opinion

Efficient Misery

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Note: You’re going to see a switch in how I do my blog posts.  I’m trying a more personal voice, and writing on broader subjects, ala my past hero Dave Barry.  It can’t all be about writing!

I really like organizing things.  I get paid for it.  I’m honestly pretty good about it, which can be a really bad thing sometimes.

So, ‘tis the season for medical stuff.  I’ve got vaccines (at least two). I’ve got the regular tests and checkups a man of fifty five has to ensure my body and I work in tandem.  Some of those tests involve fasting and/or various forms of personal violation.  Gotta pace that stuff to keep the rate of indignity to a tolerable level.

I also have some in-office things coming up at work.  My workplace is pretty remote in the work-at-home not emotional-distance way, but once or twice a year we get together so we can remark how we all look different on Zoom.  Gotta work around that too!

So my brilliant idea was to pace myself.  A vaccination one week, then one the week after, since the last time I did flu and covid shots together I felt like I’d slammed a bottle of rum but without the convenience of being too blacked out to know how bad I felt.  Do my exams after the last exam because hey a little fasting won’t hurt after that.  Then right into the all-hands! Nice and convenient and nothing piles up!

Know what, my highly organized plan had one flaw – it meant four weeks where life was intermittently punctuated with low-grade misery.

Sure, the effects of one vaccine wore off in two days, just in time for me to get going to have another vaccination.  Then fasting, which is somehow less fun after two weeks of dealing with vaccine side effects!  Then regular exams that I scheduled in What-Was-I-Thinking-O’Clock in the morning.  Then getting up at the same time days later to drive through Bay Area traffic for days.

I achieved that experience many a Project Manager knows all too well, succeeding in a way that also makes you entirely unhappy.

Well, at least it’s almost over.  So now time to gear up for the last stage of waking up early and whatever.  But next time, maybe I’ll take my discomfort and misery in a  more condensed form.

Steven Savage

Opinion Columnists: Why?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As I would like this column to be timeless, I shall not mention what inspired it. So while skipping history, let me posit something: opinion columnists without some background and skill to have an opinion on are useless.

To write on opinions and viewpoints is fine, and useful. Having an opinion, understanding it’s an opinion, is a way yo ground what you say in context. Writing on it effectively is a gateway to help people understand your views and work with them or oppose them. To write an opinion also gives you the ability to look at your opinion – and change it or bolder it.

I’m fine with opinion columnists. I write enough.

But in time I’ve come to question professional opinion columnists, whose skill is . . . opinion columnist. Your opinions are based on your ability to have opinions and write about opinions. It creates a weird, inbred, thin-skinned world of people saying things with little grounding or reality. It comes close to being – and in some cases become – a grift.

A good opinion columnist is a person who has a grounding in something that’s relevant to more than having opinions and putting them on a page. Give me a scientist who has written peer-reviewed papers and done researches. Give me a writer who writes novels that can give opinions on the process. Give me a doctor whose done surgeries discussing the experience. Just don’t give me someone who’s only skill is writing about what they know.

In fact, maybe some columnists who are or were good at something should be watched warily to make sure that they don’t decline into being opinion-only.

A good opinion columnist is someone with a connection to the larger world. It may seem narrow or specialized, but we’re all a bit narrow and specialized, it gives us perspective and depth. Only those who are deluded think they know everything and can opine endlessly on it.

This is a good reminder for anyone that creates media. Being only good at creating media is going to limit you to recycling ideas, to regurgitating the past, and to shallow results. You need a gateway to connect you to the world to be able to connect your creations to the bigger picture.

You may expand your connections, but they will never be perfect. That’s fine. The ones you have ground your opinions so you can share them.

ADDENDUM: I find this relevant to many professions as well. My own profession, the ill-defined overlap of Scrum Master, Project Manager, and Program Manager, is one you need a connection to be good at. To just be good at Scrum or Project Management only goes so far – you need to be good at something else to ground it, like communications or business analysis or something. Anything general and abstract needs something to tie it to the world to be relevant.

Steven Savage

Way With Worlds: It Comes Apart – Biases And Bigotry

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field crack division

(Way With Worlds is a weekly column on the art of worldbuilding published at Seventh Sanctum, Muse Hack, and Ongoing Worlds)

Having explored the psychology of conflict and the way that conflicts can go from simple disagreements to smashing galaxies with a Dimension Cannon, let’s take a look at some of the more personal elements of conflict. It’s a bit of a break from the galaxy-smashing thing, but the potential is there of course.

Let’s talk biases and bigotry, those steps that often let us climb the ladder to conflict.  Or descend into the pit of conflict, whatever, pick your metaphor.

We’ve all encountered biases and bigotry in real life and been driven crazy by them. We know people affected by them. In our historical readings we’ve seen cases where biases and bigotry have led to atrocities with depressing regularity.  Bias and bigotry is everywhere.

Which means that as world builders and creators, we need to think about these horrible things because they’re probably part of our worlds.

Worldbuilding isn’t for people afraid to get their brains messy. So since you have to write the biases and bigotries in your world, and the results of their existence, let’s talk about them.

But first . . .

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