spending a week in space
I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would never find out, because i have literally spent the entire last 7 days in bed.
I am fucking exhausted. Exhausted from work. Exhausted from the constant need to defend my work. (This is a standard part of computer programming - everything you do is reviewed by your peers and if it is reviewed by a nitpicker or a besserwisser you have to argue your case every step of the way.) Exhausted from the grandboss wanting to put me on a different team. (Pulling the emergency brake on that worked out in my favor - i spoke to all the managers in our group about how upset i was, they advocated for me, and now i will keep my original assignment. Unfortunately one of my colleagues has been drafted into the new team of doom instead. So now i feel guilty about that.) Exhausted, spent, sick of having to be "on" every day, angry that i have to do this in the first place just to exist in this country, or to exist at all. I'm just tired. So fucking tired.
Also about two weeks ago i deleted my Discord account, on which i was a member of two different chat groups - one about professional wrestling and one about unconventional travel. I reposted a puzzle on one of them that i had seen here on LJ and because Discord is full of ultra-woke Americans i found myself unexpectedly lectured about my apparent ignorance of antisemitism. And it's just like... guys. Chill the fuck out already. You don't need to proactively call out microaggressions in every fucking thing you see, especially when you aren't even part of the minority you are supposedly trying to defend. A few years ago i quit a computer gaming forum that i had a paid subscription to when a huge flamewar broke out over trans rights. I'm tired of it. Going to work already sucks everything i have. Every drop of energy, every scrap of mojo goes into the job. I do not have anything left over to deal with people who want to get in pointless, performative shitfights on the internet. There's bigger things to get hurt or upset about in the world. Just let it go.
So i let myself spend the entire week in bed to recover. Up until today i felt like i was wasting my holiday, that i should've gone traveling, or just done something - anything - other than lie in bed... but now i am embracing it. Clearly my body needed it. My mind needed it.
Let's talk about science fiction instead.
One of the last things that happened on Discord was someone recommended i watch Farscape, which is an old sci-fi TV show that i missed when it originally aired. I started watching it, and turned out i quite enjoyed the show. Or, at least, the first half of the first season, which had a good balance of "big idea sci-fi" stories and the kind of trashy fun throwaway episodes that all television shows used to have when seasons were 22 hours long. It's a show about a ship of alien prisoners, and the human astronaut who finds himself inadvertently entangled in their escape. They travel the stars, on the run from the law, each of them trying to get home.
Unfortunately as the show progresses it has less thoughtful episodes and gets a bit more run-and-gun. At the same time, it has less one-and-done episodes and tends more toward the post-Babylon 5 concept of longer story arcs. By the start of the third season, i was done, because i feel like it had strayed too far from the original concept, and each new actor they introduced was more annoying than the last. Two of the main characters showed up later on Stargate SG-1 - a show i did watch - so in my headcanon they both found their way "home" to Earth sometime in season 2 and joined the US Air Force.
But one thing that watching Farscape did do, was make me remember a computer game i played called Mass Effect. Which is also about a spaceship traveling the stars with a team of characters, all of different species, all with different backgrounds. And the day before my holiday started, a remastered version of the whole Mass Effect trilogy went on sale, so i bought it. And i have sunk 80 hours into it over the past 7 days. So that's what i have been doing with myself in bed this whole time.
And, damnit, it's still a great story. Especially the first game in the trilogy is fantastic space opera meets Big Dumb Object sci-fi. You play a human military officer who has an encounter with an alien artifact that gives you a vision of impending doom. And then the rest of the game you are chasing down a villain who also encountered the artifact and has been trying to wake an ancient evil that could destroy the galaxy. It's a pretty classic setup for a sci-fi story, but because it's an RPG-style game you get to have lots of conversations with different people and read tons of lore and it's all so well-written that it doesn't feel hackneyed. It feels like a love letter to classic sci-fi, a celebration of all things great in the genre. There is a lot of conversation around politics and religion and war and science and morality. Of course it's still a computer game so at the end of the day you are always shooting tons of grunts and then making a binary decision to either spare or kill their CO, which is exactly the opposite of how it should work in real life (you don't get to murder a hundred "insignificant" people and then spare one "important" person to show you are merciful), but at least the general framework is there to communicate these ideas.
It's a really good game.
The second game in the trilogy is not. The second game in the trilogy, instead of being a soldier trying to save the universe, you decide to work for a racist organization run by a Bondesque supervillain. After tens of hours of gameplay where you are forced to make friends with a whole array of murderous scumbags - including a literal perpetrator of genocide - you finally defeat an enemy that basically had nothing to do with the original big bad, so the entire fucking game might as well have just been a completely different franchise. It's a total waste of time, but unfortunately you are forced to play through it because this trilogy carries your character and decisions over from game to game, so if you skip the middle one, then the decisions you made in the first one won't count in the third.
Fortunately, the third game goes back to the roots of the series. Your character rejoins the military, and this time you are building up the fleet that's needed to fight the ancient evil from the first game. So the galaxy is under attack, and there are loads of epic speeches, and heroic sacrifices, and swelling music, and massive 'splosions... It's a totally oo-rah space marine extravaganza. But in talking to these different species, and trying to resolve their issues, to get them to come together to face the bigger threat... The writing there is great. It's exactly the kind of story i like to read, or watch, or play. It's hopeful. I find myself having ever less interest in doom and gloom stories where everyone is a sociopath, constantly screwing each other over. Most of the time they're boring and depressing, and all of the time they're not realistic. Because in the real world, people do work together. Society exists. Civilization exists. The default state for our species - and i think many "higher" species - is to collaborate. To lift each other up. To build something greater than ourselves. So i want to see stories that accept that reality and then tackle the more complex questions of how societies with hundreds or thousands of years of divergent beliefs come to see their commonalities and form a newer, greater society. This shit is why i believe in the UN and why i love Star Trek.
I'm still not sure why i love corny military shit. At first i thought it was because i was an army brat, but plenty of army brats hate the military. Hell, my dad who was in it, he hates it too. Most people i know are pacifists who think the military is trash. And yet here i was, in this very journal, cheering the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. In the end that war turned out to cause a lot more death and destruction than it was worth. But i still believe it's right to topple dictators, and once knives get drawn, i think it's important to have some kind of Team America: World Police to manage that. I think because my personal morals don't find it acceptable to kill other people in any situation aside from war. Killing out of anger or spite or revenge or fear, i find all of that repulsive, which is why i don't like computer games that force me to kill a bunch of baddies, or TV shows where the so-called hero just casually offs people and moves on to the next scene as if they'd just flicked a crumb off their shirt. But war is a framework that our species has established where it is acceptable to kill people - and specifically people who (at least in a voluntary military) have chosen to place themselves into that position of being a killable proxy for a larger political entity. When one side or the other has had enough of their pieces being taken off the board, the war is over. And, in theory, this results in less overall death and destruction than there would've been if it had just been civilians murdering civilians willy-nilly. So i respect people in the military for allowing themselves to be that proxy, and i think having a military in the first place is a valuable component of civilized society. It's the last form of communication between political entities when all other avenues of communication have become untenable. So when it comes to the military of a democratic country, i guess yeah, i am down with the corny "we are the last, best hope" stuff.
That's another dumb American shitfight that annoyed me on Discord, incidentally. The pro-gun anarchists who sound exactly like right-wing nutjobs in their insistence that everybody should be armed because that's the only way for oppressed minorities to take back power. If your idea of taking back power is a civilian holding a gun to another civilian's head then you are the one fucking up society, not the one saving it.
Anyway, the point is, i like oo-rah military sci-fi, but i also don't like wingnuttery, so something like Mass Effect is a great take on the genre because it puts different species with different belief systems and different sexualities and different lifespans into one spaceship and they all have to figure out how to get along. I suppose cynics would say that it's "gamey" in that these people would never... but that's the point, isn't it? Sci-fi is supposed to be inspirational! It makes us think about what could be, it makes us strive to be better, it gives us warnings about the future, but it gives us a roadmap too. I want to believe that in a catastrophic galaxy-threatening event, we could put aside our differences and work together. It should be possible. It has to be possible. That's the world i want to live in, and that's how i want to live my life, to try make that possible.
So, even though a lot of people annoy the shit out of me, and their politics are fucking stupid, i generally still try to work with them, because that's what society is all about.
Be professional. Get it done.
And then go spend 7 days in bed, because it's exhausting getting shit done.
I am fucking exhausted. Exhausted from work. Exhausted from the constant need to defend my work. (This is a standard part of computer programming - everything you do is reviewed by your peers and if it is reviewed by a nitpicker or a besserwisser you have to argue your case every step of the way.) Exhausted from the grandboss wanting to put me on a different team. (Pulling the emergency brake on that worked out in my favor - i spoke to all the managers in our group about how upset i was, they advocated for me, and now i will keep my original assignment. Unfortunately one of my colleagues has been drafted into the new team of doom instead. So now i feel guilty about that.) Exhausted, spent, sick of having to be "on" every day, angry that i have to do this in the first place just to exist in this country, or to exist at all. I'm just tired. So fucking tired.
Also about two weeks ago i deleted my Discord account, on which i was a member of two different chat groups - one about professional wrestling and one about unconventional travel. I reposted a puzzle on one of them that i had seen here on LJ and because Discord is full of ultra-woke Americans i found myself unexpectedly lectured about my apparent ignorance of antisemitism. And it's just like... guys. Chill the fuck out already. You don't need to proactively call out microaggressions in every fucking thing you see, especially when you aren't even part of the minority you are supposedly trying to defend. A few years ago i quit a computer gaming forum that i had a paid subscription to when a huge flamewar broke out over trans rights. I'm tired of it. Going to work already sucks everything i have. Every drop of energy, every scrap of mojo goes into the job. I do not have anything left over to deal with people who want to get in pointless, performative shitfights on the internet. There's bigger things to get hurt or upset about in the world. Just let it go.
So i let myself spend the entire week in bed to recover. Up until today i felt like i was wasting my holiday, that i should've gone traveling, or just done something - anything - other than lie in bed... but now i am embracing it. Clearly my body needed it. My mind needed it.
Let's talk about science fiction instead.
One of the last things that happened on Discord was someone recommended i watch Farscape, which is an old sci-fi TV show that i missed when it originally aired. I started watching it, and turned out i quite enjoyed the show. Or, at least, the first half of the first season, which had a good balance of "big idea sci-fi" stories and the kind of trashy fun throwaway episodes that all television shows used to have when seasons were 22 hours long. It's a show about a ship of alien prisoners, and the human astronaut who finds himself inadvertently entangled in their escape. They travel the stars, on the run from the law, each of them trying to get home.
Unfortunately as the show progresses it has less thoughtful episodes and gets a bit more run-and-gun. At the same time, it has less one-and-done episodes and tends more toward the post-Babylon 5 concept of longer story arcs. By the start of the third season, i was done, because i feel like it had strayed too far from the original concept, and each new actor they introduced was more annoying than the last. Two of the main characters showed up later on Stargate SG-1 - a show i did watch - so in my headcanon they both found their way "home" to Earth sometime in season 2 and joined the US Air Force.
But one thing that watching Farscape did do, was make me remember a computer game i played called Mass Effect. Which is also about a spaceship traveling the stars with a team of characters, all of different species, all with different backgrounds. And the day before my holiday started, a remastered version of the whole Mass Effect trilogy went on sale, so i bought it. And i have sunk 80 hours into it over the past 7 days. So that's what i have been doing with myself in bed this whole time.
And, damnit, it's still a great story. Especially the first game in the trilogy is fantastic space opera meets Big Dumb Object sci-fi. You play a human military officer who has an encounter with an alien artifact that gives you a vision of impending doom. And then the rest of the game you are chasing down a villain who also encountered the artifact and has been trying to wake an ancient evil that could destroy the galaxy. It's a pretty classic setup for a sci-fi story, but because it's an RPG-style game you get to have lots of conversations with different people and read tons of lore and it's all so well-written that it doesn't feel hackneyed. It feels like a love letter to classic sci-fi, a celebration of all things great in the genre. There is a lot of conversation around politics and religion and war and science and morality. Of course it's still a computer game so at the end of the day you are always shooting tons of grunts and then making a binary decision to either spare or kill their CO, which is exactly the opposite of how it should work in real life (you don't get to murder a hundred "insignificant" people and then spare one "important" person to show you are merciful), but at least the general framework is there to communicate these ideas.
It's a really good game.
The second game in the trilogy is not. The second game in the trilogy, instead of being a soldier trying to save the universe, you decide to work for a racist organization run by a Bondesque supervillain. After tens of hours of gameplay where you are forced to make friends with a whole array of murderous scumbags - including a literal perpetrator of genocide - you finally defeat an enemy that basically had nothing to do with the original big bad, so the entire fucking game might as well have just been a completely different franchise. It's a total waste of time, but unfortunately you are forced to play through it because this trilogy carries your character and decisions over from game to game, so if you skip the middle one, then the decisions you made in the first one won't count in the third.
Fortunately, the third game goes back to the roots of the series. Your character rejoins the military, and this time you are building up the fleet that's needed to fight the ancient evil from the first game. So the galaxy is under attack, and there are loads of epic speeches, and heroic sacrifices, and swelling music, and massive 'splosions... It's a totally oo-rah space marine extravaganza. But in talking to these different species, and trying to resolve their issues, to get them to come together to face the bigger threat... The writing there is great. It's exactly the kind of story i like to read, or watch, or play. It's hopeful. I find myself having ever less interest in doom and gloom stories where everyone is a sociopath, constantly screwing each other over. Most of the time they're boring and depressing, and all of the time they're not realistic. Because in the real world, people do work together. Society exists. Civilization exists. The default state for our species - and i think many "higher" species - is to collaborate. To lift each other up. To build something greater than ourselves. So i want to see stories that accept that reality and then tackle the more complex questions of how societies with hundreds or thousands of years of divergent beliefs come to see their commonalities and form a newer, greater society. This shit is why i believe in the UN and why i love Star Trek.
I'm still not sure why i love corny military shit. At first i thought it was because i was an army brat, but plenty of army brats hate the military. Hell, my dad who was in it, he hates it too. Most people i know are pacifists who think the military is trash. And yet here i was, in this very journal, cheering the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. In the end that war turned out to cause a lot more death and destruction than it was worth. But i still believe it's right to topple dictators, and once knives get drawn, i think it's important to have some kind of Team America: World Police to manage that. I think because my personal morals don't find it acceptable to kill other people in any situation aside from war. Killing out of anger or spite or revenge or fear, i find all of that repulsive, which is why i don't like computer games that force me to kill a bunch of baddies, or TV shows where the so-called hero just casually offs people and moves on to the next scene as if they'd just flicked a crumb off their shirt. But war is a framework that our species has established where it is acceptable to kill people - and specifically people who (at least in a voluntary military) have chosen to place themselves into that position of being a killable proxy for a larger political entity. When one side or the other has had enough of their pieces being taken off the board, the war is over. And, in theory, this results in less overall death and destruction than there would've been if it had just been civilians murdering civilians willy-nilly. So i respect people in the military for allowing themselves to be that proxy, and i think having a military in the first place is a valuable component of civilized society. It's the last form of communication between political entities when all other avenues of communication have become untenable. So when it comes to the military of a democratic country, i guess yeah, i am down with the corny "we are the last, best hope" stuff.
That's another dumb American shitfight that annoyed me on Discord, incidentally. The pro-gun anarchists who sound exactly like right-wing nutjobs in their insistence that everybody should be armed because that's the only way for oppressed minorities to take back power. If your idea of taking back power is a civilian holding a gun to another civilian's head then you are the one fucking up society, not the one saving it.
Anyway, the point is, i like oo-rah military sci-fi, but i also don't like wingnuttery, so something like Mass Effect is a great take on the genre because it puts different species with different belief systems and different sexualities and different lifespans into one spaceship and they all have to figure out how to get along. I suppose cynics would say that it's "gamey" in that these people would never... but that's the point, isn't it? Sci-fi is supposed to be inspirational! It makes us think about what could be, it makes us strive to be better, it gives us warnings about the future, but it gives us a roadmap too. I want to believe that in a catastrophic galaxy-threatening event, we could put aside our differences and work together. It should be possible. It has to be possible. That's the world i want to live in, and that's how i want to live my life, to try make that possible.
So, even though a lot of people annoy the shit out of me, and their politics are fucking stupid, i generally still try to work with them, because that's what society is all about.
Be professional. Get it done.
And then go spend 7 days in bed, because it's exhausting getting shit done.