After a long battle with infertility my wife and I welcomed two boys into this world about 6 weeks ago. They are beautiful and challenging and gorgeous and frustrating. Being a parent to two newborns is very lovely and fulfilling and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s great.

Everyone told me that our free time would evaporate when the boys showed up because of course it would. How could it not? They can’t even poop without help.

So of course I was sure that when the kids showed up I could kiss my dream of becoming an author goodbye. When would I have time to finish the book I’ve been working on for over a year?

I’ve never been more productive.

My writing habit has been incredibly solid since we had the boys because of one simple fact:

My creative time is now incredibly scarce.

I know for a fact that I’m only going to have an hour between feeds to get anything of value done. So after feeding the boys and giving them their ‘tummy time’ (which is super fun and very cute and they hate it but too bad) I’m at my computer typing away.

Children have focused me on what matters.

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that Reddit blew up its third party api and basically forced Apollo to shut down on the same day that we had the boys. I refuse to download the Reddit app so I now have hours back in my day.

All that time is now spent focused on my writing. I will never be able to show my kids how many feet of content their dad scrolled through in a day/year/lifetime.

I will, if I’m lucky, be able to show them a hardcover book and say “Your old man made this.”

I want that outcome and I have a constant reminder of my (existential) deadline looking me in the face, pooping and peeing in my hands, and screaming at me at the top of their lungs every single day.

The only problem: I’m able to do this because right now I’m on paternity leave.

What happens after that?

Do I embrace the 5 AM Club?

I’m a night owl. During the pandemic I could barely make it to my home office for work on time. My wife, bless her heart and soul, has to wake me several times to finally get me out of bed.

But when else am I going to get shit done?

If 5 AM seems arbitrary I pulled that time slot from a book called the 5 AM club, which suggests that if you want to change your life and get ahead of all the distractions that life is going to throw at you- distractions that pull you away from what you are really meant to do- you gotta beat life at its own game.

You gotta show up to life before life has a chance to wake up.

Right now I’m up at 5 AM anyway because babies don’t give a shit about you or me or anyone, they eat when they want to eat. But when we finally finally get these kids on a sleep schedule I’m going to have a touch choice ahead of me.

Do I embrace the suck and ensure that I can get my creative work done? Or do I sit in the grove that I’ve made for myself and catch more Zs?

Part of this problem is Identity

I never saw myself as a croc- wearing, costco-shopping, lawn- maintaining, full size SUV- driving dad. Waking up early is part of that identity of traditional fatherhood that I never envisioned for myself.

If I adopt this, what else am I forced to adopt? Going to bed early? Does that mean I’m going to be lame and leave parties early? Eat dinner at 5am? What’s next? Blue plate specials?

Making these big lifestyle changes means changing the narratives that we’ve built around and for ourselves. And changing your narrative, your identity, is scary.

But if I’m going to do this whole dad thing I’m going to do it right. I’m going to go all in because that’s what my boys deserve.

But it’s also what I deserve too. I do need to keep writing, because that’s a narrative about myself that I’m not willing to let go. So if my life needs to change to fit around that so be it. I can make that choice and make my life conform to what I need it to be to fit my goals.

I’ll just have to make sure I prepare some good coffee the night before.

René is a professional charlatan and amateur writer. He’s hoping that coffee will be his salvation. Yell at him on Threads @renecwrites

I’m so into Elden Ring that for my next project I’m creating a narrative inspired by it. But to do such a thing I need to break down how, exactly, the narrative threads of Elden Ring are put together and how they work.

Now of course, Elden Ring is a video game. There’s an inherent difference in how you engage with a narrative when its interactive vs when it’s in a book.

However there are some great lessons to be learned on how information is presented in ER.

There’s so much to talk about that it would be a very long post if I went into everything I had in mind, so instead I’m doing it in parts.

Part one is on how to actually organize your story, and the method that I think lends itself most dutifully to the atmosphere of ER is the vignette.

Vignettes

Elden Ring is a series of interconnected stories or quest lines. All the side characters you meet have you going somewhere or doing something that usually involves danger and some sort of “twist” at the end.

These “twists” are told to you either directly or through environmental storytelling (more on this later).

Part of what makes these quest lines so rewarding in-game is that they don’t necessarily happen linearly (unless you specifically play them that way). You start one, maybe by accident, and then you go on and continue on your way. Eventually you run into the second part of that quest and then the third later and so on.

The serendipity of stumbling upon a loose thread is part of the charm of ER and this is enhanced by how big the map is, and therefore the scope.

The best way to capture this type of “coming across” a loose thread in a novel is by constructing your novel as a series of vignettes. The Witcher books did this to great effect, as did the first half of The Three Body Problem.

A vignette is a small section of text that’s usually not more than a few paragraphs. You tell a small story that is connected to other small stories throughout a novel.

The resulting impact is that the narrative gets a dreamy quality to it. Things are happening but not always in direct succession.

Using vignettes also allows you to hop across your world map instantly. You don’t need to detail how your character had to trudge back over mountains and over swamps. This allows you to focus explictly on the relationships between characters.

When a book is broken up into vignettes the challenge is to keep the reader engaged long enough to see the different narrative strands pay off. You can do that by grouping your vignettes into “Parts” and having all the storylines conclude (or mostly conclude) within a single part.

Example

How to do this in practice? Let’s use some of Elden Rings quests as examples.

• Your character saves a blind maiden — Irina- from certain death on the road. She asks you to deliver a letter to her father Edgar.
• You come across a disgraced noble, Kenneth Haight, who asks you to reclaim his fort from misbegotten beasts.
• Your character plunges into Castle Morne to fight the misbegotten. There you learn about the treatment the misbegotten suffered. Nevertheless, you slay the beasts to deliver the letter to the father.
• You encounter Edgar as he’s discovered the remains of his daughter. He vows revenge.
• You approach Fort Haight and slay the misbegotten for the promise of riches from Haight, but mostly taking your part of the vengeance for Irina.
• Haight pays you with a dagger, and the promise of a festival in the “near future”. You wonder if the revenge was truly worth it. Perhaps your character even feels remorse over the treatment of the misbegotten and questions their role in this world.

This would all be one Part of a novel, and in the next part you would have a new series of vignettes, with a new underlying theme and set of characters.

Of course characters can show up across parts to add a single narrative thread to your overall novel, but you want to be selective as to who shows up repeatedly and why they do.

Vignettes free you from have to work the logistics of getting your character places and let you focus on the relationships and the themes of your stories, while also giving your story an airy quality.

There are drawbacks of course. If you want to paint an atmosphere and lean into purple prose it’s hard to do that in a vignette. Vignettes, because they are like mini-chapters, need to be to the point and punchy so any world-building or explanation of the environment needs to be done within the action of your scene.

I have more parts planned for this series. Next I plan on tackling the magic systems found in Elden Ring.

Let me know what you would want me to cover or if this was a helpful guide.

René is a professional charlatan and amateur writer. He spent way too long playing Elden Ring and needs to get a life. Yell at him on Threads @renecwrites

After nearly 30 years of changing the music scene, Daft Punk is retiring.

Beyond going through their official channels like their PR firm and agents, they released a short video to ease their fans into a world where we can’t look forward to seeing their next live performance or hearing their latest album.

It’s an incredible way to close the book on a duo that has revolutionized not just the music industry or their genre, but live performance and music videos.

I still remembering staying up past my bedtime to watch the music video/animated movie to their album Discovery:

Epilogue does a lot of work for us emotionally. It’s final. There is no mistaking that Daft Punk is going to ever return, and in a world where so many groups and solo artists say they’re going to retire and then MiRaCULousLY come back from retirement, this is a welcome change.

The way Daft Punk communicates this is just as important as the message itself.

If you haven’t already watched the video you owe it to yourself to do so. There’s a long lingering moment after the Silver Hero Robot stops in the middle of the desert, after he strips off his jacket, where it appears that he’s going to remove his helmet.

Removing the helmet would have done the work of telling a worldwide audience: It’s over. It’s done. The illusion is no more.

But it would have been the wrong move.

Taking off the helmet would have meant stealing the magic away from all these years of mystique and perfectly executed showmanship.

Yes, we all know what the musicians look like, but there has never been any kind of ceremonial removal of those helmets. Those helmets, just as much as the music and the artists themselves, are Daft Punk.

Similar to how Seasons 1–7 of Game of Thrones are now unwatchable because you know how badly the show wraps, removing the helmet would have retroactively demolished the allure of their previous work.

Don’t get me wrong: their albums withstand the test of time. The music is unquestionably good and stands on its own apart from its creators. The helmets only gave the music a kind of street-cred.

As the musicians said in an interview:

“When you know how a magic trick is done, it’s so depressing,” Bangalter explained to Pitchfork. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence.”

We know there’s people under those helmets but part of the magic of Daft Punks is that we can sort of kid ourselves into believing that the music is so good and so perfect because it wasn’t human hands that made it. It came from seemingly on-high, from robots who are skilled and programmed to do one simple thing: make incredible music.

As it transpires the Silver Hero Robot turns around and reveals a panel on his back that’s seemingly been there the whole time. Gold Hero Robot flips a switch, and Silver Hero Robot walks off into the desert to self destruct.

Daft Punk never stops being Daft Punk, even until the end.

There’s more symbolism wrapped up in Epilogue. I swear the sounds of Silver’s footsteps as he walks away to self destruct match up with the sound of the click from Giorgio by Moroder (The track which describes the origins of the House genre), and of course we get the outro to Touch at the end of the video.

I’m not sure why the Gold Hero Robot continues walking the desert. Perhaps his career will continue in a different form.

I think there’s something to be said about that outro.

Hold on, If love is the answer, you’re home.

This is the last message Daft Punk decided to leave their fans. You can interpret this any number of ways.

Maybe they’re saying that they’ve loved entertaining us for so long, and that they can wrap up their careers here leaving us wanting more.

Maybe it’s part of the storytelling. Silver had love in his robotic heart and he’s finally home now.

Or maybe it’s just a message they want to leave to the world. 2021 is a very different world than 1993 was when they started. Seeing a fracturing world breaking apart, perhaps they wanted to remind us of a simple truth they wished we’d remember.

René Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He is going to listen to Random Access Memories on repeat for a while. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button!

Welcome to Rapture

Bioshock was first released during a simpler time, 2007. To put that into perspective, that was when the first iPhone was introduced and memes were still in the BIG WHITE LETTERS format. Throwing lead and pumping plasmids into our arms in a spooky underwater world was fun and all, but I can’t help but feel that the anti-Randian/anti-capitalist message was mostly lost during the initial launch.

That’s not to say we didn’t get it. We heard what it was saying. It’s impossible to play the game and not be hammered over the head with “unregulated pursuit of financial gain = fucked up shit” but what I mean is, we couldn’t have possibly internalized the message as well as we can now.

The fact that Bioshock is being released as a remaster on the Switch, arguably the most popular gaming console during a pandemic when our conservative leaders are asking people to return to work despite the health concerns is so absolutely ironic and meta that I now have to fully believe that this is indeed some kind of angelic simulation and we’re not really here. I’m not really typing this.

But I think I’m typing this so I’ll play along.

I’m not here to talk about how well the game performs, technically speaking, on the switch, nor am I here to write a review of the game’s artistic value. That’s a given. People have been clamoring to bring the game to the latest consoles as if they weren’t just given stimulus checks and couldn’t be bothered to go buy a gaming PC as supply-side Jesus expects them to.

What I’m here to do is shove a random glowing syringe into my radial artery and pray that it gives me lightning powers and not a myriad of other infectious diseases. While I’m at it, I want to explore the themes of the game and how they play with how we as a collective American family currently on fire experience them.

So would you kindly keep scrolling?

“Is it someone new?” — Bioshock 1

Of course I’m going to make the connection between the Objectivism on overdrive (“Ooo”) displayed in Rapture and the current state of America’s handling of the Covid crises. I still see people saying “it could have been worse” and throwing a blind eye to the faults in our government’s response much the same way the people of Rapture continued taking plasmids until it drove them mad.

I remember wondering why Rapture’s denizens didn’t simply stop taking the drugs that were driving them insane but then I remembered that the DARE program in the 90s asked a similar question with dismal results and that I too would gladly drive myself mentally insane if I could throw birds out of my hand or conjure a swarm of bees (get wrecked Nicholas Cage).

They just couldn’t help themselves. You don’t need to be schooled in Keynesian economics to see the parallel in overzealous capitalism, the drive for extreme wealth from billionaires who already have so much, and the insatiable hunger for ADAM. “Everybody wants it, everybody needs it,” and one can never get enough of it without it leading to madness.

In fact you know what? This write up could be ten pages long if I try to go through all the parallels between our current economic climate and the events in Rapture leading up to its downfall so I’m just going to make a quick list:

• Andrew Ryan put the economic development of Rapture ahead of the health and wellbeing of his people.
• There was little to no class mobility in Rapture due to no economic safety nets leading to:
• Mass violent protests (do you seriously need a link to this one?)
• In addition to no safety nets the majority of the means of production were owned by a select wealthy few.

“But there’s nothing like a fist full of lightning now, is there?”

We’re all stressed out. We have good reason to be. This shit sucks in a verifiable way. The only light in my life is making a ton of bells on turnips and running raids in World of Warcraft. (Oh and my wife. I love my wife a lot.)

So why would we want to play a game that embodies and so easily demonstrates the issues that we are collectively facing right outside our doors at this very moment?

No really I’m asking you, why the fuck would you do that? Leave a comment below.

Nah I’m joshing of course but also I’m kind of not.

Animal Crossing I get. It’s like anti-capitalism because a benevolent Tanooki will buy anything, even weeds, to help you pay off a 0-down, 0-monthly payment, 0- do whatever you want I truly don’t care loan you made out to him.

Doom Eternal I also get because it’s metal af and “hell yeah brother”. It’s what you get when you combine a rootin’ tootin’ yeehaw hootnanny with skull fucking demons. It’s chill.

I think the value of descending back into Rapture right now (I refuse to use the phrase “during these unprecedented/uncertain times”) is that for 90% of the game you are an unwitting slave, controlled by the phrase “Would you kindly?”.

But despite that, throughout your time shooting up splicers in Rapture, you get the choice to Save or Harvest Little Sisters. This was one of the cooler aspects of the game, that your choices could affect the ending you saw. It’s par for the course now but remember that this game came out a long time ago- before games like The Last of Us, before Mass Effect, before a McDonald’s President.

Being able to influence how a story evolved was pretty novel. And I think now, more than ever, we want to feel a sense of choice. Like our decisions matter. I think I can speak for many when I say that we feel a sense of powerlessness right now. “What can men do against such reckless hate?” says King Theoden from Lord of the Rings. Games, especially great games, are able to impart one particular thing: a sense of autonomy.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. I’d be down to be taken back to high school, back to a time when I thought I knew what I was about. Back to that moment the first time I had a choice to Save or Harvest a little sister. I can’t remember what choice I made that first time. I’d like to remember.

Welcome back to Rapture: Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2 was all right.

Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt — Bioshock 3: Infinite

After what I just said about free choice in Bioshock 1, it’s strange that Bioshock: Infinite totally removes that. Infinite is all about Determinism. There’s always a Lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city. It still gives me chills.

Infinite steps away from exploring economic fallout and follows America’s evangelical religious zeal to its logical conclusion. Far Cry 5 and Bioshock: Infinite live in the same headspace for me, except one has super powers and the other is very Nascar hillbilly ‘merica bang-bang.

It would be easy to dismiss Infinite and its place in our hearts as a cathartic bullet trip killing all the evangelical racists but it’s more than that right now. It’s a chance to examine not just how we feel about the times we’re living in but in what way we should feel them.

There are more than a few thought pieces out there discussing the implications of Infinite’s determinism. Some are quite clever, even employing similarities between Infinite and one of my favorite plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard.

So many deterministic explorations spend a lot of time examining the implications of living in a world where free will is an illusion, delving into the macro and microeconomic impacts, the effects that this would have on our judicial and criminal justice system, what romantic relationships would amount to.

But one thing I don’t see discussed nearly as often is if all of our experiences are determined, how should we feel about them as we’re living them?.

Does it matter if this is just a ride that we are set on, a roller coaster on tracks that will always loop and tumble at the exact same place every time, if it still excites us?

What is DeWitt supposed to do, not save the girl? And if he must save the girl, should he not do it with all his might, all his will, all his birds flying out of his Goddamn hands?

If we are to live this life in this world that we have inherited, even if our choices were made for us already, wouldn’t it be better to enjoy those choices as we perceive to make them and smile while we’re on the ride?

It’s a bleak thought, but that wouldn’t mean that we are just passengers to our own lives or to what is happening in our world right now.

There is an iconic scene towards the beginning of the game where the player is given the choice to stone a mixed-race couple for their crime of loving each other. It’s a horrendous scene, but no matter what your choice is, the scene ends the same way.

Ultimately, the choice is made for you because no matter what the player picks, the couple will not be stoned, something will get in your way if you choose to throw the stone at them out of morbid curiosity.

But that doesn’t matter.

What matters is how I feel about the choice that I made, even if the choice was nothing but an illusion.

The coin toss always comes out heads. Your choice of broach when it’s offered to you, bird or cage, makes no difference.

But these choices don’t need to make a difference to the ending in order to mean something. They make the game, your experience, yours.

“Because it does. Because it has. Because it will”

If there’s always a lighthouse, always a man, always a city, and if there’s always a news story, always a political scandal, always a reason to be angry; that means that while the ending might always be the same, what matters is how we get there.

We all have choices to make with how we participate with what’s going on around us. I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong answer. If you feel like stepping out your door and joining your local protest is what you need to do, then of course that’s the right answer. But it’s also okay to sit under a blanket with nothing but the blue light of your Nintendo Switch illuminating your face if that’s what you need right now.

Your only consideration is what you’ll think of yourself in those last moments when all timelines converge. How your choices made you feel. When Elizabeth, the very personification of choice and freedom, stares you in the face before your last moments and holds you down beneath the water. If you can be at peace with the decisions you made leading up to that moment then what you’ve lived is a success.

Elizabeth dreams of being free during the events of Infinite. She dreams of Paris and safaris. She wants to escape her cage. We can all relate.

But to get that freedom she and DeWitt have to go through a lot of shit. So do we. We never get to see what Elizabeth does with her newfound freedom (what does she do for money? (see there’s that damn capitalism again, get out of here capitalism)) but if she’s anything like me, the first thing she’ll do is drink a warm beverage that she likes, in a place she loves.

One day.

René Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He is not being mind-controlled by a glowing personification of Objectivism. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button!

I’ve been having these existential panic attacks at night.

I’m sure that many people do. Those dark deep thoughts that creep in as you try to keep yourself still. It must be something about staring at a dark ceiling, the immobile air, the weight of the blankets. Am I in my coffin now?

The thing that gets me the most, the thought that always creeps in last, before I can’t take it anymore and I have to will myself to stop, is that it’s not a matter of if I die, but when. There’s no stopping it. What do I have left, 45 Christmases? 50 summers?

It scares me, but it never makes me sad exactly.It’s a fact. It’s neither here nor there. It’s nothing to get sad about but it can be something to dwell on if I let myself.

What does make me sad is thinking about my teddy bear. What’s going to happen to Teddy when I die?

It’s a silly thing to think about for sure. I’m a grown man, usually you put those kinds of objects away when you grow up.

I stopped sleeping with Teddy in college and then when I got married my wife pulled her teddy bear out and we pretended they were friends, in a playful sort of way. That evolved into sleeping with them again.

Now as death has begun to creep into my mind during this post-college oh-my-God-this-is-what-life-is part of my life, I’m thinking about what I will leave behind when I finally step into that next celestial room.

I have always personified things around me. I credit this habit of mine for many of my achievements, because I think it helped me develop a strong sense of empathy early in my childhood. I never liked it when I saw other boys demolishing their toys. What did the toys think? They were just here to have a good time. It wasn’t their fault that they were brought into a house with destructive monsters.

Disney probably didn’t help either. Toy Story still strikes me rather raw, as if this movie targeted an inner world I had developed since boyhood.

As I’ve gotten older I, of course, have put a lot of these things away.

Occasionally I still pretend that Teddy keeps the monsters away, but that’s really just a story I tell myself, a mythos that my wife and I both enjoy and laugh at.

But when I have those panic attacks at night, I realize part of what scares me are the things I leave behind when I die. What happens to them?

Will Teddy go in a box somewhere? Thrown out like trash forever in the dark?

Perhaps my family will give him to a niece or to a grandchild. But what if they lose him or don’t appreciate him? I don’t want him sitting on a shelf collecting dust. What do I owe this thing that consoled me when I was a child, afraid of the dark?

Our first toys are our first personalities

The School of Life has a great article on their blog about how stuffed animals help us speak to ourselves, rationalize our world, and realize our inner monologue.

In other words, Teddy is a physical manifestation of my psyche. No wonder I’m so concerned about his fate when I die. When I worry over him I’m really concerned about what’s going to happen to me after I pass.

Will my family cherish him/my memory? And when they die, what then? Where will Teddy/the memory of me go when everyone who loved me is dead? What will they think of this ratty object with it’s fur missing? What will they say about that great-great-grandpa who rode his bike to Alaska in ’13 and dreamed of being a writer?

When I hug this bear, am I clutching to life?

Teddy is a manufactured bunch of cloth, and at this point he probably has mites and a whole microscopic ecosystem living in him. He is a thing. Alone he means nothing.

But Teddy is still 5 year-old René’s best friend. And I guess I still love 5 year-old René. Maybe I’m afraid of letting 5 year-old René go out of fear of what happens when you forget what being a child is like. Is that the part of me that still wants to see the best in people? Is that the part of me that I will let take over when I have kids and they want to play make believe?

Maybe that’s why Teddy still means something to me now. If that’s the case, then I’ll probably keep him around. If I had it my way, I’d hold on to him for many decades to come. When I’m dead I suppose Teddy will die with me, but if he can find life in the mind of another child, then good for him.

Regardless of our fates, the best I can hope for is that Teddy and I have a good long run. That’s all any of us can ask for any way.

René Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He doesn’t always write about sad things, he promises. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button.

I watched the first two episodes of True Detective Season three at an advanced screening at Alamo Drafthouse and let me tell you, all the backwater mind-fuckery you loved about the first season is back in full force.

*Spoilers for the first two episodes of True Detective Season hree below*

The Basics

It’s readily apparent from the first establishing shot that the series is taking several pages from how Season one was organized. The narrative is familiar, two buddy, but sometimes not so buddy, detectives are trying to solve a missing persons case regarding two missing kids.

The flashback narrative structure is back. Mahershala Ali’s character, Wayne Hays, dips back in time to when he was working the case as he’s speaking in a deposition. Just like in Season one there’s been an update in the case, and prosecutors need Wayne’s help to put the right person behind bars.

There are three time periods in this story: 1980 when the kids went missing, 1990 when the deposition took place and there was an update to the case, and 2015 when Wayne is being interviewed about the case for a television program. We learn that Wayne’s memory has been fading and that he is suffering from dementia or Alzheimers, losing time and sometimes repeating himself. It’s made clear that he may not be a reliable narrator, which even just typing those words gets me far more yoked up than it has any license to.

(I mean really how dare they. I felt like I was watching Westworld again and that just brought back all my Westworld Reddit theory mongering PTSD. I have a family Pizzolatto they need me, I can’t spend my entire January holed up reading every single thread on r/TrueDetective.)

The Atmosphere

It feels good to be back in a more earthy, lower socio-economic environment for this season, after departing for the city of Vinci last season. Season one had the Louisiana bayou and swamps, a place with something to hide, with forgotten decaying landmarks and polluted waters. Season three is in Arkansas, and the woods of the Ozarks serves a healthy portion of southern gothic creepiness.

I like that True Detective focuses on poorer places. Places in the country where people may not want to look for too long. Places that people forget, or never knew about in the first place. I think that as an audience member it makes me uncomfortable to be in these places, and to watch a detective have to dig into the underbelly of a place that I as a middle-class American would rather not step into. I attribute a lot of True Detective’s success to how it has always made the setting of its story a character of its own. One that changes and grows.

We’re in the same world as Season one

At one point the woman interviewing an aging Wayne in 2015 tells him about how several pedophile rings have a symbol or a sign, “Like the crooked spiral.” Anyone who remembers the first season will remember seeing spirals appear throughout the story.

Obviously I didn’t think we were in some sort of multiverse comic book type story, but it’s interesting that they purposefully made the connection to Rust and Marty’s case. Thinking more on that it stands to reason that the Fontenot murder case got blown wide open and that perhaps more of the pedophiles that Marty and Rust were unable to nab got their due in the years leading up to 2015.

We’re being kept in the dark

Wayne’s dementia means that we can’t always trust him with what he’s telling us. It will be interesting to see how this might turn the narrative on its head in future episodes.

A funny exchange happens between Wayne and a lawyer from the DA’s office which might foreshadow what we can expect from this story (I don’t have the transcript so I’m doing this from memory, forgive me if it’s a bit off):

Wayne: “Well why don’t you just tell me what you know.”

Lawyer: “Well we don’t know what you know. So how can we tell you what we know if we don’t know what you might not know?”

Overall

The show keeps its gritty noir attitude while finding just the right moments to make us laugh. There were several moments of good wordplay or awkwardness that got good laughs from the audience that I otherwise wouldn’t have caught if I wasn’t in a group setting.

Mahershala does a great job because of course he does. He plays Wayne straight, never delving into the archetype of a tough street-smart detective. Of course, Wayne is a tough street-smart detective, but Mahershala’s a great enough actor that his performance feels original and organic without it coming across as forced. He makes it look easy and he was a brilliant choice.

Of course the same can be said for the entire cast, but as the leading man Mahershala shines. Wayne’s partner Roland, played by Stephen Dorff, has a completely different air about him, almost sinister, that plays well off of Wayne’s level-headedness. I’m excited to see how the relationship builds between them.

Jeremy Saulnier directed the first two episodes before having to leave the project due to scheduling conflicts, so I’ll be very interested to see how the other episodes feel comparatively.

This season is getting started on the right track, and I’m optimistic about the future of the series. True Detective has found its groove by returning to old forms, but rather than feeling like a copy of the first season, this feels like a fresh take on a genre that True Detective redefined in the first place.

René Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He hopes to one day escape his loop because time is a flat circle. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button!

My grandfather died a year ago. I spent a whole 28 hours crying. He’d been such an inspiration in my life, I think I saw him more Titan than human. A living legend, like Hercules, someone to emulate in my own life. He died quickly, within a month of his admittance to the hospital. His death was decisive and quick to the point, like he lived his life.

His body was still warm in his hospice bed while my mother cried into my grandmothers lap.

“Estoy preocupada por ti mamá,” she said between sobs. I’m worried about you, she was saying. “No quiero que estes sola en esta casa,” I don’t want you to be alone in this house.

My grandmother shook her head and ran her hands through my mother’s hair. My grandmother is a very small woman, skin and bones and barely more than 4' tall. But she looked regal sitting in that chair, her eyes far away as she rearranged her mental image of what her life would be now.

“Estoy bien”, she said. I’m fine. She was used to being independent. She would get along. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling, breathing deeply. No tears ran down her face. She would later tell my wife that it wasn’t for lack of sadness.

I want to cry, she said. But I have a condition, my body cannot make tears. But please believe me, I want to cry very much.

My grandmother waters her plants. She goes to church. She goes to the store. She pulls out old boxes and arranges the papers inside of them. She watches TV.

Those are her days. She enjoys them. I believe her when she tells me she enjoys them.

She fills her days rather than asking the world to fill her. It’s an active approach toward life. I’m proud for her and happy that she bounced so quickly into her new routine. I chalk it up to the grit that her generation had to quickly gather as they made their way through a less automated, more difficult time.

I’m sure she’s happy, and she has a family surrounding her to make sure she is happy and taken care of. But I do not want that life for my wife.

Do not misunderstand, I want my wife to have a long, healthy, and beautiful life. I want her to see her children grow up, get married, have children of their own, and perhaps even see those children get married.

I want my wife and I to travel the world, see incredible things as long as they are still there to be seen. I’m glad she thinks I’m funny because it means I get to make her laugh every day. I love making her laugh.

I’ve internalized the idea that it’s my job to make her life as blissful as possible and every time I make her laugh it is a victory against the drudgery life can become. It’s a job I’m more than happy to to do.

And that is why I want my wife to be the first to die between us.

I don’t want her to have to shuffle through her days, finding ways to fill her time. I don’t want her only company to be a garden which she waters, and a house covered in silence. I love that she and I can watch TV together and laugh at the same things and cringe at the same moments. It pains me to think of her sitting alone on the couch, watching something and thinking,

Oh wouldn’t he have loved this?

Or to think of her laughing at something funny she thought of and turning to laugh with me, forgetting that I’m not there anymore and that I’ll never laugh with her again.

To come home from running errands wanting to tell someone about her day, as she loves to do, and having no one there to listen to her. Ticking clocks. Passing shadows.

It breaks my heart writing this to imagine those moments, knowing that my wife would experience such things and that she would experience them alone. Her children would have left the house and her grandchildren would be too busy — too ungrateful to call, as I fail to do with my own grandmother.

I know how it sounds. It sounds selfish and wrong, and truthfully it might be. Perhaps this is the ignorance of youth speaking and when I’m older perhaps I’ll think differently. Maybe this is one of the things I write and look back on and wonder what I was thinking.

But for me, right now, life is wonderful and it is wonderful because of the woman at my side. I know she feels the same way about life and about me. I know that if I die she’ll experience immense hurt, and I would rather that I carry that hurt and that burden instead of her. I know that if I died first she would get along fine. She’s the one who knows how to cook the good meals and does the budgets and knows where everything goes in the drawers and cupboards.

But her happiness is my job, my solemn and holy vow that I made before family, friends, and God. No one else is as committed to that job than I am. If I am not there, I fear for her happiness. It is this fear that keeps me up at night.

Every night I hold my wife against me when I come to bed. She’s almost always asleep by the time I get there. I sing her a lullaby, even though she cannot hear me. I will not tell you which one. That moment in the dark is just for us, and really I suppose, just for me.

I am not the imposing figure my grandfather was, short and wide with thick arms corded in muscle. I am not the Hercules he was. I cannot carve steel and wood as he did for a living. But where he had sheer strength I have will, and where he carved Earth I can carve time, even a tiny bit of it. Even if it’s just a moment before sleep in the darkness, a moment of light against the thing that will inevitably take us.

I hold my wife against that Dark, a Sisyphean task that I know I will lose. Because while I hope she never has to be without me, she is not an offering. She is mine to love and to be loved by, and I will cherish every moment of it.

It is not a deal I make with the Dark, but rather a prayer I offer to it. Let her go first, or take us both at the same time. Like all prayers, the response is always silence, and in that silence I drift away with her pressed against me.

The Dark will win. It always does. But I still fight and struggle against it. I use the tools afforded to me: a sense of humor, a heart of love, and the precious time afforded me. It’s all I can I do and I aim to do it well.

Rene Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He doesn’t always write about sad things, he promises. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button.

As a teenager, no hero captivated me the way Samus Aran did.

Metroid Prime for the Gamecube was my obsession. For the entire summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, it became my morning ritual to wake up, beat the final boss of the game, and then brush my teeth.

I couldn’t get enough of Metroid lore. I learned everything about Samus’s ship. How her Power Suit was created. How Ridley destroyed her village and killed her parents. I devoured those stories and hungered for more.

As silly as it sounds, the most badass thing about Samus to me wasn’t her Arm Cannon, or her Chozo Power Suit. It was the way she walked.

I loved it. She looked so powerful. Metroid Prime had these cut scenes as you walked into a boss battle showing how Samus entered the room. My hands would get so sweaty, holding my silver Gamecube controller in a death grip.

But Samus? She was cool as a cucumber. She walked into the room like it was nothing. She had a strut, a charisma. Whatever was in that room, she could handle it. She was sure of herself.

She was my hero. I emulated her throughout the rough years of early high school. I stood up to bullies because of her. I would keep my shoulders square and my feet spread apart, just like she would. Samus was my role model.

And she saved me about a month ago.

I love to excercise. I do a bootcamp style class here in Austin. I enjoy pushing my limits and staying fit. It’s a great way to keep up with friends that I’ve met through the class as well.

I got a sinus infection a couple months ago and it knocked me down hard. My doctor treated it with penicillin and I had an allergic reaction to the medicine. I struggled for breath all the time and for whatever reason my legs seized up. Walking was difficult. I had to take a break from working out and my fitness suffered.

I was devastated. My legs wouldn’t stop seizing up. Even trying to go for a jog around the neighborhood was impossible. There was no different between my pace jogging and walking. It was like all my gains from the years I spent pushing my body went away in an instant.

Hours of my life I’d spent pushing myself, mentally and physically rendered to nothing. I was going to lose everything I’d spent so much sweat building. After two weeks of this pain in my legs, I was afraid that whatever reaction I’d had to the penicillin was permanent. That I would never be able to enjoy freedom of movement again. Dancing with my wife, running around with my future children, no more.

But then I thought about my hero.

Anyone who’s ever played a Metroid game knows how it works: Samus starts off with full abilites, and somehow loses them during the opening of the game. She’s sent to investigate an alien planet, becomes stronger, and saves the galaxy.

It seems childish, silly, contrived even, but I used Samus as a role model. I was going through what she went through so many times. I lost my abilities, and I needed to regain them.

Samus had to go through boss fights and traverse alien lands to get her abilities back. I just needed to come up with a plan. I didn’t have an arm cannon or a Power Suit, but I did have Will and Determination.

Again, it sounds corny. But this is what we do, what we’ve always done. When we hit an impasse and don’t know how to move forward, we look for someone who has been there before. That’s why stories are so important. We turn to them to guide us, to give us hope.

I maintained a routine of stretches and exercises. I began incorporating squats into my routine. Little by little my feet stopped tingling, my calves loosened up, and I was finally able to run my average pace again without getting winded.

Not Space Jump boots, but running again. Not a Morph Ball, but I regained my flexibility. Little by little, I got my upgrades.

The whole time, I channelled Samus. I kept her in the back of my mind. She made me feel powerful, and less alone.

That’s what a good story does.

The past 50 years have been a boon for womanhood. Manhood has not kept up.

WWII changed the cultural landscape of America. Women finally got a taste of the working world, filling factories and doing the jobs their husbands and fathers and brothers had done. They earned a wage while men fought overseas. They found that they liked earning wages. They wanted to keep earning wages, thank you very much.

When the men returned from fighting, shell-shocked and worn, they found their place in the social hierarchy disturbed, overturned. In time they found a different economy, one where a single man’s salary could not support an entire family. They heard the call of Women’s Liberation in the 60’s, some supported it, and others told those women to “keep it down.” Womanhood was changing, but Men stayed the same.

Every stride and every grasp to egalitarianism taken by women was met with opposition. Men could still remember through generations the feeling of crisp bills in their hands from a hard day’s work, and the clarity of a distinct and formulaic social order in the home, with a man (read: Father) at the helm. Never mind that this memory was never the whole story, and that this model hurts both men and women. Men vied to get us back to a “simpler time” that never existed, and scorned women who dared to put on a pair of pants.

Men and Manhood could have learned some lessons from women during that time.

We should have been more supportive of the women in our lives. Yet true to the stereotypes of our gender - we were stubborn and unwilling to listen.

The Lesson

Why didn’t we engage in brotherhood during that revolutionary time post — WWII the same way women engaged in Sisterhood? Why didn’t we huddle together and say, “The World is changing, let’s change with it"? Why didn’t we have the foresight to look ahead to 1980, 2000, and 2020 and think to ourselves, “We will have a better society when Men and Women are on even playing fields, and a rising tide raises all ships”? Why weren’t we secure enough in our manhood to look at how women organized themselves and propped each other up, supported each other, loved each other, and to then think, “Yes, let’s support the women we love and while we’re at it, support one another as well”?

It is because of a simple fallacy of logic that we internalized far too early in our lives. The moment we were given “boy toys” and told to wear blue instead of pink. The moment we made the distinction between “Action Figures” and “Dolls.” The moment we put up signs that said, “No Girls allowed.”

The fallacy is this: Manhood is the opposite of Womanhood.

It is not.

Manhood, in its true nontoxic form, espouses the virtues of courage, responsibility, sacrifice, resolution, patience, and much more.

Womanhood embraces these same virtues.

We are two sides to a coin. But for too long, men treated women and their rise in social standing as an affront. If you believe the fallacy, then there is no other way to respond when someone aims to “take your place” on the social hierarchy. If Manhood is opposite Womanhood, and a Woman makes more than you, makes better grades than you, navigates social circles better than you, lines up her career more nimbly than you, then what does that make you as a man?

Rather, Men need to internalize this: Manhood is the opposite of Childhood.

Once Men begin to realize this, we can begin to work on the problems that so deeply trouble us.

Statistics

As it stands, 9 out of 10 murders are committed by men. As of 2010, the latest year that the FBI provides this sort of data, men are more likely to be arrested for every type of crime besides two: prostitution and embezzlement (though in the case of embezzlement, there is only a difference of 200 arrests, whereas in all other categories the difference is easily measured in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands).

There was a theory that the difference in crime rates had to do with men and women’s stratified social standing, and that as women gained equality, there would be an uptick in violent crimes committed by women. Looking at this data set, the number of crimes committed by women has indeed gone up. However, look closer: the overall increase in crimes committed by women are made up mostly of drug abuse arrests and drunkenness including DUIs.

Women commit far less violence then men do, and they continue to commit less and less violence even as their social standing increases. The theory was wrong.

The Poison

So why are men more violent? Why are nearly all mass shooters men? What does this have to do with Manhood and it’s troubles?

Many of the men who committed terrible crimes of mass violence have a history of domestic abuse. Many went through something that they deemed unfair prior to committing their crimes. They felt entitled to something. A girlfriend that never materialized. A job that fired them.

One common stereotype of Womanhood is that women are to be tranquil, calm, submissive, and thankful for what they have. So if you believe the fallacy, then it stands to reason that the manly thing to do is to fight back against a system that has obviously wronged you, to lash out and teach the world what happens when it takes what is rightfully yours.

Of course, the truth is that children are the ones who haven’t learned that you are not entitled to anything. That sometimes life doesn’t pan out the way you want it to, and when it knocks you down, you learn from it, laugh about it, and get back up. You dust yourself off and you proceed.

But this does not square with the rugged images of James Bond, Indiana Jones, Rambo, and other “tough men” that have become instilled in our western zeitgeist as examples for young men to follow (notice the tool of choice for each of these role models: a gun). These heroes would have you believe that you do what it takes to whoever is in your way to get what you want.

The Lost Young Men

Young men are lost. Since the year 2000, men under 35 (without a college degree) are more unemployed than any other age or gender group. The rise (and subsequent banning) of groups on Reddit such as r/incels (now r/braincels since r/incels was banned), the rise of neo-nazism, the scandal and vitriol of Gamergate… all of these point to a generation of young men that are angry, scared and lost. A generation of men that were told that they could become anything and didn’t know that “anything” could mean failure.

Failure was never supposed to be a part of the picture, not when all our action heroes and all our protagonists were male. Perhaps this is why women have navigated life’s potholes more nimbly than us: their media stars were frequently in the background, so it was up to them to write their own stories.

Next Steps

All of this belabors the point: We need a fresh idea of manhood. We need something like Manhood 2.0, and we need it desperately. There are already several programs in the works, such as We Are Man Enough which aims to open men up to being vulnerable through open and honest conversations.

Art of Manliness is another resource that provides the best of both worlds: guides and how-to’s on stereotypical manly activities (how to box, how to change a tire, how to stop an intruder) but does not shy away from getting into the meat of what manliness really is, and providing a healthy egalitarian lens to view manhood through.

In the end, it boils down to us. Men need to hold other men accountable. The buck stops here. We need to take a page from the Women’s Liberation movement and learn how to be supportive without being exclusionary, learn how to listen while not being afraid to call each other out, learn how to love without fear of being labeled called a “pussy”.

The question is: Are we man enough to do it?

Rene Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. He enjoys cute comics and wholesome video games and doesn’t care if that makes him a “pussy”. Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button!

If the New York Times hadn’t reported on it, I wouldn’t have believed it.

But here it is, recently declassified footage of a UFO that United States fighter jets encountered in 2004.

Since the NYT reported on this Dec 16, there hasn’t been that much actual chatter surrounding it. UFOs were trending on Twitter and of course on Google searches:

But overall, this hasn’t been the freakout we would have expected back in 2005 or the early 90’s when UFO fever was at a pitch. In fact the only person freaking out about this in a relatively human way is Seth Rogan:

Now let’s get real: this is not proof positive of aliens. This is proof positive that the United States Air Force encountered something that they could not identify and felt so strongly about the severity of what they saw, they felt the need to classify it and then declassify it.

They also put forward documents that contained little phrases like this:

“…the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.”

But again, in the name of strict scientific rigors and journalistic ethics, I cannot say here that we have definitively found aliens. If this is what you came for then you can stop reading here and we’ll be good.

I can however, meet you down below this dotted line partition where I can speak to you as a normal human being and we can have a normal human being conversation.

HOLY SHIT THERE’S DEFINITELY ALIENS

I mean dude holy shit!!!

Okay. Okay okay. Oh boy okay- all right.

So what does this mean?

What would the discovery of aliens mean to us? As a species? As human beings? As a planet?

Let’s break this down to its parts.

Religion

What would the discovery of extraterrestrial life do to organized religion? Would Mosques, Churches and Synagogues crumble at the first alien transmission?

Probably not. We’ve actually been there before.

When we learned that the Earth was not the center of the Universe (shout out to big man Copernicus *sorry we killed you*), religion held fast. Every time we discovered micro-fossils or canals on Mars, faith hasn’t wavered a bit. In the past decade there have even been discoveries of planets that are capable of harboring life, yet the church doors remain open.

There has been a gradual decline in church attendance in recent decades, but there are a plethora of reasons for this, mostly economic and social.

The Vatican has even stated that intelligent life does not contradict any teachings or held beliefs of the Catholic Church. Pope Franics even said he would baptize any alien willing to join the church.

So religion seems pretty resilient to the inevitable discovery of life beyond our planet.

Now what about morality?

Morality

What would the discovery of intelligent life beyond our planet mean for us on a philosophical and moral level?

It kind of depends on what they (the aliens) say.

Some philosophers fall under a camp of thinking called Normative Non-naturalists. These philosophers essentially believe that there are “mind-independent” and universal facts regarding value, reason, and morality.

For example, to a Normative Non-Naturalist (NNN), murder is, by simple fact, wrong.

And if one NNN were to encounter a regular person, someone who was a “sophisticated moral agent” (i.e. has a pulse and a brain and isn’t some kind of psychopath) then that moral agent would also be able to recognize that murder is wrong, regardless of any kind of indoctrination of thought.

Basically, NNNs believe that morality transcends the natural world, and that certain morals are mind-independent, meaning they hold true across cultures and races.

But what if intelligent life forms upended this?

If aliens get to us before we get to them, that would mean they have a huge leg up on us as far as technology and advancement. They would have to get over what Stephen Webb calls Cantianism, which is basically the likelihood of a civilization to blow itself up before it can organize itself and accomplish inter-planetary space travel (looking at you, human race).

Basically if an alien race were to come to us and say “Hey, these things you thought were correct? They really aren’t,” who would we be to convince them otherwise? We aren’t really standing on any kind of moral high ground to argue with them.

Of course, we could argue with them and basically just say “Well this is our moral code and it works for us” and that would be a totally fine thing to do. It would just force us to take a look at (and possibly reassess) every single assertion we’ve made in the history of philosophy and morality that we now take for granted.

History

Truly the most devastating cost of intelligent life making contact with us would be that I would have to take this guy tremendously seriously:

I would be forced to go back and re-watch every damn episode of Ancient Aliens and actually listen to what he says. I don’t know if I can stomach it.

A New Perspective

We would probably get our collective shit together.

Maybe I’m being rosy-eyed but conflicts over culture, religion, and geography would seem very petty considering we now have a new element to throw in there: species.

The introduction of a new species of intelligent and cognizant life would probably make us look at each other and collectively say “I got your back bro/gal” (I’ve never heard someone say ‘gal’ as a substitute for ‘bro’ but I’m assuming the overall shock of alien life making contact with Earth would probably throw us all off our game for quite a while.

Like we’d be doing that thing where the cashier says “Thank you, enjoy your meal” and we’d all be going “Yeah you too” even though the cashier obviously isn’t eating anything. Our minds will just be in general states of shock and panic and we’ll probably be feeling like idiots for weeks. It’s gonna be hard and awkward and uncomfortable.)

I’m not saying we’ll never fight with each other again, but in the back of our minds we’ll be thinking, “This is an inter-species fight, when we’ve got to stick together.”

And that’ll be the thing that we’ve been missing since mankind evolved and made tribes: A sense of “stick-togetherness”

So maybe it is a good time for aliens to come and visit us. Maybe it’s just the kind of kick in the pants we need.

What’s the first thing you would do if aliens made contact with us? Comment below and let’s get a convo going.

Rene Castro is an amateur professional writer and a recreational charlatan. If aliens attack, don’t worry, he’s got your back… homie... Yell at him on Twitter @Rene4591 and don’t forget to hit the applause button!