I finished my newest book, Spin the Bottle, this week! I’m really happy to have it done and out of the way. I learned a lot while making it, and I think it communicated what I wanted it to. On a related note, I didn’t draw blushing in that book because the main character, like me, hasn’t ever seen a real live person blush before. Have you? I feel like it has to have happened at some point in my life, and I just didn’t register it. I mean, blushing isn’t a collective fantasy born of creative fiction, right? I don’t think it could be. I also don’t think I’ve seen anyone’s face turn pale or turn green when they’re nauseous. I’m not very good at pallor.
I was listening to Quick Question the other day, and Soren asked about what you’d use a time machine for that wasn’t the obvious “fix a mistake” kinds of things. So I thought about the general premise of less obvious uses of time travel, and I think I’d want to go back and convince the makers of Pokémon Go to ignore battle mechanics entirely and build a game around collecting and studying Pokémon. The fun thing to do in that game is to catch Pokémon and look for what’s in your area; the battle mechanics, raids, and Team Go Rocket stuff look like someone half-remembered the idea of Pokémon and tried to copy vibes. The game I wish Pokémon Go was is one in which you are a volunteer researcher working under your local scientist to learn about different Pokémon. You catch Pokémon and complete research tasks that involve studying Pokémon in their habitats, making note of their interactions and stuff. There’s a lot of lore established about Pokémon ecology, and a lot you can sub in from the actual animals and plants they’re based on; making a scientific education game based on Pokémon seems like a no-brainer, and most of the Pokémon Go system is built really well for that premise. I would take in-depth Pokédex study over tapping the screen until I get to tap it more and someone loses any day. On top of that, it would be really great to have a game designed to teach kids about nature and the places we all share in it.
Learning is really fun and good for our mental health; as kids, we’re all forced to go through so much in an often-rushed manner that we don’t appreciate it, and as adults, we don’t have a lot of opportunity to learn all about different topics because we’re too focused on “real world problems.” We would all benefit and enjoy an opportunity to learn about new topics throughout our lives. On the occasions I’ve been able to share the random grab bag of information I have in my head with my coworkers organically, they’ve enjoyed it. It’s fun to see someone’s face light up as they grasp what some new idea means. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately because I’ve been reading about dinosaurs a lot. I just read one covering their history that had a lot of great insights into their biology and how we learned about it, and it’s wild. Did you know grasses are flowering plants, and so didn’t exist before flowering plants started evolving in the Jurassic? Before then, it was just shrubs, trees, and ferns popping out of the dirt, I guess, and that’s what passed for vegetation. That’s nuts! I’ve started a book about how the changing levels of oxygen in the atmosphere over time has been one of the most important driving factors in evolution. The initial argument is pretty compelling, and it’s true we haven’t always been able to study historical oxygen levels.
I’ve always liked dinosaurs and biology, but I haven’t been reading about these topics in depth my whole life. This current kick started when I began thinking about what sort of Pokémon game I’d make after a Pokémon Presents, and I thus started thinking about what Pokémon I’d put in that game. And now I’m almost thirty, single and childless, wondering if enough people are telling children how cool dinosaurs are. If you’re an adult, and there’s a child in your life, ask yourself if you’re the person in that kid’s life who’s responsible for telling them how cool dinosaurs are. More importantly, I’m thinking that we need to tell adults that dinosaurs are still cool and always are; that we should not buy into the lie that becoming an adult means putting aside your childhood interests so you can be fully engulfed by the post-capitalist rat race. Obviously, it’s harder to keep up with everything you want to do when you’re struggling to keep a roof over your head. I certainly focused on manga, comics, and Pokémon as my interests, because I could feel good about treating myself with them using my money and because I was very familiar with how they could remove me from my surroundings. At the end of the day, though, we need to expand our horizons and learn about the world around us, and how we connect to it.
I think there’s a lot in society that comes from the tail end of a thought process or experience, and everyone works with that last bit without understanding the rest of the idea. Like, what I was saying about adulthood earlier. When you’re in the thick of it, working a job, taking care of yourself, and looking for ways to get ahead to your next step, there’s a lot less room for pursuing your interests, educating yourself, or learning new skills. It gets overwhelming and you can lose sight of who you are and what you want, if you’re not careful. It’s an isolating and depressing position to be in, and there’s a kind of guilt or resentment that comes from knowing you don’t have the time, and maybe lost the motivation, to do something fun like a kid. Being able to pursue your interests becomes a relic of a bygone time. Seeing others still indulging in that time as adults, when you can’t, becomes unfair to you. Adulthood is often a grind that tears away at your personal sphere, such that your main focus is on work and survival-related tasks. The conclusion of all that I gathered from the world growing up is that adults don’t do childish things like have hobbies or take time for themselves. I imagined adulthood replacing most of your life with work, and instead of hobbies, you watch TV and drink, if you want. Games were all stupid and meaningless, except professional sports for some reason, which you’re allowed to get unreasonably emotional about despite having such little connection to the game being played.
It would be a lot nicer and cooler if we had stories and other ways to tell kids about the rest of that experience, you know? For personal fulfillment, not just anti-capitalist awareness. We should be preparing children to go into adulthood with their passions intact and to fight for them no matter what. Instead of telling kids that learning is boring, we should tell them that we made schools wrong and they should keep looking for ways to learn all throughout their lives. We shouldn’t tell kids that being passionate about something is off-putting to others, that they need to tamp down their enthusiasm to fit in. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone passionate about a subject and thought they were boring; does anyone really feel that way? It’s ok to admit if you’re not getting what they’re saying, or that you also know about that subject and don’t like it, but those are different things than “it’s weird to like things too much.”
Beyond all that, there’s also the value of education for its own sake. It’s very fulfilling to learn about how the world came to be, why things are the way they are, and how things work. Any and all new ideas you encounter present you with a chance to change your thinking and become a better version of yourself. And you never know when a piece of knowledge will come in handy, right? I never understood when people complained that “you’ll never use what you learned in school in real life.” Because like, it’s sad when someone thinks “real life” means “working a dead-end wage slave job with a false dream of being the one in charge.” Also, because while you can and should learn a lot of what you learn in school on a day-to-day basis (history when you watch the news, literature when you watch a movie, etc.), it’s also not the point. Sure, you’re very likely to go your whole life without having to perform a trigonometric function, but you have to learn to think a new way in order to solve them; whether you recognize it or not, that serves you your whole life. Also, we should all appreciate math class more, because there aren’t many other situations where you’re given a problem, it looks like nothing you see anywhere else in life, you solve it with your own brain, and then you find out if it’s definitely right or wrong, with no grey area. It’s actually pretty great.
Learning is good! Go out to your local library and check out a big-kid book, or go buy an instrument and open up YouTube. Don’t be afraid to evangelize your favorite TV show or manga to anyone with ears. I, for one, need to tell more people about eels. We don’t know where they come from! They just appear in our rivers as teenagers and leave before we have a chance to discover if they ever grow genitals, and then a new generation of eels appears. Ocean to river to ocean, in one lifetime! That’s insane! Electric eels aren’t even eels! How deep does this go? While you think about all that, I’m going to go read a manga and then find out about historical oxygen levels on the Earth.
Weekly Thoughts 9/30/23
Life in the Gutters 