Patreon Letter - 17th February, 2018

It's time for another patreon letter! I wish I could say that I'm full to bursting with things to talk about, but honestly I'm not. Things are starting to settle in my life, but now I'm in charge of keeping an apartment tidy and making dinner for everyone every night and just keeping up with podcasts right now eats up all of my free time. 

I feel like I understand adults now, because I too used to wonder how they did it. The answer? They're too busy to notice how busy they are. It's fine. If you must pity them as I did, pity them from afar. They know not their lot.

You can pity me though, because I sure don't have a damn thing to bring to you that I've done in the past two weeks. All my life that is of interest is on the site in the podcasts. Whoops. Sometimes you're just out of content. And none of this would be a problem if not for capitalist pressures both cultural and self-inflicted. 

Let's start with self-inflicted. I need to be busy in my free time to get the podcasts done and out to the best of my ability, because running the network and making the shows good is a point of pride. I want this patreon to be successful. I want you all to get good value for your dollar, which means me and Jackson have a second part time job we worry about like it's our career and it pays for shit. Which is fine. We did this to ourselves. And mostly it's fun when I don't have to also cough up a blog post about something interesting. It's just a lot of work. Don't do what we do. We're lost, and you can save yourselves.

Culturally, things are pettier, but they bother me a lot more. I've written and talked about at length the pressures to consume media and gain knowledge and generally always be adding to your experience of knowing and doing. Not because it's personally enriching, of course, but because we've turned watching and playing and reading into watching the numbers go up. The more numbers go up, the smarter or more productive you are. You know this, it's old hat by now around here.

Which is how I found myself reading the Star Trek SCE books to try to pad my goodreads. I like goodreads, it's a great way to remember the titles of books I read ten years ago because I have an awful head for titles. It also keeps me reading day to day and week to week when I'd probably just sit in my own filth watching youtube if not nudged away from self-indulgence. There's a feature where you can set reading goals for the year, and I usually start with 50 books a year and then bump it up by 25 until the year runs out. 

This year because my January was the way it was, I didn't exactly do a whole lot of reading. But then I looked at the challenge and you can see your friends challenges and I noticed: holy shit, Jackson's WAY AHEAD OF ME. And suddenly some switch was flipped and I decided, suddenly and fully, that I had to get my numbers back up, because Jackson doesn't read more than me, and it would somehow speak badly for me if that fact about the world were to change. 

So back to SCE. This stands for Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and it was a long-running ebook series that came out well before ebooks were actually popular. It's a bunch of short stories (or novellas, whatever, that grey area is beyond the scope of this letter) written by all sorts of Trek authors about the adventures of a flying think tank of problem solvers that go around mopping up all the space mysteries ships like the Enterprise discovered and catalogue and leave. Mysteriously empty cruiseliner starship drifts into Federation space? Send the SCE. A planet run by a supercomputer shuts down when the computer gets a virus implanted by religious extremists? Debug courtesy of the SCE. You get the picture. 

We will probably never cover this series in depth for Second Officer Slog because they're pretty disposable, empty calorie space science adventures without (so far, I'm only a few in) much in the way of broader themes and lore nonsense we look for with SOS books. There's a lot of Trek books like this, things we've marked off as safe to read on our own if we don't get enough Star Trek for the podcast, and if something is interesting we'll mark it to go back to later.

These Star Trek novellas also only about 45-60 minutes to read a piece. So you better believe when this switch flipped and suddenly I was competing with Jackson in books read for 2018 I read three of these and got my numbers back up to where I'm ahead of my 50 for the year goal. I could continue and read another two dozen of these and be blowing Jackson out of the water within a month if I put my mind to it. Fuck Jackson's numbers. I'm the best reader. Gimme that personal pan pizza, BOOK IT! program.

Here's the part where I should mention Jackson has no idea that I now have a blood oath to beat their book numbers. They'll find this out when you do, reading this. Also, and this isn't an accusation, Jackson's numbers are entirely made up of comic book volumes. It's really easy to just read all of Y: The Last Man in a week and hey look you have a dozen new entries for goodreads. I know because I did this myself. The year I got really intensely into comics I ended up reading probably 150 books that year. They add up quickly. 

And let's not forget the most important part of all this: NONE OF THIS MATTERS.

The world does not care if I read more books than Jackson, if I meet the same goal I had last year, or even if I read a single book at all. Goodreads itself just has a sidebar widget for this, and there's nothing to be gained or lost either way. I don't actually really care either, when I think about it, except for the fact that sometimes I care deeply because the more numbers I have attached to my life the better a person I am because capitalism. 

it's dumb. We all know it's dumb. But that doesn't mean we don't fall into this trap over and over again. I'm going to go read one of the other books I have on my shelf, a lengthy volume that will probably take me two weeks to read at the pace I'm going right now. My numbers will slip. SCE will wait. It's fine. It's okay to do slowly, or not do at all. The content might be a little thin, but I'll just have to live with that. 

Jackson, you won. Congrats. Also we were competing, I guess? Sorry.

Until next month, friends. <3

Em