Category: Essays

Posted on

The Martian

I’ve been listening to The Martian on audiobook and I love it so much. It’s really a great exemplar of the “Man vs Nature” conflict structure that I learned about in elementary school.

  • Man vs Nature
  • Man vs Man
  • Man vs Society
  • Man vs Himself

Which, I think, is what the writer meant when he said he likes stories “without politics.” Because yes, I will forever clown on him for thinking that Star Trek, of all things, is “without politics” – the entire show is political storytelling overlaid onto Freudian and Jungian archetypes – but everyone is allowed to discover things they missed. Yes, even late in life. We’re allowed to not all have it figured out by Age Whatever.

But I think the appealing thing about Man vs Nature stories is that there’s no evil intent to contend with. All the other structures involve human motivations; but Nature has no motivation. It just is. We can either adapt around it, or perish. And that adaptation is what’s so satisfying to watch or read about.

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. MacGyver. Odyssey of the Mind. Destination Imagination. Heck, even puns. The heights of human achievement come from using things in unexpected ways.

I do love the other story archetypes, don’t get me wrong. But right now? There’s something comforting in good old Nature trying to kill us.

Posted on

Trust, but verify

Recently, one group of friends started talking about a YouTuber that another friend is a huge fan of, in very disparaging terms.

I asked about it, basically asking for receipts, and nobody provided them..

I’m not really a YouTube kind of person, but this contrast (between people whom I like and respect the opinions of) was too much for me to ignore, so I went and watched the YouTube video myself.

I should say that I really hate video as an information format. It’s long, you can’t really do much else while you’re absorbing it, you can’t easily skip around, you can’t copy paste quotes.

But I stuck it out, because I’m stubborn, and by this point I was INVESTED.

I should also say that normally, I am wary of the “both sides have valid points” rhetoric. It used to be true, or at least truer than today, but that was before people started telling us to inject bleach to cure diseases or what nonsense Tiktok trend is going on these days.

But I made an exception in this case, because both “sides” here are people I generally trust to be working in good faith. I don’t think any of them are acting disingenuously; I think all of them believe what they believe.

I watched the whole video over the course of a couple days.

It was this one: https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us

The initial group of friends were saying that in it, Contrapoints was “defending” JK Rowling.

I watched the whole video, and I didn’t see any defense.

About a third of the way in, I messaged the group to say “hey, I didn’t see any of the stuff you guys are talking about so far in this video…am I watching the wrong video?”

Instead of sending me the Actual Bad Video, they doubled down. One person said “If your friends telling you this person is a Nazi and a transmedicalist isn’t enough for you to keep their voice out of your head, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

That comment made me see red. And after I calmed down a bit, I said, look. When two people I like and respect tell me opposite things, which one of them am I supposed to blindly trust?

And then I thought to myself: I *don’t* blindly trust. Or rather, I don’t do it as a matter of conscious policy. Sure, there are lots of things in life where I can’t be an expert, and I do have to trust other people. But “the contents of a goddamn YouTube video” is not one of them.

Yes, we trust. But we also verify. And it’s not anti-friendship, or anti-trust, to say “I’m going to watch this for myself.”

I’m a little worried that by phrasing things this way, I’ll give steam to some kind of “do your own research” alt-right pipeline. If my friends have actual concerns about this content creator, I expect they will continue to share them with me.

But so far I haven’t actually heard any real concerns; I’ve only heard single-word adjectives with no details and no receipts. 

So I am cautiously proceeding, and looking at the primary sources myself. Because that’s what I do. “Citation needed” is just a way of life, I guess.

I’m starting the second Contrapoints JK Rowling video tonight. We’ll see if this one has the defending in it, I guess?

Coda: The day after I write this, I see the following from a friend of mine:

https://blast-o-rama.com/2026/05/13/dear-internet-read-a-little-deeper-it-wont-hurt-you-i-promise/

This. All of this. PLEASE don’t stop digging deeper and fact checking, even on things your side writes.

Posted on

The Last Rose of the Season

I have some knockout rose plants by my house. They’re not fancy, just cheap hybrids, but every year they produce beautiful flowers for me.

This year, in November, when everything was going dormant. the one closest to my door suddenly decided to produce a flower. I made a big deal about it – roses in November, The Last Rose of the Season, etc. I picked it and put it in a vase, and when it began to wilt I hung it up on the wall to dry.

Then, the rosebush made ANOTHER flower in December. It’s wilting right now in the front bed, in the most perfect “seven for beauty that blossoms and dies” dramatic pose.

And what I am taking from this is: There is no guaranteed Last Rose of the Season. Even something that you might think is final, is the end of all things, might not turn out to be.

And yes, it’s important to cherish those Maybe Lasts. When my daughter was in preschool, I thought often about “is this the last time I’ll be able to pick her up?” Children grow. I’m not a power lifter. There was, indeed, a last time.

But we never know exactly which one will be the Last. So cherish those moments; but never give up hope just because you think it’s the end.

I know this is contradictory, but contradictions are just the nature of the world, like roses in December.

(I’ve written and deleted about five paragraphs’ worth of Discourse about whether “nature” includes manmade things, and then I decided: let’s not. This is “nature” in the sense of “reality,” not in the sense of “a human didn’t influence this.” Humans are part of nature.)

Anyway. My point in all this is: Keep hope alive. Don’t give in to the despair. Allow the world to surprise you, and to be wacky and obstinate and uncaring about social or horticultural norms.

There is no Last Rose. There is always another.

The dramatic November Rose

Bonus! Songs featuring roses!

Posted on

“The categories were made for man, not man for the categories”

Many years ago, my friend shared this Slate Star Codex essay with me. It really crystallized a lot of my feelings around the concepts of trans rights and how ultimately, we should be able to be good friends and neighbors to trans people even if we don’t understand them on a deep fundamental level.

It may not be the full-throated “how dare anyone believe anything else” defense of trans rights that many might prefer; but I actually find it more compelling for that very reason. (And it’s okay if your mileage varies on that. It’s not personal for me in the way it is for many of you.)

Give it a read.

Posted on

Being a cable guy

This essay was very poignant.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon_n_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21

It’s the kind of thing that would have completely changed my perspective if I had read it in 2007, because I simply was not exposed to this kind of job back then. Not that I am a lot now, but, I’m at least a little better informed.

It is good for growing empathy for people in low wage jobs, people on disability, people with addictions.