I’m headed for the eastern Caribbean with the Writing Excuses team aboard Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas¹. The blog posts here may go a little stale, as updating the blog from the ship² is time consuming.

We board on Saturday, and return a week later. If you want to play the “where is Howard” game, you can follow this link to track the Oasis of the Seas. I’ll probably be using the same link (connectivity permitting) to figure out where the heck we are.

We are not going to be anywhere near icebergs. Also, there are plenty of lifeboats. Nobody makes claims like “unsinkable” anymore, but Oasis of the Seas can boast about being five times larger than Titanic.

When her keel was laid she was the largest cruise ship in history. Today she’s within 18 inches or so of that spot, but has been bested by only two other ships (also owned and operated by Royal Caribbean.)

Before boarding the giant ship I need to stock the buffer with comics for you to read, and I need to pack big stacks of work that I can do while I’m at sea. It’s not a proper vacation if I’m not getting some work done, after all.

¹Oasis of the Seas seems like an odd name, but since the ship has fresh water in the middle of a “desert” of non-potable salt water, I suppose the definition of “oasis” can be stretched to fit. 
²”Ship,” not “boat.” Crew members and staff are happier when you say “ship.”

Sandra and I are on our way home from Sint Maarten, dieseling across the eastern Caribbean with 180 fellow Writing Excuses Retreat delegates.

The event has been delightful. We still have a full day at sea tomorrow, so it’s not over, but Oasis of the Seas is not stopping again until Ft Lauderdale. That wake behind us is going to be a constant feature for the next 36 hours.

This largest-ship-in-the-world class of vessel is amazing, but I think I like my gargantunormous floating resorts a bit smaller. And the plan, as of this writing, is for next year’s Writing Excuses Retreat (#WXR17) to be held on a smaller ship on a different patch of ocean. We’re still finalizing the details (and getting the best prices we can) but I’m authorized to tell you that we’re going to Europe, and that the cruise will be timed to let delegates debark in time for a quick flight to Helsinki, for the World Science Fiction Convention.

I’ll post full details here and at writingexcuses.com in advance of registration opening. The plan (again, as of this writing) is to open registration on January 1st of 2017.

You probably want a full convention report before considering attending. I’ll make sure to post links to reports from attendees. Their voices carry more weight than mine, so it’s better for you (and easiest for me!) if I simply amplify.

Technically Raiders of the Lost Shark isn’t actually unwatchable. K.B. Spangler and I did watch it, after all.

We shouldn’t have. It’s not “so bad it’s funny” or “so bad it’s good.” It’s “so bad I can’t imagine how it happened.”

Anyway, we live-tweeted our viewing, and then K.B. posted a Storify of the session.

Enjoy!¹

¹Enjoy the Storify. Stay away from the movie.

Back in 2010 I tried In-N-Out, and did not like it. There was nothing setting the burger and fries apart from those served at other fast food restaurants, except that it somehow felt greasier.

I ordered the fries “animal style” because I was told to. As it happens, that’s an awesome suggestion for people who want a fried potato casserole, but it’s less awesome for people who like to eat french fries. Today I figured out that it’s almost certainly not what the In-N-Out apologists in my various feeds wanted me to try.

Today I asked for “animal style” on a burger. Specifically, I said “double double animal style,” and attempted to adopt a tone that suggested I was an old hand at this, rather than someone who had not ordered food here in six years.

What arrived was kind of amazing, with a flavor I hadn’t had before, and I can totally see myself getting that burger again. I don’t know what “mustard fried patty” actually means, but I can taste the scorched mustard under the other sauces, and their combination with the extra pickles and the grilled onions was quite nice. It stuck to the paper it was wrapped in, but rather than hold that against them I chalked it up to ordering cheese-infused food from a place that wraps its food in paper.

But I’m now led to ask this question: why isn’t In-N-Out leading with that sandwich? Despite being made of essentially the same stuff you’d find in any burger joint, the animal style sandwich sets itself apart from other fast food offerings by tasting different. It’s the sort of thing that foodies at fancy restaurants might call a signature dish. It’s a menu item that will bring people back to your specific restaurant, assuming they like the dish, and want to put it into themselves a second time.

It’s not quite good enough to send me code-diving on a voyage of exploration deep into the In-N-Out menu, but I can now see why folks might do that, and how this pursuit would lead them to acquire the taste necessary to zealously insist that In-N-Out is the best. I don’t agree, but the double-double animal style is a tasty sandwich I’ll be having again.

We’ve been wanting to make some new challenge coins for a while now. Our hope is to have at least two designs done, die-struck, and delivered in time for Christmas.

This is the first one. It’ll be simple struck brass, with an antique gold finish. No colors, no resin domes, just metal.

I love all the coins we’ve made, but this design really speaks to me. I look forward to having this in my pocket, serving as a reminder that I’m allowed to make mistakes.

The second coin we’ve planned is the Bristlecone ship coin, similar in design to the previous ship coins we’ve done. It’s not done yet, so no pictures.

Watch this space. Pre-orders will open soon, perhaps as early as next week. The coins will be $10 each, plus shipping.

A couple of weeks ago someone told me I was being quoted in Civilization VI, but I couldn’t spot the reference. This morning someone again pointed me at the play-through video, right to the the 8:20 mark, and it’s true, I was quoted in Civ VI.

I talked about it a bit on Twitter.

Here’s a crop from the graphic that accompanies the moment where Sean Bean totally reads some dialog I wrote.

Funny thing: I didn’t remember having written that line. I had to Google it, and fortunately it appears in the comic during the years where transcripts are searchable.

I didn’t ask for this placement, and I wasn’t paid for it¹. It’s what we call “fair use,” and “awesome.” Something I wrote eleven years ago resonated with the developers of Civilization VI, and so they quoted it² in their game.

“Me, Tolkien, and G.R.R. Martin… we’ve all written dialog for Sean Bean.” —Me

¹If the fine folks at Firaxis would like to comp me a copy of Civilization VI, I will happily accept. It’s on my Christmas list…

²The way in which they used that quote gives it a different emotional impact than the three panel strip for which I originally wrote it. And this is why fair use is so important for the growth, development, and evolution of human culture.

You may now pre-order the Maxim 70 coin. We expect to be able to ship these out during the second week of November.

They are $10.00 each, and should make excellent gifts. Award one to someone¹ whose persistence you admire, or to someone who needs a leg up over a recent failure. Or perhaps you might carry one in your own pocket as a tactile reminder of your own passion for standing back up after having been knocked down.

Our first run of these is limited to 500. The Schlock Patreon supporters got a head-start, and we’re down to 250 as of this writing. We’ll order another 500 if it looks like we’re going to sell out, and if that happens this week we should take delivery of the second order in plenty of time to ship everything in time for Christmas. There’s no difference between the two runs, and we’re not numbering the coins.

¹The practice of awarding a coin to someone who has performed a service, or has otherwise acted in a notable manner, is about 75 years old. We’ve chronicled a bit of that in this free PDF: An Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins, which was funded by our Kickstarter backers in 2013.

I’ve only seen parts of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and it’s been so long since I saw 1960’s Magnificent Seven that I can’t recall any of the particulars beyond the presence of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.

Contextually, then, I’m well suited to appreciate Antoine Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven for what it is, rather than for what it’s a remake of. I didn’t actually get around to seeing it until it had been out for a full month, but I’m glad I saw it in the theater. I really enjoyed myself (in part, perhaps because I was seeing it with my friend Alan.)

The film didn’t need that much help from good company. I loved the performances from Vincent D’Onofrio, Chris Pratt, and Haley Bennett, and I thrilled at pretty much every one of the scenes that establishes how deadly our heroes are. I also liked that they were each distinctly different, and not just in terms of diverse casting—they all dealt death in different ways.

In classical tragedy people are brought low by their flaws. Here, however, our heroes can die simply because there just aren’t enough good places to hide from the bullets¹. They can also die heroically, of course, and I won’t spoil who does what. I will, however, say that this remake does not improve the survival odds for the Seven².

In the final analysis, of course, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a groundbreaking piece of cinema, while Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven is just a cool cowboy movie. Still, I liked it.

¹ I believe there were too many bullets. The Gatling Gun in use in the film used a 40-ish round box magazine, which required the gunner to stop firing and reload. The Model 1881 Gatling Gun’s “Bruce Feed” mechanism (which they did not use in the film) would have allowed for continuous fire of roughly 400 rounds per minute. And even that might not have been enough for all the bullets I saw.

² The survival percentages of our heroes are equally not great in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai³ and John Sturges Magnificent Seven⁴ . Both of them round up to 43%. 

³ “In the end we lost this battle too. The victory belongs to the farmers, not to us.”

⁴ “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.”

I took the advantage of $5.00 movie day at the local cinema to see Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from an espionage/action movie, down to the last trope, but I enjoyed it a lot.

My favorite bit was seeing Cobie Smulders‘ name in the opening credits, and before I could fully squee out, up came Aldis Hodge‘s name. Smulders is Maria Hill in the Marvel films, and Hodge was Alec Hardison in all five seasons of Leverage, and let’s just say I was far more excited to see those actors again than I was to see Tom Cruise¹.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I liked it, and I think fans of the first film will, too. As will fans of Smulders and Hodge, who kind of made the movie for me.

¹ I like Tom Cruise movies, and I enjoy his work in them. There are a lot of them, though, so my excitement gets spread a little thin. 

There’s talk these days about college educations being too expensive—and by “too expensive,” some experts have said it’s simply not worth the money. I’m not currently working in the field I studied, but I don’t regret college at all. In part, I suppose, because it’s been paid for.

Of the many things I remember from my years in school, these three stick out:

• “You don’t know how to think until you know how to write” (from Freshman orientation)
• “There is more than just one way to learn a thing” (from an honors seminar on epistemology)

Those two points served me very well as I moved from career to career, and I think they can be expanded upon to form their own field of study. With a substantial portion of all human knowledge instantly available to us on our handbrains¹ it can be argued that the acquisition of such knowledge needs to be cheaper than a one-year service plan.

On the down side, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Per Sturgeon’s Law², “90% of everything is crap.” A formal education might be the best defense against inadvertently filling one’s head with digitally disseminated falsehood, folklore, and folderol.

The current model for formal education involves front-loading our brains with material delivered by professionals whose authority we’re not truly invited to question. They may teach “question everything,” but they never really support us questioning whether their class is worth our money.

That’s why I think that the class we all need, and which should likely be the first class taught to the rising generation, would teach the following skills:

• How to gather information online
• How to evaluate that information’s validity
• How to make a decision based on the available information

Simply put, it is learning how to learn, and learning how to act on what we’ve learned. I imagine the class running for about three months, and presenting increasingly complicated problems for students to solve using online resources.

It may seem a little silly, and even a little too basic, because it’s an extension of what most of us already do. But as more and more information becomes quickly available to us, this process  will inevitably become the dominant mode for learning things. Doing it sloppily will be disastrous.

Obviously the things learned from online research will need to be supplemented with practical experience, but there are manifold paths open to us once we’ve figured out that first bit. It may be that autodidacts³ of the future will move directly into medical school, skipping the undergrad and pre-med programs on their way to becoming doctors.

Or maybe the doctors of the future will go to school for bedside manner and periodic maintenance of the surgeon-bots and all their super-precise robot friends who never forget to wash their hands⁴.

¹Have you ever had a professor quote to you from their own book, which you were required to buy as part of the class? I’ve always aspired to that level of grift. 

²What we call “Sturgeon’s Law” was called “Sturgeon’s Revelation” by Sturgeon, and he never got around to condensing it into six words of pith. 

³A fancy word for “folks who are self-taught.” Useful, but pretty much everybody I know has taught themselves a great many interesting things, so at some level the word “autodidact” simply means “human.”

⁴Still a problem among modern surgeons. It’s the surgeon equivalent of using your turn signal when driving.

The trailers for the latest Tom Hanks Treasure Hunt, Inferno, looked kind of silly. The line “I left you a path… the hardest one yet” suggests that somebody has created a puzzle for Professor Langdon, and is deliberately leaving the fate of the human race in his hands.

Fortunately, the trailer is misleading.

As archaeological puzzle-solving goes, Inferno has almost nothing to offer. As a spy thriller, however, it works pretty well. Tense moments, cool action scenes, and a twisty, fun plot. It deploys some tired tropes, and then nicely explains why these things could actually happen here.

It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I did have fun.

My oldest daughter came home from college for the weekend, and insisted that I not see Doctor Strange without her. I talked to the rest of the kids about it, and one by one they each decided they wanted to see it too.

On opening night, in 3D¹.

I was $75 down before arriving at the theater, and then we bought snacks². I tweeted my forlorn hope that I was somehow going to have $110 worth of fun in the next two hours.

When the film ended, we all had smiles on our faces. We talked Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff until late, and the kids’ opinion was that this was the best Marvel movie³ to date.

My own opinion is that it’s not the best, but it’s certainly quite good. We got to see Benedict Cumberbatch play someone who grows into a sense of personal responsibility, and by the end we got to see a Marvel superhero who not only warps reality, he also chews scenery.

Doctor Strange clears my Threshold of Awesome, and I’m quite excited to see more of Doctor Strange in upcoming films.

¹The 3D turns out to have been worth it. I’ll be seeing it again in IMAX 3D just for that experience. But I’m waiting for $5.00 movie day, because ouch that first showing was ‘spensive.

²Theaters generally do not get a cut of ticket sales for the first two weeks it’s out, and sometimes it’s even longer. They depend on concessions to keep the doors open. I always buy concessions because that money (for the local cinema chain) stays in town and creates jobs.

³They have seen all of them except the Edward Norton/Tim Roth Hulk movie. We are now collecting the Blu-Rays, and we’re two Caps, two Thors, and a Hulk away from having all of them. Oh, and the first Avengers film. We have that on DVD, so Sandra says it can wait.

Arrival is brilliant, beautiful, touching, and quite thought-provoking. It clears my Threshold of Awesome, and invites me to say very little about it lest I rob my readers of the voyage of discovery the film offers.

The film is adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” which can be found in the collection “Stories of Your Life and Others,” which Publisher’s Weekly called “… the first must-read SF book of the year” back in 2002.

We’re all connected, and I’m thankful for that.

Last year I wrote this piece on the subject, and this year I think the idea is worth revisiting because we’re much less likely to spew hatred and vitriol when we recognize our connections.

Consider today’s feast, if you’re an American participating in the feasting, or if you’re a human who happens to be eating: farmers from around the world contributed to the things on the table. If you’re enjoying poultry it may be local, but the spices applied to it were likely grown much further afield—Hungary for your paprika and Vietnam for the black pepper, to name two likely contenders.

Did anything sit in your refrigerator? Components for that miraculous bit of technology were built by engineers from many nations, using materials that include petroleum products and rare earth metals. When you open the refrigerator you’re operating equipment with bits from China, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, the United States, Australia, and Saudi Arabia, and that’s the short list.

The “threaded thanks” exercise works in this way: Pick a thing for which you are thankful, and then read up on that thing. Where did it come from? Before it came from there, where did its parts come from? Who hauled it from all those places to the place where you got it? How were they able to make the trip? Find the thread and keep pulling, and identify as many connections as you’re able to. Then express your gratitude for each of those connections.

It might take a while. Probably don’t do this while others are waiting to eat.

There is no room for jingoism or any other dehumanizing belief system in this exercise. There were no “lesser” people involved in bringing you the things that made today’s meal possible. You depend on them, and when they sit down to eat, they depend on you. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that I depend upon you in some way for the meal I’m enjoying. My own living is earned in a massive web of transactions that include the streams of data moving to and from the device upon which you’re reading this text.

Last year at this time I described myself as a thankful person. To me, being thankful means acknowledging the countless hands that bear me up, and expressing my love and appreciation for them. It means being grateful, and learning to whom I owe the debt of gratitude. It means embracing the idea that when I pay for a thing and bring it home, the financial transaction is just one small part of the established connection.

We are all connected, and I am thankful for that. You’re part of those connections in more than just one way. I’m thankful for you, and the work you do to make our world a better one.

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I saw Rogue One. The odds are pretty good that if you’re reading this, you’ve already decided whether or not to see it, and if you haven’t yet seen it you’d rather I not spoil anything. I’ll make this quick:

It is a fine film beyond simply being a Star Wars film. I think it’s a better movie than The Force Awakens, and it does an outstanding job of setting up the original trilogy. It clears the Threshold of Awesome, and if you’re a Star Wars fan, I suspect you’ll be quite pleased with it.

That’s it. Enjoy the movie!

I saw Passengers on Tuesday night. Here are some words I used on Twitter:

Beautiful. Powerful. Heartbreaking. Inspiring. Awesome.

Chris Pratt did a fine job, and Michael Sheen was spot on, but Jennifer Lawrence absolutely owned her role, all the way to the bone. She was astounding, and without her performance the film simply wouldn’t have worked. Chris Pratt may have been positioned as our protagonist, but Jennifer Lawrence was the beating heart of the story.

Enough gushing. It’s a fine movie, and it clears my Threshold of Awesome.

Back in 1999 I had a boss who would consider our team’s approach to over-engineering some solution or another and say “I don’t want you to boil the ocean. Just make a nice cup of tea.” Put another way: “Don’t try to fix everything. Fix the thing right in front of you.”

I’ve been thinking about how bad 2016 was, and I’ve determined that most of the worst bits were parts over which I had little or no control. A few of the worst bits, for me anyway, were totally my fault, but they weren’t bad enough to make the news so they don’t show up on the global score card. In short, the oceans aren’t my fault, but this cup of tepid water is totally on me, and I can do better.

“Doing better” does mean looking beyond the top of the teacup. Maybe not all the way to the ocean, but at least to the rest of the mugs, cups, glasses, and carafes in the room. It’s possible that I can fix the thing right in front of me AND fix a few things that happen to be within reach. If I pay close attention, I may find that my reach even extends beyond the white-room drink station of this metaphor, and into the wider world of insufficiently incalescent beverage preparation.

But first, a pot of hot water, right here. And as long as I’m heating water, there are things that can be cleaned in it, like the dishes, the laundry, and oh! A hot bath!

2017 is here. I don’t know what opportunities and crises will present themselves, but I’m here for them, as ready as I can make myself. And if I need to keep a pot of boiling water handy, at least that’s a thing I know how to do.

2016 in Review
1) Was it bad? Yes.
2) Worst ever? No.
3) What was bad? *makes list*
4) Can I fix any of these? *tickmarks*
5) Ready for 2017

— Howard Tayler (@howardtayler) December 30, 2016

I loved Hidden Figures. It was beautiful, and uplifting ,and pretty much the perfect first-film-of-the-year for me. It clears my Threshold of Awesome, and reminded me of how awesome actual human people can be.

It also reminded me of how far we’ve come since the decade in which I was born, and how courageous we had to be in order to make it that far. And that’s pretty important because we have a long way to go, and more courage will be required.

The leads, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, were all powerfully convincing, and Kevin Costner finally got to make up for Pa Kent, which I shouldn’t have been holding against him, but that’s a different story altogether. I also loved seeing Aldis Hodge¹ play support-staff for someone else’s genius, and Mahershala Ali² be so completely different than the Cottonmouth character he sold to me in Luke Cage. 

I wish we’d seen just a little bit more of the mathematics, enough for me to fully grasp the enormity of the problems faced by the space program, but that’s a tough call to make for filmmakers. Confuse the audience for just a few seconds, and you run the risk of losing everybody. So, you know, they probably made the right call.

¹Hodge played Hardison in Leverage, and I cannot un-see him as a hacker with mad grifting skills.

²Cottonmouth was pretty much my favorite character from Netflix’s Luke Cage. Shame about that mic stand thing.