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 My primary Writing.com blog. |
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Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics). Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:  "The Soundtrackers Group"  "Blog Harbor" "Blogging Circle of Friends " "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" "JAFBG" "Take up Your Cross" Thanks for stopping by! 
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 Prompt #42: When it comes to friends, do you prefer a few ride-or-dies, or many casual acquaintances? I've always been the kind of person who appreciates the depth of some friendship more than the breadth of many friendships. I'm someone who gets along well with just about everybody, and I'm certainly happy to have casual friendships with anyone who's interested in one, but I often find myself gravitating toward investing heavily in a handful of friendships and having those deep relationships comprise most of my socialization. When I was a teenager, I hung out with the same group of friends throughout high school. We went to each other's birthday parties, played D&D together, and went to each other's houses to hang out after school regularly. We mostly lost touch when everybody moved away for college, but I could count my good friends on my fingers and everyone else was just an acquaintance. In film school, it was the same way. There were three or four other people in my film program that I really bonded with and we spent all our time helping one another with our assignments, short films etc. Similar to the high school group, we lost touch after graduation... but there was a period of a few years where this friend group was my entire world. Rinse and repeat for pretty much every job I've ever had. When we're working together, I find some office friends who I get really close to and we're each other's ride-or-dies through the trials and tribulations of the working world. We inevitably lose touch once one of us moves on to another job, and when the person moving on is me, then I find a new friend group at the new job. There have only been a handful of people who have stuck through these transitions, and it's often a challenge to make time to see them. I suppose that's the difficulty of being a working parent; it's hard to make time for adult friendships when there's a million other things going on between work life and family life and all that stuff. All that said, I am a fairly social person with a lot of varied interests, so I definitely have a lot of casual acquaintances that slot into one area of my life but not the entire thing. I have my friends that I can talk about Formula 1 with, my friends that I can play D&D with, my friends that I go to church with, my friends that I hang out with here on Writing.com, etc. The interesting thing is that almost all of those groups of friends are numbered at about half a dozen or less, at least in terms of the people that I proactively seek out and work hard to prioritize maintaining a relationship with (as opposed to just being friendly with one another). I can't think of anywhere in my life where I have dozens and dozens of friends that I engage with. I suppose the closest would actually be this community on Writing.com, where I'm involved enough that I cross paths with a lot of different people, day-in, day-out. |
| To qualify for my Watch List every month, the following has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish. Movies  The Life List — DNF A Minecraft MovieI didn't love either of the movies that I watched this month. The Life List was a generic romantic dramedy on Netflix, starring Sofia Carson as a young woman who works for her mother's company and, when her mother dies, is forced to go on an adventure of self-discovery. It ultimately felt like a rehash of P.S. I Love You, right down to the person who died giving the person on the journey prepared messages from beyond the grave. Overall, I haven't been terribly impressed with Netflix's original films, especially the ones of this variety where it seems like they're looking to compete with generic Hallmark or Lifetime cable movie fare with their own stable of regular actors. I usually watch movies straight through but we started this one late and I just had no interest in continuing it the next day. A Minecraft Movie was just okay. I'm not a huge fan of Jack Black under normal circumstances, and this kind of reinforced the fact that his schtick just isn't my thing. Jason Momoa was really funny in the role of a past-his-prime former gamer celebrity, but the script didn't do him any favors by making his character incredibly dumb and pretty much a one-note joke. I wish they would have given him a little more to work with, because Jack Black and the other characters were pretty dull and he was the sole bright spot until it became repetitive. Unless you're a huge fan of Minecraft, I don't think there's a lot to this movie for anyone else. Television Bosch: Legacy (Season 2) Bosch: Legacy (Season 3) The Pitt (Season 1) The White Lotus (Season 3)Unlike the disappointing movies this month, the television was all okay-to-pretty-good. Bosch: Legacy is a continuation of the very successful Bosch series on Amazon Prime, based on the bestselling Michael Connelly crime novels featuring the same character. I'm probably biased because I love the books so much, but I really enjoyed this series. The original Bosch was great, and this spinoff focused on his daughter Maddie (who was a teenager thinking of becoming a cop in the original series) finally getting her badge and starting her career in law enforcement while her father Harry transitions to a second career in private investigation. The stories were really interesting, especially the one where Maddie was kidnapped and buried out in the desert so that the killer could use her as a bargaining chip for a lighter sentence for other crimes. The Pitt was something that I first thought was just going to be an ER-spinoff (many of the same creators and it even has Noah Wyle as a doctor), but this one took a different approach where, instead of a case of the week, the entire season covers a single day in the ER (each episode is one hour of the day, told chronologically), on a day where there's a mass shooting at a music festival and the hospital has to become a trauma center. It was a really compelling way to tell a story and apparently they already have plans for another season told the same way (with all episodes covering and hour-by-hour account of a single day), and I'm definitely invested enough to see what they do the next time around. The White Lotus was something I was really looking forward to seeing. The first season set at a "White Lotus" chain in Hawaii was a surprise hit, and the second season featuring a mostly-new cast at an Italian branch of the chain was interesting. The third season was set at a third resort in Thailand, which is a location that I really loved, but none of the characters were interesting to me. Usually each season has a couple of people I'm fascinated by, a couple of people that I think are somewhat interesting, and one or two that are duds. This season there were no fascinating characters, only one or two interesting ones, and a whole lot of duds. If there is a fourth season of the show, I hope Mike White figures out a way to get back to interesting characters and storylines. TOP PICK: Bosch: Legacy (Season 2) |
 Day 3822: Who is your favourite character from one of your favourite novels? Three characters immediately came to mind for this prompt, one from one of my favorite novels, one from a novel (trilogy) that I really, really enjoyed, and one from a novel (trilogy) that I have yet to finish but this character dramatically stood out in the first novel. Mark Watney from The Martian is a great character from one of my favorite novels. I found the story of an astronaut trapped on Mars and trying to find his way home completely captivating. The character's brilliance is enhanced by his sense of humor, and the way the author walks us through his thought process from realizing he's stranded to figuring out how to survive to figuring out how to communicate to figuring out how to get home again is simply marvelous. As a reader, you get a ton of insight into this character's rational, logical thought process that you begin to believe, time and again, that he's actually going to pull of something that should be impossible, even when he has to deal with setbacks. Sand dan Glotka from The First Law trilogy is another favorite character of mine, and I absolutely loved this trilogy. All of the characters are really well done, but none better than Glokta, who is a former handsome champion with a life of honor and heroism ahead of him, who heads off to war and is captured and tortured by the enemy, and later comes back into society as a disfigured cripple who becomes an inquisitor/torturer working behind the scenes. The character development is incredible; not only do you get a sense of all of the aches and pains and indignities that Glokta now has to deal with on a regular basis, but you get flashes of the charisma and humor that he used to have and how his current situation has twisted his view of the world but hasn't at all impacted his intellect or his ruthlessness. Glokta could easily be the subject of a semester-long character study in some undergrad college literature program. Lady Kiva from The Collapsing Empire (Interdependency trilogy) is an absolute riot. The book focuses on the business, politics, and machinations of an interstellar civilization on the verge of change, and while many of the characters are basically playing Game of Thrones in Space, those moments are interspersed with a couple of characters who break up the "seriousness" of the narrative in key ways. Lady Kiva is basically a spoiled child of nobility who spends her time pursuing her various impulses and desires (mostly sleeping around and offending everyone's "respectable" sensibilities). It's hard to properly describe this character without going into too much detail, but I found a book reviewer who summarized it perfectly. Rogue Watson describes her as "a delightfully horny, vulgar, bisexual disaster" and, you know what? That's absolutely spot on, and it's so much fun to see a character that DNGAF running around DNGAF-ing all over the place in an otherwise serious situation. |
Prompt #41: If you were on trial for a crime you didn't commit, would there be any circumstances under which you'd consider taking a plea deal? If so, what and why? I would really struggle with this decision because I have both a very strong sense of right and wrong (and I share MLK's belief that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"), so a big part of my inner monologue would be screaming, "You didn't do this! The judge/jury will see that. You shouldn't have to confess to a crime you didn't commit!" and I would have a very hard time coming to terms with the idea of taking a plea deal (which usually involve an admission of guilt). That said, I'm also a very, very practical person, and I tend to dislike risk. If it was a reasonable plea deal, I'd be very tempted to put up with a smaller injustice than entertain the possibility of being subjected to the greater injustice of being found guilty of a crime I didn't commit. For example, if pleading guilty meant probation rather than jail time, I'd really have to consider that. If the guilty were something that could eventually be reduced or expunged, I'd really have to consider that. I suppose, ultimately, it would come down to the crime I'm being accused of and how close to it that I actually came to committing it. I don't know that I could in good conscience plead guilty to murder, for example, if I definitely didn't murder someone. But if I was accused of, for example, assault and battery by someone I had gotten into an altercation with, I'd have to consider whether the plea was worth taking even if I didn't personally believe that the altercation rose to the level of the legal definition of assault and battery. So I guess all of that is to say I suppose there are circumstances where I'd consider taking a plea deal if I was innocent. The justice system is hardly perfect, and I've seen enough innocent people convicted of crimes that I don't think I could say that I would categorically stand by my own innocence at all times, especially if I saw the case trending in a wrong/unfavorable direction. But it would definitely be a last resort because, as an optimist, I'd like to still believe in the idea that truth and justice can win out, and that I won't be found guilty for something that I truly didn't do. |
Day 3818: Write your entry about a place that no longer exists. Tell us why you believe it's gone. Did you miss it? When I first moved down to Long Beach for film school, I had to find a mechanic for one of our cars. There was something wrong with it, and the dealership quoted us like $1,200 for the repair, which my wife and I didn't have as poor college students. We took it to this small little corner repair shop a few blocks from our apartment for a second opinion, and the guy who worked there told us it was a $300 part and they would only charge us $100 for the labor, where the dealership was going to charge us $900 for the labor. A few days and $400 later, they had a loyal customer. Over the years, I came to know the manager and the owner of the business pretty well, and I found out the reason they were so good with cars is that they actually hired ex-dealership mechanics from all over. They had a guy who knew Japanese cars from working at Honda, Toyota, Lexus, etc., and another guy who was familiar with American cars like Fords and Chevys, and another guy who specialized in high-end foreign models like BMWs and Mercedes. Over the years, I brought them Jeeps, Hondas, Toyotas, and Volkswagens and they never met a problem they couldn't fix (often for much less than the dealership would have charged). Even when I moved down to Orange County, I'd bring my car up to Long Beach for every single service that I could manage, because these guys were trustworthy, hard-working, and affordable. They were also super friendly and half the time if I was just there for an oil change and they were going to be done in an hour or so, I'd just hang out and chat with them while they worked on the car. To this day, I still remember the funniest conversation I had with the owner, where he was asking what I do for a living and I told him I worked for Disney/Marvel. I'm used to people getting super excited about the fact that I work in the entertainment business and the owner was like, "Did you say marble? Like, are you a wholesaler or something? Do you do custom work?" And I said, "No, not marble. Marvel. Superheroes. Like Iron Man, The Avengers, etc." And without missing a beat the owner was like, "Huh. That's cool, I guess. To be honest, I was more interested when I thought you worked with marble."  The shop moved to a different part of Long Beach around 2018 or 2019 (I think they were struggling financially and needed a cheaper place to work out of), but then COVID hit in 2020 and one day I called to ask if they were open for a service when the world started opening back up again, and the number was disconnected. I drove by once and they weren't at their most recent address, so the place must have either relocated or — more likely — folded. I definitely miss Tuneup Masters, both for the quality of service they provided me for over ten years, and also for the tragedy of so many small businesses we lost in the economic hardship of the pandemic.  |
| This past week was Spring Break for my kids and we spent the first part of it (Sunday through Wednesday) visiting family in Arizona. I realized that it's my first visit to the state (other than a brief "step across the state line" moment during a trip to Nevada and flight layovers in Phoenix, neither of which I'd consider qualifications for saying you've visited a state). It's only the 13th state I've actually visited (following California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Florida, and Hawaii), which means I really need to pick up the pace if I'm going to reach my goal of visiting all 50 states in my lifetime. Maybe I need to get a cross-country trip on the books or something...  Overall, I'd say that Arizona was a nice place to visit, but not somewhere I'd want to live. The downtown area of Phoenix was nice and had a great children's museum, and I'm super jealous that their traffic is so light, but I thought the suburbs were a little too quiet for my tastes and you had to drive an awful long way to get to anything other than other homes and housing developments. Oh and there's the fact that it was 90°F while we visited in mid-April. I don't think I could survive somewhere that has repeated and extended periods of 110°F+ temperatures for half the year...  I'd definitely go back for a visit, as long as it's not between May and October. |
| Tonight we officially start the second half of the Dungeons & Dragons campaign that I've been playing with a new group for over a year! A couple of acquaintances from my last church approached me in January 2024 about potentially joining their weekly(ish) game nights every Thursday. All of them enjoyed playing D&D but everyone at the table either didn't like (or wasn't very good at) running the game as the Dungeon Master (which is the thing I actually enjoy most), so they asked if I might be interested in giving it a try for a little while. That was 15 months, 34 game sessions, and 10 character levels ago. We just wrapped up a nearly month-long, three-part "season finale" to the campaign; the midpoint where everything that's been building for several months finally came to a head. I've written more than 200 pages of adventure narrative and other campaign materials (hey, maybe I can write novel-length fiction after all! ), and the last three weeks was a crazy large battle that brought in characters and story elements that I've been building for weeks or even months, waiting to pay off.For those readers who haven't played D&D before, there are all kinds of ways you can play but assuming you're using a traditional structure, characters begin at 1st Level (newbie adventurers) and undertake a campaign (a series of adventures, either interconnected or not) until they reach 20th Level (world-changing heroes of legend). The players just hit 11th Level, which coincides with the fact that they just hit the "midpoint twist" of the campaign, which has spun things off in an entirely new (and more dangerous!) direction that will propel them through the remaining levels and allow us to conclude the campaign after they reach 20th Level. This is actually the longest running campaign I've ever had (by number of sessions and character development). I've played D&D off and on over the years, and the longest running campaign I've had up until this new one was several years ago where I ran 23 game sessions for characters that were 9th Level at the time. That campaign ran for three and a half years and met no more than once monthly (still my longest running campaign by time spent), so getting into the later stages of a campaign is something that's new and exciting for me. I'm really enjoying the process of developing characters and storylines again. The malleable nature of a D&D campaign speaks to my love for connection and adaptation. It's so much fun to take a small thing that one of the players does and incorporate it into a campaign such that, when it comes back around again, they're surprised and excited to see how their player choices affect the world around them. But it's also really reignited by love for storytelling and character development in general, which is something that I've really struggled with over the past several years. I've managed to write stories here and there, of course, but I haven't felt like a real writer in years. I feel like I'm starting to get that spark back, and it's largely due to being part of a D&D gaming group again. I have a couple more hours to finish up this week's adventure, where the players are going to pick up the pieces after the enormous battle that just took place, and figure out where to go from here. I can't wait to see what we're able to build together from here. |
To qualify for my Watch List every month, the following has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish. Movies None!  I was shocked to go back through what I watched this month and realize that it was all television and old movies that I've already seen before. Unless I totally missed something, I don't think I saw any new movies in March, which might be a first for me. I usually always catch one or two, but I guess I was focused on television series this month! Television Cobra Kai (Season 6) Formula 1: Drive to Survive (Season 7) Long Bright River Reacher (Season 3) Running Point (Season 1) Skeleton Crew Suits LA (Season 1)The only shows I didn't love this month were SUITS LA and LONG BRIGHT RIVER, the former of which I stopped watching after a few episodes, and the latter of which my wife was into but I couldn't tell you a thing about it because I mostly did other stuff while it was on in the background. RUNNING POINT was an okay new series from Mindy Kaling (not as good as THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS), and the third season of REACHER was a worthy addition to the franchise. I'm actually kind of excited because this season is based on the next book in the series I'll be reading after my current one, so I'm excited to do a little compare-and-contrast with a recently-read book and a recently-watched series that it was adapted into. The final season of COBRA KAI was pretty solid and I thought they did a great job bringing everything together in the final few episodes. It honestly might have been my favorite series any other month of the year, if it weren't for the fact that the new season of FORMULA 1: DRIVE TO SURVIVE also came out this month and I'm currently really into F1 so it was a great season to watch. I'm happy that I'm finally caught up and able to head into the 2025 season with a good understanding of what happened last year (and the several years before that). DRIVE TO SURVIVE would definitely have been my monthly pick on any other month if not for... SKELETON CREW. It's GOONIES meets TREASURE ISLAND set in the Star Wars universe. Need I say more? This was probably my favorite Star Wars title in the past several years, and my kids loved it too. It perfectly captures that timeless sense of all-ages excitement that you get from the best adventure stories. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes "kids going on an adventure they're not at all prepared for" tales. TOP PICK: Skeleton Crew |
Prompt #45: Do you enjoy learning new things? What's the last major topic/subject you learned something about? I definitely enjoy learning new things. I don't think there's ever been a time in my life where I haven't been learning something new, because I'm the kind of person who will think of something, or listen to someone else bring something up and go, "I should look that up and familiarize myself with it a little more." I'm at constant risk for disappearing down Wikipedia rabbit holes for hours at a time. I also have a lot of different interests, so even if you discount the random bits of trivia and various odds and ends, I do have specific subjects that I will get really into for a long period of time until my interests wanes or I feel like I've exhaustively researched the topic to the point where continuing to dive deeper would pretty much be turning it into a professional interest. Right now, my two main interests are Dungeons & Dragons and Formula 1. My interest in D&D was rekindled a little over a year ago, when a friend invited me to join his gaming group. Over the past several months, I've been re-learning how to play, but also getting seriously into the online TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying games) community where I'll watch livestreams of active games, YouTube channels with advice for players and Dungeon Masters, and check out a lot of other resources. As an adult, I've played D&D off and on for years, but always as a bit of a casual hobby. This time, it feels like a real serious undertaking (as serious as I was about playing as a kid), and it's been fun to do a deep dive on the game and it's community to see how much I can learn and evolve my game. I found myself fascinated by Formula 1 after watching DRIVE TO SURVIVE on Netflix. I burned through the first six seasons in the span of a couple of months, started researching the teams and their histories, and then just watched the seventh season of the show (which was about the 2024 F1 season) in preparation for the current F1 season which started a few weeks ago and I've been following closely. I burned out on tennis after following it closely for several years, so I think this is filling my "pretty much only interested in one sport at a time" slot in my interest matrix. I really love how this sport isn't just about the drivers; there's a whole strategy, set of logistics, and business around managing the car and resources for the season, which I find just as interesting as which drivers end up on the podium.Prior to these two interests, I spent a considerable amount of time learning a whole lot about: 1. Government / Politics 2. Self-publishing 3. Tennis 4. Cooking 5. Construction / Home Renovations |
10. 9/11 I probably could have picked any number of events for #10, but I chose one that I think had a broader impact than just what happened on that day in those places that were affected. While 9/11 is mostly an American-centric event, it fundamentally changed America's relationship with many other countries around the world, and was the beginning of the modern era where the world's most powerful nation and it's attitude of "American Exceptionalism" lost quite a bit of its luster. 9. The Second Trump Administration This might be getting out ahead of the skis since we're only sixty days into Trump's second administration, but if they keep moving and breaking things at the pace they have been, I don't think it's crazy to predict that the world might be in a very different place than it was in January 2025. Whether or not people agree with what's going on, this administration's views on what America should be doing in the world is vastly different than anything that's come before, and I don't think you can have a world superpower undergo such radical changes without it having a massive effect on the course of human history. Personally, I fear it's going to be for the worse. 8. The Fall of Rome Similar to the above, the most dominant civilization in the world at the time collapsed. That's world-changing, plain and simple. 7. World War II Much like I think the second Trump Administration listed above is going to usher us (whether we like it or not, and for better or worse) into a new era of global dynamics, I think World War II and its aftermath was probably the last time the world faced such an upheaval. And not just WWII itself, but the programs and plans and things that developed out of that era survived for decades and were precursors to several of the things further down on my list. 6. Industrial Revolution The advancements in technology and human civilization that took place during the Industrial Revolution were nothing short of exponential growth upon what came before. While it will very likely be eclipsed by The Information Age (if it hasn't been already) in terms of global impact, looking at the world pre-1760 and looking at the world post-1970 are entirely different worlds by a variety of metrics. 5. Invention of the Printing Press An efficient way of replicating and distributing the written word all around the world? Hard to imagine a list of important historical events without this one on it. 4. Invention of Electricity The next three are going to kind of go hand-in-hand, but the invention of electricity meant that - for the first time - people didn't need to structure their schedules around available daylight. Everything from modern technology to our modern sleep schedules can be attributed to the invention of electricty. 3. Invention of the Microprocessor Once the microprocessor was invented and computers became something that everyone had access to and you didn't need a giant room to house, it started us on our warp-speed adoption of technology at the advancements ushered in during the Information Age. Which of course leads us to... 2. Invention of the Internet Those of us who have been alive in the three-ish decades the internet has been around can attest to how radically different life is now from what it used to be. The fact that we can connect to people around the world instantaneously, or access basically the entirety of human knowledge from a device we carry around in our pockets, is remarkable. The internet reshaped our entire world. 1. Life of Jesus Whether you're a Christian or not, and whether you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, I think it's hard to argue the impact of the historical figure of Jesus and his followers. Christianity has fundamentally impacted countries, and even entire continents. Wars have been fought in his name, and incredible acts of kindness and generosity have also been done in his name. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through the economy every year based on Christian ideals and/or the actions of people who consider themselves followers of Christ. I'm sure the minute I post this I'm going to think of something that I should have added to the list.  But all in all, I think this is a pretty strong list that has some really significant events in the history of the world. |
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