Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!

Thoughts on 10 Years of Living in the US

This milestone has been coming for a while, but it's finally upon me: as of Christmas, it'll be 10 years since I moved back to the US after spending most of my 20s in the UK. The moment it truly hit me was a week or so ago, when Facebook sent me one of its periodic reminders of old posts. In this case it was harking back 10 years to the day I posted I'd just bought my last monthly travelcard for the Tube.

That got me thinking about how I've spent that time, and whether it's been a good decision. While it may be a mixed bag, I would say that overall moving here was the right choice.

So what's the good, and what's the bad from this last decade? To answer that I have to separate out the things in my own life from what's been happening to the world more widely. I also have to present a picture of what life was like in London at the time that I made the decision to come back here.

The first thing to say about London in 2013 is that things were a mixed bag there, too. I finally had a good job, that I was doing well at and getting recognized for, which I think has eluded me ever since. I was also in the world's greatest city for publishing, and in that final year that I lived there, I got to experience some of it for myself by going to publishing events and the World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which remains one of the high points of my life. More generally, I also loved being in a city that had so much culture, and access to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

On the negative side, life was getting more expensive. I'd spent several years living in East London but when the 2012 Olympics came I found myself priced out and having to take increasingly grim accommodations with increasingly grim flatmates. This was partly my doing, because I insisted on living in Zone 2, but that wasn't an unthinking choice: the farther out I lived, the longer and more complicated my commute would be. Personally as well, my social life was withering a bit as my friends got married, had kids and moved out of London to increasingly remote suburbs. At the same time, there was a feeling of not finding someone to be with there in London, which also hastened my desire to come back here.

By contrast, California, and the Bay Area in particular, looked like it had all the stuff I wanted. Good weather, good food, my family, and a large core group of friends, as well as the sense of being more of an adult: in London, my life was bounded by the city, which meant anything I wanted to do outside of it meant figuring out public transportation. If I wanted to go someplace that public transit didn't reach, then I didn't go there. Whereas I reasoned that here in the US, I'd have a car and I'd be able to go pretty much wherever I wanted.

My timing was also good. When I started a new job in July of 2011, I met a sales rep who lived out here and who expressed a desire to have an analyst based in California to take advantage of the tech scene here. I bided my time, doing good work, and in 2013 resolved that this would be the year I moved back, so I put it to my company, and worked with our head of research to make it work. By the end of the year, another part of our company was setting up an outpost in the Bay Area, just 20 minutes from my house, and so the writing was on the wall.

Of course, there was a big adjustment coming to live here permanently again. I always described myself as never having been a grownup here in the US, and this past decade has been eye-opening in terms of learning how to navigate life in this country. Company benefits, especially healthcare, have been a never-ending source of frustration, but at least I feel like I've figured them out; same for taxes, though I still miss the simplicity of the UK system, where I got a P60 every April that told me how much tax I'd paid, and that was it.

On the work front, there have been ups and downs. I stayed with the company that transferred me here for four years before being laid off and having to take a three-month contract job back in London. I then found myself at State Farm for almost three years, before landing at my current gig. Once I got out of my old company, my pay jumped to levels I'd never even considered, which has made life so much better - I currently make more than twice as much as I did before getting laid off, and probably three or four times more than what I earned in London.

Dating has been generally better here, though it took a while to really take off. I did find myself going on more first dates than I had in London, but I went on way fewer second or third dates. That changed over a few years, but finally in 2019 I met someone for the first time who I really liked, and equally importantly, who liked me. That came to an end thanks to the pressures of the pandemic, but it was good while it lasted, so I'm grateful that she came into my life when she did. It also feels like I've had a little more dating luck since then, so hopefully I'll have more good news to report here soon...

My friend group has stayed pretty constant in this past decade, even despite them all getting married and having kids. I even managed one of those most difficult achievements, and made a new friend in my 30s. I also have a couple of good friends (one a former London flatmate) whom I see when I'm doing in Southern California, so it's nice to have someone else to hang out with down there.

The one aspect of my life that hasn't been as good has been health. I've gained so much weight in the years I've been here, compared with London, and it's only recently that I've been properly tackling it. I've already lamented the food culture here, but a thought I had in Munich back in September was telling: everybody smoked there, but their life expectancy is still higher than here, both because of the wider availability of healthcare and the fact that the Germans, despite eating a sausage and potato-based diet, don't cram themselves with the worst foods in huge quantities all the time.

My writing has also taken a bit of a hit, but that's not because of my distance from the world of London publishing (or not only). I suffered lulls there too, but at least here, I've learned to schedule my writing time and guard it jealously. Still, it'd be nice to be able to encounter SFF writers at the pub randomly, like I used to in London.

On the other hand, my dream of getting out into nature and areas not served by public transit has come true. I have my own car, so I can leave town pretty much whenever I want without worrying about train or bus timetables. I also have a built-in road trip partner in the form of my dad, with whom I've gone to the mountains here in California almost every summer since I moved back. Those have been some great trips, and of course it's a privilege to be able to spend time with him as he gets older.

At the macro-level, i.e. federal and global politics, it feels generally clear that I made the right decision to move here, but it hasn't been a bed of roses, by any means. When I arrived at the end of 2013, the shooting of Trayvon Martin had happened, as had the Sandy Hook massacre and the Citizens United decision at the US Supreme Court. But the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence in 2014, after the Michael Brown shooting and various other police/state crimes against Black people, and in response the right wing has gone increasingly crazy, to the point of electing Donald Trump as president in 2016.

I spent most of the George W Bush years abroad, so maybe I haven't internalized how grim it was here, but the Trump years and the craziness since have been on another level entirely. I've talked about the parallels with Ancient Rome, but it's depressing that I'm fully expecting a Viktor Orban style illiberal "democracy" to be instituted here in my lifetime. I don't know what I'll do if that happens, or where I'll go, because the far right has coordinated itself everywhere, including back in Britain.

The thing that makes me most grateful to have moved here was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Hearing my sister's experiences in London, and contrasting them with my isolated but mostly okay existence here, I honestly think I might not have survived it if I'd stayed there. At the very least, I'd expect to have caught it once prior to the vaccines being available, which would have been pretty serious. The UK and US both botched their responses, but at least here in California I was in a place that took it seriously, and lived separately enough from others that I was able to isolate, including working from home. Working from my increasingly tiny and grim flats in London during a global pandemic, with flatmates, and with stricter restrictions than any we had here in the US, doesn't bear thinking about.

So overall, yes, I'd say the move here was a good thing. Unlike when I left the UK at the end of 2004, to go to grad school, I don't feel like I missed out on as much by leaving in 2013. Indeed, that time I was back in the UK in less than two years, whereas now, Brexit notwithstanding (and an abiding regret is that I didn't pick up a British passport when I could have) I haven't felt a particular pull to move back permanently, other than wanting to see my friends and visit the cultural spots in Britain.

In the final summation, London never felt like home. There were, and are, many things I liked about the rhythms of living there, but I feel like my existence is so much better here, that going back would involve too many compromises that I no longer want to make. I hope my days of traveling and living abroad aren't over, but overall I'm happy to say that coming back to California was the right choice.

Now, let's see how the next 10 years go.

Pandemic Progress Report 2023

It's been a while since some of my yearning posts from way back in 2020 about all the things that I was looking forward to doing again when the pandemic ended. For various reasons I've continued to be pretty careful about masking in public and avoiding places where I couldn't easily wear masks, but also, in the last year or so I've started venturing out to do some of the things I used to do before the pandemic.

Seeing friends in person was one of the first things I started doing again, but always with some strictures about avoiding eating at restaurants where possible. It took me some time to get comfortable with even eating outdoors, but as time has passed, and as the case numbers here and in Italy have gone down, I've considered the relative risks and rewards of eating at restaurants. For instance, when I met someone for a date last December, I agreed that it was better to sit inside (without masks), because it was too cold and rainy and miserable to sit outside.

Now I've started eating indoors at restaurants more often, including a few times this week and even today. I still think it's worth being careful in crowded places, and I'm also still trying to be careful of where I eat (I'd rather get Covid or some other airborne virus from a good restaurant than from Taco Bell or KFC), but it's nice to be eating food on-site again. It helps that it's still warm when it gets to my table, rather than cold from being picked up by me or by a delivery person.

Part of what changed my mind about eating at restaurants was flying to Italy twice since last summer. Going to Europe was a big thing I missed from my pre-pandemic life, and I'm happy to have managed it, even if it's always been to go to my family house rather than on my solo adventures from years past. When I went last summer I also decided that I'd be willing to eat at certain, particularly good restaurants in Rome and Turin, because they were special occasion-type places. When I went this past February, I found myself eating at restaurants and cafes even more often, and though I picked up a pretty bad cold I didn't get Covid.

I've been to pubs, but generally sitting outside. I still think that the interier of a crowded bar isn't necessarily the best place, but at least until cases spike again in the fall and winter, it'll probably be more okay than the last couple of years.

One thing I haven't done since before the pandemic, but that I could do just fine, is watch movies at the theater. I'm not particularly bothered by wearing a mask for a few hours, so going to see the latest Marvel flick or whatever doesn't feel like a burden. But... well, everything seems to come to streaming sooner or later, and even if my TV screen isn't big, it's just more convenient to watch things at home (and with access to my own bathroom). That said, while I've had to decline the last couple invitations to go to the movies, it's been because of scheduling issues, not because I was afraid of catching Covid.

Attending work conferences wasn't on that list from three years ago, but I've changed that as of this past week. It was a big tech show, with a huge and crowded expo floor, but I just wore my mask whenever I was walking around or talking in close proximity to people. It was nice to get back into that element and being able to strike up conversations. I should note that I was prepared to do it last year, but the show I wanted to go to had moved from Santa Clara to Austin, and my company wasn't prepared to pay for me to gad about out of state, so that fell by the wayside (also, I was still reluctant to go to states that were less Covid-conscious).

The thing I'm still not doing is working out at the gym. I'm continuing to look at how cases are developing, and am actually hoping to get back to the gym, but that's the dirtiest place of all the spots I used to frequent, with loads of exhalations and droplets splashing all over the place, to say nothing of the sweat and grossness. I also don't miss a lot of the people who went to my gym, like those who reracked weights badly or otherwise violated gym etiquette. The pandemic has made me more conscious of how nice it'd be to have my own place with room for a home gym, so I don't have to share workout space with jerks.

Overall, I'm glad to be getting back to something close to normal, even if it's a bit slower than most other people I know. I don't claim any specialist knowledge about Covid, virology or epidemiology in general, but I haven't bought into the narrative that Covid is over or that it's fine now that we've all been vaccinated. Rather, everything I've read about catching it multiple times makes me think that I'd prefer to avoid catching it even once, for as long as I can.

Still, life is out there, outside my house, and it feels good to be going out and doing a bit more stuff now. Hopefully soon it really will all be back to normal.

Reading Challenges Take the Fun Out of Reading (For Me, Anyway)

I've talked on this blog about how much I read each year (50 books per year, on average), and how much I'm reading concurrently (too much). That latter part comes out of a point in time last year when I borrowed a bunch of books from a friend and read a little bit of each every night for a couple of months, until I'd finished them all.

That unlocked some weird gamification gene in me, and I kept doing that for the rest of the year, but with a lot more books, and with books that were longer. I'd select 12 books, and plan on finishing four each month, the idea being that I'd read a little bit of each and focus the rest of my energy on the last, until I'd gone through all of them. And then the following quarter I'd choose 12 more and start over again.

Well, things didn't quite turn out that way. I still have a few books on the go since that period, which I've been picking away at. Others have been added to the selection and have been finished with more priority, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they were more interesting than the rest of the pile. And one of them went into the donation pile unfinished, because I realized, 200+ pages in, that it wasn't that enjoyable and I wasn't retaining anything.

This change in attitude has partly been influenced by a few things I've read or seen recently. For one thing, a lot of women say on their dating profiles that they want to read more, or to read a specific number of books per year. On the other hand, I read an piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago by a writer whose grandfather kept a house filled with books and read obsessively, a trait that he'd passed on to the rest of the family. This writer, by contrast, had decided to let go of this neurosis and just read for fun.

That appealed to me, so I decided to do the same, although I'm still stuck with the big TBR pile. But then I read another piece, this one in the Guardian (could've been CNET), by a writer who wanted to read more, and suggested doing reading challenges, including keeping a reading journal and setting reading targets on Goodreads or other sites.

All of this is kind of a long preamble to saying, I want to stop doing reading challenges, at least for the time being. My experiences for the last year or so have shown me a number of things about my reading habits, but the big takeaway is that if I'm reading for pleasure, I should just read in a relaxed way. Trying to read a bunch of books concurrently, one or two pages at a time, has the same effect as forcing myself to read a set number of pages each day to reach a self-imposed deadline. The effect being that I don't take anything in from the books.

My page-count target comes from the days when I'd borrow books from the library in London. I usually had four weeks to finish them, so I'd divide the page count by four, to get my weekly target, and then divide that by seven, to get my daily target. I'd then aim to read a little more than that target each day, so the amount I had to read would be less than the day before. And I'd try and hit specific goals by the end of each week to ensure that the following week would require fewer pages to read as well.

When I moved here and stopped going to the library so much, I kept dividing books by 28, so that I could finish them within a given month. I also, for reasons I don't really understand, did something similar with my e-books: I'd aim to read 5% of them each day, so I could finish an e-book every 20 days.

These numbers have started to feel more and more irrelevant as I've gone on. On Kindle, I've scaled my reading goal back to targeting just one e-book per month (the app keeps track of this, and I've also got a 240-week reading streak going, which I should acknowledge is pointless but I'm actually kinda proud of). With my physical books, I'm still dipping into them bit-by-bit each day, but I'm trying to resist the temptation to add more as I finish books, and eventually get to the point where I'm actively reading just one physical book and one e-book at a time.

Like the writer in that NYT piece, I've found that obsessively setting weekly and daily page targets has sucked the fun out of writing. I compare it with the period in 2018 when I was in London and working in an office. I read loads of e-books on the train to work, and a physical book in the lunch area on my hour off at noon. I had no distractions (ie I couldn't watch YouTube or Netflix in that office), so I just read and powered through an epic amount of books - and it all felt organic, because I was paying attention to the words rather than the page numbers.

This is what it comes down to: when I have a daily target to hit each night before bed, then I'm focusing more on getting to my goal than on the narrative, so I end up not taking anything in. I do myself a further disservice by trying to power through to my target page even when I'm too tired to really take in what I'm reading.

To be clear, all of what I've just said is about my own reading habits. I'm probably an uncommonly voracious reader, especially considering that most Americans read just one book per year, whereas I average close to one per week. My life circumstances are such that I can easily fit in an hour of reading on my lunch break, and another hour at bedtime. That Guardian article about reading challenges was written from the perspective of a mother trying to recapture some reading time for herself, which is completely fair enough.

But I do also think that some people who try to fit more reading into their lives are doing so because they think they "should", rather than because they want to. I appreciate that there are a lot of other distractions, like TV and video games, and I'm gradually coming to appreciate the idea that you should just do those things if they're more enjoyable. Nobody's grading us on how much we read or the quality thereof, so we should just be comfortable reading as much or as little as we like - even if that's one book per month.

I'm still probably going to be more interested in hanging out with or dating people who actually like books. But that's not set in stone: as long as they don't mind that I like to read, then we should be fine.

2022 in the Rearview Mirror

Another year done and dusted, and I'm not sure what to think of this one. On the work front, it was pretty good, as I got more used to how things work at my job and wrote a few reports and blogs that I'm fairly proud of. On the personal side, it's been a process of returning to normalcy as I got more confident with doing things outside the house and coping with the risks of the pandemic. 

There are still things I'm not interested in doing, like going to the gym (although the minute I think it's not a high-risk activity I want to jump straight onto a treadmill), and there are things that I can see my way to doing but haven't yet, like going to the movies. That said, all my avenues to watch movies on streaming are fulfilling my needs so far, so maybe what I need is to buy a bigger TV.

As far as eating at restaurants, I've actually done that to varying degrees this year, reasoning that a particularly good meal or good company is worth the risk of getting Covid. Though I'm quite proud of not having gotten it, and it'd be great to go through this whole pandemic having avoided it - but we'll see.

In terms of my goals and interests and pursuits, it's felt like a mixed bag. I finished my first novel in quite a few years, but then stalled pretty hard on the revisions for it and haven't really written much new stuff since then. One reason for this lack of productivity was games, both video and tabletop, which pulled my focus away from working; another was the telecoms-related blogs I was writing elsewhere, which broke my rhythm when working on other stuff. I'm quite proud of some of those blogs, but think I'll be taking a break from them for the time being (unless I get a nice idea to pursue).

Dating was a bit of a mixed bag, but the important thing is that I got back onto the apps and met a couple of ladies. The important point for me this year will be getting out to more social stuff: not even to meet women but to learn new skills and get into more social situations. I keep putting off my "Practice Spanish" meetup, but that was always okay to check out, and it was useful for sharpening up my Spanish, so maybe this year I'll go back.

Fitness was hampered by not going to the gym, as it limited the types of workouts I could do. Even the ones I could do, like running on the street, were a bit limited by the weather: I don't like to go running if it's rainy and dark, or if it's too hot.

One area where I thought I made some good strides this year was in traveling. Apart from the three drives down to my mom's house in Southern California, I also got in a ski trip with my dad and my first flight to Italy since the start of the pandemic. Both were good for calibrating my sense of what's okay to do outside the house, and the Italy trip reawakened my desire to travel the world. I'd like to get to Australia this year, for example, so hopefully I'll be able to swing that.

In terms of media consumed, very little stands out. Among TV shows, the only standouts were Andor on Disney+ and We Own This City on HBO Max, though watching season 1 of Fargo on DVD (from Netflix) was also quite fun - it's just not a new thing from this year. I also really liked Star Trek Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, both of which did good new things with Trek that have been missing from Discovery and Picard (which I felt fumbled its second season, if not as badly as Disco).

There was also Sandman, of course, which I talked about here. The main thing that came out of that was that I bought the collected editions and reread the comics. It's funny how I appreciate the stories and themes a little better, or at least differently, now that I've lived a bit compared to when I first discovered them at 13 or 14 years old.

As far as movies, even less stands out. The one film that does is Everything Everywhere All at Once, which hit a lot of my sweet spots of topics and themes that interest me. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan were particularly great, especially given the different types of characters they had to play. Much of the rest of what I saw was Marvel or DC tie-ins, and those mostly kept to the average level of quality, with none over a B+ or below a C-. Dishonorable mention went to Black Adam, which wasted a number of ideas about American power and authoritarianism, as well as characters like Dr. Fate and Hawkman and the Justice Society in general.

For podcasts, I liked My Year in Mensa and All-Star Super-Fan, though the latter I technically discovered in 2021. Still, I love that they get some great writers to talk about Superman, and it soundtracked some good drives this year.

I also want to reiterate my appreciation for the History of Rome podcast, which finally demystified Roman history, especially in the Imperial phase. My new party trick is listing all (or at least most) of the emperors from Augustus to Theodosius... though maybe I need to go to better parties?

What about the coming year?

I don't know yet what'll characterize 2023 for me, but I want to spend more time cooking more elaborate dinners than just a chicken breast in the oven with a side of salad. I already said that I hope to travel more this year, and one thing I'd like to do more of is work remotely in fun, new places. I want to spend more time reading new books, but I'm also aiming to reread my collection of Paul Theroux travel books. I also hope to spend more time encountering exciting new music, especially since I now have a few months of free access to Apple Music because I bought a pair of Beats earbuds.

More than anything, though, I plan for 2023 to be the year of getting back in shape, getting out of the house, and fixing up medical complaints that have bothered me for a while. The cooking is in aid of that, but I feel I made some progress in 2022 so I want to keep up that momentum this coming year. I'm hoping to come out of 2023 feeling excited and invigorated, but of course, that feeling will come from me, not from external signifiers of success. But those external signifiers never hurt either!

Change of Scene

After two years stuck at home, my thoughts recently have been turning quite regularly to getting out of the house for longer than a couple of hours at a time. The problem is that I'm still taking the pandemic quite seriously, and so I remain uncomfortable with certain activities or locations. This has limited me to places I can reach by car, but I've been discovering that I can still reach quite a few places.

I just spent the past week down in Orange County, in fact. I took my work laptop and all the stuff I needed to spend a week away from home (exercise gear, books, personal laptop, foodstuffs I didn't want to go bad while I was away), and drove down Saturday before last. I stayed at my mom and stepdad's house down there, keeping him company while my mom was out of town (she's a lot more confident with traveling than I've been, though I've had external circumstances that made that harder). During the days I'd drive down to the condo they had nearby, which they were renting out but is currently empty and typically used as my mom's office. Because I'm fully remote at work, I didn't need to get permission, just headed down and got my work space sorted out down there.

Having now been back home for one workday, it's struck me how much like a vacation it was, even if I was working my normal hours. For one thing, the commute gave me a nice sense of split between work and not-work, even if I spent about ten minutes in the car each way. I'd arrive in the morning, change out of my jeans and pour a bowl of cereal, before logging on for the day. At five, I'd log out, change back into my jeans and drive back to watch German TV with my stepdad and have dinner.

The other thing that made it feel like a real vacation was the scenery. They live in a pretty prosperous part of Orange County, not far from Laguna Beach and the coast generally, with communities sprinkled onto hillsides, so that basically every house has a beautiful view. I kept going for my daily walks last week, and quickly realized that if I walked up the hill, I'd get to a road that had amazing views east toward the mountains, or west toward the coast. A far cry from the flat suburbia that I usually walk around in Palo Alto.

That last part was a bit of an adjustment for me, because I've spent the last twenty years being down on Orange County. I went to college at UC Irvine, and always thought of it as a blinkered place, full of right-wing people and racist cops. If I've considered the merits of moving to Southern California, it's always been to Los Angeles, where there's exciting cultural stuff going on and I'm slightly less likely to run into a pro-Trump protest. However, the prospect of being able to enjoy views like that every day has made me a little more open to settling in Orange County...

What also helped was the subtle changes from my regular routine. For whatever reason, even though I work from home and have zero commute, I usually feel a little rushed in the evenings at home, trying to fit in writing, dinner, cleaning and whatever other tasks I want to accomplish. Down there, my stepdad usually cooked and preferred that I leave the dishes in the sink, so he could put them in the dishwasher. Plus, they've got their cleaners back in once a week, so the place was more spotless than my house, which was also nice.

One other thing, not a particularly big one but fairly important now that I consider it, was the feeling of taking a break from the pandemic. Here in Palo Alto I still wear a mask when I go out for walks, or at least carry it with me. Down there, because so few people are out walking on the roads near the condo, I didn't even bring a mask along, and honestly didn't need it (it's not like there are stores nearby that I could nip into). I maintained my usual rules of masking up in stores and of not eating in restaurants, but on Friday my stepdad and I grabbed a drink at the balcony of one of the local hotels, and ended up eating dinner there.

As I said, I spent the bulk of the pandemic at home, first on my own and then with my then-girlfriend. Since I've been on my own again, I've been trying to balance staying safe (the pandemic is still out there, even if it's not quite as out of control) with doing stuff outside the house to keep sane. My first vacation away from home since 2020 was at Christmas, when I went to Orange County to see the family, and then my first long weekend away was in March, when I went skiing for a couple of days with my dad. This trip has awakened me to the possibility of decamping somewhere else to work for a few days, and really taking advantage of being 100% remote. I don't see myself becoming a digital nomad (I'm still not completely sold on air travel) but it's nice that the possibility is open.

And failing that, I've also spent some time scanning Zillow for houses within my budget in Orange County. I'd be limited to condos, but it's nice to see I'm earning enough now for it to be a realistic idea. It might be a stretch to imagine that I'll truly end up there (I have a better social network here in the Bay Area), but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Though if I do move down there, I'm going to have to invest in a Brita filter, because the tap water is gross, y'all.

Finally Doing NaNoWriMo

Every November for years I've seen people talking about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but I've never joined up myself. It always felt a little gimmicky, or I had other stuff I was working on, or any number of other dumb reasons.

This year, though, I've decided to give it a try. I've felt a little directionless with my writing for the past 18 months or so (gosh, I wonder what that could be related to), even when I had stuff to revise or write down. More importantly, it's been a long time since I've felt able to work on something longer than a short story (and even those didn't seem to be coming to me), so this felt like the right time to do it.

On top of that is the realization that to properly get ahead in publishing, it helps to have longer works. I've been focusing a lot on novellas lately, but have also been finding it hard to find markets that would take them. A novel, on the other hand, seems easier to shop around to agents, which seems like the most reasonable port of call for getting ahead with my writing.

It helped that I finally had a novel idea, which I spent a little while developing earlier this year. I outlined it and wrote a few world-building type documents, that would help me get a sense of the structure of the story and the tone I wanted to strike, but then I found myself distracted by my tech/telecoms blog, and didn't do anything more on the novel idea for a while.

Incidentally, the tech/telecoms blog was so easy to work on because I knew, month to month, what I wanted to do with it. This is what I mean when I say my fiction writing has felt directionless - I had a short story idea a few months ago, and I got as far as the first (hand-written) draft, but in the transition to the typed second draft, I couldn't make it work or muster much more interest. With the other blog, on the other hand, the subject (comparisons of age-related mobile plans in various countries in Europe) dictated the structure, so I knew that after I finished writing about plans aimed at seniors in Italy, I could write about plans in Italy that were aimed at kids.

It's the same with the novel I'm currently working on. Because I spent some time figuring out the structure earlier this year, I know what I want to accomplish in most of the chapters, and can spend my precious and limited writing time accomplishing it, rather than getting hamstrung by all the possible things I can do. Of course, this is the kind of thing that works for me, so maybe a different type of writer thrives on that ambiguity.

As far as the actual NaNoWriMo, it turns out the goal is to write 50,000 words in November, whereas I always thought it was 30k. It doesn't matter either way, as the important thing is to have something workable at the end of the month, and because my writing sessions are regularly yielding much less than 1,000 words, let alone the 1,667 I'd need to average to get to 50k. It's still satisfying to go to the website and input the number of words I've written that day, and see the little meter tick up. I probably should have tried gamifying my writing ages ago...

In any case, it seems to be working, i.e. I have something to write that's holding my interest, and crucially I'm looking forward to certain scenes later on in the story. Even if I don't have the full 50k words by the end of November, I'm aiming to continue writing this initial draft into December, so fingers crossed that I'll be able to do something with it in 2022.

Let's Normalize Masking and Distancing

Bit of a controversial statement there, but I'm going to stand by it. Incidentally, I'm not advocating masking in every circumstance forever and ever, but ever since I started watching Japanese reality show Terrace House last year, I've been struck by how normal it is to wear a mask when you're felling sick over there.

This is a nice change from our Anglo-Saxon free-for-all of germs. I used to have a flatmate back in London who would sit in the living room when he got sick, coughing really loudly and not trying to cover it up. I asked him to cover his mouth once, and his response was that I was going to get it anyway, so why bother? Not super helpful.

A few years later, a coworker here in the US was famous in the office for coming in whenever he was sick, even though he was perfectly able to work from home (and would have saved himself a long commute on top of that). Of course he'd spread whatever he had to the rest of us, but what made it worse was that his boss didn't think anything of it - the company's policy was even to pool vacation time and sick time together (at least for their division; mine were separate), which only increased the incentive to come in and make everyone else sick.

I do remember my own experiences in years before that, where I'd have to evaluate whether I was sick enough to stay home, and if not I'd travel to work crammed onto the Tube, then sit in my office and presumably spread my germs to everyone around me. Those were different times though, when we weren't routinely given laptops and so it was harder to actually work from home. All the same, I think managers then, as now, could have been more aggressive about having sick employees stay home where possible.

We could also normalize wearing surgical masks when we're sick, or around others who are, like people in East Asia seem to do. It's a shame it's become politicized here, because it's not a big deal to put on a surgical mask - they may not be as protective as N95s or KN95s, but they seem to do something, and they're not hard to get hold of... in normal circumstances, anyway.

I read this morning about some dimwit in Missouri complaining that schools shouldn't mandate masks, because then kids won't learn about facial cues. On the contrary, I'd argue that if kids only have someone's eyes to look at, they'll get a lot better at reading facial cues - after all, don't models talk about "smize-ing", where you make your smile look genuine by smiling with your eyes? I'm sure I learned this from Tyra Banks.

This future I'm positing doesn't even require 100% mask-wearing compliance in all situations (perhaps idealistically, I'm imagining a future where we aren't in a pandemic - I am, after all, a writer of fantasy). It just requires people to be grown up about listening to their own bodies, and wearing a mask when they start sneezing and coughing to not infect those around them. It also requires us not to conform to this free-market ideal that we show our usefulness by powering through our illnesses and going to work when we probably shouldn't.

Again, these thoughts may be too fanciful for the cultural moment where we find ourselves, but they're worthy goals. If (when!) we get back to the normal run of leaving the house and going to offices and seeing humans, I'll aim to continue wearing masks when I feel it's warranted.

Of course, the damn things being so politicized means I'll be paranoid about some right-wing jerk beating me up for it because I've triggered him somehow. But I'm being the change I want to see in the world. In an absurd, meaningless existence such as our own, that's the one freedom left to us.

Why was the 1918 flu forgotten?

Like everyone else in the world since March 2020, I've become conspicuously well-informed about the previous big pandemic, the 1918 flu. I've seen (and probably shared) memes on social media about people being told to wear masks back then, or how cases surged, then dipped, then surged again over the two years that the pandemic raged across the world.

Now, that preceding paragraph needs to be rendered in a special sarcasm font, because I'm totally not well-informed about the 1918 flu, though I have indeed seen more information about it in the last 18 months or so, than I had in the preceding 40 or so years of my life. But what's spurring me to write this blog today is the fact that just the other day I was reading a book about the history of Canada, published in 2006, and it makes not a single mention of the pandemic.

I even checked the notes and index, and there's nothing about 1918 flu, Spanish flu, or pandemics in the entire book. This despite a big section on the First World War, in which Canada played a prominent role, and another on the aftermath of the war (though in fairness, that section isn't so big, because the author skips over much of the 1920s).

I've been hyper-aware of this gap in history since the coronavirus pandemic began, particularly in how books from around that period have ignored it. In fact, I think the first instance where I heard of the 1918 flu was in a series of books of alternate history by Harry Turtledove, which explore the long-term consequences of the South winning the Civil War.

When preparing to write this blog, I found this post on History.com, which suggests that this collective act of forgetting came about because people made a conscious effort to forget it. So distraught was everyone at the ferocity of the illness, that doctors made a point of not writing about it; on top of that, the world was recovering from the Great War, and America was racked by political and racial violence.

The problem is, this explanation is still unsatisfying. I get that the books I typically read wouldn't necessarily make a big deal of the 1918 flu, especially because they might have been aimed at kids or written ten years later. But given how many people it affected, it's hard to imagine everyone taking the collective decision to never speak of it again, and then abiding by that decision for the next hundred years.

For one thing, I've learned in the last 18 months that there have been other forgotten pandemics since 1918. Apparently there was one in the 1950s in Britain, for example, which I only heard about in the context of this one. I suppose it makes sense that if a disease is raging only in one or two areas, or if it's over fairly quickly, then you wouldn't hear of it again.

At the same time, I'm well aware of the polio epidemic that raged throughout the Western world in the early decades of the 20th century. That was only beaten in the 1950s, when the Salk vaccine came out, but presumably the long decades in which polio was a danger to people meant it was harder to ignore.

In this context, I can't help thinking of another forgotten event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which I'd never heard of before the HBO Watchmen show came out a couple of years ago. In that case, the forgetting is probably easier to explain, because it happened quickly (over two days) and in just one place, though of course there were other such incidents over the course of the 20th century. And, perhaps a bit distastefully, it was easy for the rest of America to forget given who was massacred in Tulsa - what would a reader of the New York Times have cared for a Black community in Tulsa being burned to the ground?

I think that, on top of people wanting to ignore these kinds of events, the reason we've forgotten them is that it was so hard to get information out back then. One point in that History.com article that I found interesting was that the papers covering the 1918 flu didn't really talk about the human impact of it - contrast that with now, when we see people on Facebook and Twitter who have caught the coronavirus, or died of it. We're all constantly talking about it, and doing so in a way that's leaving a more-or-less permanent record - something that didn't necessarily exist 100 years ago.

Still, given how unknown these events are, it makes you wonder what else we've collectively forgotten - and whether that forgetting is setting us up to repeat whatever's happened.

Where Camping Meets Doomsday Prepping

With the inevitable collapse of American society amid pandemic and political polarization, I've found myself unable to resist the lure of camping gear recently. Not only have I spent some down time during work hours checking out Wirecutter's guides to various camping items, but I've also started looking at the same lists of gear on CNet.

It all started in February or so, when the extreme weather in Texas caused all those blackouts. I mentioned then that I'd picked up a solar panel for charging my phone and other electronics, but since then I've been obsessed with finding power banks that could power my laptop, or jump-start my car, or even run household items with AC plugs. Everything that I've seen on Amazon is expensive, or not quite what I'm looking for, but I feel like it's a matter of time before something comes out that I can make use of.

Beyond that, though, I've had a look at articles on what to keep for emergencies, such as first aid kits and receptacles for fresh water, and at articles on stuff to take on a socially distanced road trip to a national park. All of it looks so appealing, from the outdoor dish set to the portable table to the cooler.

All this research on camping and outdoor gear reminds me of my trip to Joshua Tree a few years ago, which occasioned a round of REI expeditions where I picked up snack food, camping dish wear and a headlamp. There was so much stuff that looked fun and useful and that would surely turn me into the indomitable outdoorsman I'd like to be, although I'm also realistic enough to admit that I probably wouldn't use it so much if I did have it. After all, I haven't gone camping since then - between the pandemic and my girlfriend being a little less enamored of the idea of roughing it for a few days in some remote forest among bugs and predators.

Still, I find it interesting that I'm so taken by all this stuff. I guess I just like that it's all so versatile and tidy - presumably bringing out a lot of interesting equipment, unfolding it expertly, and then squaring it all away into small corners of my trunk or garage appeals to the OCD in me.

It doesn't help that I can imagine how I'd use it all. For example, we'd drive up to Yosemite, confident in the knowledge that we wouldn't have trouble with gas stations because I'd be carrying a canister of gasoline for my car. Once we arrived, I'd pull out the collapsible table and chairs, set the table with the stackable dishes and cups, and extract our lunch from the cooler (which apparently can keep ice frozen for a week).

We'd keep our devices charged during lunch with the solar panels hooked up to the 1,000 watt portable generator, which is all electronic so it can't poison us with carbon monoxide fumes. Said generator could also power everything up to and including a fan, to keep cool and ward off bugs. And on finishing, we'd pack everything away back into the car and go for a walk, or back home, or wherever we wanted.

Part of what fascinates me is the idea that going camping doesn't have to be grim and full of deprivation (without going to the other extreme of glamping) - if you do it enough, you know what you need so you bring stuff that lets you cook, relax and keep yourself entertained. The other thing is that sense of order that comes from knowing that the set of dishes you brought stacks into a neat little cube, which you place on top of the cooler that holds all your sodas and snacks.

The other, other thing is probably borne of the pandemic and all this time I've spent at home, which is the feeling of being able to go anywhere and be prepared for it. My vacations have usually been to cities, which I can navigate fairly well even if I don't know the language (as long as there's Starbucks, public transportation and cafes where I can read for an hour). My beloved city breaks feel impossible to achieve at the moment, even being fully vaccinated, since I don't feel comfortable getting on a plane and some places still aren't letting tourists in, so road trips are probably the most likely ways of getting out of the house for a few days.

Though the real limiting factor is bathrooms. Using a campground toilet is one thing, but I'm not quite at the point where I (or my girlfriend) would feel comfortable using a bucket we've brought ourselves. So for the moment it's probably better that I don't go on any REI shopping sprees...

Stop Treating the Pandemic Like It's Over

We're in a full-blown third, fourth or even fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, but nobody seems to have noticed.

That's not strictly true: people are noticing that cases are rising in the US, and that the Delta variant is becoming the dominant strain of the coronavirus (if it hasn't already), but they're sitting there blaming it exclusively on people who haven't gotten vaccinated. By people, I mean pundits and random people on Twitter - hardly a day goes by when I don't see someone on there yelling at us all to get vaccinated (I have, thanks), or being derisive about unvaccinated people being hospitalized.

I find this tone worrying. As I said, I'm vaccinated, and I'm pleased that I got it so soon after it became available in my age group. I believe that the vaccine is safe and effective, and if we all got it, we'd be seeing fewer cases. I also think that those who are peddling misinformation, be it about the existence of the pandemic or the efficacy of masking or who are making baseless claims about the safety of the vaccines, are wrong.

Recently, though, I've been finding a weird equivalency between those of us who continue to wear masks and those who refuse to get vaccinated. Speaking to some neighbors the other week, outside and double-masked, I was asked if I hadn't been vaccinated. I answered that I had, but the question rattled me a little. It shouldn't be controversial for me to continue wearing a mask, and it's not the horrible imposition that some, like Tucker Carlson, seem to think it is.

Even Bill Maher (whom my girlfriend loves but I frequently find infuriating) has laughed at people who were still wearing masks outdoors, despite the fact that he got infected with Covid after being vaccinated. If anybody should appreciate the importance of continuing to take precautions, it's him - but I digress.

The fact is that California saw around 44,000 new cases last week. This article from the New York Times says that one in five new cases are in Florida, with appropriate doses of condescension for a Republican-led state, but it doesn't so much as mention California, which by this math accounts for over 10% of new cases. There are pockets of vaccine hesitancy here, which are frequently caused by politics, but it can't be the whole story.

There have to be more Covid breakthrough infections than we're hearing about - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself admits that it's no longer tracking all breakthrough cases. This other article from the NYT notes that the more people you're around, even if you and they are all vaccinated, the greater your risk of encountering a viral load big enough to get you sick.

Some places are taking appropriate steps. I'm staying with my girlfriend at the moment, and the grocery/deli near her house has gone back to requiring masks indoors for all customers. When we went up to a mall in San Francisco a few weeks ago, the vast majority of people outside (we didn't go in) were wearing masks despite notices from the mall itself saying that vaccinated people didn't have to wear masks indoors.

I just think it's too early to start opening up again, and to start telling people they don't have to wear masks. More importantly, I think it's unwise to imply that the vaccine is the only thing that can save us from this pandemic, when wearing a mask is probably as important a step as getting the jab. There's still debate on the relative effectiveness of masks versus vaccines, but I think the point is, if you can do both, do both.

To sum up, if cases are rising in the US (and they are), then don't blame it exclusively on people who haven't been vaccinated. They might not be able to get it, for example because they're allergic, or they might not have gotten around to it yet. Even if they can get it, but are hesitant, telling them they're stupid and selfish is unlikely to convince them otherwise. And even with the vaccine, we shouldn't be declaring victory just yet - we may not want to admit it, but there's a long way to go to eradicate Covid completely, which should have been our goal in the first place.

My Own Rules for Life

I've seen that Jordan Peterson has a new book out, with new rules for life influenced by his recent (negative) health experiences. I don't typically have any time for him, but was interested to read this Guardian review that presented a more nuanced and even-handed view, which, while not letting him off the hook for his own brain-fartery, also assigns blame to over-zealous interpretations of his books and pronouncements on alt-right jerks on the internet.

In the interest of fairness, whenever I've looked at the list of his original 12 rules for life, I've approved, because they are fairly uncontroversial. For example, "make friends with people who want the best for you" is pretty good advice, even if it comes from a right-wing culture warrior with unclear ideas about anything. And I can't disapprove of his final rule, "pet a cat when you encounter one on the street", which implies an appreciation for gentleness and spontaneity that is wholly admirable.

There are some even better ones in his latest book, Beyond Order (which I haven't read, just as I haven't read the previous one). My favorite is "abandon ideology" - physician, heal thyself! "Do not do what you hate" is also deceptively simple but worth remembering.

But it still sort of irks me to let a favorite of the alt-right have this "rules for life" business to himself, so here are mine. They are a combination of my own, and ones that I like from other writers:

• Know what you should be working on at any given time
• This one is adapted from Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way. I set a lot of goals, especially for my nightly writing, and it helps to remind myself what I want to work on now, rather than getting lost chasing and not finishing a bunch of different things
• Increase the good, instead of decreasing the bad
• This is from Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich. It's more widely applicable than finance, and it's also quite simple. One of his examples is to increase the healthy food that you eat, rather than focusing only on decreasing the unhealthy food. I don't always follow this one as well as I'd like, but it's always on my mind.
• Articulate what you do want, and don't waste time thinking about what you don't
• I got this from Goals, by Brian Tracy. It reminds me to think positively about my goals, rather than trying to articulate what I want by ruling out what I don't. It's applicable for everything from what I want in a partner to where I want to go for dinner (with my partner, of course).
• Better one pleasure than a hundred displeasures
• My dad sometimes repeats this, in Piedmontese dialect, but it's one of those obvious ones that are sometimes easy to miss. And it's related to the ones just before it, so points to me for being thematically consistent
• Stay off social media after 10pm
• This is my own personal rule, and it falls within a broader "no internet before bed" rule. It's not just about sleep hygiene, as the main example I can think of is seeing something that enrages you just before you go to bed. It's bad to subject yourself to such things at most times of the day, but when you go to sleep your brain is free to think about everything it's seen all day, without mediating influences like work, your family or anything else.
• If your mother says she loves you, check it out
• They used to say this around my journalism school. It's not really about your mom, or my mom (who I'm reasonably certain does love me), but a call to really check on things that you learn. It's especially important these days, when right-wing provocateurs have made an industry out of presenting anything done by the left as an affront to common sense. There's always something to dig into. And that goes double for when people are trying to tell you that "the establishment" is lying to you about something (e.g. climate change, fluoride in water, vaccines, etc).
• Check in with your friends
• This is kind of obvious, right? It's been brought home to me in the past year when it's been basically impossible for me to see them physically - at the moment I play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends, and the weekly check-in feels good, even if we're not talking loads about our daily lives.
• Ask for help
• And finally, one that I've blogged about. When I lost my job a few years ago, I took immediately to Facebook to let people know, and the response was great. One friend took me up to Foothills Park for beer and weed, another went over my resume with me, and a couple more hooked me up with job contacts, one of which panned out. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as that, but when something big happens, it's easy to put it out to your social network that you need help with something, and even if nothing comes back, then at least people will commiserate.

These aren't twelve rules, because that's Peterson's schtick. They might be banal or repetitive or stolen, but they're some of the most important rules I think about all the time, and because they've helped me so much, I think they could help others. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Internet Self-Improvement: We Already Know the Answers We Seek

I was originally going to title this post "The Pointlessness of the Self-Improvement Internet", but decided that was too harsh, since I still think the idea of self-improvement is worthwhile. But it struck me the other day that a lot of the advice we seek is kind of pointless, because, as my actual title suggests, we already know what we need to do.

Someone on the Tim Ferriss Show - it might have been internet finance guru Ramit Sethi - once said that advice on the internet boils down to three questions:

• How do I get skinny?
• How do I get rich?
• How do I get laid?

To these I'd add a fourth, which is "How do I get published?"

(As a quick aside, it struck me a long time ago that these mapped pretty perfectly onto how I described my own goals)

The problem is that people looking for answers to these questions on the internet are actually looking for a shortcut - in each case, there are long-term and deeply unsexy ways of achieving all of these goals:

• How do I get skinny? Don't eat crap, eat less of it, and move around every day
• How do I get rich? Don't blow your money on stuff you don't want/need, and learn how money works
• How do I get laid? Scrub up, dress nice and cultivate an interesting life (this is relevant if you're looking for a relationship or just a hookup)
• How do I get published? Read a lot, write a lot, send out what you write (and revise intelligently)

In fact, as someone who's read a fair amount of self-improvement, self-help and productivity literature, I can attest that the best books on any of these subjects are clear on how slow and unsexy the best ways of achieving these goals are. There aren't really magic diets that will let you eat pizza every day and magically shred your belly fat, and there aren't scripts that will get you laid every time.

You can even go a step further and point out that almost all questions to advice columns have a simple answer. I read Dan Savage's Savage Love column each week, and whenever he gives the letter-writer the answer to DTMFA, you have to imagine the letter-writer already knows that they should be dumping the person who's caused them to write in. This goes equally well for Miss Manners and other types of advice columns - at some level you know what you should do in a given situation.

Though I'll say that it's not a bad thing that people are asking an impartial and knowledgeable third party to weigh in sometimes - someone's circumstances may have taught them all kinds of inappropriate ways of dealing with diet, relationships or money, so sometimes it is good to get a second opinion.

My objection, by the way, isn't to self-help or advice columns. I just get frustrated (with myself, because I do it all the time) when a situation gets over-complicated and over-thought, even though there's a pretty simple answer that's staring me in the face. To wit, if I want to slim down, I should take care of my body and be careful what I put in it; repeat as necessary for the other categories.

Still, it's also useful to find different approaches to all these questions - with fitness in particular, the things to do can change as you get into shape, so that what worked before just brings you to a plateau. Biggie Smalls put it wisely when he said, "Mo' money, mo' problems."

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's cheat day, so I need to go eat a donut. I'll worry tomorrow about how best to work it off!

Key Years

I've mentioned how I'm frequently rereading books and comics, or rewatching shows, that I've liked in the past, but I've been thinking lately about which media I'm consuming and what times these things are from. I've narrowed it down to three main periods that I keep revisiting, in some way or other. They are, plus or minus a couple of years, 1995 and 2002 and 2013.

The stuff from 1995 seems to be mostly music, comics and TV shows. From 2002 it's mainly books, and extending to around 2004-05 it's music. And finally, 2013 is associated mostly with books.

When I noticed this pattern I started thinking about why I kept coming back to these years, and the best I can come up with is that they were particularly key years, though usually for very different reasons.

1995 is associated with the best time in Britpop, which isn't just when I was experiencing exciting new music but also forming my self-image as a "European". I was getting more interested in European history (especially World War II) and languages, and starting to imagine what my life would be like when I could live on my own.

That interest in Europe and Britain in particular took in Premier League football, and the British comics I was discovering at the time. Of course, by 1995 Neil Gaiman's run on the Sandman was ending and Garth Ennis had finished his run on Hellblazer, but because I discovered those books around that time (actually even a tiny bit earlier) I associate them with the period. By the same token, I didn't read Grant Morrison's Invisibles until a few years later, but rereading the collections now I see how much that book was a product of its time: 1995.

The other thing I was into at around that time was Star Trek, so I can't help but associate that year with Deep Space Nine, in particular. In fact, I've already noted how my most recent rewatch had me remembering the first time I saw those episodes, i.e. 1995-97, rather than the second time in 2006 or so. About which more anon.

2002 is another key year because I'd just started my first job and was reveling in the actual circumstances of being a young adult on my own for the first time. I'd also gotten into travel, which meant I was fixated on travel writing in a big way. In a way every time I reread my beloved Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux books, I'm revisiting that period, when the world was opening itself up to me in a way that hadn't been possible when I was a kid and when I didn't have a monthly paycheck to finance such gallivantings.

In terms of music, 2002 itself was a little barren but by the end of that year I'd discovered the resurgence of guitar bands that had begun with the Strokes and the White Stripes. I was discovering new bands, both from the UK (like British Sea Power) and, in a first for me, from the US (like Interpol). At the same time, I was also discovering a lot of the older music that was influencing what I was discovering then, so I picked up Morrissey's post-Smiths back catalog, for instance, or Joy Division and New Order.

The next one is 2013, which isn't so much a year of a big transition as it was of a new feeling: actually being good at shit. In 2011 and to a greater extent in 2012 I'd found my feet at work much more than I ever had previously, and this trend carried on in 2013. I don't remember the football so much, and I'd kind of lost the thread of newer music by then, but what sticks with me most from that time is travel and history books. I've already written about it, but there was a whole sub-genre of books mostly by white male British writers extolling the wonders of one specific Northern European country, be it Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, and I was having it all.

The ones about Germany all seem to have hit around the same time, though I didn't read them all when they came out. However, I reread Germania by Simon Winder last year (preparatory to reading Lotharingia, his latest, this year), and I've reread Keeping Up with the Germans, by Philip Oltermann, several times since I bought it in 2014. Honestly, I'm kind of twitching with the junkie-like need to read it right now, although that might also be related to my Europe withdrawal, a result of not being able to get on a plane and go to London and Italy because of this stupid pandemic.

My 2013 nostalgia, by the way, is also manifesting in a desire to finish series I began or was in the middle of during that year. Last year I caught up with Ian Tregillis's alternate WWII trilogy, The Coldest War, and with Jasper Kent's Danilov Quintet, for example, and I'm still working on James SA Corey's The Expanse, though there wasn't a gap with those books as big as with the Tregillis or Kent books.

Now, it's also interesting to think about why certain years don't loom as large. 1997-98 is one, given that I'd just started college and was getting into a bunch of new music (namely all the gloomy Manchester bands from the 80s). 2006 is the other, since I'd just graduated from graduate school and returned to London to start Phase 2 of my working life.

For the former, the music just became part of my mental furniture and I've rarely been away from the Cure, the Smiths and whatever else I was listening to then. For the latter, all the bands that had become exciting in 2002-04 suddenly started releasing boring second albums. I watched a bunch of TV that was perhaps more admirable than lovable (e.g. Battlestar Galactica); or I started the big Star Trek rewatch that essentially continues now. And in terms of books, I have vague memories of a bunch of disappointing British SF novels and waiting for the next George RR Martin book to come out (which didn't happen until 2010).

Memory is a funny thing, of course. We all remember where we were when we heard about momentous events, but we also reconstruct otherwise meaningful times in our lives. By focusing in on those three periods, I can draw some conclusions about what was going on that perhaps resonates now, though it's best not to read too much into it - I could easily point to nostalgia for other books and series I was reading at the time, for instance.

Though I wonder if other people are so fixated on books, music and other media from similar significant periods in their lives, or if it's just because as an SFF writer I'm always chasing the high I got from reading favorite classics of the genre?

10 Things I'm Looking Forward To

I don't think it's radical to say that I'm missing certain things I used to do before the pandemic. Nor are any of the below peculiar to me - indeed, I think a lot of people are already enjoying many of these things, whether because they live in places that have opened up, or because they live in places that never properly closed down.

Now, the one thing missing from this list is seeing my girlfriend, and that's because she's been spending weekends here with me lately. Having her here is the most important thing of all, and it means waiting for these other things is more bearable.

Getting a drink at the pub: I'm not the biggest drinker, and it's been a while since I've been able to do this, but what I'd really like is one of those lazy Sunday afternoons like I used to get in London, where I'd meet a friend or two, get a nice pub lunch and settle in to watch one or two Premier League matches. The pub lunches would be traditional Sunday roast dinners - roast beef, vegetables, mash and gravy, and my personal favorite part, Yorkshire puddings. I'd wash the food down with a glass or two of Coke, then with belly comfortably lined, I'd switch to a couple of beers. And at the end, not too badly off after the beers and food, I'd ramble home on the train or the tube, full and happy.

Seeing my friends in person: this is kind of allied to the one above, but it's a little more general - I'd love to be able to get together with a group of friends, in a pub or a restaurant or someone's house, and not have to worry about where they've been, whether they'll infect me (or I'll infect them), etc. I've seen my sweetie a few times in the last month, and I've seen my mom and stepdad once, but it'd be great to have dinner, a game night, anything like that.

Getting on a plane: It's funny, given how obnoxious the process of flying anywhere has become since 2001, with every year a new indignity or fee to pay, but what's undimmed is my excitement at being in an airport, getting on a plane and getting to land somewhere new. Or if not somewhere new, then getting back to someplace that I know - it could be Orange County, London, Turin or a new spot like Singapore, Buenos Aires or Tokyo. And while it's being somewhere new that I really miss, settling in for my flight ritual (getting headphones, iPad and book out for easy access, shedding layers I won't need, etc) always means I'm going somewhere new.

Going to a football match: I mentioned watching games on TV earlier, but I also can't wait for the day when I can go to a match in person. And if I say football match, take it as read that I'd like to be able to go to a baseball game or an NFL game or a hockey game too. I wasn't a great one for going to matches when I lived in London, but on the occasions I did go it was a nice way to spend an afternoon - especially when I took friends to see Fulham play at Craven Cottage in West London. They happened to be the cheapest tickets available in the Premiership at the time, and if you went at the start of the season, the location along the river and the family atmosphere was extraordinarily agreeable. And if the quality of MLS isn't quite as high, I'm equally looking forward to catching an Earthquakes game at Avaya Stadium here in Santa Clara.

Sitting at a cafe with a book: this one isn't something I do much here, but it's something I love doing when I'm out of town. I remember some good stops at cafes in Buenos Aires and in Paris, especially after some epic walks through the towns. The one in Buenos Aires was notable for a weird reason (someone had slipped me a fake banknote, though I had a real one to give the waitress when I paid) and for a lovely reason, which is that the hot chocolate and croissant I had were so tasty.

Going to the movies: again, I'm not the only person who misses going to the movies. But it's worth saying - watching a movie in a darkened room on a huge screen, among loads of people who are just as excited about it as me, is something else I'm looking forward to. And making plans with friends or with my honey to go see something is great, but I also miss the times I've dropped in alone at the cinema on a whim and caught something fun, like Drive or Teen Titans Go to the Movies.

Walking down Piccadilly to the Big Waterstones: this one takes in a few different things. First is browsing bookshops for fun - I've mentioned the Big Waterstones, which is my favorite bookstore in the world, but I equally miss stopping in at Kepler's here in Menlo Park, or Books Inc in Palo Alto and Mountain View, or even the two afternoons I spent at Powell's in Portland. But the Big Waterstone's has its own ritual, which involves me taking in all five floors of books, including sometimes the cafe. Of course, there's a ritual involved before I get to the store - which is walking down to Piccadilly from Leicester Square or Tottenham Court Road. It usually involves a stop at the Forbidden Planet and Foyle's on Charing Cross Road, and it also frequently involves a stop for lunch along the way, and sometimes a stop at the British Museum (if the line isn't too long). Because I'm usually in London on vacation, I don't have loads of space for all the books I'd like to buy, but seeing the travel section, the fiction (and science fiction) section, and the history section always makes me feel good.

Taking a long train ride: here's another one that's mostly for Europe, though I'd love to do it here too. I have some great memories of taking the Eurostar between London and Paris, especially when I discovered that business class includes a pretty great meal (with wine!), as well as the route between London and Edinburgh or the time I took the high-speed train from Turin to Rome with my dad. But the highlight of recent years remains 2014, when I treated myself to the Eurostar and TGV from London to Turin, stopping in Paris to change trains, and stations. I'd sprung for business on the Eurostar, so I got a lovely breakfast on the first leg, and for first class on the TGV for the second leg. In changing from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, I saw the French newspapers commemorating the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings. And on the second leg I was treated to a crossing of the Alps in grand style, soundtracked by the epic number of podcasts I'd downloaded to my phone.

Taking a road trip: here's one for the US. A tradition from the past few years has been to take a trip to the mountains during the summer with my dad - usually somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, otherwise heading up to Northern California and southern Oregon. We spent the end of the 2018 World Cup on the road, watching the final in our hotel room in Crescent City. But it also reminds me of the time I drove down to Joshua Tree for a camping trip with friends (later that same year, as it happens), and the time I drove up to the Avenue of the Giants for a half-marathon... races, incidentally, being another thing I'm looking forward to being able to do again someday soon. There's something so great about hopping in the car for a long drive, podcasts and music at the ready, and knowing that you're on your own schedule. And of course, having somewhere to be at the end of that drive.

Stopping randomly at the store for something: This is the final one, and while it's not the most important, it's also not the least important. Going to the store involves such a production now, between wearing a mask and standing in line to get in, that there's no sense in doing a small expedition - to say nothing of the fact that being among so many other people is still a risk. More than anything, the normality of being able to just run a couple of errands in the course of the day is sorely missed. While I won't be trying to force it, I can't wait for the day when I can stop in at the store for a bottle of Coke or iced tea, without a mask and without standing in line outside.

And as I say, I'm not the only one.

Immaturity and Self-Conscious Masculinity

Something struck me the other day as I was watching Ford v Ferrari on HBO the other night. I'd been trying to put my finger on it for a while, but it occurred to me that there was a quality to the performances by Christian Bale and Matt Damon in particular, something that felt very of-our-current-time. And about 90 minutes into the movie (side note: movies are too fucking long), the best I could come up with was a certain self-conscious quality to their masculinity.

It's a reasonable movie, by the way. I knew when I first saw the trailers the kind of portrayal they'd give the Italian characters, and indeed, there's a bit of skullduggery and cheating, and people saying things sneeringly in languages that our plucky American heroes (like, er, Lee Iacocca) don't understand. And of course, Henry Ford II gets away with calling Enzo Ferrari a "greasy whop", which, um, yay for casual racism - imagine a "good guy" figure in a movie saying the equivalent slur about a Black character...

Still, it's a fun movie, the racing scenes look gorgeous and the performances are entertaining. I joke about Lee Iacocca, but he's played by the ever-reliable Jon Bernthal, an actor I really appreciate. Matt Damon and Christian Bale are good too, though as I say, there's some tic to their performances that I'm trying to figure out.

The best I can put it is, as I say, self-consciousness. Possibly because being a man, in a world of men such as racing, is freighted with a bunch of associations that are a little outdated now. In the 1960s an actor like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could stride across the screen knowing his place in the world, and the audience knew what kind of guy he was. Two-fisted, quick-drawing, irresistible to the ladies, etc etc.

John Wayne was expected to be the stoic rock upon which the world broke, and to protect the women around him, though "around" was a relative term because they were frequently not around (with the exception of something like True Grit or Stagecoach). He could play his roles that way because women weren't expected to be public, weren't expected to be doing stuff. Women in the 1960s were more likely to be homemakers (white women, at any rate), so movies tended to be made for the people with the buying power in the household, aka the men.

Ford v Ferrari has exactly one female character with a name: Mollie Miles (played by Caitriona Balfe), who is the wife of Christian Bale's character, Ken Miles. I'm not saying this to criticize the movie - after all, in that decade there likely weren't that many women in the actual racing scene, so you want to keep things close to accurate.

Nor am I saying it's a great thing, as the lack of women in spheres like that came from decades and centuries of diminishing the capabilities of women and actively keeping them away from such activities. It's simply the fact that because there likely weren't that many women working at Shelby American in 1966, there won't be many roles for them in this movie.

But it's hard to escape the feeling that Damon and Bale's performances are acknowledging these cultural aspects from the perspective of our supposedly more enlightened times. They don't go as far as Mad Men in depicting just how different those times were from now, nor are they as blatant (which is fine with me, because I've never been able to get past the third episode of that infernal show).

What stands out for me is the scene where Shelby and Miles fight each other on the corner in front of Ken Miles's house, and Mollie sets her lawn chair out to make sure they don't get up to too much mischief. At the end she brings them each a Coke, and they clink bottles and make up.

It's hard to imagine a scene like that in a movie from even 30 years ago. There were probably fistfights, but Mollie bringing them bottles of Coke afterwards is meant to underline that they're being childish, which is the default assumption of male characters in media nowadays.

As another example, there's Chris Pratt's character in... I was going to say Jurassic World but that's the same character as Star-Lord in the Marvel movies. He alternates between super-competent (bragging to the nerdy kid that he's the "alpha" for the velociraptors) and childishly stupid, especially in his interactions with Bryce Dallas Howard.

Again, it's hard to imagine a female character in a John Wayne movie dismissing him as being childish - at the very least I haven't seen it in any of his films I've watched. If anything, he's usually portrayed as the mature one, compared to his female costar in something like The Quiet Man.

Probably the other reason I'm thinking about male maturity and immaturity is a podcast I listened to recently. Because I've gone through most of my backlogs, I decided to check out The Art of Manliness, in the hopes of hearing people talking about interesting or useful subjects. One episode, from about 2012 I assume, featured an interview with a researcher who talked about a trend of immaturity among men in recent years.

He seemed to boil it down to them playing video games or reading comics, in lieu of setting up meaningful relationships with women or getting high-powered jobs or whatever. The discussion was fairly interesting, if a bit limited - he declined to talk about what female immaturity looks like, for example (his research is exclusively on men), and didn't really examine the role that our consumeristic and media-driven culture has had on infantilizing everyone.

And I think because of that he missed a key point about immaturity. Or rather, because he actually researched it and I'm some dummy writing about it on his blog, he failed to give the fully nuanced picture it deserves. Strictly speaking, video games and comics and sports aren't enough to drive a man (or any gender, frankly) to be immature - it's the role these things play in a person's life. I'm a grown man with a full-time job and a long-term relationship, for example, neither of which is affected by the fact that I read comics or sometimes play video games.

To put it another way, if I'm immature, it's because of certain things I haven't had to worry about in my life - raising kids, for instance, or illness or grappling with real poverty. And I don't deny a certain amount of immaturity - I'm sure I've said to my girlfriend that if I'd met her six years ago, when I moved back from London, I wouldn't have been quite as mature as I am now, or generally ready for the relationship, however we want to define readiness. At the very least I was a different person from now.

I don't doubt that a large number of people really are immature - unable to make sensible decisions about their money, their relationships or their jobs (and this is, again, separate from people who've had properly hard lives, and who haven't had the luxury of deferring these decisions). But I also suspect that now men are expected to be immature in certain things - to balance being competent in one aspect of their lives with being completely helpless in others.

This is, of course, kind of regressive against women in itself. To assume that women are the only ones who can properly take care of the home or the kids is both a weird backsliding to so-called traditional gender roles and ammunition in the Mommy Wars, where people shame women for not doing everything effortlessly.

To return to the original point about portrayals in Ford v Ferrari... I called the performances self-conscious, but it also feels like a trend you see in a lot of actors. It's cliche to say that men have "lost their confidence", and I think that some of that confidence deserved to be lost, but more than any value judgement, the reason I note this style of performance is that in future it'll be a clear indicator of the time period, just as surely as Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue is an indicator of the time period he worked in. I'll leave it to the sociologists to draw the real meaning from Matt Damon and Christian Bale's performances.

And hopefully by then it won't be okay to say "greasy whop" onscreen anymore...

Why Is It Controversial to End Racism?

This is the question that's going around on a bunch of memes at the moment, and when a friend posted it on Facebook yesterday, I had a bit of a brainstorm as to why it is. It involves pop culture and cognitive dissonance, and the endless talent for self-justification that people have for their own bullshit.

Pop culture comes into it because Hollywood has taught us what racists look like. They're either old fat Southern men, who drawl epithets casually, or they're Germans. Racism in the movies is easy to spot because people are using the N-word and burning crosses and such. It becomes an easy - even lazy - way of showing how bad the villain is. After all, when Ron Perlman's character in Blade 2 asks Wesley Snipes if he can blush, that's like a reverse Save the Cat moment, where we learn all we need to about that character.

This isn't to take away from the fact that racism really is evil, of course. When you call someone a racial slur, for example, you're taking away all of the things that make them a unique individual, basically saying it doesn't matter what you've accomplished in life, you're just a... whatever. But this gets elided in pop culture, because pop culture can't convey nuance.

And that leads to the cognitive dissonance. We're so used to seeing racism depicted in a certain way on TV and in movies, we ignore when our words or behavior are racist, because we aren't Germans or policemen from the Deep South (most of us aren't, at any rate). We've built up this righteous anger on the behalf of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, but it makes us smug and blinds us to the ways we're casually or even overtly racist in real life.

The most spectacular way that this manifests, by the way, is in the far-right marchers in the UK who have responded to the threat of vandalism to statues of Winston Churchill by... giving Nazi salutes? F Scott Fitzgerald would have called this a sign of a first-rate mind: being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still being able to function.

That depiction of racism as being done exclusively by certain people is also class warfare, by the way (you know, just for good measure). We may say or do racist things, but we don't think of ourselves as racist because we feel superior to so-called "poor white trash". This serves to perpetuate splits between poor whites and poor minorities, and allows more well-off whites to justify why they don't mix with "those people".

Of course, the description above only refers to people who aren't "openly" racist. They might tell racist jokes at the pub or something, but aren't actively campaigning for race wars or sequestering African-Americans and Jews in special "homelands" in the South. It doesn't apply to those who actually do say out loud the stuff that for most people is only ingrained racism - and yet, the so-called alt-right benefits from the stereotypes I listed above. All these young, well-groomed men who like to flash Nazi salutes at alt-right karaoke nights know that we won't take their racism seriously precisely because they aren't sweaty old fat men with Southern drawls. This is, in fact, just how the New York Times has gotten hoodwinked into running a bunch of normalizing profiles of "the well-dressed racist next door".

So next time you wonder why people are counter-protesting against Black Lives Matter, remember that they (and we in general) are only playing out this narrative that racism only comes from certain people. And as long as we aren't "those people", we're in the clear... right...?

Shame about the Internet

I'd been thinking of tackling the utopian topic of what kind of society I'd like to see after the whole pandemic business finishes - a more social democratic society, and one where things are less ridiculously complicated (because for some reason Americans love stupid stuff to be stupidly complex), but I decided against it.

Instead I was thinking about a topic at once less utopian, the internet, and also more utopian, i.e. how nice it'd be if it were less shitty.

I guess it's easy to complain about the ways the internet has distorted the culture worldwide - exhibit A is the Trump "presidency", which owes its existence heavily to the worst aspects of the internet, and which has given us the situation we currently face.

And it's not just here that the internet has fucked things up - misinformation on the internet generally and Facebook specifically contributed heavily to the Brexit vote in 2016 and other far-right politicians' victories in the years since. To say nothing of its success in radicalizing disaffected Muslim-background youth in Europe and leading to atrocities like the Paris attacks of 2015.

But every morning, when I fire up my laptop to do my Duolingo lessons, or when I follow along with a workout routine on YouTube, I have to remind myself of how much benefit it's brought me.

Or to put it another way, I keep trying to think how I'd be coping with boredom and so forth during this sheltering in place, if I didn't have the internet to keep me in touch with my friends and family, to keep me informed about what's happening, and to keep me entertained.

While I've gone on something of a buying spree on Kindle since the first shelter-in-place order came down, it's probably fair to say that I wouldn't be short on physical books to read. I've got my own collection here, and also my dad's, so if I don't mind re-reading certain things, I'd be fine there. Same with music, because even though I'm currently listening to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music Vol. 2 on YouTube (review: don't listen to it), I have my own CD collection and iTunes library to fall back on.

TV is a slightly trickier prospect, because as a cord-cutter I really only have access to Netflix and other streamers. And there I'd find my first set of problems, because there wouldn't even be YouTube to pass the time (for instance by watching this one British nerd solve ridiculously complex sudoku puzzles).

I wouldn't be able to learn my languages on Duolingo or any of the other apps I use, including YouTube. And it'd be so much harder to keep on top of my health or finances or generally any of the other things that keep my life humming along - I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's fair to say that a whole ton of things are so much easier now because of it, pandemic or not.

The other important thing that I wouldn't have if not for the internet is my girlfriend, because we met online, and now that we're sequestered apart we use iMessage and FaceTime to keep in touch every day.

This whole screed isn't so much a Pollyanna-ish attempt to ignore all the disruption and chaos that the internet causes, as a reminder of all the good things that we use it for. Sure, Twitter and Facebook in particular are not just causes of our current polarization, but also actively making things more chaotic by providing a platform for all the worst kooks and grifters to either peddle falsehood or use misinformation to sow division.

But even there it's pleasing to see how my friends and family are coping on my Facebook timeline, or seeing what interesting or silly things the writers and reporters and comedians I follow on Twitter. There are bad things to all of these apps and platforms, but we can outweigh them if we make a more concerted attempt to focus on the good aspects.

This is why I get so annoyed when I see writers I like (as one example) quote-tweeting whatever idiocy the president or his enablers has vomited out into the world. If we stopped signal-boosting all these idiots, I really think they'd go away. There's no upside to retweeting those things, beyond the endorphin rush of feeling superior because you got to say something snappy to a tweet by someone who doesn't even know you exist. But they're happy because you're sharing their message with other people.

Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich (another thing I know about because of the internet) talks about improving your life by focusing on increasing the good, rather than decreasing the bad. It's not always the easiest thing to implement, but it's pretty powerful - instead of cutting out junk food, for instance, you focus on increasing the amount of healthy food you eat.

It's a good model for how we approach the internet, I'd say. Instead of rage-tweeting because some right-wing dingbat thinks Mexicans cause the coronavirus or some such nonsense, seek out the things on Facebook and Twitter that make you happy, or make you think, or even just make you laugh. Such as this:

See also male opera singers and ship's horns 🚢 pic.twitter.com/HpQu17tYtc

— Olaf Falafel (@OFalafel) September 4, 2017

Recapturing the Feeling

Coming back to live in the town where I grew up carries some odd associations with it. I drive by certain spots, and my thoughts turn to the music I was listening to or the comics or books I was reading. I think I've mentioned this in the past few years, since moving back from London, but it's been thrown into sharper relief in the past six weeks, as I've switched from working out at the gym to running or walking in my old neighborhood.

I passed through different parts of the old neighborhood on two occasions today. The first was this morning, when I went on my run that took me past my old house and my old elementary school. The second was on a big walk after lunch, when I passed the elementary school again and walked around the houses of friends from those years.

As I thought about afternoons spent playing Star Tropics at one friend's house, it struck me (as it frequently does) how much replaying games or re-experiencing certain media is more an attempt to recapture the feeling of experiencing those things for the first time.

Not only that, but this nostalgia affects what I write. I'm aware of tics and idiosyncrasies that come straight from the comics and science fiction novels I was reading in high school, and I'd say the past few years have been a never-ending attempt to purge these tics from the way I tell my stories.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so quick to completely purge them - part of what informs a person's personality is the conversation they have as adults with the lessons they drew from media they experienced as kids. As a teenager I wanted more space battles and more questioning of Gene Roddenberry's vision from Star Trek; as a man in middle age I get tired of the bombast of shows like Discovery and want to get back to stories about how smart and well-intentioned people tackle problems like adults.

At the same time, it feels odd to write that I'm "a man in middle age", because the teenager (or child), as I was then, never feels so far from the surface. Part of it is dismay at the passage of time, and the thought that I get ever closer to decay and irrelevance and oblivion, but part is also cognitive dissonance that the "I" encompasses such a different person now compared with back then.

Paradoxically I might not feel this disconnect so clearly if I'd stayed in Palo Alto the entire time, or if I'd come straight back after college. My suspicion is that the disconnect is more marked, and appears in such specific places, because I'm confronted with triggers to these memories for the first time since I formed them. And in the case of spots I pass more frequently, it's become my habit to think about how those places reminded me of the video game or book or comic, which brings up memories of the thing again.

It's a reminder of how the brain forms grooves and your thoughts fit along those grooves quite easily, whether you like it or not. What's funny is that it also happens with new stuff I experience now - certain things remind me of working out in or wandering around London, despite there not being any explicit link. These memories then trigger thoughts of specific things I used to do or friends I used to hang out with, and as I return to the piece of media (for example a YouTube video) I'm reminded of the place or person I was thinking of the last time I watched it.

Brains are weird.

At any rate, it's a funny phenomenon that I think back to the Legion of Superheroes whenever I pass by the first condo complex my dad lived in after he and my mom split up, or that I think of the Quick Man level from Megaman 2 whenever I walk by the community center where I used to play kids' league basketball. I suppose you could call them both traumatic experiences, in their own way (basketball gave me nightmares for years afterwards), but it's interesting how the brain creates full snapshots of memories, and the weirdest triggers bring them back.

Proust, of course, wrote about this at length in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but we can only imagine what he'd have had to say about a reboot of his favorite comic series or the feeling of finally beating one of Megaman 2's toughest bosses. In the absence of his thoughts on these topics, I can only say that it's not always bitter to get back to that child-mind, or to see the continuity of my own sense of self between then and now. The question is whether I'll feel the same about the shows and books and whatever that I'm experiencing now, when I revisit them in twenty years' time.

Or maybe I'll just still be thinking of Megaman 2?