IRL – Secret Thoughts

Heroes (Seasons 1-4)

My mom and I had a tradition of watching serial, supernatural dramas together, beginning with Heroes, which originally aired starting in 2006, and proceeding to Manifest, God Friended Me, and Evil. We watched the first three seasons of Heroes, and by the end, the plot had become so convoluted that we no longer understood what was happening.

Heroes, however, remained a major source of inspiration for me. I liked the idea of an ensemble cast of seemingly disconnected characters becoming entangled from a common cause. In 2009, I wrote the first draft of my novel Twelve’s Design from the perspective of twelve characters, who steadily become entwined in paranormal happenings. Previously, this novel had been two novellas, one about an alien abductee and one about a psychic in a mental hospital. The multi-perspective style melded them into an oddly more coherent whole that fed all my desires for experimenting with storytelling and writing. Many things have changed about Twelve’s Design over the years, but the Heroes ensemble-cast-style that inspired its storytelling method has remained.

I forgot how inspirational Heroes was at some point though. I forgot it was the piece of media that inspired Twelve’s Design’s ensemble-cast style, although I knew it had been inspired by something. Maybe it was The Casual Vacancy, that ensemble cast J. K. Rowling novel that otherwise I hated? Maybe it was Manifest or God Friended Me? The timeline didn’t quite fit. Maybe it was nothing in particular.

So when I saw Heroes available on Netflix recently, I took the opportunity to revisit it. I remembered really liking it. I remembered my mom and I had stopped watching it at some point due to its loss of coherence. I wondered if it genuinely became incoherent or if it was trying to tell a complicated story to a distracted audience over dozens of weeks. It turned out, it may have inspired Twelve’s Design in more ways than one… and Season 3 is genuinely incoherent.

Genesis (S1 E1)

I thought it was odd that a prostitute would call her clients perverts. What job do you think you applied for, lady? But then she explained herself as a desperate, somewhat single mom, and it was fine.

My god. This ensemble-cast style and the superhuman abilities has Twelve’s Design inspiration written all over it.

Don’t Look Back (S1 E2)

Claire, the cheerleader is adopted and has regenerative capabilities. That doesn’t exactly match any character in Twelve’s Design today, but it’s close enough that I can 100% believe Claire is in their DNA.

Also, it’s a good thing Claire has regenerative capabilities. She has glass bones and paper skin. She also receives very few consequences for crashing a guy’s car into a wall and punching a girl unconscious. Maybe she’s also immune to prosecution.

Unexpected (S1 E16)

Dr. Suresh and Sylar go to Bozeman, MT!

Four Months Later (S2 E1)

I remembered the whole first season was about “save the cheerleader, save the world” and how that somehow connected to stopping a nuke from exploding in New York. What happens in Season 2?

Because of her regenerative capabilities, Claire argues that she should reveal her abilities in order to donate her organs. Is this where I got the idea for people with regenerative capacities revolutionizing medicine by donating their organs in Twelve’s Design?

The Line (S2 E6)

This Hiro side plot feels like a cheap sci-fi movie that takes place in the woods. The characters have to do everything in the woods because the production can’t afford ancient Japanese architecture.

The Second Coming (S3 E1)

At the time I watched it, the ending of Season 2 seemed rushed and didn’t feel finished before Season 3 started. Among other inciteful incidents, future Peter randomly decides to shoot past Nathan. Sylar cuts Claire’s head off. And did Maya completely stop caring about her dead brother?

In preparation for writing this post, however, I scanned the Heroes Wikipedia for facts. In retrospect, it makes so much sense why the transition between these seasons felt rushed! It turns out, Season 2 happened during the WGA writers’ strike. The second half of the season was canceled, so the start of Season 3 was reshot to quickly tie up all the loose ends.

The Eclipse – Part II (S3 E11)

This eclipse has lasted hours! Across the world!

Was Noah just watching Sylar having sex until he finally decided to shoot him? For a cripple who’s been running around with superhuman speed for months until this eclipse took her powers away, and even for this eclipse lasting hours, Daphne found those leg braces and put them on very fast. Sylar has changed alliances like three times today. And when did Peter stop caring about the Irish girl he met at the beginning of Season 2?

Our Father (S3 E12)

Claire became severely ill and almost died in apparently the multiple hours that the eclipse existed. She was also shot. For how accident prone she is, once again, it’s a good thing she usually has regenerative abilities, or she’d just die immediately.

Claire: You weren’t there. I needed you.
Noah (her dad): There was something I had to do.
Me: He had to slit a man’s throat!

Dual (E3 E13)

Sylar has now changed allegiances like five times in the past day.

Shades of Gray (S3 E19)

I don’t think I’ve seen Season 4 before. My mom and I gave up during some season back when I first watched Heroes. I can believe it was Season 3 because that was awful.

…Wait, never mind. I remember Sylar’s teenage sidekick.

…WAIT, IT’S STILL SEASON 3!? WTF IS THIS NEW PLOT WHERE EVERYONE IS NOW BEING HUNTED!?

Turn and Face the Strange (S3 E22)

Well, of course Matt didn’t kill Jakob’s girlfriend. He didn’t have to. He already made her hate Jakob, so they’re as good as broken up. He’s had his revenge.

Orientation (S4 E1)

Okay. For real, none of this looks familiar.

Is this really how college works? You go to college and then take a test to determine what math class you’re in? Shouldn’t that be determined before the school year starts? Did the writers go to college? What kind of upper-floor dorm room has large, side-hung windows? This is a murder, suicide, or accident waiting to happen.

Ink (S4 E3)

The scenes that take place in Japan are so cheesy that I wonder if the production hired a Japanese studio and director to film them exactly as they would a Japanese drama. Japanese TV is extremely cheesy. Perhaps it merely inspired the production, which is also cool.

Acceptance (S4 E4)

Claire in college makes me oddly nostalgic for college even though nothing particularly good happened to me there. I didn’t make friends. I was quite miserable. It was simpler though. There was routine and interesting things to learn and focus on. I had to do laundry occasionally, but otherwise, there wasn’t cooking, cleaning, animals and plants to take care of, house projects to do, outings and invitations to consider, etc. Also, the University of Montana’s Food Zoo was great!

More relevant to this particular episode, however, lesbian kiss scene. Heroes is going woke in 2009!

Upon This Rock (S4 E13)

This season has been so much more coherent than Season 3. In retrospect, it makes sense. Season 3 had to handle the consequences of thirteen missing episodes from Season 2 while also trying to do whatever it had planned. Season 4 returned to Heroes’ roots of character-driven, ensemble cast storytelling.

Sylar being forced to carry Nathan’s memories, wear his appearance, believe he is Nathan, and live Nathan’s life is also interesting.

The Wall (S4 E18)

Matt trapped his enemy Sylar in a mental hell in his basement and was in the midst of sealing Sylar behind hand laid brick when his ally Peter burst into his house and got trapped in mental hell with Sylar. Matt was very upset about this… so he finished laying the brick and decided to make a sandwich?

Brave New World (S4 E19)

The series ended hinting that more was to come but also fittingly with Claire revealing the existence of people with superhuman abilities to the world.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is one of the most well-constructed TV series I’ve ever seen. It follows Walter White on his rise from over-qualified high school chemistry teacher to methamphetamine drug lord. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend getting on Netflix and watching it before proceeding.

The series features many well-developed characters, but Skyler, Walter’s wife, in particular caught my interest. A fellow Breaking Bad fan, and the person who introduced me to the series almost a decade after its final episode aired, however, told me this was an odd choice. The wife of the shady protagonist in crime dramas like Breaking Bad (e.g. The Sopranos) tends to receive a lot of hate from viewers. They’re either submissive to whatever their criminal significant other wants them to do, making them seem weak or unrealistic to the audience, or they are antagonistic, making it natural for the audience to dislike them for getting in the “hero’s” way.

As Walter White’s wife, Skyler is no exception to the rule of being a commonly disliked character. She begins the series oblivious to Walter’s criminal activities. After she discovers them, she transitions between reluctantly or unwillingly supporting them, trying to separate herself and/or her kids from them, and finding herself hopelessly ensnared by them. Walter reasons that his actions are for the good of his family. He wants to provide them with wealth and safety for after he dies prematurely from terminal lung cancer. Skyler similarly reasons that her actions are for the good of her family. She hides Walter’s criminal activities partly to protect her son, who would be devastated to discover the father he admires is a criminal, and partly to protect her brother-in-law DEA agent Hank Shrader, who would be devastated to discover a criminal mastermind in his midst.

While Walter is willing to sell drugs and commit murder to provide for his family, Skyler is willing to go to equal extremes to protect them. She concocts a clever explanation for Walter’s wealth for her sister and brother-in-law. With her former career in accounting, she insists on overseeing Walter’s money-laundering operation to ensure no one discovers it. She pays most of Walter’s accumulated fortune to her former employer when she discovers he is at risk of being investigated for tax evasion. Fearing her household and money laundering business will also fall under this investigation, Skyler insists he use the money she forces on him to pay his bills and shutter his business, even sending goons to scare him into doing so. Unfortunately, she does this at a time when Walter needs his accumulated wealth most, unwittingly creating a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for him.

Admittedly, after watching the series a second time, Skyler is most interesting during this period of reluctant acceptance, which peaks in Season 4. Her prior period of revenge sex with her former boss in order to punish Walt for hiding his criminal activity and post period of deep depression and antagonism after she discovers Walt is not only a drug dealer but a murderer is less interesting. Perhaps this is because in both cases she reaches the contradictory conclusion that she must split her family apart for the good of the family.

Still, she was the character I didn’t know existed and yet needed for inspiration. I’d never watched a crime drama before and was unfamiliar with her archetype. It turns out I’ve been writing a novel with a loose crime drama sub-plot for over a decade, and the “crime boss’s” wife was my weakest character. Unknowingly following the trend of crime dramas, I’d never had a good idea of what to do with her to make her likeable or even interesting. Skyler made me wonder, “How far would this supporting character go to protect her family?” While I can’t say I’ve solved the problem of the “crime boss’s wife” archetype, finding an answer to this question resulted in a much more interesting character.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.

I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.

Mr. Black and Night

Night and Mr. Black merging into one.
The first names I thought of when considering what to name my black cats was Mr. Black and Night. “People are going to think I’m boring,” I thought. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t care and proceeded to take them to their first vet appointment where my veterinarian struggled to keep their names straight. Perhaps I named them Black and Night to annoy people. How do I even keep them straight?

There’s a reason for my madness though. I’ve been obsessed with the music artist mind.in.a.box since 2017. With the exception of R.E.T.R.O., each of mind.in.a.box’s seven albums are a chapter in a science fiction story. My obsession has been particularly intense this year. Prior to adopting my new cats, I spent several months studying mind.in.a.box lyrics. Mr. Black and Night are reoccurring characters and seemed like perfect names for a short-haired, black male cat and a long-haired, black female cat.

If you happen to have any interest in an electronica/futurepop musical without the stage play, I highly recommend it. For those wanting the TLDR version just so you can keep my cats straight, however, “Travel Guide” suffices:

And just because I can’t resist sharing two of my favorites featuring my cats’ namesakes…

Mr. Black

Night

UnagiLogic Shout Out

UnagiLogic gave this blog and other things I’ve written a shout out on Patreon, so I’m returning a shout out. UnagiLogic is building a VRChat game called Tap-ioca Tavern and sharing game development learnings and other aspects of the journey along the way. They will also be hosting regular Micro Jams and are open to collaboration for those wanting to build their programming skills or widen their community.

If you’re interested in game design or game development, you can find UnagiLogic’s Patreon here.

August AniMeals Adoption Follow Up

In August, I adopted a bonded pair of cats from AniMeals. Adopting from AniMeals was interesting in that they require adopters to sign a contract where if adopters can no longer care for the cat in the future, they must return the cat to AniMeals. It also takes a couple days for AniMeals to respond to adoption applications because they will do a background check, including calling personal references provided to them. I didn’t expect the friends I listed as references to actually receive phone calls, but they did! I don’t think even personal references I’ve listed on a job applications actually received phone calls, but AniMeals is thorough.

Anyway, since AniMeals is more involved in the lives of their adopted cats than the typical shelter is, they sent me an email to ask if I’d share an update about how the cats have adjusted. Below is the questionnaire I filled out for them, and a few of the pictures I sent.

1. Did you rename your kitty?

I adopted Stella and Bodie, now known as Night and Mr. Black.

2. How did your kitty adjust to your home?

It took some time for them to adjust to the house, my other cat Luna, and me. They stayed in their safe room and didn’t like leaving it for about three weeks. Night can still be skittish outside her safe spaces, but she is slowly getting more comfortable with me and the house. Her latest favorite place is lounging on my desk while I’m working. Mr. Black, who has settled in with much greater ease, gives her confidence when she’s feeling shy. Both of them like pets, watching birds out the windows, and playing with toys. Black will throw himself on the floor to ask for full body pets. Night likes playing with cat wands, and Mr. Black can often be heard playing with stuffed mice and toy balls late into the night. They’ve always been polite to and tolerant of Luna, who is slowly accepting them into her house. While they aren’t friends yet, the three of them frequently lounge in their favorite spots on the couch together.

Luna, Mr. Black, and Night lounging on the couch.

3. Have any behavior issues arisen since adopting?

No major behavior issues have arisen since adopting them. Mr. Black occasionally picks a fight with Night and has swatted at Luna, particularly around meal time, but nothing too concerning.

4. Is your kitty eating & using the litter box, okay?

Both of them eat and use their litter boxes fine. Mr. Black had some diarrhea initially that resulted in messes at the entrance to the litter box, but I’ve since identified that as a sensitivity to fish.

5. Have you been to the vet since adopting, and if so, did anything arise from the visit?

I’ve taken them to the vet and had bloodwork done for both of them. Night’s bloodwork was perfect, but Mr. Black had some abnormal kidney values. I’ve since put them both on an all-wet food diet (except for a few crunchy treats they enjoy). Mr. Black will have his kidney values tested again in a couple months.

6. Would you adopt from us again in the future?

I would definitely adopt from AniMeals again!