I'm getting to the end of The Years of Rice and Salt. While it's excellent as a story, I also get the sense it's painstakingly researched and corroborated compared to most alternate history. Not because of an abundance of detail but a distinct lack of it.

Robinson uses a very broad brush to outline how world events progress over the book's huge timeline, but goes into very little detail about what this very different world looks or feels like, or the texture of the cultures in different places. This is probably because a whole ton of work went into building logical historically based rationale for why events would play out the way they do in the novel, why certain cultures end up expanding or contracting in territorial holdings the way they do.

That psychic friction you feel? That sense of growing frustration about everything that nevertheless eludes you when it comes to providing a definite reason or culprit behind your pain? It’s the slow realization that the ways you traditionally engaged with politics and felt like you were having some kind of small influence of which levers got pulled don’t work anymore.

You have no control. The funny thing is that you never did. The levers you thought you were manipulating were hooked up to nothing.

They’re dabbing on us.

The continued existence of the USPS isn’t just under credible threat, it’s already being dismantled. Despite all of our quarantine-addled brains, a few of us might remember the story from a few weeks ago (or five years ago, I can’t remember) that a bunch of post offices were planning to cut hours to save money. More recently were the reports that blue boxes are being removed in Washington towns -- in an election year -- due to “low utilization” and mail-in ballots may not “arrive in time” for November.

I don’t like to blog about politics, but whatever.

I’m a 2008 college graduate. A 2008 grad in journalism no less. When I got my diploma the world wasn’t ending, it had ended and ceased to exist months before I even walked onto the podium. Everyone in our tiny J-school had been warned for years that journalism jobs were dwindling, that we would have to work harder than we ever had in our lives just to get one grubby foot in the door. We almost certainly would have to move out to the middle of nowhere and report on local Little League games for several years before getting in somewhere that wouldn’t make you want to place a .22LR cartridge on your clapboard desktop and press your forehead down on it until it fired. And yet I persisted.

I didn’t have a full-time salaried job with insurance until 2012. By that time I was 25. The job was not in journalism.

I’ve come full circle on evaluating art. For a long time I slipped into the trap of over-indexing on structure and pacing of narrative. Not to say these things are never important, but neither should they be a universal rubric to evaluate every narrative work by. Not everything under the sun that’s worthwhile excels or even cares about that rubric, and a lot of stuff that could be praised for “concise three-act plotting” and “tight character arcs” is, in practice, boring as fuck.

In its worst incarnation it becomes a straitjacket for your brain, reducing your brain’s range of motion and pulling you away from potential new ways of thinking and new modes of creative expression because they’re “sloppy” and “go nowhere.”

I call it the Red Letter Media Trap.

Contrary to popular belief I don’t craft opinions to deliberately butt up against friction points, creating just the right amount of abrasiveness to get attention. Of course, me making that statement is me using typical reverse-REVERSE psychology so maybe in fact yes, that is exactly what I do. Draw your own conclusions.

Galaxy brain arguments aside, one thing I feel like I have to clear the air about is my take on media set in World War 2. More specifically, how can I make outrageous claims about bombastic, trivializing pop works like Kantai Collection or Girls und Panzer being far more innocent than certain films that have been deemed as being “significant”? Obviously I’m just being contrarian again. Obviously I just have a terminal case of internet irony-poisoning. Obviously I’m a closet rightist worming my way into circles of progressive anime fans to sow confusion where consensus should be clear. Right?

I used to think I was the only one who felt this way. Thankfully that’s not the case.

To me, there’s much more value from both a representation standpoint as well as an artistic one to have more speculative fiction in settings that are something other than a reheated version of 14th century England and France with magic dribbled on top like off-brand sriracha on a gas station breakfast burrito. Stridently demanding that nonwhite characters be fitted into stories led and driven by white people in white settings seems, for a couple of reasons, much less valuable. It’s also pretty unseemingly.