Integration

Back in college, I had to take a speech class and it was...fine.

I actually learned not to judge sorority girls, but that's another story.

Anyway, in my speech class, we had to do a speech that explained something about ourselves to people. Despite being into super-music mode at the time, I actually decided to do my speech on my novel - the only one I had completed in its entirety at that point. I was 17 at the time, I wrote that one when I was 15.

The basic structure of the speech was that I went through all of the characters, one by one, and explained how each of them represented a different aspect of my personality. It wasn't something I had intentionally done when I wrote it, and I'm not even sure it's that accurate. Honestly, I probably just thought it was an easy way to organize the speech and keep it interesting and just ret-conned the different pieces of myself into the characters.

I'm bringing this up, though, because I think I've made an important step in my most recent creative block.

Two days ago I was writing an update to the Persona 5 Fanfic (henceforth to be referred to as "P5F"). The basis of P5F is that Nanako, the little girl from Persona 4, is the same age as the rest of the Phantom Thieves in Persona 5, and joins them on that adventure, and all the implications that entails. The way Nanako has panned out, though, is that in many ways she takes the same position on the team as Makoto, one of the original P5 characters, and thus they have had a lot of conflict because they are very similar to one another.

The scene I was writing was basically the two of them trying to smooth things over so they can work as a team. However, from Makoto's perspective, there were still things that Nanako did wrong, and Makoto says that even though she wants to be friends with Nanako, she will continue to call out Nanako when she thinks she's doing the wrong thing.

And when I wrote that sentence...something unlocked. It was a very visceral moment, as if a tension somewhere in my subconscious had finally been resolved. It was so physically resonant that I spent the whole day trying to figure it out. Why had that sentence been so meaningful? Why did I have that reaction?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about that college speech, about how characters are a reflection of who I am - or at least parts of who I am.

And what I realized is that the reason Makoto's line resonated so well is because it's something I've been working on a lot in my professional life.

See...when you're the leader of anything, it's an uncomfortable truth that part of your job is to call out things when someone else is not doing their job. I do not relish it, but I have become much better at it. Still being kind and humane, but also understanding that I'm not doing anyone any favors by turning a blind eye - the same thing Makoto declared she was going to do in the story.

And that's when I realized I built too much of a wall between my professional life and my creative one.

I have changed a lot in my professional life as an educator, especially over the last three years. But I haven't allowed any of those new changes and new experiences to filter into my creative work. I'm still trying to write and create things like I'm 2019 Chris - the guy who was still teaching in the classroom and who hadn't lived in a pandemic. I haven't addressed any of the topics of my professional life in any creative work - nothing about leadership, about difficult work, about negotiating between people. All of my heroes are always lone rangers, working either outside of the system or bucking it.

But...I am the system in my professional life. I'm the bad guy, "the man." And there's a different kind of story that can be told from that perspective.

I don't really know what it means yet, but this realization has been very encouraging, and I'm working to integrate all sides of my life together again - not just professional into creative, but personal as well. I mean, I have four kids, and not once have I written about being a parent.

Let's go find out where this road leads.

Adventure Boredom

The other day I had an interesting idea for Patreon content.

I spent a couple of hours generating the background information, I got some input from the Discord, and I built up the basic structure.

I rolled some d20s.

I started typing.

And I was immediately bored.

It's hard to explain the type of boredom I feel when I know an idea isn't right. It's more than just like "wow this is drudgery" or "this is tedious" because there's always portions of a creative work that are tedious. I have enough mental discipline to push through moments that aren't terribly exciting.

This sense of boredom is almost a physical revulsion. I feel it in my gut, a deep sense of "blech, why am I doing this?" And I pretty much always just shut down after that point. There's no recovering from it. I may pick up the idea later, but that's usually only after I've figured out some different angle for it.

(I used to keep a file on my computer called "Bin" which was just where I threw stuff that didn't work. Now I just keep it all in a long list of files on the filetree in Obsidian. I go through it once in a while to see if there's anything worth resurrecting.)

I think I've become bored of adventures.

And as someone who primarily writes/creates in genre fiction, this is a bad sign.

I mean, I was never a straight genre-consumer. I need my stuff to have either something weird, or a lot of heart for the characters. Otherwise I get bored.

I don't know if it's an age thing or what, but I'm getting tired of the action sequences. I'm getting tired of the battles. I've talked before about how my tolerance for violence, even fictional, stylized violence, is constantly dropping.

So it's harder and harder for me to create.

I don't even know what genre I want to do anymore. Romance? Non-violent sci-fi? Surrealism? Mystery?

I feel like I'm in a transitional phase AGAIN, which sucks, because I feel like I just got through one and I didn't even produce any major works in between.

And as much as I love doing these guest episodes with all the listeners, it's just not the same. It is so much more work than just running the show in its normal format.

This morning I wrote an AU random fic passage of some characters I made a long time ago for an online RP. I sent it to my friend who played the other character. It was the first time in a bit that I've felt...normal about what I was doing.

It's gonna be a lot of "pointless" output for now, I guess.

At least the Persona 5 fanfic is still moving along.

Tape Leg

So I messed up my leg pretty badly two weeks ago. I tried to jump over a (super small) stream and missed.

I didn’t break anything, thank goodness, but it is possible I tore stuff. I got an MRI last week and I’m waiting for the results.

I’m getting more mobile by the day, but I was told it could take at least 6 weeks to heal, maybe longer if I need surgery.

Anyway, the really relevant part of this update is that because SilZero HQ is designed to be super compact, I haven’t been able to sit at that computer because I couldn’t bend my leg that far. But this morning, I’m writing this blog post from it!

It’s still not the most comfortable, but I should be able to start working on podcast edits in small bursts, and then recording once I gain enough flexibility and it also doesn’t feel like I’m being stabbed by a thousand needles when sit on it at that angle for too long.

The New Internet is Old Internet

With Twitter X-ing itself to oblivion, I wanted to share what I’ve been thinking about for a few months.

This new internet feels like the old internet.

I’m not talking about like 2010 internet, when social media was finding its legs and that first generation of really popular, successful content creators were getting their time in the sun. I’m talking about like 1995 internet, where everything was nickle-and-dimed and siloed into their own proprietary areas.

Twitter started suppressing mentions of other platforms to the point where everyone is talking in l33tspeak code again for thier “p@tr30ns.” Then they switched it over so you have to pay for your blue check if you want any realistic engagement with your posts.

Reddit killed off their third-party app support, which has made using it on mobile basically unusable for me - the whole point of reddit is you can customize your communities, and the official app does nothing but shove random other posts in my face that I have no interest in.

These corporations want to be AOL - the stranglehold of your internet experience.

I’m sad about it, oddly enough. I really liked Twitter, especially in the early 2010s, and I know it’s been changing a LOT since then, but it was still mostly functional until the new ownership change. And without reddit, I’m not sure I would’ve gotten a lot of attention for the podcast in the early days.

Of course this is the possibility of a new opportunity as new social media places drop in to try and fill the Twitter void. The frustrating part for me is that now I’m going to have to sign up on a bunch of them and see which ones pan out to being the ones that have the most possible reach. Right now I have signed up for a Counter Social, though I have only used it like once. I also signed up for cohost.org which has a very AO3 vibe to it. I kinda like it, but I’m not sure how much it’s going to pick up.

I’m still waiting for my bluesky invite.

I also heard a lot of people are switching to misskey, which is a social media site in Japan. It looks uh…a little overwhelming. But I’ll keep an eye on it.

Hopefully the internet will continue to evolve and remind these mega-corps that they don’t, and can’t, own it.

The Meander

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. I think it’s book 2 of his Thursday Murder Club series, but I didn’t read book 1.

(I actually have done this multiple times on accident and I kinda like starting on book 2…?)

(Also I picked it out from the library completely because he was on Taskmaster.)

It was a really fun read, but one of the things I loved about it - and about all novels, really - is “the meander.” Where the characters thoughts just kinda wander around, or even actions in the story happen that don’t really have a major relevance to the plot, but it’s just fun and you learn more about the people and you feel like you’re really connecting with them.

Sometimes I get caught up in the “modern” take of trimming everything down to racecar efficiency. It was good to remind myself that I enjoy the Meander.

Study Question: What do YOU think of “the meander”? Do you read them? Skip them? Are there books that do it too often? Are there genres that don’t do it enough?

Reconnecting

Like many blog posts, this one has been started and stopped many times.

There's always a part of me that looks at blog posts with a sense of "nobody cares about this" or "isn't this just whining" or "a post about excuses for not making content is not content."

But part of the reason I've started and restarted this particular update is because my thinking keeps changing on the matter, so then what I wrote before doesn't make sense.

One of the problems with blogs, tweets, or even personalized podcast posts is that it's just a moment in time. And unless you do it a lot, it doesn't capture the evolution of thought. So then it just feels like "hey look, here's what I was thinking at the time" and then people go back and be like "wow you're a really inconsistent person, you were doing one thing before and now you're not doing it that way."

Which I suppose is an argument for blogging more often, isn't it? To capture the nuance of thought over time...

I'm getting off track.

--

I think I've been depressed since about March.

Well, I knew I was depressed in and around February. Not in any real medical sense of the term, but just felt kinda low and heavy and had a hard time feeling energized and motivated. I got myself out of that really bad low in February, but I don't know that I really "fixed it" in March.

Part of this depression is working in education post-COVID.

I'm not going to get into it in great detail. The only thing you really need to understand about it is that the job is harder - or at the very least a lot different - than it was before.

Pre-COVID, I was a superstar that could make things happen quickly. Post-COVID, everything goes a lot slower, but instead of me looking at the fact that the Post-COVID world is different, I blame myself. I figure that I'm not doing enough, I'm not working fast enough, smart enough, ingenious enough.

Matt once told me I was a perfectionist, and I don't think I ever really saw myself like that. But I do think he was on to something. When it comes to things I care about, like my writing, podcasting, or my work in education, I hold myself to a really high standard.

So in order to handle the fact I wasn't reaching those high standards, I just shut down portions of my personality. I numbed myself, I suppose so I could stay focused on getting the job done, on achieving the goals, on hitting the targets.

I didn't, of course. Because you're never "done" in education.

Nor should you ever want to be, until you retire.

--

Throughout June, I knew I had to reconnect to things. I actually started working on it in May. I knew I had to reconnect to the art part of all this stuff I do - the story telling, the podcasting, the writing. The art part - the part that is expressive as a human, the part that heals the soul, the part that helps you process the other events you're going through.

So much of my art identity, though, is based on the fact that I can do so much at a time. I'm a fast writer, I run the podcast by myself, I do all these things alone and people go "wow, Chris, you do all those things alone you're so amazing" and I bask in that.

But I had burned that part out of me trying to do the education work. I couldn't bear to be efficient, procedural, systems-based any more at home. This meant that, realistically, I couldn't do any projects in-progress, including editing the podcast.

(I actually sat down to edit the most recent episode weeks before it came out and physically said "eugh" then closed it. It had nothing to do with the guest, they were great, but this was one of the warning signs that told me I needed to do something different.)

So the first thing I had to do was new work completely disconnected from what I was doing.

I did three things from May through June to help with this.

MUSIC: I saw this doodad on a TikTok video and knew immediately that I had to get one. It's an Orba 2, and it's the most fun thing I've had in a while. It serves as a physical instrument with all sorts of touch responsive things, but also as a sampler and a 4-track recorder. It's been a lot of fun and a new way for me to interact with music - no computer, no instruments that I know how to play, and it has a limited tonal/chordal/scale range, so I can't even get myself overly hung up on making complicated progressions and complicated melodies. All I can do is make fun grooves and that's all I've been doing with it.

PAPERART: I bought this a bit ago. It's been slow-going, but again it's been something I can work on that is completely unconnected to stuff I've already done. But while I was doing this, I started having ideas about making paper cut-out art. I can't even really describe why I came up with this idea, I just found myself really wanting to do it.

So I did.

I bought paper and a cutting mat and an exacto knife and just...started.

It's fun!

WRITING...SORTA: I have an idea for a story I want to write, but I knew that I had to ease my way back into writing. I couldn't use my normal methods.

So I got a big blank sketchbook and some paint markers and just...started building a story in it.

It's the sloppiest, weirdest, most disorganized thing I've ever created, but it's been really good. This story is a little dark but I think it's helping me process some of the harsh stuff I encounter during my day job, which is not something I've been very good at doing. I need to create more art that's just...processing.

--

So that's been the last two months for me. As you can see, it's working, as I was happily able to edit and then record another podcast episode, and I'm feeling much better as a human being.

There's a lot of other aspects to it, but that's all I feel like writing about right now.

Study Question: What do you do to reconnect to your artistic self when you’re burned out?

A love story in two scenes and the song that (accidentally?) connects them - an essay about Haruhi Suzumiya that nobody asked for

I've been working on editing the first episode of Corsucant is Cracking, and as a result, have been spending a lot of time developing the "sonic palette" of the season. Every season has one - a style of music and sound effects that I try to generate that makes each season unique and subtly identifiable and different to each other. Some of it is obvious - things like the intro/outro music. Some of it is less so.

But this isn't a post about that, this is a post about the greatest two scenes ever written about a man falling in love.

--

Because I've been working on the sonic palette, I've been tinkering around in music again, and chipping away at the "Japanese Royal Road Chord Progression" - the chord progression used in almost all of Japanese popular music and a lot of...well, Japanese music in general. It's a fascinating subject that deserves its own post, but suffice it to say that if you've ever felt a song "sounded anime" or "sounded Japanese" it's because of this chord progression. In any case, it's pretty easy to look up the chord progression, but I was having a really hard time groking it. I finally cracked it tonight, and as a result, I went back to watch one of my favorite songs that uses this progression: God Knows, from the Melancholy of Harui Suzumiya.

Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31aBzZokJMA

I love this song and have for years. But part of it is the scene (which is in the video) that is attached to it. To understand the scene, there's a few basic parts of Haruhi you have to learn:

- Haruhi is a god, though she doesn't know it. Whatever she wills, happens. But since she doesn't know she's a god, her emotions and desires can alter reality at her whim.

- Kyon, the male lead, is an extremely boring person. He's also snarky, an unreliable narrator and a massive male tsundere.

- There are three other members of the SOS Brigade (the group Haruhi founded in order to not be bored) - an alien, a time traveler, and an esper. They have not revealed their identities to Haruhi, but each of them has been sent by their organizations to make sure Haruhi doesn't accidentally wipe out the world (or rewrite reality so they don't exist.)

- Early in the story (in the "official order"), Kyon manages to prevent Haruhi from erasing the world through his feelings for her. It's then that it's clear they care for each other, but Haruhi doesn't remember the event and Kyon won't admit his feelings to himself.

So here we are, in this scene with this song. It's a school festival, and two of the members of the four member female rock group are sick, and the drummer is desperate to try and find someone to sing because she's worked so hard for this moment. Haruhi and one of the other characters agree to go and help her out, even though Haruhi has never shown any musical talent up to this point.

In the scene, Haruhi looks a little nervous. The girl in the witch hat is an alien who downloaded how to play guitar into her mind, so she just starts going. And then Haruhi starts to sing. In the scene, the crowd at first seems a bit surprised at how good she is - and then everyone starts getting into it. By the end, the entire place is going crazy.

Well, the entire place except for Kyon.

Kyon spends the entire time staring at Haruhi, dead still.

Kyon knows through another part of the story that Haruhi's greatest fear is being insignificant - ironic considering she's a god. She creates the SOS Brigade so she can have fun and make the most out of every day, hoping that one day she'll meet an alien or a time traveler or an esper. Haruhi has made herself a bit of an outcast at school because she is so aggressive and so strange - she won't stop talking about all this paranormal stuff.

But here in this moment, Haruhi is everything. The entire school loves her. They don't care she's wearing a bunny suit, or that she's been odd before. She is their rock god, and she can ride this moment to total popularity. Whether or not this talent is a result of Haruhi's god powers is irrelevant - Haruhi is amazing at so many things. If she wanted conventional popularity, acceptance, and success, she could have it.

But she's not singing for them.

She's singing for Kyon.

The lyrics are kind of about them - about two people who can't seem to break down their final walls of communication. And ironically the song asks god to bless them.

And Kyon sees her in this moment, and he knows how deeply she must care for him, love him, even. She could have everything she wanted, but in the end, she literally reshaped the world to be with him - a boring, average, nobody.

And I think he finally admits to himself that he loves her, too.

--

Haruhi has a lot of problems, both in the original novel series (which has gone the George RR Martin path of probably never being finished AND having too many characters) and in the anime adaptation.

But to me, another scene brings the whole story full circle.

There was a movie made for Haruhi: the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. The movie is basically as it sounds like - one day Kyon wakes up and Haruhi and the others are just gone. None of them are at his school. And no matter what he does, he can't find them. He still has all of his memories, but he wonders if he's been abandoned by Haruhi, and the world has been rewritten. He's not even sure she exists anymore.

And then this scene happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=splPOCJZZUg

When Kyon finds out that Haruhi exists, and finally knows where she is, he goes ballistic. He can't control his feelings so he acts out against his friends. He leaves school and runs right to where she's supposed to be. It's the final acceptance of his love for her, now that he's lived this world where she wasn't in it, and he's finally able to externalize how much she has meant to him in his life, even though there's a long ways to go in solving the problem.

It's kind of a long scene and I won't blame you if you don't watch past the part where Kyon goes running out of the building. But if you have an ear for music, I want you to listen carefully to the background score.

This is probably a coincidence - as I said, this is the Japanese Royal Road chord progression, it's used everywhere. But the music sounds like an orchestrated callback to God Knows - as if now that he's finally found her, the music itself is drawing him to her, to that moment when he realized he loved her.

--

I get that I am taking liberties with this. I don't care. These two scenes have been so important to me throughout most of my creative life. Hell, one of the books I wrote early on was basically me trying to recreate Haruhi and Kyon's relationship, and I think it echoes in a lot of the relationships I write.

There's just something about that deep, deep emotional connection left unspoken that rings so powerful to me.

Study Questions:

1. Did you watch the scenes? What do you think of my analysis? Do you agree or disagree?

2. What is the best portrayal of love, in your opinion?

Vanity

My biggest weakness as a creator is my vanity.

I think it’s a holdover from my time as a musician. Or maybe I was attracted to music because of my vanity. But I like immediate feedback.

And there’s a piece of it that has to be immediate. I like when people speak about me in a more general sense of “wow the podcast is so good and influential” or “you’re a good writer” but it doesn’t quite scratch this particular itch. It’s like there’s a part of me that needs to know that the thing I’m making right now is good. Like, specifically, this thing right now in that moment.

It’s probably a subset of general creative insecurity.

In any case, it makes long term projects difficult, because you don’t get any immediate feedback. Or in situations like now, where projects are either jammed up or taking longer to launch than anticipated, you can’t put anything out to get feedback on. So to the audience or readership it just seems like you’re doing nothing. Not that I’m under the impression that people are sitting around thinking about me.

It’s worse; they’re sitting around NOT thinking about me, off reading and listening to other things.

And what is more irritating is that to fix these things I have to use non-creative skills, typically the skills I employ on a day to day at work, which puts me off of doing them because I’m already tired of doing those things.

But there’s no solution other than to eat the bitter medicine and get it done.