No comments

In Defense of eReaders

  By , ,

I’m a dedicated, hardcore eBook reader. Back in 2009, my wife picked up a bulky, strange reading device: the Kindle 2. This was only about a year and a half after the launch of the first iPhone, so full touch-screen devices still hadn’t quite taken over. The Kindle 2 was big for its screen size, with giant bezels and a strange integrated keyboard and d-pad used for navigation and searching. It was goofy-looking, and a little awkward to use.

After reading on it for ten minutes, I was hooked. See, I’d tried to read eBooks in the past, primarily on a computer, and never connected with them. The experience was jarringly different, until someone took the time and energy to design a digital book experience specifically for readers.

Not long after, both of us upgraded to the Kindle 3, a slightly less awkward – but still tied to legacy features like a physical keyboard – device, and we never looked back. Within a year we had begun the process of replacing all our books with eBooks and had sold our entire, substantial physical library.

I’d like to talk to you about the glory of eReaders, and why I think they get an undeserved bad rap from parts of the reading community.

Let me start this off by saying I’m not going to discuss the more ephemeral joys of reading physical books. There is a significant segment of the reading population who thoroughly enjoy the feel, the look, and even the smell of tree-books. For many, having a personal library of books they can display on shelves is just as important as the reading experience itself.

I do not, in any way, begrudge these folks. I’m not here to argue that one way is “better” than the other, or to tell you that eReaders are an objectively superior choice. I think the “eBook vs Tree Book” debate/rivalry/war/whatever is absurd. These aren’t two sides of a conflict; rather they’re two sides of the same coin.

We’re all readers.

I could wax rhapsodic about why I love my eReader. It’s light and ergonomic. I can read in almost any conditions. It’s water resistant. I can easily read it one handed. I have over 1,500 books with me wherever I go, and I never have to pick-and-choose which ones I take on vacation or out of the house. I no longer have to worry about shelf space. I never have pack and lift boxes of books when I move. The list goes on.

In specific, though, I want to address a physical complaint I frequently see in these discussions, and the misconception fueling it.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen readers deride eBooks in favor of physical with the specific complaints that they can’t concentrate when reading eBooks, or that reading eBooks hurts their eyes or gives them headaches, or that they can’t read for long sessions. In many of these instances, it’s made clear that the person lodging these complaints has never used an eInk device, and has only read eBooks on a phone, tablet, or computer screen.

eInk screens – like what you’ll find on Kindle, Kobo, and older Nook devices (as well as a ton of others now, like the reMarkable) are a completely different beast from your typical LCD/LED screen, and are built specifically with readers in mind.

A lot of digital ink has been dropped about the problems with staring at screens all day. Google “Computer Vision Syndrome” or “Blue Light Exposure”, and you’ll run across endless articles about the problems we all face in a world run by screens. While looking at screens for extended periods isn’t likely to cause any lasting damage, things like eye strain, headaches, and blue light exposure are all very real issues.

But, for the most part, they don’t apply to eInk screens, for two main reasons: eInk screens are not backlit, and they don’t constantly refresh.

First and foremost, eInk screens – even the ones with built-in lights – are not backlit. While staring at any brightly-lit screen for hours on end – even with external lights – might cause issues, backlit screens beaming light directly into your eyeholes has been proven a major cause of eye-strain and headaches.

eInk screens, however, are opaque, and thus are impossible to backlight. The misconception of backlit eInk screens is constantly reinforced by articles and reviews where the authors casually use the word “backlit” even though it’s incorrect. eInk manufacturers designed a clever type of front-light for modern eInk devices where a layer is placed over the top of the eInk screen that redirects lights from the edge of the device down onto the page to light it while still being transparent for reading. This is the type of light you’ll find on almost every newer eReader like the Kindle Paperwhite/Oasis or the Kobo Aura.

But if you find the front lights on devices like this still hurt your eyes, you can turn the lights off, and still read. Early eReaders didn’t even have built-in lights, so you’d light them just like you would a book – with room light or a clip light. Some of the less-expensive models still don’t have built-in lights. eInk was designed to be digital paper (some early devices actually called it “ePaper”), readable just like you’d read a paper page.

Part of delivering this feature was designing a screen that didn’t need to be constantly refreshed. Unlike LCD screens that are refreshing anywhere from 30 to 240 times per second (another potential source of eye strain), eInk screens only refresh when they’re changed. So, if you have a static page of text, it’s just that: static. The individual pixels are locked into a particular configuration – displaying a book page, for example – without the need to consume power to maintain it. So, when you turn the page on an eBook, the eInk screen draws a minuscule amount of battery power to rearrange the pixels on screen, then goes dormant. This is one of the reasons why eInk devices have such amazing battery life.

And to make sure I address an earlier point: Blue light exposure can still be an issue. Until recently, the LED side-lights on eReaders were still well into the cool end of the spectrum, and could result in the same circadian-rhythm-altering issues as other screens. Newer eInk devices have started integrating warm light features, though, so you can adjust the amount of blue light coming off your screen (my Kindle Oasis does this, for example, and it’s phenomenal). And you can still always use an external light.

What this all boils down to is that modern eInk screens – the ones you find on dedicated eInk devices – are no different than reading a physical book page. They’re static, non-backlit, non-refreshing displays, specifically designed not to cause the same types of eye strain as your average phone or computer screen. It’s as far from reading on a phone screen as a physical book is.

So, if eye strain, headaches, or inability to concentrate are reasons you’ve given up on eBooks in the past, but you’ve only ever tried eBooks on your phone, tablet, or monitor, give a dedicated eReader a try. They combine all the benefits of physical books (except smell, of course) with all the convenience of a modern device. You might be surprised at how great the digital reading experience can be when it’s supported by the right hardware.

No comments

In Memoriam: Midnight Matthews, 2000-2019

  By ,

Sometimes it feels like the only reason I come back to this blog is to write about massive changes or terrible things happening in my life. But I want to document some of these things as a means of remembrance, especially when it comes to my pets. Losing Midnight last month was, for us, the marking of an era.

Prior to Gremlin and Bastion, I’d never had a cat live past 10 or 11. We had outdoor cats when I was a kid, so that’s not entirely surprising. Which also meant we went through animals quite often. I lost a lot of cats and several dogs throughout my childhood. I don’t think I realized, until I was responsible for raising my own animals, just how much longer a life they can lead by being indoor cats. We lost Bastion at 16, Gremlin at 17, and now Midnight at 18.

18 years old. That’s baffling to me. That’s so long for a cat. I’m 40 years old, which means Midnight was with us for pretty close to half my life up to this point. I still can’t even conceptualize that, even having lived through it. I’ve never had an animal – short of my real childhood dog Smokey – have such a lasting impact on my life.

I also didn’t really realize, until Bastion got sick, the level of responsibility taking care of elderly animals entails. I hate having this thought, but I don’t think my parents would have ever done the things we’ve done for our pets. Partially because they had a very different way of looking at pets, but also partially because it’s damned expensive, and pet insurance didn’t really exist back then.

Over the last few years Midnight had developed the same chronic renal issues that stole Bastion from us. She’d lost half her body weight in that time, dropping from 11 pounds to under 6. She slept most of the day, curled up in her heated bed, but when she wanted to be she was still pretty spry, which is impressive for a cat the equivalent of over 100 years old.

In Midnight’s case her disease moved much slower, and was more treatable in the long term. Bastion passed away only about six months after his diagnosis. Midnight stayed with us for almost three years. It involved a lot of work: subcutaneous fluids every day (which involves inserting an IV needle under her skin and dripping 100ml of saline solution into her system), prescription food, and four different medications, delivered by pill and shot. It was a lot of work. Work I’d do every single day for the rest of my life if it meant Midnight would still be with us. And without that work, she definitely would’ve died much sooner.

My wife and I married very young, and at the beginning of our relationship we knew we wanted pets. We were both animal people, and it only took a year to pick up Gremlin and Bastion – found in Port Angeles on our first anniversary. Once they were a part of our lives, we knew we were doomed to be “multiple animal” people. Even though we were both dog lovers, we were living in small apartments, and that environment wasn’t right for dogs. But cats… cats we knew we could accommodate.

One day at work, Christina saw a post about someone giving away kittens, and called me. Her birthday was coming up, and another kitten was her birthday wish. How could I refuse?

Our friend Karl and I went down to a standard cookie-cutter apartment complex in Renton to have a look. We were led to the closet in the main room, where the mama cat lay in a large box with her brood. There were still five or six kittens available of all different colors, and a couple other people were also browsing. They sat in the middle of the floor with a couple of feisty little calicos. Obviously I wasn’t going to disturb their choice, so I looked in the box.

I knew pretty much instantly which one was ours. A little tuxedo kitten, not quite a runt but definitely smaller than her siblings, hung out in the corner of the box, away from the other cats. She didn’t come to the edge and meow, nor try to get my attention in any other way. She just looked up, and I fell in love. Into a smaller box she went, and Karl helped keep her there for the half-hour drive home.

Christina reinforced my decision by falling in love with her just as quickly as I had. When Midnight came home with us she gained some energy, partly just from being in a new place, but partly from being introduced to her new brothers, who took to her the instant she set foot in the house. The three of them would go on to rule our lives for 18 more years, masters of the household they graciously let us live in. And Midnight was the queen.

She was, without a doubt, the most imperious and standoffish of the three. She demanded attention on her own time, and doled out love in parcels at her leisure. She was an energetic kitten and a studious adult. She frequently played the boys against each other, but just as frequently could be found curled up in a heap with both of them. They loved each other unconditionally, and we couldn’t have asked for a better relationship over the years. No animosity, no real fights, no special circumstances required. She was instantly and forever part of the family.

She always surprised us, though, when new people came around. Several times people house-sat for us while we were away, and we’d always come back to reports of how affectionate and loving Midnight was, and all we could do was shake our heads in wonder. It’s hard to show direct affection to your own subjects when you’re a queen, I guess, but there were no such social constructs with those outside her influence.

After Gremlin and Bastion passed, we knew for sure where she had been directing her affection, because it all came to us. Through both of their illnesses, she was their caretaker, frequently cleaning them and cuddling with them when they weren’t feeling well. When they were gone, it was clear she was lonely. She realized she didn’t need to be, and finally started showing us the kind of affection she’d always shown them. She became almost needy, and it was both heartwarming and bittersweet.

On Sunday, January 6th, we were giving her her fluids, and her breathing became a little labored. It’s probably not something I would have noticed, except that it was the same sign we got at the end of Gremlin’s life. Cats are obligate nose-breathers, so when they breath through their mouths, something is definitely wrong. My instincts proved right: We took her to the vet the next day, and found that she had fluids in her chest cavity. Just like Gremlin.

Once that happens, there’s not much more that can be done. The quality of life for a cat at that stage is not great, and not long. Rather than desperately try  to find a way to extend her already impressive lifespan by another few months – a selfish move that wouldn’t have been in her best interests – we decided to let her go. She came home with us that night, and it was both the hardest and most fulfilling night of my life.

We spent as much time with her as we could, at the end. Lavishing her with affection and cuddles, giving her treats, and getting as much out of those last few hours as we could. We cried a lot. Grieved before she was even gone. It’s amazing, in those last few hours of dreading the morning, how every minute felt like an eternity, and yet it felt like we had so few left to spend with her. But I am so, so thankful we spent them with her, and had a chance to say a proper goodbye.

Driving her to the vet the next morning was one of the hardest moments of my life. Weirdly, sitting with her at the end felt easier than the lead-up. Her end was peaceful, wrapped in a warm blanket in our arms, hopefully knowing just how much she was loved, and how achingly she’d be missed.

Gremlin, Bastion, and Midnight were our first pets. They were a unit. The genesis of our family. In total, the three of them were with us for almost two decades. Each one of their deaths has had a massive impact on us, and the three of them all being gone now feels like the end of an era. I know life goes on and new eras will come and go, but figuring out a new dynamic was a challenge – in spite of knowing it would someday come – I never really prepared myself for.

Wherever you are, Midnight, I hope you’re happy and warm, and curled up in a big pile with your brothers again. We love you so, so much. Always.

No comments

Goodbye, Twitter

  By ,

I’ve been on Twitter for almost a decade now. In truth, I have no idea why I joined Twitter in the first place, and I rarely posted to it in 2009. In 2010, I began using it to promote the After The Fact podcast, and my usage spiked considerably. Over the years it morphed into my “author” account, leading into and following the publication of Construct. Through all that time, it was also my personal social media space, where I’d post about any random thought that came into my head. Over that time I’ve controlled a total of five Twitter accounts: @GeekElite, @AfterTheFactPod, @TradeSecretsPod, @ChroniclerSaga, and – most recently – @PixelartMeeple. Now, all but one of those are gone (and the last is effectively a placeholder).

Back when I started on the platform, I thought – like most people I knew, honestly – it was stupid. How could you convey any manner of thought in 140 characters? Little did I know… My early years on Twitter I discovered one potent aspect of the platform that kept me coming back: Access.

People had their guard down back then. You could Tweet at minor celebrities and actually get a reply. After we started up Trade Secrets, I started talking to my favorite comic book creators on Twitter, and would get into actual conversations with people I openly admired. If you go back and listen to the early years of Trade Secrets, we have interviews on that show with creators like Cullen Bunn, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Matt Fraction – people we’d never have the same kind of access to today. And it was all because we’d built an initial rapport on Twitter.

Over the years my Twitter usage grew significantly. In all my 10 years on the platform my follower count capped out at just over 500, but I also wasn’t pushing real hard for followers. I was enjoying my time interacting with people I never thought I’d get to talk to. It helped us garner podcast listeners, and eventually helped me to promote my debut novel. I thought I’d be on the platform for a long time. Until things turned dark.

Look: I’m a middle-aged, white, cis, heterosexual man. I don’t have the kinds of problems on Twitter that women, people of color, non-binary folks, and other minorities have on the platform. I’m not assaulted by nazis and Trumpists, I generally don’t get trolled unless it’s in good fun. But people I know do. Friends. Acquaintances. Colleagues. And Twitter does nothing about it. In their wishy-washy corporate stand for “fairness”, their mush-mouthed, limp-dicked platitudes about solving the very real issues Twitter has raised in society in general dig into me like a splinter. As a platform, they refuse to take a stand, and I can’t abide that anymore.

But I’ll be totally honest: That’s not the main reason I left Twitter. I left because it’s a goddamned productivity sinkhole.

Twitter – like all social media platforms – is designed to mine your attention. You’re not a customer, you’re an asset. Your eyes being glued to their site is what makes them money, because they can point to those numbers and sell ad space. And in order to keep those numbers rising, they’ll employ every psychological and sociological trick in the book to keep your attention. To stoke your FOMO so you keep logging back in, keep scrolling through shit you’ve already seen, keep clicking on shit you don’t even want, keep arguing about shit you don’t really care about, keep feeding the algorithms that tell them they can mine X-hours of engagement per user every day.

And those hooks work on me like a goddamned charm.  I’d surf Twitter on my phone at every opportunity. At dinner, in the bathroom, in bed at night, first thing after waking up. Every single moment of “downtime” I had, I’d be on Twitter filling that space with bullshit. I’m the guy – and I’m definitely not the only one, admit it – who’d close down the Twitter app on my phone at night, then look at my screen and absentmindedly just click the goddamned icon and open it up again.

This is the main reason I don’t believe they’ll ever actually solve any of the problems they have with abuse: because it’s not in their best interests to do so. They’ll continue to treat their users like shit in favor of numbers, keep trying to code algorithms to solve very human, very nebulous issues that require the judgment calls of real people. The problem is their judgment is genuinely faulty, if they even decide to employ it at all.

Their systems fucking work. These behaviors are not a mistake. They’re neither unintentional nor harmless. As innocuous as you may think this behavior is in the moment, this is the result of engineers and psychologists doing everything in their power to design as system that keeps you glued to its interface, whether it’s good for your productivity or not. It is absolutely a designed addiction, and it’s completely uncontrolled at the moment. Silicon Valley is moving so fast in this direction, doing everything they can to manipulate peoples’ attention, and there are zero regulations to put a damper on it.

But that’s a little more ranty than I’d intended to get here. The point I’m trying to make, from a personal standpoint, is that all that psychological design and social engineering worked so well on me that it destroyed my productivity. For years. The attention economy has very real, very negative connotations for sustained, thought-intensive work, and that’s exactly what I was suffering from. And not only did it keep me glued to their platform, but it made me feel bad for wanting to leave. It made me scared to leave. Realizing how irrational, ridiculous, and very likely manipulated that fear actually was is what finally made me pull the trigger.

The closest I’d ever come to deleting my account in the past was in October of 2018, when I downloaded my Twitter data and almost – ALMOST – deactivated my account. But I backed off. I started questioning my own decisions, wondering if all the negativity I felt toward the platform, all the frustration and anger building up inside me, all the productivity loss, was actually Twitter’s fault. The platform as a whole had gaslighted me into thinking it wasn’t.

But it was. And the moment finally came when I got frustrated and angry on Twitter, at Twitter, and when I thought about deleting my account it didn’t generate any fear or anxiety. Only calm detachment, and some curiosity about what it would mean.  That was the sign, to me, that I was done. That I can no longer abide the combination of attention mining, apathy, and genuine insidiousness that makes up Twitter as a company and a platform, and could no longer tolerate it’s effect on my life.

So, here I am, Twitterless after almost a decade. I’m not as calm and detached as I would like to be. I’m definitely nervous I’ll lose contact with some of the people I feel I’ve become friends with via the platform. That fear isn’t nebulous, either, it’s rooted in experience. I left Facebook a couple of years ago for similar reasons, and I’ve entirely lost contact with quite a few people I thought were my actual friends. Like, full on ghosted. If I’m not on Facebook, it’s like I’m not alive.

And I know that’ll happen again. I put out a call on my Twitter account a few weeks ago, asking my 500+ followers if anyone would even care if I left. I got two replies. No one gives a shit. But removing myself from social platforms like this shrinks my world. That’s the one negative effect that I’m struggling with. I have alternative methods to keep in touch – events I run, Slack channels, Discord – and no one wants to engage me there. I can cope with cutting myself off from insignificant interactions with a wide swath of people. What’s harder is coming to grips with cutting off meaningful interactions with the few I enjoyed interacting with. And narrowing others ability to interact with me.

I can only hope the positive benefits outweigh all of that.

For further info on some of the ideas I only barely touched on here, read Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter and Deep Work by Cal Newport.

No comments

Out With The Old, And All That…

  By , , , , , ,

I felt like I needed to write a blog post, so that’s why I’m here.

I’m honestly not sure where this one’s going to go, because I’m sort of firing from the hip on this one.

So let’s find out together, shall we?

The big impetus for writing this right now is I’ve been thinking a lot lately about big life changes. Taking on new projects, letting go of old hobbies, moving in and out of groups and communities and cliques. My life is in a state of flux right now that started almost a year ago, and doesn’t show much sign of slowing down. There is stability here: my wife, my dogs, our new house. But my own endeavors and hobbies are changing and shifting again, in ways that I wasn’t really expecting. Starting with my relationship to poker.

Poker has been an important part of my life for nearly 15 years. In fact, about 5 years ago, I wrote this blog post about the measurably positive effect it has had on my life. I’ve been playing regularly since 2004, and hosting games regularly since roughly 2007.

As of November, I won’t be hosting games anymore, and I’m taking the entirety of 2019 off from playing the game.

And it’s a weird feeling for me. On the one hand, I know I’m completely burned out on playing poker, and even more burned out on hosting games. On the other, it’s been a cornerstone of my life and hobbies for nearly a third of my life. Making the decision to stop hosting a game I’ve been running for a decade was not an easy one. But it’s not the first time I’ve come to the conclusion I needed to step away from something that dominated my free time for so long. In my post “On Leaving Things Behind“, I talk about retiring from a LARP I’d played for over a decade, and reconnecting with some players several years later.

Leaving Amtgard was an extraordinarily hard decision for me. It was the largest non-work part of my life at the time. That decision hurt, and I went through a full-on grieving process when it had solidified in my mind.

But this decision feels a lot easier. Mostly because there are so many direct parallels to leaving Amtgard, but without nearly as many social consequences for me, and poker is a game I can definitely go back to if I feel the urge to play after 2019. Leaving it behind is hard, but it’s something I need to do, and leaving Amtgard is so directly analogous that it has prepared me for this moment.

With Amtgard, I was driven out by internal politics that ignited spectacular burnout. With poker, it’s more just me being tired. Yeah, I’m a bit burned out on playing the game, which is definitely having an effect on my performance, but more I’m just tired of being host. Hosting a regular game means both dedicating space to the endeavor and being constantly prepared for each event. I have to block off my calendar, and the poker game (which used to be weekly but slowly dropped to bi-weekly then monthly) has to come first for me. The hardest part is that it doesn’t come first for most of the people who play anymore. For the players, it is a secondary diversion they can float in and out of at will as their lives allow. For me, it’s a dedicated time-sink whether the game actually goes off or gets canceled (which happened more and more over the years).

My other main gaming hobby, board games, has a much different dynamic. With poker, if I can’t draw 6+ players, the game likely gets canceled because in most cases, short-handed games aren’t really worth doing (at least not to my group). With board games, I only need a total of 3-4 players for a game to work, and usually my wife and I will fill two of those seats. It’s much easier to get a board game night to go than poker, so it almost never feels like I’ve sunk time and effort into something that fails.

There are many things over the years I’ve pursued, become invested in, and left. Amtgard, podcasting, working at Nintendo. All things that were massive parts of my life, right up until they weren’t. So, it’s time I leave poker behind, too. Probably not forever, but I’m definitely committing to taking the entirety of 2019 off of the game. My hope is that, just like with Amtgard, the creative pursuits I’ve got swirling around in my head will fill the void and keep me occupied, but also actually make me happy.

I guess that’s where the second part of this post comes in: discussing my newest endeavor, Pixelart Meeple.

Back in 2010, I started a podcast called After The Fact. You can find links to episodes right here on this website, and even look through all the old posts about it. That show started a 5+ year love affair with podcasting that ended in 2016 with the final episode of Trade Secrets. It was a lot of work, but being on those podcasts was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. I was able to take a couple of my favorite hobbies at the time and translate them in to some fun media for others to enjoy.

Which is exactly what I hope to do with Pixelart Meeple. As a “brand”, Pixelart Meeple is already on Twitter, but has been way more successful on Instagram, where I’ve already garnered over 1000 followers in a little under four months. The intent is to translate something I’m passionate about – the hobby-within-a-hobby of modifying and upgrading my board games – into a channel on social media and YouTube that I hope will a) fill a niche (because WOW is it a niche), b) entertain people, and c) teach people how to recreate a lot of the DIY projects I do on a regular basis.

While I’m very familiar with audio work after five years of podcasting, I haven’t really done much in the way of video work since I graduated college twenty years ago. Editing software I can use on my laptop now was relegated solely to massively expensive dedicated Avid machines back then, and I’m really looking forward to re-learning it all from scratch. And I’m not being facetious – I think it’ll be fun.

And that’s the key, I think: I’m genuinely looking forward to it. I love learning new things, embarking on new endeavors. Like most people, there was a time in my life when I was really afraid not just to do new things, but to let go of old ones. But I’m finding that’s not the case anymore, at least not to as significant a degree. It’s not that I wasn’t afraid to let go of poker – I was, and I agonized over it for a long time – but the act of actually doing it was much more a relief than a fear. And I’ve already found something to occupy both the physical space I used to dedicate to poker, and the time and money it used to take up in my life.

Change can be scary, but without it life becomes boring. Things you once loved can become a slog, and holding onto them just because you think they define you is the fastest path to hating your favorite activities. I learned this the hard way once, and as I get older it becomes easier to realize that it’s not the individual activities that I have to hold onto, but my ability to shift and grow and learn new things, so that when that hobby or activity I used to love becomes a chore, I always have another on the horizon to take its place.

No comments

Bye Bye, Facebook

  By ,

This week, I deleted my Facebook account.

Or, rather, my Facebook account was “officially” deleted. I’ve been working on ridding myself of it for a couple of months now, trying to do things the easy way, when I realized Facebook just doesn’t allow for an easy way to do… well, pretty much anything.

I posted to my wall multiple times that I’d be leaving the service, asking for all of my Facebook friends to send me an e-mail address so I could stay in contact. No one saw the posts. It was endemic of one of my biggest problems with Facebook: how the site and its algorithms closely control and prune everything you see, to provide you with the image of your world they want to present.

And it’s gotten worse in recent years. If one of my friends’ posts blows up with comments, it’ll constantly float to the top of my feed, even if it’s days or weeks old. You know what kind of posts float to the top? Inflammatory bullshit. Save that, it’ll be reasoned posts full of inflammatory comments from people whom I’d never otherwise interact with. I spent so much time pruning, blocking, and curating on Facebook that it became a chore, and I never really saw the posts I actually wanted to interact with.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the attention economy, and how social media sites are specifically built to mine your attention and keep you riveted so they can drive ad revenue. And you’re never riveted to useful or interesting information, you’re just praying for another Like or desperately hoping for that red notification icon. People, myself included, feed on it. It’s not random, neutral, or innocent. It’s not just a service they put out and let people use as they see fit, it’s a tool for them to mine your time, where users are very clearly resources, not customers. No other service in the world has such simultaneously high user retention and low user value. Everyone uses it, but no one really wants to.

And that’s the mindset I encountered as I was in the process of leaving. After several weeks of responses to my posts piddling in, I decided to just go down my Friends List and message everyone individually for contact information. I told them I was leaving and would like to stay in contact, and requested an e-mail address. I got personal replies from all but four people, which showed me the futility of those original public posts. I, unfortunately, didn’t keep any specific data on the responses I received. I wish I had, because they were really interesting, and it means the rest of this post is going to be primarily anecdotal. Oh well.

Regardless of other responses, almost everyone (of course) asked me why I was leaving. When I explained, I got a combination of three different reactions.

The first was just shock that I’d actually do it. So many people replied with some variation on “I can’t believe you’re actually doing it!” My favorites were the “Yeah, right!” reaction, like I was making some weird joke. As though it was a monumental feat; a life change equivalent to quitting my job. That’s how those comments felt: shock and awe at my bald audacity, sometimes mixed with little passive-aggressive “whatever, dude”-style admonitions, as though my decision to leave a social media site was somehow a direct affront to them.

The second was seemingly genuine sadness, on the scale of a friend moving out of state. “Really sad to see you go. I hope we can keep in touch.” This reaction was so common, I actually began to internalize it, as though I were moving away and somehow leaving everyone I know behind. I caught myself, one night, actually contemplating if I was giving up friendships, before I shit-canned that entire line of thought because it’s frankly ridiculous. If neither I, nor you, are willing to maintain contact outside a social media outlet, it’s not much of a friendship, is it?

Last, and most surprising to me, were the people who desperately wanted to follow me, but felt chained to the service. I got so many variations on “Man, I really wish I could quit Facebook.” As though they were Mark Zuckerberg’s personal indentured servants. I would – and do – universally respond with “You can. Just do it.” Without fail, every single person had a reason they couldn’t leave. I won’t call any of them “excuses”, because I honestly don’t know the validity of the reasons from their point of view. I only know my own: it’s just a social media site.

In theory, social media should just be a tool with which you maintain connections and communicate with friends, relatives, and colleagues. I’m sure that was the original intent. In our modern, corporate-capitalist reality, it is a quagmire designed to feed statistics into algorithms in order to satiate advertisers and gather data on users, Facebook being one of the worst. And they’re damned good at keeping you there, whether you actually like it or not.

I hated every minute I spent on Facebook. Beyond the superficial problems like the interface and algorithms that seemed designed with an eye toward endless torment, I watched my friends and family get into unending, cyclical, pointless pissing matches. It was almost never a dialogue. For any topic deeper than food porn or television, conversations almost universally fell into two categories: slavish agreement and vicious opposition.

Of course exceptions exist, but overall Facebook just isn’t a place for real dialogue. You’re either the echo in someone’s chamber, or the invader thrashing against the walls of their stronghold until the inevitable block or unfriending. When attempts at genuine questions or conversation are made, even the most reasonable people have been conditioned so heavily for attack they lash out, their first reaction either anger or condescension, or both. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been condescended to on Facebook, both by loose acquaintances and people ostensibly calling themselves my friends.

Over time, I found my own interactions increasingly falling into these categories as well. I didn’t feel good about myself or the time I spent on Facebook. In spite of many people expressing sadness that they’d no longer see my “reasoned rants”, I began to feel my public sociopolitical opinions taking on a vindictive, malicious tone rather than just constructive anger. I definitely found myself posting for reaction rather than dialogue. It’s an unintentional (I believe) side-effect of this sort of attention economy that driving users to post with likes and arguments in mind leads to a definitive dumbing-down of expression, sometimes bordering on (if not directly delving into) radicalization. I didn’t feel like a good person on Facebook.

On top of all that, I realized how susceptible I am to the tricks social media uses to mine attention. I definitely fall prey to the micro-doses of dopamine that come along with every little notification, and I can see an unambiguous effect on my depth of concentration. If I’m ever going to be a serious writer, I can’t do that if I can’t keep my mind on task for extended periods of time, and social media is designed to train a person’s brain away from deep thinking and into constant, shallow distraction.

These thoughts simmered in my brain for a long time before I came across an episode of The Ezra Klien show where the founder of Vox Media interviews Cal Newport, author of the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It’s a great springboard toward understanding social media’s effect on your brain, and a show I suggest everyone listen to. Here’s the link to that episode. Of similar interest, I’d suggest checking out episode 71 of Waking Up with Sam Harris, entitled What Is Technology Doing To Us?, as well as episode 68 of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, entitled Shadenfacebook.

After listening to that first podcast, I had a conversation with my cover artist, Carmen Sinek (www.toomanylayers.com), about this very subject. She’d been struggling with a lot of the same thoughts and issues as I had, and sent me links to several books on the subject. I haven’t read them yet, but I know Newport’s Deep Work is on the list, as well as Thomas Sterner’s The Practicing Mind and Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. All three are atop my TBR pile at the moment while I struggle to work myself into a routine that will train my brain for more productive, rewarding work.

Facebook, like any good company vying for your attention, makes it somewhat difficult to delete your account. It’s not a straightforward process, and after requesting the deletion, they purposely give you two full weeks to recant your decision, reminding you that all you have to do is log back in and everything will go back to “normal”. I didn’t recant, and my account was officially, permanently deleted over this last weekend.

I’m genuinely relieved. There are some things – like inviting friends to get-togethers at my house – that will become distinctly more inconvenient, for both me and my friends. Those inconveniences are worth exorcising the specter of Facebook and its inexplicable hold on my psyche. It’ll be a tough road for a little while, while I train my brain to live without it, to find constructive things to fill the time I’ve regained, to move past the need for constant distraction.

It hasn’t quite worked, yet. In the last two weeks since I requested the deletion, I’ve definitely found myself hovering in spaces that can begin to offer me the same sort of mindless distraction I found in Facebook. Over time, I hope to fill that time and space with deeper, more thoughtful creative work. Something that improves and fulfills me. Until then, you’ll probably see me on Twitter (@GeekElite) and Reddit (Luke_Matthews) a lot more than I should be.

But never again on Facebook.

No comments

What They Want

  By , ,

They deride progressives
to demonize progress.
They use SJW as a pejorative
to demonize justice.
They sneer at triggers
to demonize empathy.
They call us snowflakes
to demonize individuality.
They loathe political correctness
to demonize kindness.
They invent alternative facts
to demonize reality.

They only consider these things weaknesses
because they lack the strength
to uphold them.
They don’t just want us silent
They need us subservient.
Crushed under a bootheel of authority
so fragile even our simple togetherness
erodes it.

But our reality is objective.
A place where
kindness is strength
individuality is sacred
empathy is powerful
justice is necessary
and progress is INEVITABLE

No comments

In Memoriam: Gremlin Matthews, 1999-2016

  By

I dreaded writing this post. It took me two weeks to drum up the courage to write it, and another week and a half to push through posting it.

A few weeks ago, our wonderful cat Gremlin passed away. Gremlin was an old fart – he was 17, which is the equivalent of something like 85 in cat years – and he was ill. We’d been treating him for diabetes and after about four months, he went into remission (something unique to feline diabetes). It didn’t last long; his diabetes came back. Daily glucose tests, infrequent insulin shots, prescription diet. And he did really well. Gremlin was a total champ when it came to his glucose tests, which involved taking a blood sample from one of his paw pads. He didn’t even care. I could flip him onto his back on my lap and get the entire test done in a matter of seconds while he just laid there and purred. Our vets constantly told us how lucky we were to have a cat that tolerated it so well. He didn’t just tolerate it, he practically ignored it.

Suddenly, in the last few months, his glucose levels spiked and we were giving him shots every day, sometimes twice per day. We took him to the vet and they diagnosed him with pancreatitis, a fairly common affliction for diabetic cats. Unfortunately there’s not a real “cure” for pancreatitis, you just have to treat the symptoms and manage flare-ups.

Days after the diagnosis, before we were even able to start treatment in earnest, something went wrong. Gremlin was even more lethargic than normal over the weekend, so I called and made another vet appointment for him. He went downhill fast, forcing us to take him into the emergency vet that Sunday night, where they told us his breathing was irregular – he was breathing through his mouth, which is really bad for cats because they’re obligate nose-breathers. X-rays revealed fluid in his chest cavity, in and around his lungs.

This prompted the single hardest discussion I’ve had in my entire life. The weighing of options, and determination of Gremlin’s quality of life. There were a number of things that could’ve caused the effusion, most prominently congestive heart failure. I won’t recount and relive the long – almost three-hour – back-and-forth with the vet, but we came to the difficult conclusion that basically anything that would cause this kind of effusion was a serious issue that would result in a ton of vet visits, testing, and rigorous treatment… none of which guaranteed any kind of improved quality or length of life for Gremlin.

This all happened very late at night. Initially, we were going to move Gremlin to our primary vet in the morning, possibly have them do a chest tap (where they insert a needle and drain the fluid from his chest) and see what other kinds of tests could be done. We never made it that far.

We got a call a little after 2am from the emergency vet, telling us that the diuretics they were giving Gremlin with the intent to pharmaceutically drain some of the fluids inhibiting his breathing just weren’t working; a very bad sign. His breathing was getting worse, even in an oxygen box. He wasn’t going to get better without putting him through a spate of risky procedures, made even riskier by his already less-than-stellar health and age. We couldn’t bear to put our wonderful cat through any of that on a vague hope supported entirely on uncertainties. That would’ve been selfish.

Gremlin was the first animal in my life that was truly mine. Sure, I’d grown up with animals all my life, but they were always taken care of by my parents. So, while they were part of my family, they weren’t solely my responsibility. Gremlin was my cat. My responsibility. My family member. My friend.

gremlin_001We picked up Gremlin and Bastion in 1999, during our first anniversary. For the first several years of our marriage, we traveled to Victoria, BC for vacation. Normally, we’d drive to Port Angeles, WA to catch the ferry, but this time our trip was slightly delayed. We missed the last boat out by literally minutes, stranding us in Port Angeles overnight.

With not much to do in Port Angeles, we decided to seek out a pet store and just go look at animals. We honestly weren’t looking to buy any, we just wanted a distraction. In our talks about animals, we had decided that our first purchase would be two kittens. We both wanted cats, but we also wanted them to have company so if we were away, we wouldn’t be leaving a solitary cat alone. When we walked into the pet store, we approached their cat area and saw two 7-week-old white and grey kittens, snoring away, the last two of their litter.

We fell instantly in love. It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve thought something truly felt like a sign.

gremlin_002We asked to see them, each picked one up, and they sunk their hooks into our hearts the moment we touched them. Christina immediately knew Bastion was “hers”, and I felt the same way about Gremlin (even though we didn’t have names for them yet). We even traded holding each of them several times, just to be absolutely sure which ones we were attached to, and from that first moment on those attachments never faded or changed. The problem was that we were about to go on a week-long vacation, and couldn’t take them with. So, we paid for them (only $10 each!) and left them in the pet store to pick up on our way home.

As we spent time in Victoria, we couldn’t stop thinking about them. We ended up cutting our vacation short just so we could take them home.

At first, their coloring was so similar we could only tell them apart by Gremlin’s black nose (Bastion’s was pink). As they grew older, they grew more distinct, Bastion maintaining a slender, lithe form while Gremlin got heavy, at one point hitting sixteen pounds. Gremlin was always the alpha of the two, definitely dominant. The two of them always curled up together, but it was always on Gremlin’s terms. Gremlin would sometimes assert his dominance by hissing or swiping at Bastion. This was especially prominent when Midnight joined the family, and they would get into little fights about who she was cuddling with. But the rifts never lasted long. They were very close their whole life.

gremlin_003He accepted Midnight into the family without even a thought. Their adjustment period was only hours, and they curled up with each other the first night they were able. Gremlin was like our family’s animal ambassador. Although he was initially very wary of Colt (which, combined with Midnight’s hostility and Bastion’s aloofness, made Colt very gun-shy of cats), he was the only cat to ever try to actively befriend Colt. He’d approach Colt for attention, try to play with him, and even walk back and forth under Colt’s midsection to try and make nice. Even though Colt was scared and not having any of it, Gremlin continued to try. I even got them to lay on the same bed a few times, without too much coaxing.

gremlin_005In my life, I’ve had well over 10 cats, starting from when I was very young. I can say, definitively, Gremlin was the best of them. He was affectionate, but not needy. Confident, but not aloof. Playful, but not manic. He was the most cuddly, warm, loving cat I’ve ever had the privilege of caring for. He loved unconditionally, and was unconditionally loved. He’s irreplaceable, and that’s the hardest part for me.

His loss has affected our whole household. Christina’s torn apart by it, Midnight no longer has any brothers to curl up with, and Colt has lost the only cat who ever showed him affection. I found, after he passed, that Gremlin was effectively a therapy animal for me, without me even knowing it. He and I had a very strong, unique bond. Whenever I was angry or sad or depressed, all it took to settle my mood was to interact with Gremlin. Sometimes, I’d just lay my head on his side and listen to him purr. Others, I’d sit in my favorite chair and he’s just come curl up on my lap.

There was no place in the world Gremlin would rather have been than curled up on me. He slept next to my pillow, or cuddled up on my chest or side, almost every night for the last 17 years. If I was sitting somewhere, it was almost guaranteed that Gremlin would show up and claim his space on my lap. If he couldn’t climb up on me, I could be sure he’d be somewhere very nearby.

gremlin_004There was something specifically comforting about Gremlin’s attention. It never felt like he was demanding attention from you… instead it was like he was paying attention to you. It’s a feeling that’s almost impossible for me to articulate, because it felt so special. So human. I’ve never in my life had a bond with an animal as strong as what I had with Gremlin. Without him, the world is a much harder place to deal with, to accept. He was with me for my entire adult life. Losing him, for me, is like losing a piece of myself.

I know, intellectually, we made the right decision for Gremlin. My heart still tears me a part over it, though. Some people will tell you that it’s somehow easier to lose an animal when you make the decision yourself, but for me, that’s a lie. Although I can be glad he’s no longer suffering, there has been nothing easier or nicer or more comforting about this. With the exception of my parents, this has been the single hardest loss I’ve ever dealt with. The thought of it tortured me before he fell ill, and eviscerated me when there was no other choice left. I’m broken.

Gremlin was my all-time favorite cat. The best animal friend I’ve ever had; likely ever will have. I don’t think, even with the words I’ve written here, I can ever appropriately express how truly awesome he was, or the void his passing has left in my life. I am sustained only by the idea that in whatever afterlife you may believe in, he and his brother are finally reunited. And that some day, maybe, I’ll get to see them again.

We miss you so much, Gremlin, and we will always love you. You are in our hearts, forever.

gremlin_006

No comments

We Can’t Allow Ourselves To Forget History

  By ,

I refuse to be open to the possibility of a milder, gentler Donald Trump. Everyone who opposes him should refuse.

Now, I’m not saying we should oppose other citizens of our country (unless they’re being bigoted, sexist fuckwads, then feel free to oppose). I do think that the swath of people who voted Trump into office voted for hatred, bigotry, misogyny, isolationism, and nationalism. I won’t give them leeway on that. But I also believe that they are not exempt from the fallout of Trump’s election. You can say all you want that “they” deserve what they get with Trump, but the problem is that we ALL get Trump, not just them. The focus of our ire should not be on Trump voters, but on the man himself.

The rhetoric Trump spread during his campaign is nothing short of disastrous. Given half an opportunity to implement the things he’s talked about, he will usher in an era of nationalism, isolationism, and bigotry scarily akin to Hitler’s Germany.

It sucks to say that. It sucks to think it, to feel it, to know it. None of us – not even liberals like me – *want* to think that of our country. It’s not just frightening, it’s demoralizing. It makes us feel filthy inside, even if we didn’t vote for him.

The internet is famous for its hasty and spurious references to Hitler. So much that it’s been immortalized in Godwin’s Law. And that might be the problem, actually: We’ve spent so much time hearing idiots and assholes use Hitler as a baseless troll or a joke that when his values and policies are echoed in the highest stations of our nation’s government, we are either blind to it, or willfully resist the association.

But the comparisons are too close. We can’t forget history, lest we be doomed to repeat it. Only this time, we’d be magnifying history through the lens of a country four times Germany’s size and with exponentially more global influence.

Austrians and Germans thought Hitler was a blusterous buffoon who was merely using rhetoric for political gain, thinking he wouldn’t follow through once in power. When he came to power, the politicians surrounding him thought it best to give him a chance, thinking he was inexperienced enough that they could control him. Media dismissed his racist, nationalist rhetoric as theater.

Sound familiar?

Take a moment to read this Daily Beast article about Hitler’s rise, and try to tell me the similarities aren’t striking and horrifying.

Trump doesn’t need to be experienced to become the next Hitler. All he needs is for media and society to attempt to normalize him and his positions, for politicians to go easy on him, for citizens to back off long enough to “see if his actions match his words”. The problem is that his actions are what will destroy us. If we give him that length of rope, he’ll hang all of us with it. Even if we don’t think he’s got the wherewithal to do it himself, he’ll surround himself with a cabinet that can. Hitler did. Incompetent people can make terrible history given enough power.

A lot of conservatives right now are drawing false equivalencies between Trump and basically any other conservative politician. As a liberal, I can tell you that I would absolutely not have this attitude if it were Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Marco Rubio up there right now (maybe Ted Cruz, though, but probably not even him). I would absolutely not have had this attitude with Mitt Romney or even John McCain. Trump is different. Equating him to other candidates isn’t just specious, it’s outright dangerous.

Giving him space emboldens his positions. Gives him the power to act before we realize what’s happened. Gives him a chance to become the fascist we all imagined he’d become. I know I’m not the first person to say this, nor even the most eloquent or educated. But I have to say it. I can’t just sit on it for fear of the response.

Don’t normalize him. Don’t give him space. Don’t offer him the chance to send us down that path. Stay vigilant.

One Comment

The Knot In My Chest

  By ,

I’ve awoken the last few days with a rock in my chest. I’m clearly not the only one; everyone around me is just a little more frazzled, a little more distant, a little more afraid. The media is already trying desperately to paint the picture of a more reasonable Trump (I say “more reasonable”, but that’s such a low bar as to not really matter), trying to normalize the horror of what we’ve done here.

The knot in my core is ever-present, fueled partially by anger, but mostly by fear. My wife and I have spoken almost every day since the election about what comes next, and we can’t seem to come to any solid conclusion. We just know that both of us are afraid. While we were talking on Wednesday afternoon, discussing the things that frightened us most and attempting to highlight the good things in our lives to cling to, there was a pause in our conversation and my wife looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, simply, “I’m a woman.”

It might seem odd, or stupid, or obvious, but the words were an expression of every fear that Trump’s election has brought to the surface. She’s looking at a world where the leader of our country sees her as sub-human, and it broke my heart. I feel like I want to say more, but that moment is now so indelibly scarred into my memory that I’m not even sure I can articulate it. It is, honestly, not my place.

In the grand scheme of people in danger from Trump’s presidency, I don’t really rate. I’m a late-30’s white male, about as privileged as one can get, and not technically the target of the wave of hate extending out from the election’s splash. Yet, I’m still bone-shakingly afraid. My political views (primarily liberal-leaning) have put me in the crosshairs, too. I’ve been called a “libtard”, a “useful idiot”, a “cuck” – all buzzwords of the Radicalized Right that tilted this election. It wasn’t until yesterday, though, that I realized where a lot of my real fear is rooted.

In my lifetime, I’ve come to realize that many (read: most) conservatives – even the ones who might not consider themselves part of the alt-right extreme – harbor a core disdain for artists. Oh, they’ll partake in art – listen to music, read books, watch movies and TV, maybe even go to plays or buy artwork or photography. Their dichotomy is to engage in art while viewing the careers of artists invalid. I’ve had direct personal experience with conservatives telling me I should not be able to write as a career, that it’s “not a real job”, and because it’s not, it’s not a positive contribution to society.

To them, art is a hobby, and there is no value in it being a career. My skills as a writer are not useful unless being applied to a corporate job or business venture. And that’s the inherent hypocrisy I’ve seen from conservatives in my lifetime: an emphasis on the importance of entrepreneurship and individuality while simultaneously deriding anyone who isn’t part of a corporate system. It’s an amount of cognitive dissonance I can’t even fathom.

I realized, yesterday, that a Trump Presidency very likely means the death of my writing career in the womb. Under liberal leadership, art can be a career, the means and end together. Under conservative leadership – especially extreme right leadership – art only exists as rebellion.

Many of you reading this will key on that word, offering advice akin to “Well, then, rebel.” I’m still trying to figure out how that fits into my life, my psyche. As a white man, I’ve not had to endure the life of rebellion that so many marginalized people have lived every single day. I am, I think, still in shock, mourning in the quagmire of uncertainty where there was once stability.

I know, both intellectually and emotionally, that I am not endangered here like so many others. Others like my wife who, in spite of being solidly middle-class and white, is part of the 51% demographic that will see a definitive threat to their physical, mental, and social well-being. Like my gay friends, whose marriages are now on the chopping block. Like my trans friends, whose very existence is seen as an existential threat. Like the Muslims I know, who face the very real threat of deportation and mass violence.

I know I am not those people. And I know I will stand up for them and beside them in whatever ways I can. But sharing my own fear is the only way I know how to even try to move past it, to become productive again. To try to write again. Because, over the last five days, the conservative attitude toward my art has been validated and normalized by the election of their own demagogue. In a time when I know, intellectually, I should stand up and make myself heard, I find myself questioning the validity of my art, of my choices. Questioning its value. Questioning my self-worth.

I’m hoping for some level of catharsis from this writing. I can look at this blog post and say to myself I’ve used my words as and expression of my fears, and that’s helpful. I haven’t yet summoned the strength to just barrel back into the work – like I desperately need to – and I’m hoping this will help. I’m hoping I can find the strength to stop worrying about my art as a career, and engage in it as my own personal form of rebellion. I guess I won’t know until I click “Publish”.

No comments

Fear, Numbness, and Openness

  By , ,

Note: The feature image for this post has nothing to do with the post at all. It’s just a picture of the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport, Oregon. A place that equates to serenity for me, so the image reminds me of that serenity in a time where I’m struggling to find it.

I keep a word document on my desktop entitled “Blog Post”, formatted in a way that makes it easy for me to open up, write, and transfer the words to my blog. This morning, I opened up this document and deleted the text that remained there from my “I Voted” post.

It seems fitting.

I’m truly at a loss for words right now (at least, as of this sentence). I’m hoping I’ll find them as I write this, so just be warned this post might ramble a bit. I just don’t know what to think about my home country right now, or the future of the world we live in. Two days ago, I felt like we stood on a precipice, ready to fall. Today, I know we did not just fall, we jumped. The fear I felt before this election has been replaced by horror, and a strange grieving numbness I can’t seem to shake. I don’t even have room for anger right now.

We elected Donald Trump our President.

I feel like I have to put that down in words to make it real. Because it has to be real for me. I don’t have the luxury of ignoring it or pretending it’s a fantasy or a nightmare. It’s a real thing that has happened in my country, in my world. And I still don’t understand it.

If there’s one part of Trump’s campaign I do understand, it’s the message that drove it home. Not the overt racism and misogyny, but the idea of crumbling infrastructure and rural towns in danger. It’s a message that resonates with a lot of folks who’ve been led to believe that “liberals” don’t actually care about those things (we do). It’s a message driven home by the heads of the GOP for years, by more qualified and intelligent candidates than Trump. It’s a message driven home by (sometimes) legitimate fears (although bolstered by illegitimate fears of “outsiders”). And I believe the contingent of voters who are just looking for a way to change the paradigm in rural America won him the Presidency.

(But not without the help of people who were either purposely or blindly following their party line, regardless of the figure at its head.)

I won’t excuse the fact that those voters are willing to ignore Trump’s blatant sexism and bigotry, but it’s not the part that confuses me the most. The part that just baffles me to my core is that any of those people actually believe that Trump has the power, knowledge, wherewithal, or ability to actually make the changes he so cavalierly promises. He just plain can’t, and won’t, do the things he says he’s going to do. He doesn’t give a solitary fuck about the people of this country, and never will. Trump believes in only one thing: himself. It has always seemed so obvious to me. He’s a liar. A con-man. A classic huckster.

And our nation fell for it. Tens of millions of people fell for it, radicalized, and brought a Trump presidency to fruition, while enough of us who know better, who see him for what he his, failed to mobilize against that radicalized tide. We’re here, in numbers, I know it, but we were lazy and overconfident. We underestimated the power of willingly blind faith.

This was the first Presidential election I ever voted in. Never in the past has a Presidential election had much of a direct effect on my life. I completely understand that comes from a place of privilege, but as I looked upon our previous candidates, even when I saw policies and values I didn’t necessarily agree with, I saw men of intelligence and reason. I never saw a demagogue or a tyrant in the face of opposition like George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney. Opposing viewpoints, sure, but never fascism or even anything near its like. Austerity, at worst. I was moved to finally vote in this election for two reasons:

1. I did see fascism in Donald Trump’s positions, in his words, in his frightening echo of tyrants past. I saw his lies and his bigotry and the hatred and divisiveness in his heart.

2. I saw in Hillary Clinton a historic chance for this country to continue the progress we’ve worked so hard to build. To become “Stronger Together”. To elect our first woman President, and show the world we weren’t as problematic as everyone thinks we are. To move forward.

I thought, naively, perhaps, that if someone as ambivalent as I’ve been was moved to vote, certainly there would be enough others. I was so very wrong.

I never voted in the past because I – correctly or not – never believed my vote mattered. I was hypocritical in that way, because I disliked that opinion when others voiced it, but held that very belief in private. My wife very pointedly exposed that hypocrisy in me, opening a wound that I saw fit to close by registering to vote, and participating in my first election, with the intent to continue voting in the future. But there’s a new wound there, in my psyche, bred now of that same cynicism, telling me my vote doesn’t matter because in this case, it didn’t. This might be the hardest thing to push past, for me.

I know people who will be directly impacted by the hateful policies that Trump – with his now Republican-controlled Congress and whatever Supreme Court Justice he appoints – will have carte blanche to invoke. Even if Democrats take back the House or Senate in the 2018 mid-terms, that Supreme Court has the power to cause direct harm for decades coming. The only hope is that the moderate Republicans who opposed Trump during the election have the strength to stand against him when his policies are overtly harmful. But that’s a very, very slim hope.

Hope is what I lack. I don’t know how to move forward when I don’t see a clear path through. I don’t know how to continue trudging away at my daily life when it all feels so insignificant. I feel broken. Trod upon. And feeling that way as a relatively privileged white male, I can’t even fathom how women, Muslims, and people of color feel right now (and I won’t speculate, because that’s not my story to tell).

I’m horrified. I’m numb. The last fifteen or more years of my life has been about becoming better, becoming more open, and opening myself to the world through writing and social media. Expanding my bubble to become more inviting and inclusive. I still want to move in that direction, but now I’m so frightened by the presence of 59 million people who voted for fascism, I fear my only coping mechanism might be to simply contract. To build a shell and hide within it; to eschew trust in the absence of hope.

Because I have a reputation, you see. One that I’ve never been able to fully break. A stereotype of abrasiveness. A shadow of exclusion from my twenties that now, as I approach forty and have completely erased within myself, still darkens my path. If I haven’t been able to make those around me see the openness I’ve cultivated after years of living in a society that had finally started to praise it as a virtue, how am I supposed to leave myself vulnerable in a society that threatens to preach isolationism?

I know in my head I need to be strong. Both my head and my heart are failing to find reservoirs of strength to draw upon, though. My wife is a pillar of strength in my life, but she’s just as devastated as I am right now. Perhaps moreso, because this was also her first vote, and she was ecstatic to vote for the first woman President. Hillary would’ve been her President. We’re both broken stones, standing only by leaning on one another. And that doesn’t leave me much strength for anyone else.

All I can do is try. My life contracts down to very few things: caring for my wife, caring for our animals, putting words on paper, and recreation if I can bear it. I will try my hardest to be available to my friends, and fellow gamers and writers, to anyone I know who needs a friend. If you’re one of the people who thinks I’m abrasive or standoffish or intimidating, all I can give you right now are my words, to tell you that I’m here, I’m open, and I would rather move forward with you than suffer and stew alone, or let you do the same.

I’m not comfortable with vulnerability, so I’m not exactly sure what shape this offer will take, but I just know I can’t stand by and not make it. Beyond that, I don’t know where I’ll go or what I’ll do. Right now, I’m hoping this will be enough. It has to be enough.