilled oil. Grimer and Muk in the Kanto games don’t really have much going on for them. They’re another two pure Poison types in a generation filled with pure Poison types and where Psychic types reign without challenge. 

If we refer back to our weakness chart, Poison types are weak to Psychic types. But here’s the kicker, Alolan Grimer and Muk gain the Dark typing and become completely immune to Psychic types. Even more, the Dark type is weak to Fighting type moves, but Poison resists Fighting, rendering these moves to hit for neutral or normal damage instead of being supereffective. 

What we get is a Pokemon with only one weakness, the Ground type, that has an advantage over the Psychic types that would normally love to ruin its day. Throw in some coverage of the dreaded Fairy type (as Fairy type is weak to Poison), and my Dragons are roarin’ happy. 

Of course, it’s not perfect. Ground is still the most oppressive move type in the competitive scene and that remains a problem for sure, but the fact that Alolan Muk, Skuntank, and Drapion only have one weakness and can hit pretty much everything else with no problem makes them my favorite type. Heck, Steel even lost its original resistance to Dark moves somewhere along the way, so they can literally hit the entire roster of Pokemon at least with neutral damage and that makes them unstoppable (read: they are not unstoppable, I just like them). 

A Bigger PokePicture

Of course, Dark/Poison is not the only typing that only has one weakness. In fact, there are seven. Normal, Electric, Poison/Dark. Water/Ground, Water/Dragon, Bug/Steel, Normal/Ghost, and Ghost/Dark are the full contention of one weakness typings. 

Here’s a list by someone at ScreenRant that details all the Pokemon who fit into one of those typings, if you’re curious. 

But really, the one weakness thing doesn’t merit consideration for one’s favorite Pokemon typing. It’s just something that I value in a Pokemon if I’m going to be choosing from the roster of 1025 to fill out the six slots of my party. 

Notice, I never really talked about favorite Pokemon throughout this article because when it comes down to it, your favorite Pokemon should have very little to do with utility or how well they perform in the overall competitive meta of the games. Truly, none of the Dark/Poison types really rank anywhere near what is considered to be “good” through that lens, and there are surprisingly very few Pokemon that are considered “good” when you break down things to their competitive juices. There’s only a handful of Pokemon that have won at the World Championship stage, for instance. I’ll put a graphic here below to demonstrate that, but you’ll see how narrow of a field we’re talking when it comes to serious competitiveness. 

So the moral of the story is just to use the Pokemon and the typings that you like. And I happen to like the Dark/Poison types because I value the strategic benefits that pairing offers. What does that say about me, really? I’m not sure, I’m evil? Cause, like, Dark and Poison are like the evil types. If we dole out moralistic values to the typings, that is. 

Anyway, use the Pokemon that you love and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise and I’ll see you in the next article (not really, I can’t see through the website - that would be weird). 

In my recollection of the events surrounding my introduction to Guild Wars 2, my friend “Jeff” insisted that I find a way to play it with him, which I did by purchasing the game, only for him to quickly abandon it shortly after I had. 

In his recollection of the events surrounding his involvement with Guild Wars 2, he played the game for maybe a week one summer with his brother and never talked to me about it at all. 

What we have here are two versions of events surrounding a central focal point, Guild Wars 2, and our personal experiences that have colored our separate memories. But which version of our experiences that we can recall is the correct one? Or probably more accurately and to borrow some verbiage from standardized testing that has plagued young people's minds for decades, which version of events is the most correct? 

To answer that question, we'd need some sort of unbiased third party, a witness so to speak, of what had happened back then. Luckily, I rarely delete any digital communications thanks to a large helping of childhood anxiety brought on from sharing an email inbox with my mother on the family computer. Her rapid want to delete all emails trained me to be a digital hoarder as I scrambled to remind myself of events I had received e-vites for only to not be able to locate them, as they had been deleted. 

So let's just turn to my trusty archive of texts, Facebook messages, and other forms of communique to find the tru–what the?

The Archives Are Incomplete 

In my attempt to discover the truth of an argument, I ran back the text thread message between “Jeff” and I to the very beginning. At first I was perplexed at how difficult it is to do such a thing; I couldn't find a method that wasn't just endlessly scrolling up until I came to the first moments of our budding friendship of over 15 years as documented by messages such as “Gilgsmesh has declared war on me.” 

Luckily for this task, Jeff and I hadn't actually texted that much. We conversed much more on Facebook messenger for reasons lost to time, so I was able to come to the beginning of our thread as it existed in 2015 quite easily. 

What I found though, was a bit frustrating. Gaps in conversations. One sided answers to things that didn't make sense. Reactions to images that were no longer present. Things that felt missing or maybe had never been there but suggested. To quote one of the movies of all time, it was as though the archives were incomplete. Perhaps. 

Now in that movie (Star Wars II - Attack of the Clones), the archives are incomplete due to sabotage and I wouldn't put it past “Jeff” to somehow hack my phone and delete incriminating evidence that he pressured me into purchasing Guild Wars 2 sometime in the summer of either 2012 or later, but somehow I doubt this is the case. 

For one, “Jeff” doesn't even remember us talking about it, so how would he have remembered to hack my phone for that exact conversation? And for two, our texting started in 2015 according to my phone, as we used Facebook messaging much, much more often and Guild Wars 2 came out the summer of 2012.

For a bit of background, I have had the same phone number since I first received a cellphone in high school. Every time I have upgraded from phone to phone, I have imported my messages with me, reinforcing that digital hoarding tendency I alluded to earlier. 

This has allowed me, at least I thought, to carry a digital record of a good portion of my communications with me throughout my life. Not having checked to see if these records are incomplete, I’ve been walking forward through my life with the background knowledge that I can turn to this ledger at any time and relive my past as it is represented through the exchange of lols with people I haven’t talked to in years. 

Now that I’m aware of the incomplete nature of the ledger though, it’s like I lost a part of me. 

The Ship of Theseus is Sinking 

Here’s the deal I thought I had with the devices in my life: You get to collect all the data you want on me and sell it to advertisers without paying me for that valuable data and make millions in advertising money and I get an infallible record of who I am over time through the accumulation of texts, messages, and other activities. 

That deal has apparently been altered as messages are now just starting to disappear. What this means for me is that the version of myself that I can easily access in the form of my responses and conversations with friends, family, and complete strangers isn’t as reliable. How much that version of myself reflected the real life version is suspect (I come across way more put together in text than in real life), but now that it’s been proven to be incomplete, it’s even less reflective. 

I used to reread texts, messages, and the like often to see how I’ve lived my life. The memory can only do so much, so having actual empirical records of what was said, what was done, is refreshing. I don’t have to wrack my brain - it’s right there if I scroll up. From these messages, I can glean a little bit of who I was at different points of my life - my demeanor toward certain people, the type of humor I went for, the different stages and masks I donned for different social situations - and form a picture of the person I was and am. 

It’s an interesting exercise and one I recommend doing sometime in short bursts as it becomes easy to become trapped in reading messages in the past. In essence, step outside of your mind and all of the knowledge of who you think you are and read texts, messages, letters, and emails and try to see who you are as a person, how you as a person carry yourself in situations with others. 

For anyone who is not gifted with the fantastical powers of telepathy, how we respond is all people get to know of us. Talking is one half of the way we learn who people are (the other half is observation), so take a step outside of the knowledge of who you believe yourself to be and observe how you’ve talked to other people. See if you can piece together the type of person you are and it can be interesting to see if it matches your perception of yourself. 

This is what the digital ledger of every conversation I’ve had since owning my phone with the same phone number was for, at least, when I thought and knew it to be complete. 

From this ledger and my earlier eluded to conversations with “Jeff,” I learned I was overly sarcastic to the point of not making sense to anyone outside of our circle, as evident in the following exchange dated Thursday, Nov. 26, 2015:

Jeff: How interested are you in Elite: Dangerous*?
Henry: How decent is the sale?

J: It’s 15 dollars. 66% off of 45.
H: How many planets can I destroy? I don’t really know much about the game other than like super realistic space flight that requires calculus.

J: All I really know is it’s a superhuge space open world game.
H: Can I romance my spaceship?
J: I doubt it. I’m getting the feeling it’s an arcade-style Eve Online**.

J: Let me know. It’s been on my radar for a while, but the more I read, the more I think I’d rather play with friends.
H: Multiplayer? I can't marry a ship, but they can do multiplayer? I thought this was 2015 in the year of our lord, not the Dark Ages.

J: The lord spake, let none touch a spaceship with thine weiner, for thus becometh them Satan.
H: Maybe that’s the kind of Sole Survivor I want to be, Bethesda***. Get off my back.

–Scene–

*Elite: Dangerous is a superhuge space sim video game that was popular at the time.
**Eve: Online is a superhuge space sim massive online video game that is [checks notes] still popular.

***This is what I was referring to and will explain now. 

The line, “Maybe that’s the kind of Sole Survivor I want to be, Bethesda. Get off my back,” in the context of this conversation means absolutely nothing outside of the circle of friends I was playing games with at the time (and still play with on a weekly basis to this day). It’s not uncommon for us as a group to make reference to makers of video games who did not in fact make the video game we are playing. This is an inside joke that has been repeated for years unchecked in our circle spawning from a constant refrain of “Fix your game, Blizzard” regardless of which company actually made the game. 

(To explain the line, Bethesda made Fallout 4, of which the Sole Survivor, is the protagonist.)

Now, why couldn’t I just give Jeff a yes or no answer to his very simple query? Well, because I was the kind of person who didn’t like to give definitive answers to questions back then. I was anti-authoritative (still am) and absolute answers have a ring of authority to them. I also, and this was a disease at the time from which I still suffer, would constantly try to make jokes instead of having an actual conversation with people.

This is something I’ve observed in myself throughout many conversations and often led to miscommunications or missed connections. People who obviously wanted to hang out only to be deflected by an off color comment. Invitations to meet up somewhere met with jokes about the venue name and then no follow up to commit to going there to meet up. 

All of this took place somewhere around 2014-2016, a time when I was a postgraduate student struggling in a program that was asking me to be way more serious than I had ever even attempted to before and ultimately failed at. My conversations from this time are insufferable as a result, I think, of the very serious nature demanded of me from that program. 

Think of this analysis as but one of the many planks of the ship that come together to create the whole of the philosophical Ship of Theseus with which you might be familiar. In this thought exercise, one is to ponder that if every board of a ship called Theseus were to be replaced, would the ship called Theseus still be the same ship?

I don’t know the answer, but let’s complicate things with my metaphor of experiences that make us who we are as planks and the ship is us. Throughout life, there are many moments that shape who we are, but the memory of them is fallible. It is possible to forget moments that have shaped us, and those moments are replaced with new moments that shape us in different ways. Memory for memory, plank for plank, who a person is changes throughout a life, but are they the same person? Or a different, new person with the same name?

Well, with my infallible digital ledger, I could at least keep track of the planks of wood, but now that it has been proven to be fallible, I don’t know what’s going on any more! The ship is sinking! 

Okay, Not Really

I mean, I’m not going to die or anything if I don’t have an infallible record of everything I’ve ever said to anyone at any given moment. For one, I’m never going to sit down and read all of that. There’s simply not enough time to relive my entire life, after all. 

And honestly, these infallible digital records are relatively new to the human experience if we zoom out enough to see all of human history (and pre-history). Phones and messages systems are like, maybe old enough to drink now? I’m not doing the math, but they’re young. And human history (and pre-history) is much, much older. Again, not doing the math.

The point is, humans have gotten by with not remembering every moment of their waking life just fine. In fact, that’s probably a good thing, actually, that they couldn’t remember everything. Memory, as a function of the human brain, is probably more of a “don’t eat this, it made you sick,” sort of biological process than a “hey, remember you like these berries and that’s kind of your whole thing, you’re the ‘berry guy,’ it’s your whole deal.” 

Now that my phone has started to forget things, I’m just on the same playing field as Berry Guy. And I guess everyone else who isn’t as narcissistic as I am to reread entire conversations and analyze what I’ve said to see if I like it or not. (Most times, I do. I’m pretty funny. To myself). 

So, it’s sad that my phone has Alzheimer's or whatever. Especially because now I have no evidence whatsoever as to whose version of events is true “Jeff’s” or my own. It’s one of those things that will haunt me forever, since I so clearly remember being pressured into buying it only to be abandoned, but no one else seems to recall that happening. 

What I did find, however, was a time when “Jeff” invited me over to watch a soccer game that would take place early on a Saturday morning. He warned me how early it would be. He asked if I was still game for it, given the earliness. And I assured him that I was indeed still in. I told him I would set an alarm. He offered to pick me up and I waved him off. All of this was done days before the game was to take place. The result? “Jeff” messaged me the final score about an hour after the game had ended. I had missed it without even so much as a word. 

So to “Jeff,” I extend an apology. I’m sorry I missed that game and did not even bother letting you know that I was going to miss it. I will try to be better. 

We’ll start at the beginning with the naming of this blog as the source of the topics for each article and we’ll move through with the breakdown, why that isn’t happening as frequently, why I’m having to force myself to write at the end of the week now as opposed to the beginning of the week like when I started the blog back in [checks notes] March? That doesn’t seem right, but okay. 

I hope this is somewhat entertaining if not just sort of elucidating a bit how my mind works when it comes to writing. If nothing else, it’s therapeutic to get this out of my head, which of course is the final bit we’ll cover, the why write of it all, so let’s just get into it without stalling much more for time. It’s not like stalling for time does anything in the context of writing anyway, since you’ll be reading this long after I am done writing it and how long it takes to write usually isn’t too apparent in the body of work since it is all presented as one complete piece. Here we go. 

Recursive Thoughts 

Those of you who program might already be familiar with the concept of recursion. For a fun little demonstration of the concept, anyone can google the world “recursion” and see it in action. When one does so, the words Did you mean: recursion pop up at the top, like when a googled word is misspelled.

In programming, a recursion loop or error is when a function calls itself within its own definition to solve a problem by breaking it into several smaller subproblems, according to the definition provided by Google. The result is an endless loop of the function calling upon itself to solve the problem in an endless execution. 

For those of us who do not program, recursion is simply an endless repetition of an idea broken into smaller forms of that idea, usually in an endless loop. Fractals can be thought of as a visual type of recursion. The mythical figure of the Orouboros is another visual representation as the snake eats its own tail, forever. 

When I first decided to make this blog, I had no intention of naming it. Names and titles can be a struggle for me at times, but to be honest I never really even thought of naming the blog. I was telling a good friend who also has done a bit of blogging in his day, albeit in the realm of architecture, when he asked me what the name of the blog was. 

This question of a name put the blog into perspective for me in a way I hadn’t considered up until this point. I was several weeks into posting weekly entries at this point under the guise of writing every day and only publishing what seemed good enough to post and that seemed to be the purpose of the blog. Everyday Thoughts? Was that a good title? Evoking the concept that writing is a form of thinking for me and the occurrence of that thinking taking place every day? Also, there’s a play on “Everyday” in that it suggests these are normal thoughts, commonplace, when my writing style is, shall we say, a bit too elevated to the point of obnoxiousness at times. 

I hated it, so we moved on, but the form of the thing had taken place. There’s an idea in the creative field for those who work for clients or bosses who commission work to be done. It’s much easier for those in charge to critique something endlessly than it is for them to put into words exactly what they envision the end product to be. It’s hard for some people to start from scratch, in other words, and having some of the form on paper down to mold into a more accurate shape is easier. 

I’m not one of those people, but much like woodworking, I could see the end product within that first attempt. A blog title shouldn’t be too long. That’s what article titles are for (I just like being needlessly wordy - I find it humorous, spare me). So there was something in the form of “Everyday Thoughts” that I liked and could envision being close to the end goal of a blog title. Commence the encircling. 

Encircling, for those of us who have traveled through the frontier wilderness, is a concept whereby a train of covered wagons forms a circle to protect their charges from the outside elements, usually at night, while they rest. For me, it is the practice of obsessing over an idea until that idea has been completely surrounded by my thoughts and understood to the point where I feel confident that it should be put down to paper. This practice happens almost without effort in the spare times of my life - showering, driving, traveling from one spot to the next - basically any time when my mind is at “rest,” it is doing this encircling process. 

The rub. If I never write down the concepts that I’ve been obsessing over in this encircling process, it never actually ends. I keep encircling. The wagons are always circled. The concept never goes anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go. The only way out of my brain is through my fingertips (or my mouth, I do podcast some of this stuff out (www.zerocredits.net)). The ideas start to fold into themselves in repetition - hence, recursion. 

Recursive Thoughts. A place for all of the obsessive ideas that haunt the spare times of my brain. 

The Process of Writing a Post (and Why It’s Not Happening as Much Now)

Well, I pretty much covered the how in the reasoning behind the name. An idea pops into my head from the active part of my day. Talking to people, reading about current events, watching various television shows (currently watching Portlandia for some reason), or any other sort of active action puts the idea in my head either consciously or subconsciously. During a brain down time moment (the spare times), that idea starts to worm its way into the center of the circled wagons and becomes an obsessive thought for me to process through. Once I feel as though I’ve obsessed enough over the thought, I start writing out the ideas and all of those encircled ideas spill out of my fingertips as easily as breathing. 

It’s a pretty straightforward process and kind of airtight, when you look at it all on paper. The bulk of the work, the encircling, happens almost automatically since it’s done by the passive part of my brain. So why isn’t it happening as much lately? In a word, I’m tired. 

Juggling raising a newborn and a fulltime job is not something I’ve read much about or heard much about in the avenues of my life beyond the very tiresome quips from those who have done it before, long, long ago in a completely different societal environment. So let me be the first to say it without an ounce of sarcasm or mean-spirited humor: being a parent and a full time employee is the hardest thing I’ve done. 

It’s funny and I don’t want to dive too deep into the gendered nature of this experience, but when I mention I’m tired to people at work as a father, there is little to no sympathy. Instead, I am met with jokes to the tune of, “you think you’re tired now. Wait until [insert some future milestone that will no doubt bring me endless joy because every milestone for my child is pure magic].” There’s this weird need to forecast doom with early childrearing. “Oh, they’re actually sweet at this age and I miss when my children were that young. Before, [thousand yard stare] it all changed…” 

And, yeah, maybe it gets worse, but the fact of the matter is I’m still more tired than I’ve ever been right now. And maybe I’ll be even more tired when I get to whatever milestone it is they allude to, but that doesn’t magically make me less tired right now. 

I haven’t gotten more than five hours of sleep straight in months and I used to sleep six to seven hours on the regular.

The compounding result of this is that the spare times where I used to ruminate and compose are spent fighting to stay awake or wake up (the drive home after work is the worst for this). There’s less thinking going on and that means less polished and less thoughts overall escaping my fingertips.

This is why some of these articles keep hitting a wall halfway through that I just sort of power through for the sake of completing the article (see: Back When Tigers Used to Smoke). 

Why with the Writing, Then, Mr. Sleepybrain?

The short and simple is that for me, there is no difference between writing and thinking. They are one in the same action with different results. There’s no evidence that I’ve been thinking without writing it down is the only catch. 

I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of writers out there, but the process of thinking about what I’m going to write and the act of sitting down to write are basically the same action. All of the thinking, all of the pre-writing, flexes the same writing muscles that I use when it comes down to actually putting fingers to keys and pounding out the letters and words that make these sentences. 

So the answer to why is a simple one - because the thinking truly never really stops. Sure, I’m spending my spare times fighting to stay awake, but how do I do that? By thinking. And sure, I’m trying to wake up in the morning in the show and I accomplish that by thinking. With all this thinking and thinking in these spare times, there’s a backlog of thoughts piling up in my brain and with the recursive nature of how I think, they’re starting to repeat to the point of being tuned out altogether. 

The one difference between thinking and writing is that when a thought is written, it leaves my brain. If I don’t write out a thought, it gets tuned out and ultimately fades after a period of time. And when a thought fades, all of the work encircling that thought, carrying it through weeks and weeks, and developing it to a point where I feel confident about putting it to paper fades with it - lost, like tears in rain to quote Bladerunner. 

At some level, I feel obligated to write down the thoughts I’ve been carrying if nothing else to free up space for my brain and also to ensure those thoughts and the work that went into forming them doesn’t disappear. It’s a matter of finding the energy and time to sit down and pound out the keys so the letters form the words and sentences, but it’s something that is important to me, ultimately, and so that’s why with the writing, folks. 

A Sad Secret

There’s been a sort of half-truth woven throughout this article, or well, I haven’t been completely honest with the scope of what we’ve been talking about. You see, I’ve framed this thought-to-writing process as the method by which this blog works, but the truth is much larger. What I’ve outlined in this post is actually how my brain approaches any form of writing, including and especially including my work in fiction. 

And the sad part of this secret is that I haven’t been writing fiction, not for quite some time even before the birth of my daughter. The thoughts still happen - I still compose the ideas, scenes, sentences that would go into my work. But the writing isn’t happening. All of these thoughts just fade because it’s kind of easier to just let them disappear then to put them down to paper.

This blog is a way to get into the practice of writing my thoughts down again, of figuring out when and where the little free time that I have is and to commit to getting back into the habit of putting words to the fiction I like to create. 

The other half of the sad secret is that it is ultimately easier to write down my personal thoughts than it is to craft fiction. I can be confident in what I think is what I think and throw out any notion of whether or not what I think is good, but that barrier still exists when it comes to my fiction. 

There’s no easy way out of that and I can’t pretend that writing a personal blog will help, but that is why I try to challenge myself with off the wall topics that are outside of myself sometimes. Either way, I love writing and I want to continue to do it in whatever form that writing takes. I hope you enjoy it, too, but to be honest, I’m just trying to clear my head a little.

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A little post script for you:

The blog isn’t dying or anything, in fact, I’m trying to improve it more each day. There’s a new RSS feed to subscribe to, if that’s your thing and you want to know the second there’s a new post without waiting for me to lose a coin flip and post to my instagram. You can find a subscribe button at the top of the main blog page and also right here, if I can figure out how to post it here.

I’m considering adding comments as well, so we can form a little community, but that’s much more down the pipeline. For now and as always, stay tuned.  

Type match ups. Move sets. Favorite Pokemon. I carry these in my little head everywhere I go like some sort of wandering vagabond in a franchise that is, quite frankly, very much involved with merchandise. 

Besides the video game entries, all I have are a love for my favorite little guys. So when there’s news pertaining to my little guys and people who know me and also know who my little guy are, I hear that news multiple times in a given news cycle.

Which is to say, yes, I have seen the announced design of Mega-Dragonite coming to Pokemon Z-A later this fall. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I have seen it. 

Now, for those unfamiliar, I’ll give you a little brief of what’s going on with the goofy dragon boy, a rundown of a very critical and overblown fan reaction to the news, and ultimately a defense of the design GameFreak, The Pokemon Company, and Creatures, Inc. decided to bestow onto us, the most loyal of Pokemon fans. So let’s wade into the tall, tall grass and encounter some wild Pokemon information! 

Oh, What a Dragonite

Dragonite is the final evolution in the Dratini line who debuted in the very first Pokemon games, Green, Red, and Blue depending on your location back in the late 90’s. It is also my most favoritest Pokemon. Dragon types were very rare overall in these games, as there were only three total: Dratini, Dragonair, and Dragonite. 

There’s been speculation as to why this typing was so rare with several internet users positing that the type was supposed to be a sort of “final boss” type in that it is resistant to the three types of starter pokemon - fire, water, and grass (as well as electric) - and only being weak against ice types and itself, but regardless of the reason for the rarity, once I faced down Lance at the end of the elite four and encountered a Dragonite for the first time, I fell immediately in love. 

In a game where your first partner pokemon ends up looking like some of the baddest boys on the block, here was a goofy looking dragon boy who could end their whole career with a move proving that you didn’t need to have those weird angry angular eyes to be cool. 

Let’s look at a side by side comparison of two dragon-esque Pokemon designs from the original games and you tell me which one you’d want to hang out with more. 

I mean, Charizard is cool. I won’t deny that, but with the eyes of an angry sailor and fangs hanging out its mouth, it looks dangerous. Would it ever love me? Hug me? Or would it just fiercely protect me no matter what, regardless of my feelings?

 In the anime, our introduction to Charizard is an interesting one. We spend episode after episode, an entirety in young childhood time, with young Charmander just to have the resulting Charmeleon and Charizard hardly ever listen to Ash’s commands. 

Meanwhile, our first introduction to Dragonite in the anime is one of mythic proportions. A kaiju sized one walks past a lighthouse and instantly becomes the stuff of legends in our minds. 

I’m biased here, but you get it, right? You get it! 

A Look Eternal 

Since its debut in the first mainline games, Dragonite’s design has remained pretty untouched. Sure, the addition of color in the Gold, Silver, and Crystal games on the Game Boy Color would reveal the true color palette of the line in its trademark blue and then orange (and the additional reveal of its shiny form being inexplicably pink to green), but beyond these touchups, the Dragonite line has been pretty stable.

Over the years with the introduction of new and different game play mechanics there have been opportunity after opportunity for the designers to revisit the line, give it something new, as had happened with some other original Pokemon through the iterations.

The first chance game with Pokemon X and Y on the 3DS and the introduction of Mega Evolutions. This mechanic will ultimately grant us the new design that has prompted this whole article, but not for a solid decade; you’ll see what I mean. Released in 2013, X and Y’s Mega Evolutions granted a chance for some popular and not-so-popular lines to get neat power up forms, updated designs, altered abilities, and in some case typings to refresh how these Pokemon were utilized in battle and in general thought of by the playbase. 

But the choices of which Pokemon lines to grant a Mega Evolution were somewhat baffling. Charizard, one of the most if not the most popular Pokemon, was given two different Mega Evolutions, as was Mewtwo. Then you have Metagross, Garachomp, and Salamence - Pokemon who have traditionally and vernacularly been referred to as “pseudo-legendary” due to their late game nature of coming into power and due to their overall Base Stat Totals being 600. Dragonite is also one of these pseudo-legendaries, so it stands to reason it would get a Mega Evolution as well, but that wasn’t the case in 2013. 

Instead, we got Mega Beedrill and Mega Sableye, niche Pokemon with very little popularity in the major professional formats. The original Kanto starters each got at least one Mega and later on, with the remake of Ruby and Sapphire, so did the starters of the Hoenn region. 

But left behind was our boy Dragonite. 

A second chance came six years later with the advent of Gigantimax Pokemon introduced in Pokemon Sword and Shield in 2019. All Pokemon are able to Dynamax, bringing over a design choice made in the previous games to enable all Pokemon to be special and not just a scant few, but then oddly, only a few Pokemon change forms when they Dynamax. If this is confusing or hard to understand, it’s not necessary to understand for the point and history we’re covering. The short of it is, while Butterfree and Kingler got special forms for this mechanic, Dragonite was again left off the special boys and girls list. 

(Charizard got a special form, though, so I guess I’m salty about that). 

And so the design of one Dragonite has been relatively unchanged since its introduction barring small design tweaks and some design choices that come with translating from 2-D animated sprites to 3-D models. Dragonite has always and will always be this goofy little guy.

Z-A: All Backwards???

Yeah, I couldn’t think of anything clever for this heading, sorry. Anyway, enter Pokemon Legends: Z-A, an upcoming title for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 systems that has us revisiting the Kalos region, the home of Pokemon X and Y. With a revisit to a region comes the speculation that we’ll also be revisiting the mechanics of the games set in that region and lo and behold, it’s confirmed Mega Evolutions are coming back into the fold. 

I’ll skip the time period in which we didn’t know if new Mega Evolutions would be introduced or not, because this past Tuesday on July 22nd, 2025, a new trailer for Pokemon Z-A dropped as part of Pokemon Presents that included the introduction of a brand new Mega Pokemon: Mega Dragonite.

Here he is. 

Finally, after over a decade of waiting, the Pokemon Company has remembered that Dragonite exists and is deserving of their and our attention. 

And fans were…underwhelmed? Distraught? Displeased. None-too-happy. 

You see, for a lot of people in the fandom of Pokemon, coming up with designs is something of a fun pastime. There are countless artists designing up concepts for new Pokemon, redesigning old Pokemon, or giving alternate forms to their favorites and with how long it’s been since Dragonite got any love, there are hundreds of fan drawn examples of what a Mega Dragonite could look like. With all of the time and plenty of people working on bringing our goofy boy back into the fold with a new form, it is safe to say that maybe, just maybe some people built up their expectations a little too much. 

Here’s numerous examples of people being less than happy with the design of Mega Dragonite. 

A Link to An Article at TheGamer

A Link to an Article at The Express Tribune

And here’s just a few examples of what people dreamt up for what could have been Mega Dragonite’s design. 

There’s clearly a disparity between how the creators of Pokemon and the fans of Pokemon view the original dragon.

Goofy is Good, Actually 

The thing about the design of Mega Dragonite for me as a Dragonite fan is that it totally fits my perception of what Dragonite is - a goofy little dragon with immense power. So the big wings on its head that are reminiscent of Dragonair fit right in with how I perceive Dragonite to be. They’re oversized and plain silly, but that’s not going to stop it from wiping the floor with your Pokemon because it’s still just as powerful as before.

If anything, there should be more wings. They should have gone biblically accurate angel with it, like this design from reddit user ApricotArticuno. 

My point here is, just because something like a new design for a Pokemon doesn’t meet the expectations that you’ve built up in your head, it doesn’t mean the design is bad. The design is totally in line for the vision and execution that the Pokemon Company has been using for years. Dragonite as a goofy little guy with explosive power. Dragonite as an affable mail carrier and nothing more. 

In a game where lead game designer Ken Sugimori chose to give so many of the powerful, more titular final evolutions those angular, angry looking monster eyes, he chose to give Dragonite the soft, round eyes of a friend. And so it follows that the Mega Evolution that Dragonite gets decades later, the first redesign it has ever gotten, falls in line with that thinking. Dragonite with big ole floppy wing ears is friendly. Kind. And powerful enough to level a city. 

So while perhaps the design could have been cooler or more edgy or epic or over-designed or what have you, the design we got is pretty spot on with the depiction of Dragonite over the years. And I for one am happy to see the original vision of Ken Sugimori not succumb to the modern think that something needs to look cool to be cool. I’ll be Mega Evolving a Dragonite when Z-A comes out this fall for sure. 

I just hope that Z-A has abilities, unlike its spiritual predecessor Legends: Arceus. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now, any time you see someone complain about something that doesn’t meet their expectation, ask yourself if the execution is in line with a grand overall vision. If it it’s not, only then can you riot.

And that leads me to a big question - how does one start introducing the world to one’s kid? How does one begin that process?

Now, I’m not really asking that question and this piece won’t be about that much at all, it’s just a vehicle with elements of my personal life blended in to get at something neat that I had no other way to introduce, but uh, do you guys know how Korean folktales start? In English, we use this little phrase “Once upon a time,” to evoke a time long gone when magic and princesses mayhaps dominated the world, but I think the Koreans have us beat with their phrase, “호랑이 담배 피우던 시절.” 

For any of you who don’t speak Korean (including me), here’s a more western spelling of that phrase: horangi dambaepiudeon sijeol. Roughly translated, this phrase means “back when tigers used to smoke,” or “In the time tigers used to smoke” and that’s just a badass way to start a story of any color. How did I go almost 35 years without knowing this? was my first reaction, I’m not sure what yours is, but together, let’s take a little deep dive into the various ways people start their stories and break them down to understand their meanings. Because that sounds fun to me and I hope it does to you too. 

In the Time When Tigers Used to Smoke 

Tigers are fascinating. Like the wolves that haunt a good number of western fairytales, tigers seem to have captivated an entire hemisphere of the globe with their vicious, stalking nature. Unfortunately, there is no recorded origin for the implication that they used to smoke, leaving us to speculate why they kicked the habit before we reached modern times. 

There is one hypothesis as to the meaning of the phrase “Back when tigers used to smoke,” that carries on connotations of social hierarchy of the times. According to a user on Quora who goes by Neky (I know, I know), the “Cigarette was first introduced in Korea in 1618, roughly in the early 17th century. Back then, everyone could smoke. Even small children at 4–5 used to smoke. They didn’t know how smoking is bad yet.” Over time, namely during the Joseon period, the availability of cigarettes would become more restrictive, reserved for members of the higher classes, leaving out our poor striped friends. The phrase then evokes a time when everyone, even tigers, could smoke which no doubt felt like a long, long time ago for those who had to go without that sweet, sweet tobacco and nicotine. 

Because of the nature of folktales being more of an oral tradition than a written one, I do not have a recorded first example of this phrase being used. It’s an interesting one, though, as it can only have existed as long as smoking was a popular pastime for Koreans, so we know it isn’t too much older than the 1600s. The funny thing about my exploration of the phrase was that I found the same exact wording of the Quora post in not one but two different articles about the phrase right down to the exclusion of the word “the.” So, if that user was wrong, so are those other two articles. 

Other than this supposition, there’s not much in the way of an explanation for the origin of the phrase. Tigers are extinct in Korea today, unfortunately, as they were hunted for sport during the time of Japanese occupation. Korean tigers are still a large part of the country’s mythology, even playing a part in the creation of the country in one version of the myth. I won’t dive too deep here, we’re only interested in the beginning after all, but depictions of Korean tigers smoking are still ubiquitous to this day even with no hint as to how the phrase came to be. 

There are other popular tiger related idioms in Korean that would suggest the practice of evoking these creatures was commonplace. “호랑이도 제 말 하면 온다” which translates to “Even a tiger comes when you say his name,” a phrase used to admonish children for not listening to their parents. There’s also “호랑이를 잡으려면 호랑이 굴로 들어가야 한다,” meaning “To catch a tiger, you have to go to a tiger’s den.” This one has been compared to “No pain, no gain,” denoting that you have to give something your all to accomplish it.

So tigers abound in the Korean idiom scene. There’s also way more idioms that have nothing to do with tigers, but perhaps the occasional to frequent appearance of tigers in everyday language colored the beginnings of folktales. Either way, it is no doubt one of the coolest ways of beginning something. 

 A Story, a Story. Let It Go, Let It Come

Ah, yes, and now we reach the part of writing the article where I’ve covered what I wanted to cover and now have to pivot to something else. I was going to keep deep diving into different folktale beginnings, but none are quite as neat as back when tigers used to smoke. Maybe we shouldn’t have started with that one and the truth of the matter is there aren’t a ton of sources behind the beginnings of folktales, their origins, or why they rarely seem to change. 

There is a great exploration of the formulaic and flourishes found in folktales ‘round the world from Anothy Madrid in The Paris Review that I found intriguing and will be linking to somewhere in this sentence (surprise, it’s here), but I won’t be replicating any of his work here and instead instruct you to click that link and read his article, which is very good. I did lift one of the beginnings from that article for the heading of this section, but we don’t need to tell him that. 

This opening, “A story, a story. Let it go, let it come,” comes from Hasua, a region, language, and people found all over West Africa. Apparently every story begins with this phrase and it is a beautiful phrase. Interesting is that the phrase evokes the story’s leaving before it even arrives, maybe emphasizing the temporary nature of our stories, how they only live with us during the telling and as long as we remember that telling. Let it go, I think is a gentle reminder that stories and memories will leave us eventually, that we won’t be able to recall them as we go about our lives and experience other stories. But the nature of the order of this phrase can be cyclical, I think, in that we might one day remember the story again (Let it come). It’s a very good way to start a story if not just an outwardly perfunctory way to let you know a story is happening.

 I think, perhaps, in the same way, I may need to let this piece come and go as I have run out of steam here toward what could be generously described as “the middle” of writing through this idea. 

Once

What I’m struggling with now, the doldrums that come when the first winds of starting something have died down, is why beginnings are so important. With the right energy that a good beginning breathes into a work, there’s enough momentum to carry us through the hard part, when inspiration and passion give way to the arduous task of following through. It’s easy to get wrapped up in starting something new, it’s fun even. I have so many projects that I’ve started and then left to rot on the vine as if projects like produce can ripen on their own without being watered, weeded, and w-cared for.

One of the more common thrown around openings that I could not track down an origin for is the phrase “When the animals talked.” I even found a “When the animals and men spoke the same language,” but there was so much controversy surrounding this phrase as I could not find an actual country or language of origin for it. Spanish apparently has “Cuando los animales hablaban,” but Flemish fables also allegedly have their “Toen de dieren nog spraken” and neither of these languages or many others have true recorded examples of their first use, which makes it difficult to nail down if it was even used at all. Here’s a very fun internet argument from a Dutch speaker putting forth that the phrase is more of an ironic tongue-in-cheek phrase than an actual fable or fairy tale opening.

Regardless of whether the phrase was actually used to open folktales and fables, it is unquestionably a good phrase. “Back when the animals speak” evokes a time when the world was still new, when customs weren’t as set in stone, when magic could still be thought of as “in existence,” and for that I applaud it. The point of bringing this phrase up now, at the end of this post’s life, is to hopefully give you some inkling of a point to this discussion of beginnings and the way we phrase them. 

Don’t suffer the doldrums for so long that your begun projects date back to when the animals could still speak or when the tigers used to smoke. Instead, use the winds from your beginnings to sail through the tough middle center and onto natural or unnatural conclusions. 

It’s easier said than done, but let’s spice up the “saying” of it all to make it more fun.

Physicists who are no doubt a blast at parties have used this implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to posit a possible “heat death” of the universe, whereby the energy of the system of existence is too spread out to achieve any sort of “work.” All of the heat that exists spreads out so evenly throughout the universe that nothing can be done again. The universe simply freezes over, so to speak.

Cool, now that we’re all freaking out about that, let’s move on to the topic at hand: Have you guys noticed that everything is seemingly getting just a little bit worse over time? Sure you have. At least, perhaps if you’re terminally online or scroll a couple of TikToks too many, you’ll find people singing about how nobody’s trying to fix anything. You may have even come across the term “enshittification” on your world web travels. 

Not too unlike entropy quantifying a system’s tendency to pull toward disorder, I think we should come up with a term for a very similar phenomenon happening in our social systems - the society we live in every day. Hopefully I find this proposed term in the writing of this article (spoilers, I don’t), but for now, let’s just say it how it is: the system of unregulated capitalism that we’re currently living in is demonstrating a consistent and constant pull toward the worsening of everything around it for the sake of a larger short term gain that only benefits the ultra wealthy. 

The Fall of the House of U.S.her 

So, not to get too political here or anything, but the decline of the United States of America is a topic that I think is going to be studied for a long, long time. And that’s saying something because a weird minority of people can’t even see the decline happening right in front of them (this too should also be studied, probably). 

But before we get to present day shenanigans like the mass firing of federal employees who run vital programs that keep U.S. citizens fed, safe, and not-deported, let’s turn the clock back a bit to the time of a fledgling nation that had yet to be ravaged by savage, greedy capitalists. And I’ll add a disclaimer here that I am not by any stretch of the imagination an historian, so, there may be errors in this point I’m trying to make. 

The year was 1890, wait, that seems…kind of…early? Oh, so capitalists have been ravaging the nation for a long, long time. Okay then, well in 1890 the Sherman Antitrust act passed both houses of congress and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harris back when we didn’t really feel the need to keep track of every little law and action a president did, since well, there was no publicity back then. The law aimed to protect consumers by getting rid of the practice of price fixing by way of being the only game in town so to speak and put into place processes (imperfect as they are, affected by entropy even then) to break up so called monopolies that aimed to strong arm the market with outrageous prices due to there being no competition. 

You see, dear would be reader, the U.S. economy was deemed to be a “free market” where competitors across shared industries would compete with one another either by creating better and better products or coming up with ways to entice consumers to their product over their competitor’s. Competition would drive prices down, you see! 

Well, one John D. Rockefeller (and I’m not being silly here, we’re actually talking about John) figured out that if there were no competition, prices wouldn’t necessarily have to be driven down. They could do the opposite, actually. And they could do the opposite for a really long, long time, potentially. And so a campaign of bribery, violence, and economical warfare began under the name of U.S. Standard Oil, the first recorded monopoly on U.S. soil. 

A funny thing about the first U.S. monopoly is that it and many other domestic monopolies actually formed after the passing of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Huh, what odd timing. Anyway, U.S. Standard Oil actually benefited the oil industry through its cruel, barbaric ways, if it can be believed. Before the cannibalization of most of the nation’s fledgling oil tycoons, environmental damage through the dumping of waste byproducts and waste water was rampant. U.S. Standard Oil found a way to monetize the byproducts through the creation of oil based home products like Vaseline and Baby’s First Oil Rig (the second one is made up, sorry). 

In fact, U.S. Standard Oil gave seemingly a lot back to the nation at large, creating numerous infrastructure improvements across the nation to perfect its oil distribution network which created thousands of jobs in the process. I mean, the oil baron was still an oil baron, but there has to be a reason that 30 Rockefeller Plaza is such an iconic mainstay of the New York skyline. Traditions like the large Christmas Tree and the ice skating rink during the winter certainly helped and Rockefeller wasn’t the only millionaire giving back. Carnegie Hall comes to mind, funded and constructed on the behest of Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate and founder of U.S. Steel Corporation (there weren’t a lot of names back then, so you just called your company the product you sold, apparently?). 

Point is, these monopolies run by tyrants who employed terrible practices to ensure a lack of competition, thus maximizing their gains, used to give back to society at large. They funded the arts. Erected concert venues where the greatest musicians of the world came to play. They created infrastructure that would be used by hundreds of dozens of Americans. This idea was put forth by the Carnegie Hall guy (relax, I know his name is Andrew) who argued that excess wealth should be put to the betterment of society in his work “The Gospel of Wealth.”

I’m not defending their practices or the means by which they funded all of these things, but the point is, they did them. Maybe as a way of paying off the public at large from thinking what they were doing was underhanded. Maybe as a way of paying off government officials from employing the use of that Sherman Antitrust Act we keep hearing about. Sure, their motives might have been far, far, far from pure, but at least there was something. 

Nowadays, our millionaires and billionaires only seem to give money to charities toward the end of their lives, which is fine I suppose, but what happened to the societal pressure to be seen as some sort of benevolent force of unfettered wealth? Where are the sponsors for the arts, the champions of infrastructure, and why does it seem like every millionaire is trying to get the basic necessities of their industry subsidized by the government when they already have so, so much money?

A fundamental shift in the mindset of your average millionaire seems to have taken place somewhere between the dissolution of U.S. Standard Oil and the explosion of Silicon Valley. Where the Renaissance was spurred on by the patronage of the Medici family in Italy and the sparse amount of public works we got later in the Rockefeller and Carnegie era, a draconian (and I do mean like a dragon) hunger has taken place in the heart of the obscenely wealthy today. This hunger seems to possess two primary directives: hoard and increase. 

Neither of which actually improves anything other than the number in a bank account. 

Trickle Down Tendencies 

The absolutely fun phenomenon of humans that starts when we’re all just infants is that we like to copy each other. We see someone do something we want to do and we do it too. Why not? I mean, the entire reason this blog exists is because a fellow improv comedian I’ve met on a few occasions started his own blog and started writing about Donkey Kong sequels, so like, I’m not innocent either. 

Usually in infants, though, we have parents to steer us away from behaviours that should not be copied. Bad influences we call them, and we strive to teach our child that rocks aren’t for eating or throwing, but for collecting, polishing, and storing in a nice display case that we show our friends when they come over before they stop coming over (no one wants to look at your rocks). The problem with infants, though, is they stop being infants. Children, and science is still unsure why, grow up into adults and adults, and scientists are also unsure why, do not tend to listen to other adults. I mean, like, the police can dissuade you from stealing by their sheer existence, I guess, and like society is supposedly supposed to guide us from doing bad influency things and all, but the problem is there’s no real laws against being the shittiest capitalist to ever capital in hopes you too can be like the Big Boys. 

Hence, a lot of copycats trying to out-shit each other and a prolific abundance of copycats making less than quality products at premium prices. A service that launches for free with really good features soon turns into a paid only service that barely offers the bare minimum for an untenable monthly subscription fee. One only need to say the ill-begotten sentence “I think I want to start a podcast” to receive hundreds of VoIP recording services, each charging $19.99 a month for the most basic of service packages that allows you to 1. Record Over the Internet, 2. Download Your Recor–WAIT, WE CAN EDIT YOUR PODCAST WITH AI! 

As a seasoned idiot podcaster for the past 8+ years, I have navigated a number of these services and sadly, it’s the same story each time. Debut for free to establish a user base, then turn on the monetization switch and watch your user base plummet off the face of the earth because WHY ARE YOU CHARGING ME TO RECORD A CALL OVER THE INTERNET? 

This has led my podcast (www.zerocredits.net) to go underground and use the very gracious people over at Discord’s voice chat with an open source bot that simply just records the call for free. Until Discord starts charging for long voice calls and loses their user base overnight, that is. 

The problem with this Money, Please mentality is that no one following it seemingly wants to follow the long-term strategy goals of making a good product and support it over a long product life cycle to create loyal customers. Instead, it’s slap together a decent product and slowly strip features out of it overtime to keep scraping and squeezing as much money as possible out of the initial investment without infusing any more cash. 

This phenomenon was first thoroughly documented in the software as a service industry (SaaS if you’re sassy) by Canadian-British blogger and anti-monopolist Cory Doctorow as “enshittification.” Here’s a link to a podcast with the man himself explaining way more about the thinking behind it and its detremets. 

Before it hit the software industry, however, enshittification hit a much different industry, one much closer to home: the grocery store. Going by another name but in essence being much the same thing, I present to you Shrinkflation! Pioneered, possibly, by one of my favorite websites MousePrint.org, shrinkflation describes a practice by food service companies who shrink the size of internal packaging while charging the same amount of money - your money literally buys less product due to changes in packaging. 

These practices, of course, are nothing new - companies and corporations are always scheming ways to shrink overhead and cut costs to achieve short term gains that reward shareholders with more instantaneous gratification than prolonged rewards - but it’s becoming more and more obvious that we need to be prepared for a reality where everything is broken, our money doesn’t go as far, and presumably someone out there is amassing all that stolen wealth. 

Cyberpunk 2027

One of the key aspects of the genre of Cyberpunk put forth by movies like Blade Runner and books like Neuromancer are the sprawling megatropolis-es where these stories take place. These mega-cities are dingy, run-down, expansive, and seemingly all-encompassing; they are as much a force in the narrative as any of the characters due to their ever present and oppressive nature. 

These cities are symbols for rampant, unchecked capitalism that thirsts only to expand, to grow, to make the line go up and achieve another year of record revenue. That is accomplished by building new things to promote more investors and creating more products so that more people spend more of their money with your branding. Let’s face it, fixing up something that is old and broken is only sexy if it’s on HGTV. So let’s keep building new skyscrapers. New hotels. New day spas and luxury resorts. Let’s keep building all these new things and maintain none of them so that they all slowly break down and wear away over time. 

The spiraling cityscapes of this genre do not happen by accident or chance. It’s all purposefully designed. The wealthy take care of their own - their offices are spotless, pristine, lording over the common filth of the streets below because what obligation does those with means have to take care of those who do not? There is no obligation in these futuristic science fiction settings and it’s becoming very apparent that certain individuals are watching these movies and reading these books and learning the wrong lessons. 

The thing about a capitalist system is that no matter how it tries, if unregulated, it will pull more and more money out of the process and set it aside for hoarding. The more money it siphons out of the system, the less money there is to go around for the average day working person. Our buck will stop shorter and shorter and the ever widening gap between the ultra-wealthy will only deepen into an impassable crevasse.

This is the true heat death of the country of America. With the passing of one of the dumbest named bills in U.S. History, our government as all but enabled the greatest siphon of American wealth to the ultra-rich we’ve ever seen, speeding along the heat death of the country. When the money is too spread out to be spent, the system will collapse. The ultra rich will survive through the sheer force of their means, but the average person will have little option but to perish, since the safety nets of our social programs have been all but cut to ribbons completely. 

Unregulated capitalism kills. It’s also the reason why everything is just a little bit worse now. And why I lay up at night, thinking about entropy. 

What’s that? You’re asking why I started this blog with the intent of writing every day when I knew full well that our baby would come this year and I’d be naturally interrupted in that goal? Haha, dear reader, you’re such a kidder. Of course I launched this blog with those intended goals. Because of the W A I T I N G. 

While being a father is new to me, probably too new to write about, the absolute agony of those few but very long days that took place before the event are in the very distant rear view window of the car three cars behind us on the road of life. So that’s what we’re going to dive into in this little episode of Recursive Thoughts. That and maybe some of what it’s like to be in a hospital for five days straight for the first time and not be a patient. There’s room for all things in the articles of repeated thought.

Scheduled Delivery

Here’s a fun fact, our daughter was delivered at 41 weeks into pregnancy. Here’s another fun fact, our doctor thought that our daughter was going to be over 9 lbs at birth. Put those two fun facts together and you get some very not so fun thoughts. The heavier a baby is, the more likely there might be complications during delivery. The longer a baby cooks in the ole oven, the heavier a baby is likely to be. Babies predicted to be already quite heavy at 36 weeks should then be encouraged to come out at or before their due date to avoid those complications. 

Because of all this, we elected to schedule an appointment to induce labor. Our doctor told us on a Tuesday, and I quote, “it would be smart to induce before your due date.” So we called to schedule an appointment to induce, following our doctor’s advice, only to find that the next available appointment would be Thursday of next week. We booked it.

Que a montage of us going to work with the looming cloud of labor possibly hovering o’erhead for a full week. It literally feels like lightning could strike at any time and change the course of your entire life, not to mention your day. As a person who very much values a regulated schedule of activities per day (HA! dear read, HA! I say), this lingering threat of change did a number on my psyche and possibly my soul. But it was all alright - we had that scheduled appointment to induce in the books. An ending to suffering was on our calendar, we even had the exact time! 

The aforementioned promised Thursday comes to be. I did not go to work that day, as it seemed like a perfect day for my leave to begin. This was the day, after all, and it seemed to be the day right up until 3:38 p.m. when the labor and delivery floor of the hospital called us to say that our appointment would not be honored. There were a lot of deliveries currently and they simply had no room for a non-emergency induction of labor. They would simply call us back when there was such room for a non-emergency induction of labor with a non-committal estimate that it could be later tonight or even tomorrow morning.  

Welcome, dear reader, to the amplification of one’s personal purgatory. I wouldn’t call it hell - I’ve been through worse (OR WILL GO THROUGH WORSE, HA HA), so purgatory is a nice fit. For those unfamiliar, purgatory is a concept of some of the Judeo-Christian religions whereby the recently deceased who are in God’s graces but not cleansed of sins wait until their soul is perfected before moving into the gated community of Heaven. Some call it a waiting room. Some claim it lasts forever and is not a stop on the way to paradise. Some don’t think it exists at all and only really existed to push indulgences of a corrupt church. 

I don’t have the answer as to whether it exists in the afterlife, but I can vouch personally that waiting for a call from the hospital to let you know you can start moving toward your life forever changing is the equivalent of purgatory on earth. 

I won’t linger here, in this earthly waiting room, so let’s just cut to the chase, to borrow a phrase. We didn’t get the call until 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Go ahead, reread that. We waited three full days. And our last night of restful sleep was so rudely interrupted, but looking back, maybe that was for the best. Either way, there was a lot of time right before the event and not much to do. When your baby is 40 to 41 weeks cooking, you’ve completed all the preparations weeks ago. Nursery is ready. Supplies purchased and arranged in optimal spots. How then, do you fill the time?

A List of Made-Up “Waiting” Chores

Why, you create a list of new preparations and chores that once completed will surely signal to the universe that you’re ready for the baby’s arrival, of course. Let’s explore a list of this so called made up chores that filled the hours and days before the hospital called.

• Clear off the back patio of every leaf, stick, and branch that fell during last night’s freak thunderstorm.

• Charge the batteries to the leaf blower so that you can simply blow the storm debris away. 

• Begin blowing the storm debris away just to realize that you’re committing to bad habits and killing perfectly good grass by blowing the debris into your yard.

• Blow the storm debris back onto the back patio so you can sweep it and put it into lawn bags instead.

• Sweep the storm debris into lawn bags.

• Forget to put the lawn bags out with the trash come trash day and now they’re sitting on your back patio as a reminder that you didn’t put them out.

• Watch the lawn bags full of storm debris get wet in the rain because you forgot to put them out with the trash on trash day. 

• Vacuum a rug.

• Finish playing The Last of Us Part II.

• Write an article about finishing The Last of Part II for your silly blog.

• 100% Astro Bot on Playstation 5 for some reason.

• Start Metaphor Re:Fantazi–Oh shit, they’re calling hold on. 

We also taught my wife’s mother to play Everdell one evening, but that didn’t feel like a chore. Not that the list of video games felt like chores either. A strange breakdown happens around the third day of waiting for the hospital to call - there’s a shift in priority from “Okay, is everything 100% prepared” to “Well, if I start playing this video game, then surely they’ll call to interrupt.” You start bargaining with fate, tempting it to interrupt your good time with what you’ve been waiting for all along.

All the while, your wife is growing visibly more pregnant than you thought possible. Her discomfort grows. You start playing a fun game of, “Is she in pain?” and begin asking her what’s going on just for her to continually reassure you that nothing is going on. 

There’s a fun game that all doctors and nurses who take care of pregnant people play where they don’t actually answer some of your questions. Our main question was, what does a contraction feel like? How will we know when my wife is experiencing one? And the ubiquitous answer was a resounding, “You’ll know when you feel one.” Which is a non-answer.

There was a moment within all these chores where my wife thought she was experiencing contractions. She tracked what she thought were contractions on an app on her phone. They began increasing in frequency and the app suggested she head to the hospital because she might be in active labor. So we did what any logical people would do and called the hospital to find out if there was room for us now - it had been two days since we were told it might be later that night or even tomorrow morning. 

What we met with was more of the non-answers, more of the unhelpful variety of help. The attending head nurse of the labor and delivery floor listened to my wife describe everything she was feeling, had been feeling for a while now, and about the app and the suggestion she might be in active labor. The nurse listened to all of this without a word and then said simply, “You failed the sweetness test. You’ve been way too nice to me, so there’s little chance you’re in active labor.” I quoted, but I’m paraphrasing, you get it. 

So we were told to wait more, to keep track of these false contractions and this not-active labor for any changes, but we wouldn’t be heading to the hospital since there wasn’t any room for a non-emergency induction still. I started thinking of more chores to do while we waited. 

Having Patience as a Non-Patient

Eventually, and it did come sooner than either of us thought, we did get the call to come to the labor and delivery floor for an induction - go time, as we called it. Go time was chill, it was 4 am on a Saturday morning, and everything felt a little unreal. My wife took a shower before we left. Things felt normal. 

When we got to the hospital, I quietly transferred into my role as a non-patient. At first, there were questions aimed at the room that either of us could answer, but very quickly these questions narrowed down from the room to just my wife, justly so. There’s calmness there, in the being of a non-patient. No one ever wants to hear from you unless the patient is unable to answer for whatever reason. There’s freedom in just being there to watch and observe. 

We spent five days in the hospital and in those five days, I went by a new name. Dad. Everyone knew my wife’s name - it was on her chart. It was written on a board in the room. My name was also written on that board, but my name was now Dad, a name only spoken when there was something to be done. Dad, you’ll be pushing her leg back when she pushes. Dad, you can count with us. You can come over here, Dad, to see the baby in the warming station. 

It makes sense, the simplification of my personage. Learning and remembering a name takes energy and effort that’s better put into focusing on Mom, on the patient. But there was an otherness to myself that I’m not sure how to describe. A beginning of the shedding of ego that I think most parents experience that enables us to take care of a child. None of this was about me in a way I hadn’t experienced in my entire life and it was my job to come to terms with this, accept it, and embody this role. 

There’s little tasks that helped me in this endeavor. Dad got to learn where the hospitality room is, where to refill Mom’s water bottle or grab a juice or a snack real quick. Dad got to learn the in’s and out’s of ordering room service for Mom so she didn’t miss a meal. Dad learned how the remote worked and plugged the TV back in so that we could watch Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark over the course of four hours with commercials. These small steps help place your thoughts outside of yourself in a way that felt comforting or methodical. 

Everything felt purposeful. It felt right. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of explaining this or revealing that maybe I’ve lived my life a little more selfishly than I’d like to admit, but there was a transition from solely securing the survival of myself and my wife somewhere in that hospital stay because by the time the baby was born, I’d nary a thought in my head about myself. My wife had to remind me to go grab lunch most days. Or to refill my own water bottle. 

And for reasons I still can’t explain, it all felt really, really good. 

The End of the Self (and this Article) 

As I’m writing this, it’s been about three weeks with our little one. That sentiment of being outside of oneself has continued in that time, but it’s normalized a bit. I’m no longer singularly focused on the wellbeing of my wife and child. I’ve found room for myself again, which is healthy, I think. 

I now know why parents say that the time flies with their little ones, that you’ll blink and time will lurch forward. It’s because we spend so much energy, focus, and time waiting for the little one to arrive that when they’re here, and it can all begin, it feels like it rushes forward. 

Let’s say you’re dining at a restaurant alongside the Mississippi River in New Orleans. You’re seated at a window overlooking the river and spend the time watching the various barges and boats float toward the Gulf of Mexico or chug their way up river. You’ve ordered your food, your drinks have arrived, and there’s not much to do but wait, so you watch these boats. They seem to trudge along, fighting against the current, and seem to barely make any progress. Then your food arrives and for a moment you forget the boats. You eat your food, talking as you, maybe you glance at the river, but you don’t give it much thought as there’s food here and life is good. You finish your meal. It was delicious. And in your satisfied state, you turn back toward the river and the boat is gone from view. It had continued fighting against that current the entire time you were eating, but you hadn’t noticed. 

This long winded metaphor is to say that time is always passing at the same rate, it’s just our attentions that vary. The time it took for us to receive the call to come to the hospital was the same 72 hours of any other chunk in our lives. It’s just the attention we gave it that made it feel slow. Likewise, the three weeks we’ve had with our baby are the same three weeks as any other time of our lives. Only it feels like it’s flying because we’re sleep deprived and on a strict feeding schedule to ensure our child grows at a healthy rate. But that’s a story for another time.

I guess if there’s a moral here or a something I’d like to impart, it’s that our attention to our perception of time is what shapes our memory of it, so if you’re in a place you’d like to remember and feel as though you’re in that time, take very close attention to what it feels like to be in that time. In that way, it will live on in you for much longer than if you just lived through it. Or something. This is bad. Okay, bye. 

The sequel builds upon that foundation in a stellar way. None of the new additions, be they new things to craft or new enemy types, feel out of place. Everything feels natural to a point, although it is odd there’s way less traversal puzzles that so littered the first game. To continue our bias reveal, I am also a huge fan of the Last of Part II for these and other reasons that should become clear by the end of this article.

But this isn’t a review of The Last of Us Part II, since I don’t do reviews, at least not simple straight up reviews like “is the game good?” There is a ton of discourse about this particular game, a lot of it is bad faith in nature due to whatever political argument you want to make (I will not be elaborating) and some of this spills over to critiquing the artistry of the game to support those bad faith arguments. 

I want to critique something different, break it apart, and see if it fits into the overall scheme that the Last of Us sets to establish through both editions of this franchise. I want to focus on something I noticed, something my wife noticed, and maybe something you might have noticed as well if you have played through the game. What I want to focus on is - why do we never have to nor can we choose to go backward in The Last of Us? 

Potential spoilers ahead for those who have never played these games or watched the HBO show.

Only Moving Forward

There’s not some sort of trick being pulled on you here, I mean it very literally. Throughout The Last of Us and its Part II sequel, we as the player must navigate a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future of a world ravaged by CBI, the Cordyceps Brain Infection. We do this through different characters - Joel, Ellie, and Abby, but the modus operandi remains the same no matter who we pilot: loot everything, stealth as much as possible, eliminate every threat. 

This is the core gameplay loop of The Last of Us. Gather supplies to craft weapons that might make combat easier. Stealth our way through enemies and choose whether or not to engage them silently or loud. Spend resources dispatching said enemies. Loot the combat zone for the next group of enemies. And so on. 

While we engage in this loop, the settings change, the environment switches, the situation differs, but the loop maintains as the gameplay only exists to serve and reinforce the story. 

[Writer’s note: I would never claim that the gameplay is lesser than the story - there’s entire modes dedicated to just this gameplay loop with no larger story attached and there’s a community out there that support that the gameplay loop is fun to some people (I am not one of these people - while I respect the game design and what it adds to the narrative, these games make my heart race like the wee little baby I am).] 

A crucial part of this gameplay loop exists within the transition between these environments, the navigation from zone to zone be they loot zones or combat zones. The characters in these environments must bend and contort their bodies to access the next bit of the gameplay loops through crouching or going prone and crawling or climbing or squeezing their way through small gaps in walls in such ways that make the journey feel real; it takes energy to move from place to place like it does in the real world. 

Another crucial part of this gameplay loop is that the navigation only goes in one direction. The Last of Us is in no way an “open world” game. I’d fail to describe anything about these games as “open” at all, except maybe you should “open yourself up to some heartbreak.” Cause your heart’s gonna break. It will. And if it doesn’t, let’s never meet. 

Each environment is carefully sculpted, each piece of loot you pick up has to conform to some real world logic. Go into a bar? You’re bound to find alcohol. Raid a laundry room? Here’s some rags. The detail to real world placement of these items is something I grew to expect and respect - there is a lot of attention to detail of the placement of things, of the places we navigate, of the set dressing that brings this world to life. 

Which is why there are some pretty jarring moments for me where the characters simply abandon one of the biggest rules of survival pretty much constantly in these games, which is: Always have an exit. A second rule of survival is very much related: Never go anywhere you cannot come back from. There are story scenarios where a character says they are just going to go look around or explore a potential route that result in the complete cutting off from the route that lead them to that point and that shit should be terrifying. 

The closest example we have in the real world of the type of exploration done in the Last of Us would be the modern practice of urban exploration (or urbex, if you’re in the know). While there are larger rules in the urbex community like “Take only pictures, leave only footsteps” and “you are going to be trespassing on private property no matter where you go,” there are also a few common sense guidelines that echo the sentiments I’ve expressed here. Do not go somewhere you cannot come back from and always plan your route (with the implication that you know where the exit is at all times). 

These guidelines help people stay safe in a world without fungus infected zombies so they should absolutely be followed by our various playable protagonists, yet not even Abby, who was trained in the most strict military protocols and survival techniques, adheres to them. 

And when every other detail in this game serves to make the setting and the gameplay and the narrative feel as real as possible, why is it that this decision of throwing caution into the wind for the sake of reaching one’s destination is made time and time again? 

It’s Gonna Suck When You Have to Come Back 

In the gameplay segment or chapter known as Seattle Day 2 for Abby, we are introduced to the concept of a skybridge built by the Serphites for traversing around the WLFs. If that sentence didn’t make sense to you, you’re too deep into this review and I’m sorry. Abby, who we are playing as, has an established fear of heights. This is reinforced in the gameplay as Abby when you approach any sort of ledge that is high up. The camera zooms out and in and the further you look down, the further the image shifts and becomes blurry as though Abby is experiencing vertigo. Because she is. It’s really cool and if you didn’t notice it, go check it out. 

For plot reasons, Abby must get to a hospital by navigating these skybridges and we undergo a very long transversal section of gameplay where we are making our way across what is extensively a system of construction cranes and scaffolding loosely held together to form a bridge over the landscape of foggy downtown Seattle. 

Now, I play these games while my wife watches because she is engrossed by the story of The Last of Us and occasionally she will offer very good comments on what is happening in the game. On this occasion, seeing how much Abby is affected by the drastic heights she is crossing, my wife said astutely, “It’s gonna suck when you have to come back this way.”

To which I said, “Oh, you sweet summer child. We will never go back.” This, of course, prompted some confusion, but what I meant was, not once in the history of me playing The Last of Us has the game ever made us return somewhere we had been before. Travel like that is reserved for cutscenes. There might be a short scene of our character hopping into some vehicle that can explain our expedited return, or sometimes we appear just in front of our home base after a quick fade to black transition. 

To prove my point, Abby doesn’t even completely cross the skybridge. She freaks out, slips, and drags her guide Lev down with her falling luckily into the pool of the hotel they were crossing to. This prompts an extended sequence of navigating our way through an infested hotel with crumbling floors and a sequence of jumps we cannot make in the opposite direction as if to reinforce that we will never be coming back in this direction. 

Because we won’t. We never will. The Last of Us is a game played in one direction both in terms of time, traversal, and in player agency. It’s almost as if this “One Direction” motif was a core tenement of the design, writing, and production of the game. No backtracking. No player choice when it comes to narrative. No alternative routes. The game will guide the player through a series of challenges, scenes, and traumatic violence at the pace we have designed.

And if we have to fly in the face of common sense and survival rules to accomplish that pace, then so be it, we have some fictional lives to ruin, damnit, stop showing me survival guides and urban exploration rules. 

The Complete Discography of One Direction 

In a way, I very much like the design choice that this “one direction” design philosophy that The Last of Us clearly has. We don’t have to worry about missing too much other than when you accidentally find the loading zone to the next segment before you’ve convinced yourself you have explored everything. 

There are two moments in the Last of Us Part II where I was screwed out of opening a safe because I accidently stepped too far away from it and triggered a cutscene or a “press triangle to open the door” moment. The first time it happened was on Seattle Day 1 as Ellie where I thought maybe I could come back upstairs to the very first safe in the game once I found the combination to open it. I never did find that combination and apparently you can crack the safes by feel so maybe I never needed it.

The second time it happened was Seattle Day 1 as Abby onboard the Washington ferry. After I had cleared out the top floor of the ferry of the infected there, I stumbled across another safe but with no note or clue as to its combination. I looked around a bit and found a door and without thinking, I went to open it thinking that the combination would definitely be on a note on the other side. But the door slammed shut behind me and a filing cabinet was propped up against the door so I could never go back and search again for that safe combination. 

These two moments and any loot I missed out on are the casualty of the One Direction movement, but I’d like to think that they play very much into the overall vibe that the game is going for. Would Abby really stop and look around every nook and cranny for a note to open a safe on a ferry when she’s so close to the aquarium, where she suspects Owen is after he went AWOL? Likely not. 

A joke I like to make about the HBO show The Last of US is that my favorite scene in every episode is when Joel and Ellie reach a new building, they take twenty minutes to scour the place for scissors and duct tape. Because that’s how I play. It’s the little bit of player agency we get in these games - we get to decide every aspect of the core gameplay loop. But it’s not our story. It’s Ellie’s. And Joel’s. And Abby’s. We have no influence over the direction of the story, just like we have no influence over the direction of our navigation. 

Ready Player None

I’m gonna do our first ever Heading 2 here to interject a critique I see time and time again about why The Last of Us 2 is bad, but the Last of Us 1 was good and it has a lot to do with a term I’ve casually thrown around here and that term is “player agency.” 

Player agency is a concept in narrative based games of the modern era where the player has some influence over how the story plays out based on the choices they make over the course of the game. Mass Effect and Dragon Age where huge forefathers of the modern version of our understanding of player agency, but the concept’s been alive way before those examples in the genre of CRPGs like the original Baldur’s Gates, classic Fallout, and of course, Tokimeki Memorial. 

Player agency can also be understood as the influence a player has over a game and be more widely applied to all video games ever. Mario doesn’t run without player agency. Mario is influenced by the player to run. To jump on Goombas. To select what levels to play and which to skip, etc. 

This understanding of player agency has fallen out of the wider parlance when we talk about video games today in favor of the more modern understanding that when we talk about player agency, we’re talking about narrative choices that can affect the outcomes of a story. 

With that understanding, The Last of Us has zero player agency when it comes to the narrative. In both games. There are no decisions that you as the player get to make that affect how the story plays out. The story will play out the same every single time. 

The crux of this is the climax of The Last of Us Part I. Joel delivers Ellie to Salt Lake City to the care of the Fireflies who have a way to create a cure for CBI. Tess chooses to inform Joel that it will cost Ellie her life. Joel decides to save Ellie by any means necessary and guns down many, many Fireflies in the process, including Dr. Jerry Anderson, the man with the idea for a cure. 

The rest of the Last of Us franchise stems from that decision and that decision alone. Everything before that decision, the entire journey of getting Ellie to Salt Lake City and seeing Joel bond with Ellie, grow closer to her, consider her his daughter, all builds up ultimately to this decision. It is the only decision that Joel can make given everything he has done up to this point. 

It just so happens that this decision is also one the player can get behind. We feel justified in saving Ellie because the Fireflies never bothered to explain to Ellie that developing a cure would mean her sacrifice. She would die never knowing that she was helping people.

So, and I’m speaking in a supposing manner now, I think a lot of people had no problem with Joel’s decision to rescue Ellie and take her back to Jackson to live out what meager life they can. It should be shocking. It should shock a player to their core because this is the first and only time in The Last of Us where you gun down innocent people who have done nothing wrong. The only thing the guards you kill trying to save Ellie are guilty of is showing up for work that day. Joel has a shady past and might have killed some innocents before, but that’s before the game started. That’s in his backstory. We’ve never controlled Joel doing something this close to evil before. 

The Last of Us Part I ends in what should be a fascinating disconnect between what the game is asking us to do, kill innocent people to save Ellie, and what we want to as the player. But I think we as a player base got too caught up in wanting to save Ellie to stop and reflect on our actions in those moments, in what saving Ellie truly means - the abandonment of hope for a cure, the rejection of a return to normalcy. 

It makes perfect sense to me, then, that The Last of Part II is chalk full of these moments and that every one of these moments is a perfect logical conclusion and progression of the one moment in the previous game. What serves as the climax for The Last of Part I is but the tip of the iceberg in Part II. 

Ready Player None-r 

If every moment of banter, traversal puzzle, and each time Ellie saves you with her pocket knife ultimately serves the purpose of justifying Joel’s decision in The Last of Us Part I, then every moment of combat, cutscene, and banter between Ellie and whoever she’s with in The Last of Part II is to solidify that your motivations are monstrous. The main sentiment of Part II seems to be that revenge and retribution are violent means to unnecessary ends that destroy lives. This is true of both Ellie and Abby’s story - by the end of each of their segments, they have lost everything for the sake of revenge and retribution and it is only when they choose to break that cycle do they begin to heal. 

We have 20 hours of gameplay to explore this theme, so let’s start out with Ellie having to kill a bunch of combat dogs that trigger the most gut wrench reactions from the NPCs who we will also be killing. The first thing I noticed in the early hours of Ellie play is that every NPC seems to have a name and people cry out this name as you kill their friends. 

Also, I had to verbally apologize to the dogs I was killing as I was killing them because I did not want to kill dogs. Please stop making me kill dogs. Why did I have to kill so many dogs, Naughty Dog? Is this your sick, sick joke, you twisted fuck? Ahem.

Why yes, it is their sick, sick joke and the punchline is: Ellie isn’t the good guy here. Just like Joel in the final sequence of Part I, Ellie is killing somewhat (it’s very grey) innocent-ish people who are just trying to live their own lives (read: do a genocide on another group of people). 

And the game highlights this in super close-up, highly graphic, and deeply upsetting ways. When we switch to Abby and we’re attacked by Serphites (yes, I use the proper term), this burden of killing innocents is eased slightly. Abby doesn’t kill dogs and she was attacked first, so it feels okay. Then, in the third act of Abby’s story, she begins killing her fellow WLFs to protect Lev. Her story sort of mirrors Joel’s in a way. But Abby becomes the monster that Joel was when he wanted to save Ellie. Abby’s actions result in the death of Isaac and probably ultimately the disbandment of the WLFs (or at least a huge disorganization of them that will lead on to strife and discord) - she has become what she hated so much in Joel.

My point is, the narratives of these games are set up in a way where every individual element of storytelling and a large chunk of the gameplay reinforces the outcomes we reach by the end of the story. To add in player agency at the storytelling level would be to drastically alter the chemical makeup of these games - it wouldn’t be The Last of Us.

If you like first the game for how the story is told and the way the game is, then you should ultimately like the second game, because it’s more of the same if not more of the logical conclusion of the first game. I’m not writing this article to convince anyone of this, I’m just stating an objective fact. The two games are the same construction, the same narrative design, and the same spirit - the only thing that differs is the message that each game builds to and the characters involved. 

Let this be an end to “The Last of Us fell off” discourse. 

One Way Ahead

It took me a long time to sit down and play The Last of Us Part II. What I thought was a pivotal emotional climax for the game was spoiled for me indirectly through an internet meme of all things. It took a long time after this spoiling for me to build up what I thought was the mental strength I’d need to see what happens. 

It turns out, that moment I was so worried about takes place in the first hour of the game and is the impetus for everything that happens next. Even more so, when I learned who the perpetrator of the action was and their relation to the events of the first game, an inner peace glowed in me regarding the whole affair. Because it made sense. Because it was interesting. 

Because from the onset of the incident there is only one option for Ellie to do, there is only one choice to make, and only one direction to go - we can only move forward. While I still have my misgivings about exploration safety and dystopian survival (I literally made sure all the doors I went through stayed open so I could run out if necessary), the design choice of only moving forward suits The Last of Us and its messages. 

That being said, jumping backward to Abby’s three days in Seattle felt a little off pacing-wise and totally invalidates all 3500+ words of this article, so can we remaster the game (again) so that we play out those segments concurrently somehow? 

Eh. Who am I kidding? We can only move forward. And I’m never playing The Last of Us again.