15 Comments
So I’m just going to come out and say it: My favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Conundrum.” It’s episode fourteen of season five, and I just deeply love it.
I don’t know if it’s because I literally just assumed Erich Anderson’s Commander McDuff was a random Enterprise officer of the week (which we saw quite often during the show) when I watched it as a kid during the original run, so the twist actually worked on eleven year old me. I don’t know if it’s because I just like a good “everyone has amnesia” story. I don’t even know if it’s just because it’s a good Ro Laren episode. I don’t know if it’s just because we learn that Starfleet doesn’t give a crap about lasers.
I just like it. It’s neat.
And I rewatched it last night, and feel that it holds up — which is why I found it deeply weird that the folks who wrote the episode actually think it’s not that good. My favorite episode of the entire seven season run of the show was a failure according to the folks who wrote it.
And maybe, as a writer and creator, I should remember that.
Like the hardest part of releasing creative works to the public is that often, after a while, I’ll start to judge those things far more harshly than when I first made them. Or I’ll compare it to the potential I thought an idea had in my head. And if I don’t reach that potential, I’ll think of it as “bad” — when it might just be slightly different than that idea. I have one hundred percent published stories that I thought were just sort of okay and later had someone tell me how much it meant to them to read it.
*cough*I Hate November*cough*
So I should make sure I remember Conundrum. That one of my favorite things to rewatch is considered one of those failures by its creators. That the things I make might have value, just not in the way I originally thought they should.
It’s just sort of how things work out.
Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches’ Collective’s April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!
I’m going to be on a panel that should start about fifteen minutes into the event, hosted by my friend Alex Wrekk (creator of the zine Brainscan and author of Stolen Sharpie Revolution). The other folks on the panel are Lane Smith (author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World) and Lee Cotman (author of The Good Enough Pagan Newsletter). We’re going to be talking about book publishing and demystifying the process of getting stuff into print.
I think it’s going to be fun time. I really like CTWC, but haven’t had the chance to do something with them since I was on a panel at CritWitchCon a few years ago. So when Alex asked me if I wanted to do this panel, I said yes as soon as I saw the message.
So yeah, join us and spend a Saturday morning listening to witches talk about books. It should be a good time.
First off, I stopped by “Collector Con,” a small con held at the Lismore in downtown Eau Claire. For those of you know my history with conventions, you’d know that when that place was a Ramada it was home to No Brand Con for five years in the late 2000s. I was only there for an hour or so, but it was my first time back in that convention center since I was twenty-nine years old. Like literally the last time I was there was a month before Crysta and I moved to Indiana in 2010.
Which was almost exactly fifteen years ago.
It’s a strange thing to return to a place like that. The room felt smaller than I remembered it, but it’s largely unchanged for better or for worse. It makes me miss running No Brand Con in the space. It never really felt the same after the con moved out of Eau Claire, and even though it felt great that last year in Stevens Point, nothing compares to home sometimes I guess.
Afterwards, I headed over to a friend’s house to hang out with a bunch of old friends from my early twenties. A group of three of my friends (all named David) have been regularly getting together as “The Council of Davids” for dinner for a while, and they’ve started inviting more and more of us to join them. It was a lovely evening talking with old friends (some of whom I haven’t seen in years), a just being social was, frankly, nice.
I have spent the last chunk of my life being a bit of a shut in, and I didn’t use to be. I’m at heart a social being, and I think I need to train myself to have the energy to get out more again. I, believe it or not, am happier when I actually spend time around other humans.
It’s easy to forget when sitting at home is often so much easier.
So in Wisconsin the April 1st Spring election is in less than two weeks, and it’s a doozy. It’s our first major election since the garbage fire that happened last November, and here in America’s Dairyland we have a massively impactful major race on the ballot: a State Supreme Court seat.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is currently held by the left by a single seat, so the outcome of this race will determine the balance of the court. On the left we have Susan Crawford, and on the right there’s Brad Schimel. While this is, in theory, is a nonpartisan election… let’s not kid ourselves. Nothing ever is anymore, especially when the stakes are as high as this one. It is vital that we elect Susan Crawford.
This court will make many decisions that affect our daily lives. This court is what will decide whether or not Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban is legal or not. This court will either stand up for Wisconsinite’s rights or bow to Trump’s every whim.
And Elon Musk is pouring millions into Schimel’s campaign. Whether this is because he’s doing so for ideological reasons or if it’s just because Tesla is going to have a case in front of the court soon is hard to tell, but either way a billionaire who’s likely barely set foot in the state thinks he gets to decide how we live our lives. He thinks he can buy this election.
But as far as I’m concerned, we’re not for sale.
So I beg you, if you live in Wisconsin make sure you vote. It’s so, so important. Frankly, elections like this have way more impact on people’s lives than they realize. Like also on this ballot is the State Superintendent, and it’s really important that we re-elect Jill Underly. And you probably have things like city council, school board, and other local races on your ballot.
Those local races dictate a lot about what happens in your community, and have a much larger impact on your daily life than you realize. Like the book bans you read about happening in some parts of the country? A lot of that happens at the city government level. Who’s on your local city council or school board is what makes the difference.
We always vote absentee, and I put our ballots in the mail today. I’ll be tracking it over on MyVote to make sure it arrives with our local clerk safely. I can’t emphasize how important this is and how vital it is we all show up on this one.
So I talked about this on my Tumblr and my TikTok (and cross posted stuff to Bluesky and YouTube), but it would be deeply ironic if I didn’t post something about it here on my actual blog/site. With TikTok likely being banned in the United States in a few weeks, we’re seeing a major social platform go down. A platform where people have built community and connection. A platform people use to get new information, and which has been used to shine a light on current events in ways most people don’t normally get to see.
It may just be gone for users in the US.
And this highlights a major issue with the way people currently use the internet — it’s dependent on centralized platforms. Whether it’s TikTok, Facebook, Bluesky, and even my beloved Tumblr — everyone reserves their interactions what seems like less than a dozen sites/apps. And when everything is based on so few sites, it means that in the best case scenario we surrender control of our speech to those companies’ moderation policies or they can disappear taking down large swaths of our shared culture, content, and ability to communicate.
And that’s why what we direly need right now is to decentralize our internet experiences. You need to build your own shit, and you need to do it now.
This blog that you’re reading (whether its on my main site or one of the comics I write/wrote’s page) is hosted on my own site. I pay every month for some shared server space, and run my own blog software. For most folks, within a few clicks they can get a WordPress installation running on it and build their own online presence.
Now, I know that’s not feasible for everyone, so the other option is just starting a blog on a smaller blogging site. It’s not as good, but it’s better than the current system.
Now, you might be asking yourself, how do I follow people when they’re all posting to separate websites. The answer is simple: the humble RSS feed.
For those unfamiliar, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are effectively a list of updates to a site — sometimes full text, sometimes just summaries. If you listen to podcasts, you actually use these all the time as they’re the backbone of how podcasts operate. All you have to do to follow folks is find a good RSS reader (I use Thunderbird since I already use it as my email client). There are apps for every platform under the sun.
Likewise, we need to start building forums again. We’ve tried starting this with Nerd & Tie [dot] Social ourselves, and modern forum software is easy to set up. If you can’t set one up yourself, but have a friend who can… use it. Build as many small communities as you can across the web.
Because here’s the thing, when there are only a few sites, it’s easy to destroy them. But when there are thousands — maybe even millions — of small communities and sites suddenly you can’t easily remove communities from the web.
Now is discoverability harder in this world? Yes. We’re reliant far more on word of mouth and exchanging links with eachother. But that’s what we exchange for resilience. This is how the old web worked in the 90s and most of the 2000s. We need to rebuild this kind of world, or else we will always be at the mercy and whims of politicians and billionaires.
Which is kind of bad, y’know? Let’s make a world where we all have control of our spaces, where we can spread to every nook and corner of the web.
Let’s be cockroaches.
